Francis Bacon [antikvár]

PREFACEOriginally this selection from Bacon was intended to include many of his scientific works, which formed the basis of his fame in the seventeenth century, and which have been positively revalued in recent times (see Further Reading, § 7). However, these were mostly written in Latin, then the international scholarly language, and the English translations by Francis Headlam and James Spedding in the standard edition on which this selection is based (that produced by James Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath between 1857 and 1874) are sometimes inconsistent and anachronistic in rendering key concepts. That deficiency could be corrected by selective re-translation, but as I worked on annotating the texts I realized that I was having to evolve two different types of annotation: one for the translated texts in Victorian English, directed to explaining the scientific concepts and argument, and a quite different one for Bacon's original Elizabethan and Jacobean English writings, which turned out to require a large amount of basic semantic and philological explication. The contrast between these two modes of annotation became so extreme that I found myself in effect editing two different books; so I decided to leave the scientific works for some other occasion and devote this volume solely to Bacon's writings in English.This change of plan, while delaying its publication for several years, meant that I could now give a much wider coverage of Bacon's English writings than any single volume has yet attempted. In addition to the obvious major works, the Advancement of Learning (1605), the Essays of 1625, and those posthumously published New Atlantis, I could include the earliest version of the Essays (1597), selections from the 1612 Essays, and those important and neglected early proto-dramatic court entertainments that he produced in the 1590s. But I could also include representative examples of his writings in politics, law, and theology, not reprinted since Spedding's time. For the first category, politics, I have chosen to illustrate Bacon's independence as a counsellor, his ability to make a rational analysis of a given situation, rather than simply telling his superiors what they wanted to hear. My selection includes his plea for civil tolerance, An Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of England of f.1589-91 (pp. 1 ff.), which criticizes the policies of both the reformers and the Established Church, and his justification of Queen