Bacon's Writings, #4 of
Francis Bacon: "The Secretary of Nature"
"The style of Bacon has an idiosyncracy which we might expect from his genius."6Earlier, we referred to the comparison which Frederic R. White made between Sir Thomas More and Francis Bacon. Their lives were remarkably paralleled, but as White points out there was little similarity between their writings. "More was a classicist and a humanist; his Utopia is well-planned ... Bacon ... [was a] scientist; his New Atlantis is incomplete, ill-proportioned, somewhat heavy in style, and dogmatically devoted to the glorification of natural science."
Bacon's first work was The Advancement of Learning (1605). His second came along in 1620, Novum Organum; it was part of his larger philosophical work known as Instauratio Magna, of which he only completed two parts: this, Novum Organum, and De Augmentis Scientarum.7 De Augmentis Scientarum, which came out in 1623, was an expansion of his 1605 work. Apothegms came out in 1624. His aphoristic Essays were continually worked on between 1597 and 1625. Bacon's utopian fable about the island of "Bensalem," the New Atlantis, came out in 1627, appended to Sylva Sylvarum. And his final work, The World, came out three years after his death.
