Bacon meant at first to publish. He sent it to his usual critics, Sir
Thomas Bodley, Toby Matthews, and Bishop Andrewes. And he meant to
follow it up with a practical exemplification of his method. But he
changed his plan. He had more than once expressed his preference for
the form of _aphorisms_ over the argumentative and didactic continuity
of a set discourse. He had, indeed, already twice begun a series of
aphorisms on the true methods of interpreting nature, and directing the
mind in the true path of knowledge, and had begun them with the same
famous aphorism with which the _Novum Organum_ opens. He now reverted to
the form of the aphorism, and resolved to throw the materials of the
_Cogitata et Visa_ into this shape. The result is the _Novum Organum_.
It contains, with large additions, the substance of the treatise, but
broken up and rearranged in the new form of separate impersonal
generalised observations. The points and assertions and issues which, in
a continuous discourse, careful readers mark and careless ones miss, are
one by one picked out and brought separately to the light. It begins
with brief, oracular, unproved maxims and propositions, and goes on
gradually into larger developments and explanations. The aphorisms are
meant to strike, to awaken questions, to disturb prejudices, to let in
light into a nest of unsuspected intellectual confusions and
self-misunderstandings, to be the mottoes and watchwords of many a
laborious and difficult inquiry. They form a connected and ordered
chain, though the ties between each link are not given. In this way
Bacon put forth his proclamation of war on all that then called itself
science; his announcement that the whole work of solid knowledge must be
begun afresh, and by a new, and, as he thought, infallible method. On
this work Bacon concentrated all his care. It was twelve years in hand,
and twelve times underwent his revision. "In the first book especially,"
says Mr. Ellis, "every word seems to have been carefully weighed; and it
would be hard to omit or change anything without injuring the meaning
which Bacon intended to convey." Severe as it is, it is instinct with
enthusiasm, sometimes with passion. The Latin in which it is written
answers to it; it has the conciseness, the breadth, the lordliness of a
great piece of philosophical legislation.

The world has agreed to date from Bacon the systematic reform of natural
philosophy, the beginning of an intelligent