and understanding, three principal sciences are distinguished; history,
poesy, and philosophy. Of the three objects of the latter, "nature strikes
the mind with a direct ray, God with a refracted ray, and man himself
with a reflected ray." Theology is natural or revealed. Speculative
(theoretical) natural philosophy divides into physics, concerned with
material and efficient causes, and metaphysics, whose mission, according to
the traditional view, is to inquire into final causes, but in Bacon's own
opinion, into formal causes; operative (technical) natural philosophy
is mechanics and natural magic. The doctrine concerning man comprises
anthropology (including logic and ethics) and politics. This division of
Bacon was still retained by D'Alembert in his preliminary discourse to the
_Encyclopédie_.]

[Footnote 2: Cf. on Bacon, K. Fischer, 2d ed., 1875; Chr. Sigwart, in the
_Preussische Jahrbücher_, 1863 and 1864, and in vol. ii. of his _Logik_;
H. Heussler, _Baco und seine geschichtliche Stellung_, Breslau, 1889.
[Adamson, _Encyclopedia Britannica_, 9th. ed., vol. iii. pp. 200-222;
Fowler, English Philosophers Series, 1881; Nichol, Blackwood's
Philosophical Classics, 2 vols., 1888-89.--TR.]] Bacon's merit was
threefold: he felt more forcibly and more clearly than previous
thinkers the need of a reform in science; he set up a new and grand
ideal--unbiased and methodical investigation of nature in order to
mastery over nature; and he gave information and directions as to
the way in which this goal was to be attained, which, in spite of their
incompleteness in detail, went deep into the heart of the subject and laid
the foundation for the work of centuries.[1] His faith in the omnipotence
of the new method was so strong, that he thought that science for the
future could almost dispense with talent. He compares his method to a
compass or a ruler, with which the unpractised man is able to draw circles
and straight lines better than an expert without these instruments.