This communication, which reports the discovery of an unknown manuscript of one of Francis Bacon's earliest philosophical writings, also has the more general purpose of offering an assessment of the manuscript's implications for our understanding of the attraction of Bacon's ideas in the milieu of the early seventeenth-century universities. As such, it contributes to two broader areas within the field of early modern manuscript studies. The first area concerns the circulation of Bacon's writings, and in particular the differential ways in which diverse genres of writing by this notable polymath were copied, transmitted, and read in manuscript. Although we now possess several penetrating studies of Baconian manuscripts,Footnote 1 the foundational question of the dynamics of their circulation has not yet been treated as systematically as it has been for contemporaries such as Philip Sidney and John Donne.Footnote 2 A second area concerns the broader history of annotation, and specifically the phenomenon of the university notebook.Footnote 3 Such manuscripts have been an evidentiary staple for the history of the English universities for some time.Footnote 4 But in default of detailed case-studies,Footnote 5 we still lack a general typology of how university students in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England conceived, constructed, and used these documents. As well as shedding new light on Francis Bacon, this study also offers a contribution towards that broader goal.
I
In the two decades before the lavish folio publication of his Novum organum in 1620, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) developed the ideas for his ‘Great Instauration’ (Instauratio magna) of human knowledge across a range of preliminary and often abortive unpublished writings. One of these preliminary tracts, indeed probably the earliest of them all, is the manuscript treatise in English entitled Valerius Terminus of the interpretation of nature with the annotations of Hermes Stella. Though these two pseudonyms have so far resisted straightforward interpretation,Footnote 6 and though it is unfinished, this rich work adumbrates several of the key preoccupations of both Parts i and ii of Bacon's mature vision of the Instauratio. The early chapters of the Valerius Terminus, in particular, are concerned with the nature of knowledge: with its scope, its impediments, and – in the case of the first chapter, which is one of the few that was finalized – with its ‘limites and end’. Bacon's treatise thus opens with a powerful defence of the human ‘thirst of knowledg’ which sees it as arising, not from Lucifer's transgressive presumption, but rather from a legitimate ‘emptines or want’ in nature and from a holy ‘instincte from god’.Footnote 7 As such, the Valerius Terminus has played an important role in assessments of the intellectual development and philosophical significance of this prominent author.Footnote 8
For a variety of reasons the Valerius Terminius has usually been ascribed a date of c. 1603.Footnote 9 Nonetheless, it should be acknowledged that we do not yet know precisely when – or, rather, over what period – Bacon composed the treatise. One mark of its relatively early date may be that Bacon wrote it in English; all the other versions of what became the Instauratio magna are written in Latin.Footnote 10 Another clue suggesting an early date is Bacon's adoption of the authorial persona of ‘Valerius Terminus’;Footnote 11 in other versions of the Instauratio, including the Novum organum itself, Bacon tends to write in the magisterial third person (‘Franciscus Bacon sic cogitavit’). But possibly the most telling indication of when the treatise was conceived is that, unlike most of what Bacon wrote in English from April 1603 onwards, the Valerius Terminus is not addressed directly to the new King James.Footnote 12
Hitherto, the Valerius Terminus has been known from a single manuscript, now among the Harleian collections of the British Library (MS Harley 6463). Though it is in a scribal hand, this manuscript was evidently produced under Bacon's direction, for it is prefaced by a table of contents in his own hand, which also appears throughout the manuscript making corrections and additions to the scribally copied text.Footnote 13 However, the Valerius Terminus was never printed in Bacon's lifetime, nor did it appear in any of the posthumous collections of his writings that were published across the seventeenth century.Footnote 14 The Harleian manuscript was first printed by the historiographer royal Robert Stephens in 1734, and its text has been the one used by all subsequent editors of the treatise.Footnote 15 It is, moreover, the only item presently recorded for the Valerius Terminus in Peter Beal's invaluable catalogue of surviving Bacon manuscripts.Footnote 16
Both in Bacon's lifetime and following his death his political, legal, and religious writings circulated widely in manuscript, even when they already existed in print.Footnote 17 This pattern of circulation contrasts sharply, however, with that for Bacon's unpublished philosophical writings. These were all unprinted in his lifetime and seem to have had a very limited circulation in manuscript. Most are only witnessed by a single exemplar, and several more are only known from the edition of philosophical writings that Isaac Gruter published in Amsterdam in 1653 from a cache of authorial manuscripts obtained from Bacon's executor, Sir William Boswell (d. 1650).Footnote 18 In its status as a treatise contained in a unique scribal manuscript containing its author's own hand, therefore, the Valerius Terminus has hitherto shared a clear pattern with Bacon's other earlier philosophical writings.
