“It is generally better to deal by speech than by letter...  Letters are good, when a man would draw an answer by letter back again, or when it may serve, for a man’s justification, afterwards to produce his own letter, or where it may he danger to be interrupted or heard by pieces.  To deal in person is good, when a man’s face breedeth regard, as commonly with inferiors, or in tender cases, where a man’s eye upon the countenance of him with whom he speaketh may give him a direction how far to go, and generally, where a man will reserve to himself liberty either to disavow or to expound.”

Scientific and Miscellaneous Works.—­The Advancement of Learning is another of Bacon’s great works.  The title aptly expresses the purpose of the took.  He insists on the necessity of close observation of nature and of making experiments with various forms of matter.  He decries the habit of spinning things out of one’s inner consciousness, without patiently studying the outside world to see whether the facts justify the conclusions.  In other words, he insists on induction.  Bacon was not the father of the inductive principle, as is sometimes wrongly stated; for prehistoric man was compelled to make inductions before he could advance one step from barbarism.  The trouble was that this method was not rigorously applied.  It was currently believed that our valuable garden toad is venomous and that frogs are bred from slime.  For his knowledge of bees, Lyly consulted classical authors in preference to watching the insects.  Bacon’s writings exerted a powerful influence in the direction of exact inductive method.

Bacon had so little faith in the enduring qualities of the English language, that he wrote the most of his philosophical works in Latin.  He planned a Latin work in six parts, to cover the whole field of the philosophy of natural science.  The most famous of the parts completed is the Novum Organum, which deals with certain methods for searching after definite truth, and shows how to avoid some ever present tendencies toward error.

Bacon wrote an excellent History of the Reign of Henry VII., which is standard to this day.  He is also the author of The New Atlantis, which may be termed a Baconian Utopia, or study of an ideal commonwealth.

General Characteristics.—­In Bacon’s sentences we may often find remarkable condensation of thought in few words.  A modern essayist has taken seven pages to express, or rather to obscure, the ideas in these three lines from Bacon:—­

  “Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little,
  repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period,
  but content themselves with a mediocrity of success."[3]

His works abound in illustrations, analogies, and striking imagery; but unlike the great Elizabethan poets, he appeals more to cold intellect than to the feelings.  We are often pleased with his intellectual ingenuity, for instance, in likening the Schoolmen to spiders, spinning such stuff as webs are made of “out of no great quantity of matter.”