In the Dedication of this work to James I, Bacon admires his Majesty's genius, "a light of nature I have observed in your Majesty," who certainly was a clever man, and interested in literature. The book is a plea for the organization of knowledge: Bacon styles it "a small globe of the intellectual world". He surveys all knowledge, and maps it out, with a view to organized study. He meets religious objections in his usual way. It is argued that ignorance is a fine thing, making "a more devout dependence on God as the first cause". Bacon replies in the words of Job, "will you lie for God, as one man will do for another to gratify him?" Will you "offer the author of Truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie"? Bacon attacks the schoolmen as darkening counsel by words and spinning cobwebs out of assumed first principles, instead of collecting facts, and questioning nature by experiments. Practically, experimental philosophy, and the endowment of special research, are the burdens of his argument. He divides knowledge into History (the original sense of the word being _inquiry_), Human, Natural, and Divine. Anxious that nothing should escape him, he even classifies Ciphers, then much used in the secret correspondence of statesmen and conspirators. He had invented a cipher when a young diplomatist in Paris, and, in the later Latin translation of this book, the "De Augmentis," he is copious on the subject. The secrets of each writing were usually discovered by the simple process of torturing the conspirators who used them.