book i

. of the _Novum Organum_. (5) _Cogitata et Visa_, perhaps the most important of the minor philosophical writings, dating from 1607 (though possibly the tract in its present form may have been to some extent altered), and containing in weighty and sonorous Latin the substance of the first book of the _Organum_. (6) The _Descriptio Globi Intellectualis_, which is to some extent intermediate between the _Advancement_ and the _De Augmentis_, goes over in detail the general classification of the sciences, and enters

## particularly on some points of minor interest. (7) The brief tract _De

Interpretatione Naturae Sententiae Duodecim_ is evidently a first sketch of part of the _Novum Organum_, and in phraseology is almost identical with it. (8) A few smaller pieces, such as the _Inquisitio de Motu_, the _Calor et Frigus_, the _Historia Soni et Auditus_ and the _Phaenomena Universi_, are early specimens of his _Natural History_, and exhibit the first tentative applications of the new method.

(B) The second group consists of treatises on subjects connected with the _Instauratio_, but not forming part of it. The most interesting, and in many respects the most remarkable, is the philosophic romance, the _New Atlantis_, a description of an ideal state in which the principles of the new philosophy are carried out by political machinery and under state guidance, and where many of the results contemplated by Bacon are in imagination attained. The work was to have been completed by the addition of a second part, treating of the laws of a model commonwealth, which was never written. Another important tract is the _De Principiis atque Originibus secundum Fabulas Cupidinis et Caeli_, where, under the disguise of two old mythological stories, he (in the manner of the _Sapientia Veterum_) finds the deepest truths [v.03 p.0145] concealed. The tract is unusually interesting, for in it he discusses at some length the limits of science, the origin of things and the nature of primitive matter, giving at the same time full notices of Democritus among the ancient philosophers and of Telesio among the modern. Deserving of attention are also the _Cogitationes de Natura Rerum_, probably written early, perhaps in 1605, and the treatise on the theory of the tides, _De Fluxu et Refluxu Maris_, written probably about 1616.

(C) The philosophical works which form part of the _Instauratio_ must of course be classed according to the positions which they respectively hold in that scheme of the sciences.

The great work, the reorganization of the sciences, and the restoration of man to that command over nature which he had lost by the fall, consisted in its final form of six divisions.

I. _Partitiones Scientiarum_, a survey of the sciences, either such as then existed or such as required to be constructed afresh--in fact, an inventory of all the possessions of the human mind. The famous classification[47] on which this survey proceeds is based upon an analysis of the faculties and objects of human knowledge. This division is represented by the _De Augmentis Scientiarum_.

II. _Interpretatio Naturae._--After the survey of all that has yet been done in the way of discovery or invention, comes the new method, by which the mind of man is to be trained and directed in its progress towards the renovation of science. This division is represented, though only imperfectly, by the _Novum Organum_, particularly