DISTINCTION BETWEEN HIS ESSAYS AND HIS OTHER WORKS
Both in the prefaces to the “Instauratio Magna” and in “The New Atlantis,” Bacon is thinking of the world as he believed it should and would become. The assumption that he had a similar purpose in his famous “Essays”〖H. C., iii, 7ff.〗 unfortunately misleads many modern critics, and tends to obscure the peculiar merits of his most popular work. Yet Bacon himself tells us that in his opinion we already had enough books which enthusiastically described moral ideals, and that what we really needed were accurate observations on the extent to which those ideals were attainable, and on the methods by which, under the actual conditions of everyday life, they might be put into practice. What he wished to present in the essays was human life, not as it ought to be, but as it is. “Let us know ourselves,” he said, “and how it standeth with us.”