Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

34 FRANCIS BACON
elusion that the works actually written by Bacon himself are far
in excess of those ascribed to him by the majority even of his
most enthusiastic admirers. It became evident that it would
have been beyond human power for any single individual to
have observed, experimented, travelled, read, written, to the
extent which we find Bacon to have done, unless he had been
aided in the mechanical parts of his work by an army of
amanuenses, transcribers, collators, translators, and publishers,
and even by powerful friends in high places, and by the control
of the leading printing-presses.
An examination into Bacon's own repeated statements as to
the ignorance, incapacity, and miseries of the age in which he
lived, shows him pointing oat, amongst other things, the
" poverty " of language, the lack of words, the necessity for a
mutual exchange of words through many countries, in order to
perform that nuble and much needed work of building up a fine
model of language. He notes the absence of graceful forms of
speech; of commencemeuts, continuations, and conclusions of
sentences; of a scientific grammar of philology, in default of
which he has been obliged to make " a kind of" grammar for
himself. He shows that there were, in his time, no good collections
of antitheta, sophisms, and arguments, and that the
good sayings of the ancients were lost, or choked in the dust of
ages; also the ancient and scriptural use of parables, figures,
metaphors, similes, and so forth, was extinct; the sciences were
"weak things" weakly handled; the learning had become
" words, not matter;" " the muses were barren virgins:" poetry
and the theatre at the lowest level.
So Bacon found things when he conceived his magnificent idea
of the " Universal Reformation of the whole wide world. "
was at that time a lad of fifteen, and there is reason to believe
that he had already written, or was in process of writing,
poetry and other works which passed then, and at later periods,
as the productions of men of mature years, " authors " of an
earlier or later date than is
He
generally ascribed to the works of
Francis Bacon.
And, as in his boyhood he found the world of science and litera-