ghts and plans in a philosophical
tale, which he did not finish--the _New Atlantis_--a charming example of
his graceful fancy and of his power of easy and natural story-telling.
Between the _Advancement_ and the _Novum Organum_ (1605-20) much
underground work had been done. "He had finally (about 1607) settled the
plan of the _Great Instauration_, and began to call it by that name."
The plan, first in three or four divisions, had been finally digested
into six. Vague outlines had become definite and clear. Distinct
portions had been worked out. Various modes of treatment had been tried,
abandoned, modified. Prefaces were written to give the sketch and
purpose of chapters not yet composed. The _Novum Organum_ had been
written and rewritten twelve times over. Bacon kept his papers, and we
can trace in the unused portion of those left behind him much of the
progress of his work, and the shapes which much of it went through. The
_Advancement_ itself is the filling-out and perfecting of what is found
in germ, meagre and rudimentary, in a _Discourse in Praise of
Knowledge_, written in the days of Elizabeth, and in some Latin chapters
of an early date, the _Cogitationes de Scientia Humana_, on the limits
and use of knowledge, and on the relation of natural history to natural
philosophy. These early essays, with much of the same characteristic
illustration, and many of the favourite images and maxims and texts and
phrases, which continue to appear in his writings to the end, contain
the thoughts of a man long accustomed to meditate and to see his way on
the new aspects of knowledge opening upon him. And before the
_Advancement_ he had already tried his hand on a work intended to be in
two books, which Mr. Ellis describes as a "great work on the
Interpretation of Nature," the "earliest type of the _Instauratio_," and
which Bacon called by the enigmatical name of _Valerius Terminus_. In
it, as in a second draft, which in its turn was superseded by the
_Advancement_, the line of thought of the Latin _Cogitationes_
reappears, expanded and more carefully ordered; it contains also the
first sketch of his certain and infallible method for what he calls the
"freeing of the direction" in the search after Truth, and the first
indications of the four classes of "Idols" which were to be so memorable
a portion of Bacon's teaching. And between the _Advancement_ and the
_Novum Organum_ at least one unpublished treatise of great interest
interv