The Advancement Of Learning

“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.