THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING




INTRODUCTION.



"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,