[196] It has been remarked, that the famous experiment of Pascal on the barometer, by carrying it to a considerable elevation, was “a _crucial instance_, one of the first, if not the very first on record in physics.” Herschel, p. 229. |Its objects.| 46. The first object of Lord Bacon’s philosophical writings is to prove their own necessity, by giving an unfavourable impression as to the actual state of most sciences, in consequence of the prejudices of the human mind, and of the mistaken methods pursued in their cultivation. The second was to point out a better prospect for the future. One of these occupies the treatise De Augmentis, and the first book of the Novum Organum. The other, besides many anticipations in these, is partially detailed in the second book, and would have been more thoroughly developed in those remaining portions which the author did not complete. We shall now give a very short sketch of these two famous works, which comprise the greater part of the Baconian philosophy. |Sketch of the treatise De Augmentis.| |History.| |Poetry.| 47. The Advancement of Learning is divided into two books only; the treatise De Augmentis into nine. The first of these, in the latter, is introductory, and designed to remove prejudices against the search for truth, by indicating the causes which had hitherto obstructed it. In the second book, he lays down his celebrated partition of human learning into history, poetry, and philosophy, according to the faculties of the mind respectively concerned in them, the memory, imagination and reason. History is natural or civil, under the latter of which ecclesiastical and literary histories are comprised. These again fall into regular subdivisions; all of which he treats in summary manner, and points out the deficiencies which ought to be supplied in many departments of history. Poetry succeeds in the last chapter of the same book, but by confining that name to fictitious narrative, except as to the ornaments of style, which he refers to a different part of his subject, he much limited his views of that literature; even if it were true, as it certainly is not, that the imagination alone, in any ordinary use of the word, is the medium of poetical emotion. The word emotion indeed is sufficient to show that Bacon should either have excluded poetry altogether from his enumeration of sciences and learning, or taken into consideration other faculties of the soul than those which are merely intellectual. |Fine passage on poetry.|