Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Some tanning and marking due to age. Year 1967. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> Francis Bacon statesman philosopher and au- thor has always been an intriguing Renaissance figure. Today he is acknowledged as the first great English essayist and historian. Bacon taught men how to think originally and com- municate well but he did not accomplish this without first evolving his own view of how the human mind functions. Professor Wallace here examines the concep- tual bases of Bacon’s system of knowledge and learning as revealed in The Advancement of Learning (1605) and in the expanded transla- tion of that work De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum. The result not only illuminates Ba- con’s thought and the significance of his psychol- ogy of man but also sheds new light on the intellectual climate of the period with its long tradition of reflection on man’s nature and soul. Bacon’s main divisions of learning – philoso- phy history and poesy reflected his view of the reason memory and imagination and the faculties of mind allied with them understand- ing will and appetite. By evaluating the nature and function of these faculties in the context of Bacon’s scheme of knowledge the author shows him to be a rationalist a systematic thinker interested in controlling the conditions of crea- tive thought. Bacon’s famous method of “induc- tion” is seen as an attempt to promote insight by linking the understanding directly with the data of sense perception and by minimizing sources of distraction. He thus may be said to have invented a “psychology of discovery.” Bacon’s unique view of the creative function of imagination made him the first to formulate a psychological foundation for a rhetoric that by nature had to be reasonable moral and appeal- ing. Only through an account of Bacon’s psy- chology of man can one appreciate his compact definition of style as revealing “a sensible and plausible elocution. (LL)