There is clear evidence, moreover, that Bacon consciously regarded his unpublished philosophical speculations as being for restricted circulation only. In a note referring to his fragmentary Latin treatise Temporis partus masculus (part of which appears immediately after the Valerius Terminus in the same Harleian manuscript), for instance, Bacon wrote that it was ‘destined ‹for› to be ‹traditionary› ‘separate´ and not publike’.Footnote 19 Evidently, it was not intended for a general readership. We might even suggest that Bacon's conviction that knowledge should be exclusive required him to treat his manuscripts in this way: in his unpublished Proœmium de interpretatione naturæ he wrote that the discoveries of his natural philosophy would be ‘more vigorous and better secured’ if they were ‘confined among proper and selected’ people.Footnote 20
This is not to suggest that Bacon did not circulate his philosophical writings at all. In a surviving private memorandum from July 1608 he proposed to himself ‘Imparting my Cogitata et Visa wth choyse, ut videbitr.’Footnote 21 Bacon had already sent a copy of this Latin philosophical treatise to the proper and selected Sir Thomas Bodley for his comments, and he sent it on afterwards to Lancelot Andrewes, who had previously also served as the pre-publication ‘Inquisitor’ of the Advancement of learning.Footnote 22 Bacon was also in the habit of sending drafts of his writings to his close friend Tobie Matthew.Footnote 23 Yet, in one letter to Matthew, Bacon requested him to ‘take care, not to leave the Writing, which I left with you last, with any man so long, as that he may be able to take a Copy of it; because, first, it must be censured by you, and then considered again, by me’.Footnote 24 By contrast with the broad manuscript circulation of his political, ecclesiological, and legal writings, therefore, Bacon seems to have maintained a rather close guard over his unprinted philosophical compositions, and to have permitted only limited access to them.
II
Yet, Bacon's control over the circulation of his philosophical writings was clearly not absolute, for a hitherto unknown copy of part of the Valerius Terminus has now come to light. Though only a relatively brief extract, the copy is of interest both for what it tells us about contemporary interest in Bacon's early philosophy, and for the light it sheds on the evolution of this important early work.
This newly discovered copy of Bacon's Valerius Terminus is contained in Cambridge University Library, Additional Manuscript 102, fos. 28v–29r.Footnote 25 It consists of the first 800 words or so of Bacon's treatise; that is, from what in the Harleian manuscript is the opening portion of the first chapter. The extract is copied into a single opening of two pages, and breaks off with the catchword at the end of the second page, in the middle of a sentence (fo. 29r). Thirteen further blank pages follow this fragment, which may offer an indication of how long the extract was that the scribe expected to copy. The abandonment of his task does not necessarily mean that the scribe lost interest in transcribing the work: it is possible that, having started the job, he then decided to copy it out in full into a separate notebook. The extract is entitled ‘Valerius Terminus of the interpretation of nature with the annotations of Hermes Stella’, precisely as in the Harleian version. Bacon's name, however, is not attached to the treatise, which is no doubt why it has evaded identification for so long.
