Page:The Works of Francis Bacon (1884) Volume 1.djvu/406

 278 EDITOR S PREFACE. raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground, for strife and contention; or a shop, for profu o sale; and not a rich storehouse, for the glory of the Creator, and the relief of man s estate.&quot; If the intricacies of a court are neither discovered nor illustrated with the same happiness as the intricacies of philosophy, &quot; because the distributions and partitions of knowledge are not like several lines that meet in one angle, and so touch but in a point; but are like branches of a tree, that meet in a stem, which hath a dimension and quantity of entireness and continuance, before it come to discontinue and break itself into arms and boughs; therefore it is good, before we enter into the former distribution, to erect and constitute one universal science, by the name of Philosophia Prima, primitive or summary philosophy, as the main and common way, before we come where the ways part and divide themselves.&quot; &quot;That it be a receptacle for all such profitable observations and axioms as fall not within the compass of any of the special parts of philosophy or sciences, but are more common and of a higher stage. Is not the precept of a musician, to fall from a discord or harsh accord upon a concord or sweet accord, alike true in affection! Is not the trope of music, to avoid or slide from the close or cadence, common with the trope of rhetoric of deceiving expectation? Is not the delight of the quavering upon a stop in music the same with the playing of light upon the water.&quot; If in a work written when the author was more than sixty years of age, and if, after the vexa tions and labours of a professional and political life, the varieties and sprightliness of youthful imagination, are not to be found, yet the peculiar properties of his mind may easily be traced, and the stateliness of the edifice be discovered from the magnificence of the ruins. His vigilance in recording every fact tending to alleviate misery or to promote happiness, is noticed by Bishop Sprat in his history of the Royal Society, where he says, &quot; I shall instance in the sweating-sickness. The medicine for it was almost infallible : but, before that could be generally published, it had al most dispeopled whole towns. If the same disease should have returned, it might have been again as destructive, had not the Lord Bacon taken care, to set down the particular course of physic for it, in his History of Henry the Seventh, and so put it beyond the possibility of any private man s invading it.&quot; And his account of the same calamity contains an allusion to his favourite doctrine of vital spirit, of which the philosophy is explained in his history of Life and Death, and illustrated in his fable of Proserpine in the Wisdom f the Ancients, and which is thus stated in his Sylva Sylvarum : &quot; The knowledge of man, hitherto, hath been determined by the view, or sight ; so that whatso ever is invisible, either in respect of the fineness of the body itself; or the smallness of the parts; or of the subtilty of the motion, is little inquired. And yet these be the things that govern nature principally ; and without which, you cannot make any true analysis and indication of the proceed ings of nature. The spirits or pneumaticals, that are in all tangible bodies, are scarce known. Sometimes they take them for vacuum ; whereas they are the most active of bodies. Sometimes they take them for air; from which they differ exceedingly, as much as wine from water; and as wood from earth. Sometimes they will have them to be natural heat, or a portion of the element of fire ; whereas some of them are crude, and cold. And sometimes they will have them to be the vir tues and qualities of the tangible parts, which they see; whereas they are things by themselves. And then, when they come to plants, and living creatures, they call them souls. And such super ficial speculations they have; like prospectives, that show things inward when they are but paint ings. Neither is this a question of words, but infinitely material in nature. For spirits are nothing else but a natural body, rarified to a proportion, and included in the tangible parts of bodies, as in an integument. And they be no less differing one from the other, than the dense or tangible parts : and they are in all tangible bodies whatsoever, more or less; and they are never (almost) at rest: and from them, and their motions, principally proceed arefaction, colliquation, concoction, matura tion, putrefaction, vivification, and most of the effects of nature.&quot; One of his maxims of government for the enlargement of the bounds of empire is to be found in his comment upon the ordinance. &quot; That all houses of husbandry, that were used with twenty acres of ground and upwards, should be maintained and kept up forever; together with a competent proportion of land to be used and occupied with them ;&quot; and which is thus stated in the treatise &quot;De Augmentis,&quot; which was published in the year 1623. &quot;Let states and kingdoms that aim at greatness by all means take heed how the nobility, and grandees, and that those which we call gen tlemen, multiply too fast; for that makes the common subject grow to be a peasant and base swain driven out of heart, and in effect nothing else but the nobleman s bond-slaves and labourers. Even as you may see in coppice-wood, if you leave your studdles too thick, you shall never have clean t.nderwood, but shrubs and bushes : so in a country, if the nobility be too many, the commons will ne base and heartless, and you will bring it to that, that not the hundredth pole will be fit for an helmet; especially as to the infantry, which is the nerve of an army; and so there will be great population and little strength. This which I speak of hath been in no nation more clearly confirmed