by examples), and by Prodromi (preliminary results of his own inquiries),—­by natural science, Philosophia Secunda.  The best edition of Bacon’s works is the London one of Spedding, Ellis & Heath, 1857 seq., 7 vols., 2d ed., 1870; with 7 volumes additional of The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, including His Occasional Works, and a Commentary, by J. Spedding, 1862-74.  Spedding followed this further with a briefer Account of the Life and Times of Francis Bacon, 2 vols., 1878[2].

[Footnote 1:  According to the faculties of the soul, memory, imagination, and understanding, three principal sciences are distinguished; history, poesy, and philosophy.  Of the three objects of the latter, “nature strikes the mind with a direct ray, God with a refracted ray, and man himself with a reflected ray.”  Theology is natural or revealed.  Speculative (theoretical) natural philosophy divides into physics, concerned with material and efficient causes, and metaphysics, whose mission, according to the traditional view, is to inquire into final causes, but in Bacon’s own opinion, into formal causes; operative (technical) natural philosophy is mechanics and natural magic.  The doctrine concerning man comprises anthropology (including logic and ethics) and politics.  This division of Bacon was still retained by D’Alembert in his preliminary discourse to the Encyclopedie.]

[Footnote 2:  Cf. on Bacon, K. Fischer, 2d ed., 1875; Chr.  Sigwart, in the Preussische Jahrbuecher, 1863 and 1864, and in vol. ii. of his Logik; H. Heussler, Baco und seine geschichtliche Stellung, Breslau, 1889. [Adamson, Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th. ed., vol. iii. pp. 200-222; Fowler, English Philosophers Series, 1881; Nichol, Blackwood’s Philosophical Classics, 2 vols., 1888-89.—­TR.]] Bacon’s merit was threefold:  he felt more forcibly and more clearly than previous thinkers the need of a reform in science; he set up a new and grand ideal—­unbiased and methodical investigation of nature in order to mastery over nature; and he gave information and directions as to the way in which this goal was to be attained, which, in spite of their incompleteness in detail, went deep into the heart of the subject and laid the foundation for the work of centuries.[1] His faith in the omnipotence of the new method was so strong, that he thought that science for the future could almost dispense with talent.  He compares his method to a compass or a ruler, with which the unpractised man is able to draw circles and straight lines better than an expert without these instruments.

[Footnote 1:  His detractors are unjust when they apply the criterion of the present method of investigation and find only imperfection in an imperfect beginning.]