of human knowledge, and to write out chapters, books,
passages, sketches, designed to take their places in
it as essential parts. It was to include six
great divisions: first, a general survey of existing
knowledge; second, a guide to the use of the intellect
in research, purging it of sources of error, and furnishing
it with the new instrument of inductive logic by which
all the laws of nature might be ascertained; third,
a structure of the phenomena of nature, included in
one hundred and thirty particular branches of natural
history, as the materials for the new logic; fourth,
a series of types and models of the entire mental
process of discovering truth, “selecting various
and remarkable instances”; fifth, specimens
of the new philosophy, or anticipations of its results,
in fragmentary contributions to the sixth and crowning
division, which was to set forth the new philosophy
in its completeness, comprehending the truths to be
discovered by a perfected instrument of reasoning,
in interpreting all the phenomena of the world.
Well aware that the scheme, especially in its concluding
part, was far beyond the power and time of any one
man, he yet hoped to be the architect of the final
edifice of science, by drawing its plans and making
them intelligible, leaving their perfect execution
to an intellectual world which could not fail to be
moved to its supreme effort by a comprehension of
the work before it. The ‘Novum Organum,’
itself but a fragment of the second division of the
‘Instauration,’ the key to the use of
the intellect in the discovery of truth, was published
in Latin at the height of his splendor as Lord Chancellor,
in 1620, and is his most memorable achievement in
philosophy. It contains a multitude of suggestive
thoughts on the whole field of science, but is mainly
the exposition of the fallacies by which the intellect
is deceived and misled, and from which it must be
purged in order to attain final truth, and of the
new doctrine of “prerogative instances,”
or crucial observations and experiments in the work
of discovery.
In short, Bacon’s entire achievement in science
is a plan for an impossible universe of knowledge.
As far as he attempted to advance particular sciences
by applying his method to their detailed phenomena,
he wrought with imperfect knowledge of what had been
done, and with cumbrous and usually misdirected efforts
to fill the gaps he recognized. In a few instances,
by what seems an almost superhuman instinct for truth,
rather than the laborious process of investigation
which he taught, he anticipated brilliant discoveries
of later centuries. For example, he clearly pointed
out the necessity of regarding heat as a form of motion
in the molecules of matter, and thus foreshadowed,
without any conception of the means of proving it,
that which, for investigators of the nineteenth century,
has proved the most direct way to the secrets of nature.
But the testimony of the great teachers of science
is unanimous, that Bacon was not a skilled observer