tation, slowness of assertion, readiness
to reconsider, carefulness to arrange and set in order; and
as being a man that affects not the new nor admires the old,
but hates all imposture. So I thought my nature had a certain
familiarity and kindred with Truth."

During the next two years he applied himself to the composition of the
treatise on the 'Advancement of Learning,' the greatest of his English
writings, and one which contains the seed-thoughts and outline
principles of all his philosophy. From the time of its publication in
1605 to his fall in 1621, he continued to frame the plan of his 'Great
Instauration' of human knowledge, and to write out chapters, books,
passages, sketches, designed to take their places in it as essential
parts. It was to include six great divisions: first, a general survey of
existing knowledge; second, a guide to the use of the intellect in
research, purging it of sources of error, and furnishing it with the new
instrument of inductive logic by which all the laws of nature might be
ascertained; third, a structure of the phenomena of nature, included in
one hundred and thirty particular branches of natural history, as the
materials for the new logic; fourth, a series of types and models of the
entire mental process of discovering truth, "selecting various and
remarkable instances"; fifth, specimens of the new philosophy, or
anticipations of its results, in fragmentary contributions to the sixth
and crowning division, which was to set forth the new philosophy in its
completeness, comprehending the truths to be discovered by a perfected
instrument of reasoning, in interpreting all the phenomena of the world.
Well aware that the scheme, especially in its concluding part, was far
beyond the power and time of any one man, he yet hoped to be the
architect of the final edifice of science, by drawing its plans and
making them intelligible, leaving their perfect execution to an
intellectual world which could not fail to be moved to its supreme
effort by a comprehension of the work before it. The 'Novum Organum,'
itself but a fragment of the second division of the 'Instauration,' the
key to the use of the intellect in the discovery of truth, was published
in Latin at the height of his splendor as Lord Chancellor, in 1620, and
is his most memorable achievement in philosophy. It contains a multitude
of suggestive thoughts on the whole field of science, but is mainly the
exposition