Book Description

Valerius Terminus The Interpretation of Nature Francis Bacon Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Albans, 22 January 1561 - 9 April 1626, was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, author and pioneer of the scientific method. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Although his political career ended in disgrace, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution. The following fragments of a great work on the Interpretation of Nature were first published in Stephens's Letters and Remains [1734]. They consist partly of detached passages, and partly of an epitome of twelve chapters of the first book of the proposed work. The detached passages contain the first, sixth, and eighth chapters, and portions of the fourth, fifth, seventh, ninth, tenth, eleventh, and sixteenth. The epitome contains an account of the contents of all the chapters from the twelfth to the twenty-sixth inclusive, omitting the twentieth, twentythird, and twenty-fourth. Thus the sixteenth chapter is mentioned both in the epitome and among the detached passages, and we are thus enabled to see that the two portions of the following tract belong to the same work, as it appears from both that the sixteenth chapter was to treat of the doctrine of idola. In this work of 1603, an argument for the progress of knowledge, Bacon considers the moral, religious and philosophical implications and requirements of the advancement of learning and the development of science. Although not as well known as other works such as "Novum Organum" and "Advancement of Learning," this work's importance in Bacon's thought resides in the fact that it was the first of his scientific writings. He opens the book, in the proem, stating his belief that the man who succeed in "kindling a light in nature," would be "the benefactor indeed of the human race, the propagator of man's empire over the universe, the champion of liberty, the conqueror and subduer of necessities," and at the same time identifying himself as that man, saying he believed he "had been born for the service of mankind," and that in considering in what way mankind might best be served, he had found none so great as the discovery of new arts, endowments, and commodities for the bettering of man's life.