Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/227

Rh divines or politicians, on their own ground, with arguments consciously adapted to "popular estimation and conceit," expounding texts and meeting text with text, example with example, developing in approved rhetorical style the most telling "topics" his well-stored mind had at command. The analysis that follows, of the errors which have misled learning, is more pregnant with valuable suggestions. But the whole book is confessedly a brilliant and ingenious "concio ad populum." In the second book he addresses himself more seriously to his main task, a review of the existing state of knowledge and its more patent defects, than which, perhaps, nothing he wrote is a more vivid reflection of Bacon's mind—his wide-ranging view (more ample than exact in detail); his fertility of suggestions, often fruitful anticipations, if not seldom fantastic; his exact and discriminating phraseology, and his wealth of felicitous illustration, surprising and illuminating analogies. In science and philosophy Bacon was, indeed, nothing so much as a thrower-out of brilliant and fertile suggestions, and the stater and restater in startling and far-shining phrases of one or two central ideas. Of these almost all are foreshadowed in The Advancement of Learning. For the actual formulation of a logic of science he did less than Kepler and Galileo, because he knew less of the actual methods of science. The methods which he describes in the Sylva Sylvarum (1627), a collection of notes in natural history published posthumously, and in the New Atlantis (1627), a brief sketch of an