, yet a
great way off; and what there was, he either did not care about or
really understand, and had no aptitude for handling. He knew enough to
give reality to his argument; he knew, and insisted on it, that the
labour of observation and experiment would have to be very heavy and
quite indispensable. But his own business was with great principles and
new truths; these were what had the real attraction for him; it was the
magnificent thoughts and boundless hopes of the approaching "kingdom of
man" which kindled his imagination and fired his ambition. "He writes
philosophy," said Harvey, who had come to his own great discovery
through patient and obscure experiments on frogs and monkeys--"he writes
philosophy like a Lord Chancellor." And for this part of the work, the
stateliness and dignity of the Latin corresponded to the proud claims
which he made for his conception of the knowledge which was to be.
English seemed to him too homely to express the hopes of the world, too
unstable to be trusted with them. Latin was the language of command and
law. His Latin, without enslaving itself to Ciceronian types, and with a
free infusion of barbarous but most convenient words from the vast and
ingenious terminology of the schoolmen, is singularly forcible and
expressive. It is almost always easy and clear; it can be vague and
general, and it can be very precise where precision is wanted. It can,
on occasion, be magnificent, and its gravity is continually enlivened by
the play upon it, as upon a background, of his picturesque and
unexpected fancies. The exposition of his philosophical principles was
attempted in two forms. He began in English. He began, in the shape of a
personal account, a statement of a series of conclusions to which his
thinking had brought him, which he called the "Clue of the Labyrinth,"
_Filum Labyrinthi_. But he laid this aside unfinished, and rewrote and
completed it in Latin, with the title _Cogitata et Visa_. It gains by
being in Latin; as Mr. Spedding says, "it must certainly be reckoned
among the most perfect of Bacon's productions." The personal form with
each paragraph begins and ends. "_Franciscus Bacon sic cogitavit_ ...
_itaque visum est ei_" gives to it a special tone of serious conviction,
and brings the interest of the subject more keenly to the reader. It has
the same kind of personal interest, only more solemn and commanding,
which there is in Descartes's _Discours de la Methode_. In this form