M.A.

ROBERT LESLIE

LESLIE ELLIS,
LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE;

AND

DOUGLAS DENON HEATH,
BARRISTER-AT-LAW :

LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

LONGMAN AND CO. ; SIMPKIN AND CO. ; HAMILTON AND CO.; WILTTAKER

AND CO.; J. BAIN; E. HODGSON, WASHBOURNE AND CO.; H. G. BOIN;
RICHARDSON BROTHERS ; HOULSTON AND CO. ; BICKERS AND BUSH ;
WILLIS AND SOTHERAN; J. CORNISH; L. BOOTH ; AND J. SNOW.

The right of translation is reserred.

LONDON: Printed by SPOTTISWOODE & Co.

New-street-square

Add to Lib.

1857

HISTORY AND PLAN

OF

THIS EDITION

Bacon's works were all published separately, and never collected into a body by himself; and though he bad determined, not long before his death, to distribute them into consecutive volumes, the order in which they were to succeed each other was confessedly irregular ; a volume of moral and political writings being introduced between the first and second parts of the Instauratio Magna, quite out of place, merely because he had it ready at the time.' In arranging the collected works therefore, every editor must use his own judgment.

Blackbourne, the first editor of an Opera Omnia?, took the Distributio. Operis as his groundwork, and endeavoured first to place the various unfinished portions of the Instauratio Magna in the order in which they would have stood had they been completed according to the original design; and then to marshal the rest in such a sequence that they might seem to hang together, each leading by natural transition to the next, and so connecting themselves into a kind of whole. But the several pieces were not written with a view to any such connexion, which is altogether forced and fanciful ; and the arrangement has this

a

1 « Debuerat sequi Novum Organum : interposui tamen Scripta mea Moralia et Politica, quia magis erant in promptu. . Atque hic tomus (ut diximus) interjectus est et non ex ordine Instaurationis." — Ep. ad Fulgentium, Opuscula, p. 172.

? Francisci Baconi, fe., Opera Omnia, quatuor voluminibus comprehensa. Londini, MDCCXXX.

2

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