ly by his
contemporaries. (See _Letters and Life_, i. 268.) Raleigh and Jonson have
both recorded their opinions of it, but no one has characterized it more
happily than his friend, Sir Tobie Matthews, "A man so rare in knowledge,
of so many several kinds, endued with the facility and felicity of
expressing it all in so elegant, significant, so abundant, and yet so
choice and ravishing a way of words, of metaphors, of allusions, as perhaps
the world hath not seen since it was a world."--"Address to the Reader"
prefixed to _Collection of English Letters_ (1660).

[47] The division of the sciences adopted in the great French
_Encyclopedie_ was founded upon this classification of Bacon's. See
Diderot's _Prospectus (Oeuvres_, iii.) and d'Alembert's _Discours
(Oeuvres_, i.) The scheme should be compared with later attempts of the
same nature by Ampere, Cournot, Comte and Herbert Spencer.

[48] See also "Letter to Fulgentio," _Letters and Life_, vii. 533.

[49] _Fil. Lab._; _Cog. et Visa._ i.; cf. Pref. to _Ins. Mag._

[50] _Val. Ter._ 232; cf. _N. O._ i. 124.

[51] _Letters_, i. 123.

[52] _N. O._ i. 116.

[53] _Fil. Lab._ 5; cf. _N. O._ i. 81; _Val. Ter._ (_Works_, iii. 235);
_Advancement_, bk. i. (_Works_, iii. 294).

[54] _Fil. Lab._ 5; cf. _N. O._ i. 81; _Val. Ter._ (_Works_, iii. 222-233);
_New Atlantis (Works_, iii. 156).

[55] _N. O._ i. 116.

[56] _Ibid._ i. 124.

[57] _Ibid._ i. 6.

[58] The word _Idola_ is manifestly borrowed from Plato. It is used twice
in connexion with the Platonic Ideas (_N. O._ i. 23, 124) and is contrasted
with them as the false appearance. The [Greek: eidolon] with Plato is the
fleeting, transient image of the real thing, and the passage evidently
referred to by Bacon is that in the _Rep._ vii. 516 A, [Greek: kai proton
men tas skias an rhaista kathoroie, kai meta touto en tois hudasi ta te ton
anthropon kai ta ton allon eidola, husteron de auta]. It is explained well
in the _Advancement_, bk. i. (_Works_, iii. 287). (For valuable notes on
the _Idola_, see T. Fowler's _Nov. Org._ i. 38 notes; especially for a
comparison of the _Idola_ with Roger Bacon's _Offendicula_.)

[59] _N. O._ i. 58.

[60] _N. O._ i. 79, 80, 98, 108.

[61] On the meaning of the word _form_ in Bacon's theory see also Fowler's
_N. O._ introd. s. 8.

[62] _N. O._ ii. 1.

[63] This _better known in the order of nature_ is nowhere satisfactorily
explained by Bacon. Like his classification of causes, an