should be like mines, resounding on all sides with new works, and farther progress. And thus it ought to be, according to right reason; but the case, in fact, is quite otherwise. For the above-mentioned administration and policy of schools and universities generally opposes and greatly prevents the improvement of the sciences."
It is not the correctness of these opinions respecting universities, which is now attempted to be investigated. The only object is to explain the similarity of the sentiments in this tract, entitled "Valerius Terminus," and the "Novum Organum;" but it seems not undeserving observation that this opinion must have been entertained by him very early in life, probably when resident, in Cambridge, which he quitted soon after he was sixteen years of age, when the torpor of university pursuits would ill accord with his active mind, anxious only to invent and advance. At this early period, he, without considering whether universities are not formed rather for diffusing the knowledge of our predecessors, than for the discovery of unexplored truths; without considering the evil of youthful attempts not to believe first what others know, would naturally feel "that in the universities of Europe they learn nothing but to believe: first, to believe that others know that which they know not; and after, themselves know that which they know not." He would naturally enough say, "They are like a becalmed ship; they never move but by the wind of other men's breath, and have no oars of their own to steer withal." But this opinion, thus early impressed upon his mind, seems to have been regulated in the year 1605, when he published the Advancement of Learning, and where, in his tract upon universities, after having enumerated many of their defects, he says, "The last defect which I will note is, that there hath not been, or very rarely been, any public designation of writers or inquirers concerning such parts of knowledge as may appear not to have been already sufficiently laboured or undertaken."[1]
§ 7.
DE GALORE ET FRIGORE.
This is obviously the rudiment of the Affirmative Table in the Novum Organum.
§ 8.
HELPS FOR INTELLECTUAL POWERS.
The tract entitled "Helps for Intellectual Powers," was published by Rawley in his Resuscitatio, in 1657.
In a letter from Gruter to Dr. Rawley, dated July 1, 1659, and thanking him for a present of Lord Bacon's Posthumous Works, in Latin, (probably Opuscula cum Vita, published in 1658,) he says, "one paper I wonder I saw not amongst them, 'The Epistle of the Lord Bacon to Sir Henry Savil, about the Helps of the Intellectual Powers,' spoken of long ago in your letters under that, or some such title, if my memory does not deceive me. If it was not forgotten and remains among your private papers, I should be glad to see a copy of it, in the use of which, my faithfulness shall not be wanting. But, perhaps, it is written in the English tongue, and is a part of that greater volume, which contains only his English works."[2]
§ 9.
THE APOPHTHEGMES.
In the Advancement of Learning, Bacon divides the Appendices to History into—1. Memorials. 2. Epistles. 3. Apophthegmes. And, after lamenting the loss of Cæsar's book of Apophthegmes, he says,"as for those which are collected by others, either I have no taste in such matters, or else their choice hath not been happy:" but yet it seems that he had stored his mind with a collection of these "Mucrones Verborum," as, for his recreation in his sickness in the year preceding his death, he fanned the old, and dictated what he thought worth preservation.
Archbishop Tenison, in his Baconiana, page 47, says,
"The Apophthegmes (of which the first[3] is the best Edition) were (what he saith also[4] of his Essays) but as the Recreations of his other Studies. They were dictated one morning, out of his memory; and if they seem to any, a birth too inconsiderable for the brain of so great a man; they may think with themselves how little a time he went with it, and from thence make some allowance. Besides, his lordship hath received much injury by late editions,[5] of which some have much enlarged, but not at all enriched the collection; stuffing it with tales and sayings, too infacetious for a ploughman's chimney-corner. And particularly, in the collection not long since published,[6] and
- ↑ See his New Atlantis.
- ↑ See the original in Latin, with the translation from which this extract is copied in the Baconiana, 239, 240, and note he was right in this supposition.
- ↑ Apoth. printed in Oct. Lon. 1625. The title page of this edition is "Apophthegmes, New and Old, collated by the Right Honorable Francis Lo. Verulam, Viscount St. Alban.—London: printed for Hanna Barret and Richard Whittaker, and arc to he sold at the King's Head in Paul's Church, 1625."
- ↑ See his Epistle to Bishop Andrews.
- ↑ Even by that added (but not by Dr. Rawley to the Resuscitatio.—Baconiana.
- ↑ In Octavo. Lon. 1669.
