The physical and metaphysical works of Lord Bacon : including the Advancement of learning and Novum organum / edited by Joseph Devey.

  • Francis Bacon
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The physical and metaphysical works of Lord Bacon : including the Advancement of learning and Novum organum / edited by Joseph Devey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    105/608 (page 93)
    CHAP. X.] PROSPECT OF ADVANCEMENT IN SCIENCE. 92 1 kind of ruminated history we highly esteem, provided the I writers keep close to it professedly, for it is both unseason- t able and irksome to have an author profess he will write a : I proper history, yet at every turn introduce politics, and I thereby break the thread of his narration. All wise his- j tory is indeed pregnant with political rules and precepts, I but the writer is not to take all opportunities of delivering ■' himself of them. Cosmographical history is also mixed many ways,—as I taking the descriptions of countries, their situations and II fruits, from natural history; the accounts of cities, govern- I ments, and manners, from civil history; the climates and II astronomical phenomena, from mathematics: in which kind I of history the present age seems to excel, as having a full I view of the world in this light. The ancients had some I knowledge of the zones and antipodes,— though rather by abstract demonstration than fact. But : that little vessels, like the celestial bodies, should sail round the whole globe, is the happiness of our age. These times, moreover, may justly use not only plus ultra, where the ancients used non plus ultra, but also imitabile fulmen where the ancients said non imitabile fulmen,— This improvement of navigation may give us great hopes of extending and improving the sciences, especially as it seems agreeable to the Divine will that they should be coeval. Thus the prophet Daniel foretells, that “ Many shall go to and fro on the earth, and knowledge shall be in- creased,” 0 as if the openness and thorough passage of the world and the increase of knowledge were allotted to the same age, which indeed we find already true in part: for the learning of these times scarce yields to the former periods or returns of learning,—the one among the Greeks and the other among the Romans, and in many particulars far ex- ceeds them. “ Nosque ubi primus equis oriens afflavit anhelis, Ulic sera rubens accendit lumina vesper,”11— “ Demens qui nimbos et non imitabile fulmen.”0 c Dan. xh. 4.