"Poesy," he says, "was ever thought to have some anticipation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things." He conceived that there was a mystic meaning, a record of lost wisdom, in the myths of the Greeks (which are mainly decorated survivals of savage guesses at the causes of things). He asks for more biographies, in an age very careless of biography. He speaks of the "inductive" method, as opposed to the scholastic reasoning from invented assumptions; and his mind was always busy with a perfect system, "Instauratio Magna," of the interpretation of nature, and the encyclopædic organization of knowledge. This work he never completed; the "Novum Organum" (1620), written in Latin, is the most important fragment. He "had a vision of his own," but what his great and perfect method really was, in practical operation, he probably did not know himself. Fallacies he could detect and classify in brilliant fashion, the "Eidola" or shadowy Dwellers on the Threshold of Truth, bewildering men who would enter that sanctuary. His work in this kind, especially the "Novum Organum," is immensely stimulating: he saw in vision the Promised Land of Science into which he did not enter, and he would have been much disenchanted by the results, as regards human happiness, of the discoveries which he, not vainly, summoned men to make. He did not urge haste in practical application--the commercializing of science. He insisted on the collection of "contradictory instances," a method always, in accordance with human eagerness, too much neglected.[1] Bacon's mind, in fact, was encyclopædic, and shared the faults common to encyclopædias. The contemporary specialist, like Gilbert with his remarkable experiments in magnetism, is spoken of but slightingly by Bacon; nor has he much praise for other students who, in his time, were practising what he was preaching.