The manuscript into which this extract is copied is a substantial quarto paper-book of 293 folios, with margins ruled in ink, which survives in its original full leather binding with vestigial green silk ties. The Valerius Terminus fragment is the only extended appearance of English in the document, which otherwise consists almost entirely of notes in Latin on natural philosophical, astronomical, mathematical, natural historical, and medical topics. Overall, the notebook gives the strong impression of being the work of a student pursuing the studies of the arts course at a high level (i.e. perhaps undertaking MA rather than BA work) at one of the two English universities. Indeed, as an evidently university-related document, the manuscript has previously been found of interest for the light it sheds on English academic studies of the period.Footnote 26
In respect of its handwriting, the notebook contains a variety of visually distinct stints, almost all of which nonetheless appear to be the work of a single scribe. The English Valerius Terminus alone is copied in a secretary hand, with italic used for emphasis and titles.Footnote 27 For the Latin written throughout the rest of the volume the scribe uses an italic hand that varies considerably in its degree of formality. Some of the earlier material is copied in very regular and sometimes beautiful fashion, including the use for titles of an elegant humanist minuscule script.Footnote 28
The notebook does not appear to have been compiled consecutively. Although there is a fair degree of natural chronological progression throughout the volume, any one page may nonetheless contain material from different periods of composition. But the earlier pages of the manuscript do generally seem to have been copied earliest in time, and they principally record the author's reading. In the fifty or so pages that lead up to the copy of the Valerius Terminus there are notes from printed books by the following authors, among others: Pietro Pomponazzi (De incantationibus, 1556); Julius Caesar Scaliger (the Exotericae exercitationes against Cardano, 1557); John Dee (Monas hieroglyphica, 1564); Juan Huarte (Examen de ingenios, 1575); Francisco Vallès (De sacra philosophia, 1587); Giambattista Della Porta (Magia naturalis, 1558 onwards); Girolamo Provenzale, De sensibus (1597); Martin Delrio (Disquisitiones magica, 1599); Euclid (Optica & Catoptrica, translated by Jean Péna, 1599); Guido Panciroli (Res memorabilia, 1599). The most modern treatise to appear is Girolamo Fabrizi d'Acquapendente's De locutione of 1603.Footnote 29 Elsewhere, the manuscript also contains later dateable materials (in a less meticulous hand), including a note on the front pastedown to John Selden's De diis Syris, first published in 1617.
Notes taken directly from printed books are by no means the only items in the manuscript, however. It also contains systematic analyses of philosophical subjects, in particular of the soul (fos. 12r–17v, 22r–23v); this was a prominent part of MA-level natural philosophical study in the seventeenth-century English universities.Footnote 30 Moreover, another of the items immediately prior to the copy of the Valerius Terminus is a rather rare kind of document: a transcription of a disputation, complete with contributions from both Respondent and Opponent, on whether the imagination is able to produce real effects (An Imaginatio possit producere reales effectus?) (fos. 8r–11r).Footnote 31 This general subject was, as it happens, a subject of great interest to Francis Bacon.Footnote 32 But it seems much more likely that its presence here should be connected to the visit King James made to Oxford in 1605, when precisely this natural philosophical quæstio was disputed before him.Footnote 33 A further hastily-written question briefly considers the morality of the theatre (An Ludi scænici sint liciti?) (fo. 25r–v). The item immediately preceding the copy of the Valerius Terminus in the manuscript is an analysis of the intellectual powers of angels, in which Thomas Aquinas serves as an authority and the more recent views of the Jesuit Francisco Suárez are rejected (fos. 26r–28v). Furthermore, the item immediately following the Valerius Terminus (after the thirteen blank pages) is a ‘Digression on laughter’ (Digressio de risu) which is concerned to adjudicate the different views of Cicero (‘refuted’), modern authors (‘demolished’), and Aristotle (‘approved’) on the subject (fos. 36r–38v).Footnote 34 One of the most striking (and attractive) aspects of seventeenth-century English university life was the very high value it placed on wit and humour;Footnote 35 it is therefore interesting to find the phenomenon being investigated so systematically – albeit, dare one say it, earnestly – here.
