Bacon (1881) Paperback -

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Bacon's Survey ' Of The Sciences. The divisions, existing condition, and deficiencies of the sciences are the subject of three of Bacon's works, ?namely, the Advancement of Learning, published in 1605, the Dc Aug- mentis Scientiarum, published in 1623, and the Descriptio Gloli Intellectualis, which, though written about 1612, was first published by Gruter in 1653.2 For the purposes of this chapter, it will be sufficient to confine our attention to the second of these treatises, Of its relation to the first I have already spoken. The third, though curious, as expressing (in conjunction with the Thema Cxli, which really forms part of the same work) the opinions entertained by Bacon on the disputed questions of astronomy almost immediately after the publication of Galileo's Syderus Nuncius, is of too fragmentary a character to claim any of the space at my disposal. The first book of the De Augmentis is, with some variations, a translation into Latin of the first book of the Advancement of Learning, already described, and need not detain us. The distribution of the Sciences (Partiones Scientiarum), the subject of the first part of the Great Installation, properly begins 1 Quaintly called by Bacon his perambulation. 2 A few chapters of the curious but interesting fragment Valerius Terminus bear on the same subject, but they are too slight to be mentioned by the side of the other treatises. with the second book. As his basis of division, Bacoa takes the three faculties of the rational soul (or, as he calls them in the Advancement of Learning, the three parts of man's understanding). History has reference to the Memory, poesy to the Imagination, and philosophy to the Reason. And by poesy here I mean nothing else than feigned history, or fables...