Excerpt from The New Philosophy

When I was admitted to (i) B K and the symbols upon the key were explained to me, I was told that the hand at the bottom of the shield was pointing to the seven stars, emphasizing seven, the sacred number, and that the seven stars were the seven philosophies, which should guide the neophyte in (i) B K to perfection. I now understand that a (i) B K antiquarian has spoiled all this symbolism. I have little respect for historians - they are always spoiling good stories they worship dull facts and seem to have a small Opinion of the romance that interests the most of us.

While Thomas Gresham in 1573 was planning for the propagation and glorification of the seven philosophies, a young freshman named Francis Bacon had entered Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a relative of Gresham by marriage, Gresham having married a first cousin of Bacon. He applied himself diligently, but three years taught him to despise the current philosophy of Aristotle. He left Cambridge without a degree, convinced that the methods employed in the sciences and the results reached were alike erroneous, yielding, as he said, no true fruit.of learning but merely idle disputation and schoolish ends. There was planted in him the germs of a new conception. He announced that a new method of philosophy must be devised whose aim should be the service and welfare of men and not the pleasure and delight of scholars. He claimed that it mattered little to the fortunes of humanity what abstract notions might be entertained concerning the nature and principle of things. He said The aim of all science is to endow the condition and life of man with new powers or works, or to extend more widely the limits of the power and greatness of man. He desired that a body of accurately ascertained facts should be amassed from which alone, in his Opinion, the processes of Nature could be understood and a solid foundation could be laid on which discovery and invention might proceed apace. By such means, he believed, man would attain to the knowledge of the courses and secret motions of things and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effect ing of all things possible. He held that there is much ground for hoping that there are still laid up in the womb of nature many secrets of excellent use, having no affinity or parallelism with anything that is now known, but lying entirely out of the beat of the imagination, have not yet been found out. They too, no doubt, will some time or other.

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