Most of the remaining materials in the notebook appear to post-date the copy of Valerius Terminus. They consist of numerous headings for disputed quæstiones of a natural philosophical nature (taking the form an … sit) with occasional more extensive sub-notes (fos. 41v–83r); notes on natural history (probably made rather later, fos. 47r–48v, 101v–105r); numerous numbered paragraphs (371 in total) of answers to solved questions (taking the form cur …), again mostly on natural philosophical subjects (fos. 113v–161r); a few sides of notes, probably written a little earlier in the life of the notebook than their placement over half-way through it might suggest, on the metaphysics of being (fos. 161v–164r); various more miscellaneous notes amidst many blank leaves (fos. 164v–254v), including lists of proofs for the Copernican thesis of the motion of the earth and William Gilbert's thesis (published in 1600) of the earth as a magnet (fos. 241v, 242r);Footnote 36 and finally some sustained collectiones (i.e. notes) from Alessandro Piccolomini's Anatomicæ prælectiones (1585) (fos. 249r–292v).
Within the context of the notebook as a whole, and particularly in the earlier portion in which it is found, the appearance of Bacon's treatise is unusual in three prominent respects. First, it is the only item in English.Footnote 37 The dominance of Latin elsewhere in the notebook is a strong marker of its ‘scholastic’ nature. (To use that much-abused word in the strict sense of ‘studies pursued for the university schools’). Secondly, and in notable contrast to most of the rest of the material in the volume, the scribe set himself to copy Bacon's work in full, rather than extracting selected passages. Lastly, unlike the great majority of the material around it that is copied from printed books, the proper author – as opposed to the obvious pseudonym of ‘Valerius Terminus’ – is not identified. It is possible that the scribe was ignorant of Bacon's authorship of the treatise.
Overall, the portrait that emerges from the notebook as a whole is a rather characteristic one. It is of a student of the natural philosophy of the Arts course, possibly one who later came to teach the subject himself, who also pursued an early medical interest.Footnote 38 Notwithstanding an initial appearance of miscellaneity, the notebook is quite tightly focused on its task of providing its author with material for use in the disputations, declamations, and philosophical verses that were the staple forms of exercise and examination in the early seventeenth-century English universities.Footnote 39 The compiler's notes from Charles de Bovelles's early sixteenth-century treatment of physics, for instance, seem to have been put to the service of making a philosophical declamation, since later on in the notebook there appears the opening captatio benevolentiæ of an oration ‘in praise of sight’ that draws upon this material.Footnote 40
It is in the context of these scholastic excercises, therefore, that we should understand the presence of Bacon's Valerius Terminus in the notebook. Notwithstanding its somewhat outlying status in the volume, the compiler of the notebook seems to have found Bacon's reflections on the licitness of human knowledge both attractive and useful enough to plan an extensive copy of his work – albeit that this plan was not ultimately followed through. In the hands of this student, therefore, Bacon's treatise is not serving as the kind of bitter critique of the Aristotelianism of the schools with which the new philosophers’ writings in general, and Bacon's in particular, would later become associated. On the contrary: the Valerius Terminus appears here to be providing an attractively eloquent source for the kind of intellectual self-justification that was as characteristic an aspect of early modern English university life as it is of Bacon's own consciously extra-scholastic writings on the advancement and restitution of learning. Moreover, a good number of the authors who appear in the manuscript – including Scaliger, Huarte, Della Porta, and Panciroli – were also of great interest to Bacon as well.Footnote 41 Evidently, the student compiler of this academic notebook and the intellectually ambitious lawyer who had taken ‘all knowledge for [his] province’ shared a common intellectual culture.Footnote 42
III
