“The TVVOO Bookes of Francis Bacon. Of
the proficience and aduancement of Learning, divine
and humane. To the King. At London.
Printed for Henrie Tomes, and are to be sould at his
shop at Graies Inne Gate in Holborne. 1605.”
That was the original title-page of the book now
in the reader’s hand—a living book
that led the way to a new world of thought.
It was the book in which Bacon, early in the reign
of James the First, prepared the way for a full setting
forth of his New Organon, or instrument of knowledge.
The Organon of Aristotle was a set of treatises in
which Aristotle had written the doctrine of propositions.
Study of these treatises was a chief occupation of
young men when they passed from school to college,
and proceeded from Grammar to Logic, the second of
the Seven Sciences. Francis Bacon as a youth
of sixteen, at Trinity College, Cambridge, felt the
unfruitfulness of this method of search after truth.
He was the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Queen Elizabeth’s
Lord Keeper, and was born at York House, in the Strand,
on the 22nd of January, 1561. His mother was
the Lord Keeper’s second wife, one of two sisters,
of whom the other married Sir William Cecil, afterwards
Lord Burleigh. Sir Nicholas Bacon had six children
by his former marriage, and by his second wife two
sons, Antony and Francis, of whom Antony was about
two years the elder. The family home was at York
Place, and at Gorhambury, near St. Albans, from which
town, in its ancient and its modern style, Bacon afterwards
took his titles of Verulam and St. Albans.
Antony and Francis Bacon went together to Trinity
College, Cambridge, when Antony was fourteen years
old and Francis twelve. Francis remained at Cambridge
only until his sixteenth year; and Dr. Rawley, his
chaplain in after-years, reports of him that “whilst
he was commorant in the University, about sixteen
years of age (as his lordship hath been pleased to
impart unto myself), he first fell into dislike of
the philosophy of Aristotle; not for the worthlessness
of the author, to whom he would ascribe all high attributes,
but for the unfruitfulness of the way, being a philosophy
(as his lordship used to say) only strong for disputatious
and contentions, but barren of the production of works
for the benefit of the life of man; in which mind he
continued to his dying day.” Bacon was
sent as a youth of sixteen to Paris with the ambassador
Sir Amyas Paulet, to begin his training for the public
service; but his father’s death, in February,
1579, before he had completed the provision he was
making for his youngest children, obliged him to return
to London, and, at the age of eighteen, to settle
down at Gray’s Inn to the study of law as a profession.
He was admitted to the outer bar in June, 1582, and
about that time, at the age of twenty-one, wrote a
sketch of his conception of a New Organon that should
lead man to more fruitful knowledge, in a little Latin
tract, which he called “Temporis Partus Maximus”
("The Greatest Birth of Time").
