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here, the vast difference which is known to have existed between these men, in respect of their education, studies, and whole personal history, would seem to preclude all possibility of mistake. The coincidences are not merely such of that age: usage as might be attributed to the style and they extend to the scope of thought, the particular ideas, the modes of thinking and feeling, the choice of metaphor, the illustrative imagery, and those singular peculiarities, oddities, and quaintnesses of expression and use of words, which everywhere and in all times mark and distinguish the individual writer.

CHAPTER V.

MODELS.

"For true art is always capable of advancing."1- BACON.

It has already been observed, that Bacon had a purpose, though he broke the order of time, to attempt to draw down to the senses things which flew too high over men's heads in general, in other forms of delivery, by means of patterns of natural stories, and feigned histories or speaking pictures; and it would seem to be very clear, that he had a similar object in view in those "illustrative examples," which were to constitute the Fourth Part of the Great Instauration, which was never published, nor indeed written, otherwise than as we may have some part of it, or at least some exemplification of what it was in part to be, in these very plays. First, premising that after the Second Philosophy, in the previous parts, had succeeded in furnishing the understanding with "the most surest helps and precautions," and had "completed, by a rigorous levy, a host of divine works," nothing would remain to be done but "to attack Philosophy herself,” and that, in a matter “so arduous and doubtful," a few reflections must necessarily be inserted, "partly for instruction and partly for present use," he proceeds:

"The first of these is, that we should offer some ex

1 "Quin contra, artem veram adolescere statuimus.” — Scala Intellectus, Works (Boston), V. 181; Trans. of Bacon, (Mont.), XIV. 426-7; (Phil.) III. 519.

amples of our method and course of investigation and discovery, as exhibited in particular subjects; preferring the most dignified subjects of our inquiry, and such as differ most from each other, so that in every branch we may have an example. Nor do we speak of those examples, which are added to particular precepts and rules by way of illustration (for we have furnished them abundantly in the Second Part of our work), but we mean actual types and models, calculated to place, as it were, before our eyes ["sub oculos"] the whole process of the mind, and the continuous frame ["fabricam "] and order of discovery in particular subjects selected for their variety and importance. For we recollect that in mathematics, with the diagram before our eyes, the demonstration easily and clearly followed, but without this advantage, everything appeared more intricate and more subtle than was really the case. We devote, therefore, the Fourth Part of our work to such examples, which is in fact nothing more than a particular and fully developed application of the Second Part."1

As it is said in his letter to Fulgentius, the great Instauration began with the De Augmentis Scientiarum as the first part; the Novum Organum was the second part; the Natural History was the third part; these Examples were to be the fourth part; the Prodromus (or forerunner of the Second Philosophy) was to be the fifth part; and the sixth part would complete philosophy itself, and "touch almost the universals of nature." In this consummation of the Second Philosophy, he would, of course, arrive again at the Philosophia Prima, by that road, and in that way; and so, philosophy itself would necessarily include both the First and the Second Philosophy in one Universal Science, which would amount to " Sapience," or "the knowledge of all things divine and human."2 In this letter, the subject of the Fourth Part is introduced in connection with certain

1 Distribution of the Work; Works (Mont.), XIV. 22; (Spedd., I. 225). 2 De Aug. Scient.

portions of the Natural History, concerning winds, and touching life and death, which he mentions as "mixed writings composed of natural history, and a rude and imperfect instrument, or help of the understanding." He then proceeds to say, that this Fourth Part should contain many examples of that instrument, more exact and much more fitted to rules of induction." From these expressions alone it might be inferred that these examples were to be confined strictly to matters of physical inquiry; but when it is considered, that the scope of his system always embraced the whole field of knowledge (however divided into parts), of which his principal divisions were God, Nature, and Man, it may not appear incredible that this instrument or help of the understanding, and these examples, were to find an application to man and human affairs as well as to mere physical nature.

Indeed, all question of this would seem to be set at rest by his Thirteen Tables of the Thread of the Labyrinth; for, in the paper entitled "Filum Labyrinthi sive Inquisitio Legitima de Motu," these tables are enumerated in like manner as a part of Natural Philosophy, and in the Novum Organum, they are spoken of as included in the Fourth Part. The only specimens of them actually found attempted in his works are certain fragments, under such titles as Heat and Cold, Sound and Hearing, Dense and Rare, the History of Winds, and the like; but that the entire series was to have a much wider range, is evident from his own "Digest of the Tables," which is as follows: —

"The first are tables of motion; the second, of heat and cold; the third, of the rays of things and impressions at a distance; the fourth, of vegetation and life; the fifth, of the passions of the animal body; the sixth, of sense and objects; the seventh, of the affections of the mind; the eighth, of the mind and its faculties. These pertain to the separation of nature, and concern Form; but these which follow pertain to the construction of nature, and con

cern Matter. Ninth, of the architecture of the world; tenth, of great relations, or the accidents of essence; eleventh, of the composition of bodies or inequality of parts; twelfth, of species or the ordinary fabric and combinations of things; and thirteenth, of small relations or properties. And so a universal inquisition may be completed in thirteen tables."1

It is not easy to understand exactly what his meaning was; but he probably considered motion as a phenomenal effect of force; and there is no motion without moving power. Addressing himself to an inquiry into the nature, laws, limitations, and modes of power, or forces, by experimental methods, and finding the subject presented in nature in the shape of phenomenal facts as effects, he would naturally begin with a table of motions. Indeed, he defined Heat as being nothing else but motion, or moving force; a doctrine which our more modern science, from Rumford to Tyndall, confirms. Pursuing the study to the end, he would expect to arrive, in time, at a knowledge of "the last power and cause of nature." But, at first, he would begin with the secondary powers or forces, taking the phenomenal effects as facts, in such subjects as heat and cold, the radiating motions producing impressions at a distance (what are now treated of under the names of light, heat, electricity, magnetism, and the like), sound and hearing, density and rarity, the ebb and flow of the sea, winds, &c. He then comes to the motions of vegetable and animal life, the passions, the senses, the affections, or emotions, and, at last, to the mind itself and the mental faculties. In all this, the inquiry looks to the form or law. Bacon's idea of form would seem to have been identical with what we would now call law of power giving form to itself." And so this portion of the Tables would span the whole field of sensible and visible motions in nature, beginning with the

1 Works (Boston), VII. 170.

2 Trans. of Nov. Org., II. 2; Works (Boston), VIII. 168; 206.