The Works of Francis Bacon: Translations of the philosophical works

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Brown and Taggard, 1864

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Página 417 - And this the consent of ages and of antiquity has rather embraced and approved. For the opinion concerning the motion of the earth is not new, but revived from the ancients, as I said ; whereas the opinion that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable is altogether new (except one verse, wrongly translated), and was first introduced by...
Página 344 - It was not they, but Genseric and Attila and the barbarians, who destroyed the atomic philosophy. "For, at a time when all human learning had suffered shipwreck, these planks of Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy, as being of a lighter and more inflated substance, were preserved and came down to us, while things more solid sank and almost passed into oblivion.
Página 397 - THE best division of human learning is that derived from the three faculties of the rational soul, which is the seat of learning. History has reference to the Memory, poesy to the Imagination, and philosophy to the Reason. And by poesy here I mean nothing else than feigned history or fables; for verse is but a character of style, and belongs to the arts of speech, whereof I -will treat in its proper place.
Página 402 - Whereas men ought on the contrary to have a settled conviction that things artificial differ from things natural, not in form or essence, but only in the efficient ; that man has in truth no power over nature except that of motion — the power, I say, of putting natural bodies together or separating them — and that the rest is done ty nature working within.
Página 188 - The manufacture of gold, or the transmutation of metals into gold, is to be much doubted of. For of all bodies gold is the heaviest and densest, and therefore to turn anything else into gold there must needs be condensation.... But the conversion of quicksilver or lead into silver (which is rarer than either of them) is a thing to be hoped for.
Página 347 - ... united to the first form, and likewise to the first principle of motion, as it is found. For the abstraction of motion also has begotten an infinite number of fancies about souls, lives, and the like ; as if these were not satisfied by matter and form, but depended on principles of their own. But these three are by no means to be separated, only distinguished ; and matter (whatever it is) must be held to be so adorned, furnished, and formed, that all virtue, essence, action, and natural motion,...
Página 343 - Spedding, the learned editor and biographer of Bacon. It is evident, indeed, that Bacon considered Democritus to be a man of weightier metal than either Plato or Aristotle, though their philosophy ' was noised and celebrated in the schools, amid the din and pomp of professors.
Página 401 - And if any one dislike that arts should be called the bonds of nature, thinking they should rather be counted as her deliverers and champions, because in some cases they enable her to fulfil her own intention by reducing obstacles to order; for my part I do not care about these refinements and elegancies of speech ; all I mean is, that nature, like Proteus, is forced by art to do that which without art would not be done ; call it which you will, — force and bonds, or help and perfection.
Página 398 - Now this composition and division is either according to the pleasure of the mind, or according to the nature of things as it exists in fact If it be according to the pleasure of the mind, and these parts are arbitrarily transposed into the likeness of some individual, it is the work of imagination ; which, not being bound by any law and necessity of nature or matter, may join things which are never found together in nature and separate things which in nature are never found apart ; being nevertheless...
Página 471 - ... which they are situated, which does indeed revolve but more slowly. They affirm that from this inequality come the fluctuations, waves, and reciprocations of the planetary ether, and from them a variety of motions. They affirm a necessity in the planets of revolving faster and slower, according as they are situated high or low in the heaven, and that by consent of the universe. But at the same time they affirm a dislike in the planets of preternatural velocity as well of the greater as of the...

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