In fact, however, we do not have to work entirely from internal evidence in assigning an identity to the compiler of our manuscript, for the front of the volume (fo. 2r) contains the elegant italic signature of its owner: ‘Edmundus Læus’, and also a date: ‘1607’.Footnote 43 Can this ‘Læus’ be identified?Footnote 44 We have seen that the contents of the manuscript are consistent with it being the work of a student at one of the two English universities, and this conjecture provides the means for discovering his identity. There was no likely student at Cambridge during this period with the name of Edmund Lee.Footnote 45 But there is a unique candidate from Oxford: one Edmund Leigh.Footnote 46
Edmund Leigh, from Lancashire, matriculated as a ‘plebeian’ from Brasenose (a college with strong Lancashire and Cheshire connections)Footnote 47 on 24 October 1600 at the recorded age of fifteen, and was therefore probably born in 1584 or 1585.Footnote 48 Like other matriculants, he indicated his subscription to the Articles of Religion with his signature, in a youthful secretary-hand.Footnote 49 He was elected to a Nowell scholarship in January 1601, and went on to take his BA in 1604 and then his MA (curiously late) in July 1611, having previously became a founder's fellow in March of that year. His surname dutifully appears (in a scribal hand) among those other members of Brasenose ‘who took or were to take the Oath of Allegeance’ in July 1610.Footnote 50 But he had arrived at Oxford just too soon to sign the first Admissions Register of the Bodleian Library, a volume that is otherwise a treasure-trove for those seeking to match seventeenth-century signatures.Footnote 51
Leigh pursued a long academic career at Brasenose, with ten years as a student and thirty more as a fellow, at a time when the average tenure of a college fellowship was only a decade.Footnote 52 He served as lecturer in Natural Philosophy in 1614,Footnote 53 praelector publicus in 1615–16, Greek lecturer in 1617 and 1630, custos jocalium (keeper of the treasures, a post combined with that of library-keeper) several times in the 1620s,Footnote 54 chaplain (at a college that still lacked a chapel),Footnote 55 and, frequently across the 1620s and 1630s, as junior bursar, senior bursar, and vice-principal.Footnote 56 In the course of this career he will have become one of the six senior fellows who, by virtue of the fines they divided among themselves, ‘were able to maintain themselves sumptuously while the juniors lived like beggars’.Footnote 57
Leigh's religious sympathies are elusive but not entirely out of reach. Brasenose in general was a college of godly sympathies in this period.Footnote 58 During the tenure of his fellowship, Leigh presented to his college a thirteenth-century manuscript of the Vulgate.Footnote 59 More tellingly, on the death in 1607 of the prominent puritan John Rainolds, president of Corpus Christi College, Leigh was among the several dozen ‘Students of several Colleges and Halls in Oxon, especially such that had sate at his [Rainolds’] feet and were his admirers’, who received books from Rainolds's library.Footnote 60 We have already observed Leigh's interest in a question that greatly exercised Rainolds: the wickedness of stage-plays.Footnote 61
As all this suggests, and notwithstanding the medical materials at the end of our notebook, Leigh became a divine. He was ordained a deacon on the last day of February 1613, again subscribing the Articles of Religion, and he went on to take his Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1619.Footnote 62 In June 1629, he briefly became perpetual vicar to the Brasenose advowson of Gillingham & Upbery in Kent, but resigned the living eighteen months later, in November 1630.Footnote 63 Leigh did ultimately take up a living permanently, however, since he is recorded as having been presented to one in May 1640; and in April 1641 (shortly after the imprisonment of Archbishop Laud, which may perhaps be significant), he resigned his fellowship from an increasingly indebted Brasenose.Footnote 64
The living Leigh had acquired was in the parish of South Moreton, then in Berkshire though now in Oxfordshire, but still only thirteen miles from Oxford.Footnote 65 A will proved on 20 October 1658 places ‘Edmond Leigh, clerk’, as its minister, and other evidence confirms that he had taken up this living in 1640.Footnote 66 Leigh, who had resided in celibate Oxford until the advanced age of fifty-five, was clearly long reconciled to the single estate, and indeed no wife or children are mentioned in the South Moreton will. A specific bequest of the great folio volume of the ninety-nine Sermons (1629) of the warden of New College, and subsequent bishop of Bath and Wells, Arthur Lake, reinforces the impression of Leigh as a divine of godly sympathies with an Oxford connection.
