Tuvill's Advancement of Bacon's Learning

Abstract

TN HIS Two Bookes of... the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane (i6o5), Bacon's fertile and wide-ranging mind noted in the knowledge of his time an array of deficiencies to the elimination of which the next twenty-one years of his life were to be assiduously devoted. Although taking all knowledge to be his province, he was so far from any arrogant preemptions that he deliberately encouraged the aid of other pens, hoping, as he remarked, that his book might serve to excite voluntary endeavours.' In the progress of the century, besides his own titanic performances, certain other works did appear by means of which, consciously or unconsciously, some of the gaps he had indicated were solidly filled. Among these may be mentioned Bishop Joseph Hall's Salomons Divine Arts ( I 609), comprising systems of ethics, politics, and domestic economy, drawne into Method out of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes2 and Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia epidemica (I646)-a bountiful answer to one of Bacon's pleas for more light, in a kalendar of popular errors.3 But the major response to Bacon was slow 'in coming and less in the scientific than in the moral and speculative realms. It is something of a surprise, therefore, to find an almost immediate and demonstrably conscious response to his work in the writings of Daniel Tuvill, a minor essayist of the early seventeenth century.4 That