Valerius Terminus Of the Interpretation of Nature
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~33,300 words · 158 passages
Cite this work
- APAFrancis Bacon. (n.d.). Valerius Terminus Of the Interpretation of Nature. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/francis-bacon/valerius-terminus-of-the-interpretation-of-nature
- MLAFrancis Bacon. "Valerius Terminus Of the Interpretation of Nature." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/francis-bacon/valerius-terminus-of-the-interpretation-of-nature.
- ChicagoFrancis Bacon. Valerius Terminus Of the Interpretation of Nature. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/francis-bacon/valerius-terminus-of-the-interpretation-of-nature.
What it is about
Valerius Terminus (c. 1603): an early draft, unfinished.
Context and history
Bacon abandoned it and never published it; it appeared in 1734. It is worth reading because the method is visible half-made, before the Novum Organum fixed it in the form everyone cites. **Warning: the text is incomplete and fragmentary.**
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
The following fragments of a great work on the Interpretation of Nature were first published in Stephens's Letters and Remains [1734]. They consist partly of detached passages, and partly of an epitome of twelve chapters of the first book of the proposed work. The detached passages contain the first, sixth, and eighth chapters, and portions of the fourth, fifth, seventh, ninth, tenth, eleventh, and sixteenth. The epitome contains an account of the contents of all the chapters from the twelfth to the twenty-sixth inclusive, omitting the twentieth, twentythird, and twenty-fourth. Thus the sixteenth chapter is mentioned both in the epitome and among the detached passages, and we are thus enabled to see that the two portions of the following tract belong to the same work, as it appears from both that the sixteenth chapter was to treat of the doctrine of idola. It is impossible to ascertain the motive which determined Bacon to give to the supposed author the name of Valerius Terminus, or to his commentator, of whose annotations we have no remains, that of Hermes Stella. It may be conjectured that by the name Terminus he intended to intimate that the new philosophy would put an end to the wandering of mankind in search of truth, that it would be the TERMINUS AD QUEM in which when it was once attained the mind would finally acquiesce. Again, the obscurity of the text was to be in some measure removed by the annotations of Stella; not however wholly, for Bacon in the epitome of the eighteenth chapter commends the manner of publishing knowledge "whereby it shall not be to the capacity nor taste of all, but shall as it were single and adopt his reader." Stella was therefore to throw a kind of starlight on the subject, enough to prevent the student's losing his way, but not much more. However this may be, the tract is undoubtedly obscure, partly from
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