This disregarded Oxford divine is unquestionably the ‘Edmundus Læus’ who kept the notebook containing the Valerius Terminus: comparison of its signature with Leigh's diaconal subscription of 1613 confirms the identity beyond doubt.Footnote 67 When he started the notebook in 1607, Leigh would have been working towards his MA degree, and the reading and studies recorded in the manuscript are entirely consistent with this status. Moreover, the work that he was undertaking, including the copy of the Valerius Terminus, would have prepared him very well for his subsequent office as the Natural Philosophy lecturer in 1614. Indeed, some of the later material in the volume may even reflect that function.
IV
It remains unclear how Francis Bacon's early and unpublished philosophical treatise came to be copied into the notebook of a diligent student at Oxford University. We might note that on 14 March 1609, the then principal of Brasenose, Thomas Singleton, was admitted to Gray's Inn – of which Bacon was a prominent member.Footnote 68 Alternatively, we might wonder whether it was Bacon's immediately superior legal officer, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere – a former student of Brasenose, and subsequently a generous benefactor to it – who provided the connection between the Inns of Court and Leigh's Oxford college.Footnote 69
However Edmund Leigh obtained his copy of Bacon's treatise, he was not in fact the only Oxford-educated divine to read a manuscript of the unpublished Valerius Terminus with interest and attention, for it was also known to the rather more prominent figure of William Twisse (1577/8–1646). Twisse, ‘doubtless the most able disputter in England’, in the judgment of the Scotsman Robert Ballie,Footnote 70 was a few years older than Leigh, and was educated first at Winchester College and then at New College, Oxford (admitted 1596; BA, 1600; MA, 1605; BD, 1612). But if our reconstruction of Leigh's religious sympathies is correct, then he shared them with Twisse, for across the 1620s and 1630s Twisse resisted the Book of Sports and the ecclesiological innovations of his old Oxford acquaintance William Laud, and ultimately became prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly in 1643.Footnote 71
In that same year, Twisse also contributed a preface to the English translation of Joseph Mede's Clavis apocalyptica. He began it with the recollection that he had ‘lighted some times upon a wittie interpretation’ of Daniel 12:4 (‘Many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased’) ‘in a certain Manuscript’ – Twisse does not name its author – which had glossed the text in these terms: ‘That the opening of the world by Navigation and Commerce, and the increase of knowledge, should meet both in one time, or age.’ Notwithstanding a doubt he goes on to imply about the ‘congruitie’ of this interpretation with Daniel's text, Twisse did observe that this reading was indeed ‘justified by experience’.Footnote 72 The point, however, is that – as Charles Webster percipiently realized – Twisse is surely here referring to a manuscript of the unpublished Valerius Terminus, the opening chapter of which contains a passage that directly matches his account.Footnote 73
It seems unlikely that Twisse had seen the manuscript of the Valerius Terminus that is now in the Harleian collection, which was probably then in the hands either of Bacon's executors or of his former chaplain, the royalist William Rawley. We can also be sure that Twisse was not using the copy in Leigh's notebook, for this breaks off before the passage that caught Twisse's eye. Yet these two divines’ shared interest in Bacon's theological justification of philosophical knowledge is telling, for as well as being sympathetic to one another ideologically, they were also proximate to each another geographically: Twisse maintained his connections with Oxford (he was present at the 1634 Act),Footnote 74 and after Leigh left the university to minister to his flock in South Moreton he would have been only fifteen miles from Twisse's Berkshire parish of Newbury. A personal connection between these two neighbouring and like-minded ministers is not improbable. But whatever the precise circumstances may be, the new manuscript confirms the hint that Bacon's unpublished Valerius Terminus, circulating in one or more copies, though probably without his name attached, was available and of interest to certain godly but also philosophically minded Oxford divines in the earlier seventeenth century.Footnote 75
V
But in what form was Bacon's treatise available to these readers? To answer this, we must turn to consider the text of the new manuscript. It is notable that the text of the new manuscript of the Valerius Terminus is similar to, but by no means identical with, the version that we have known hitherto. The differences between the received text and the one newly discovered must therefore be accounted for. Differences between early modern manuscripts of the same text often indicate no more than the carelessness of a particular scribe, or the accumulation of errors over a repeated process of professional copying.Footnote 76 In other instances, however, they may point to the existence of substantive authorial revision.
