ELIZABETHAN 'SECRETS OF MORALITY AND POLICY';
OR,
THE FABLES OF THE NEW LEARNING.
Reason cannot be so sensible, nor examples so fit. Advancement of Learning.
INTRODUCTORY.
CHAPTER I.
THE DESIGN.
The object of this Volume is merely to open as a study, and a study of primary consequence, those great Works of the Modern Learning which have passed among us hitherto, for lack of the historical and scientific key to them, as Works of Amusement, merely.
But even in that superficial acquaintance which we have had with them in that relation, they have, all the time, been subtly operating upon the minds in contact with them, and perpetually fulfilling the first intention of their Inventor.
'For,' says the great Innovator of the Modern Ages,—the author of the Novum Organum, and of the Advancement of Learning,—in claiming this department of Letters as the necessary and proper instrumentality of a new science,—of a science at least, 'foreign to opinions received,'—as he claims elsewhere that it is, under all conditions, the inevitable essential form of this science in particular. 'Men have proposed to answer two different and contrary ends by the use of parables, for they serve as well to instruct and illustrate as to wrap up and envelope, so that, though for the present, we drop the concealed use, and suppose them to be vague undeterminate things, formed for AMUSEMENT merely, still the other use remains. 'And every man of any learning must readily concede,' he says, 'the value of that use of them as a method of popular instruction, grave, sober, exceedingly useful, and sometimes necessary in the sciences, as it opens an easy and familiar passage to the human understandings in all new discoveries, that are abstruse and out of the road of vulgar opinion. They were used of old by philosophers to express any point of reason more sharp and subtle than the vulgar, and nevertheless now, and at all times, these allusive parabolical forms retain much life and vigor, because reason cannot be so sensible nor examples so fit.' That philosophic use of them was to inform and teach, whilst the minds of men continued rude and unpractised in matters of subtilty and speculation, and even impatient and in a manner incapable of receiving anything that did not directly fall under and strike the senses. 'And, even to this day, if any man would let new light in upon the human understanding, and conquer prejudices without raising animosities, opposition, or disturbance, he must still go in the same path and have recourse to the like method.'