Bacon, moreover, was an inveterate reviser of his writings. The Advancement of learning (1605) was revised into the De augmentis scientiarum (1623); the unfinished manuscript treatise Of the true greatnes of the kingdome of Brittaine displays several layers of authorial revision and in due course became the essay ‘Of the true greatness of kingdomes and estates’ (1612); the Abecedarium novum naturæ exists in two subtly different forms, one of them a revision; the De vijs mortis is a morass of second thoughts; and the Essays themselves were transformed from their first hasty and unlooked-for appearance in print in 1597 to being (as Bacon himself put it) ‘un Oeuvre nouveau’ in 1625.Footnote 77 Moreover, we already have clear evidence that the Valerius Terminus was subject to extensive revision on the basis of the Harleian manuscript alone, for Bacon himself wrote at the beginning of the treatise the comment (subsequently deleted): ‘The first chapter perfited.’Footnote 78
The Cambridge and the Harleian texts of the Valerius Terminus are indeed sufficiently different as to suggest that they record two different states of Bacon's treatise. We may divide the variants (presented in the edition below) between the two versions into three broad kinds. The first kind are those which are obviously errors on the part of the scribe – or, potentially, which already existed in the exemplar he was copying. The reference in the Cambridge text to goodness as being guarded from all ‘excesse’ of ill is intellectually unsatisfactory: the Harleian text's ‘access’ is much more plausible theologically. The misreading here can therefore be diagnosed as a memory of the correct ‘excess’ that the scribe had copied immediately above.
The second class of variants are those which are undecideable per se, that is to say, those which might arise equally either from scribal corruption or from authorial revision. A variant between ‘his approaching’ (Cambridge University Library (CUL)) and ‘this approaching’ (Harleian MS (Harl.)), for instance, is of very limited consequence in regard to sense, and might equally arise either from scribal carelessness or from authorial tinkering. Into this class, too, might be placed the instances of verbal rearrangement, such as ‘guide & rule’ (CUL) vs. ‘rule and guide’ (Harl.).
The third and most interesting class of variants, however, are those which are unlikely to arise from scribal inattention and which therefore suggest authorial revision on Bacon's part. Not all of these cases are clear-cut, but taken together they add up to a picture of an author returning to and improving the precision of expression of his treatise. A variant between ‘dominion’ (CUL) and ‘kingdom’ (Harl.) is unlikely to be owing to scribal error; indeed, it is even possible that it is a change that reflects an intervenient accession of King James to his rich southern realm. If so, this would place the composition of the Cambridge text (though not of course Leigh's copying of it, which occurred at some point from 1607) before April 1603.Footnote 79 Other additions in the Harleian manuscript tend in the direction of greater precision: ‘sollicite’ (CUL) becomes ‘most sollicite’ (Harl.); ‘creatures’ (CUL) become ‘inferiour creatures’ (Harl.); ‘fitt’ (CUL) becomes ‘fittest’ (Harl.); ‘position’ (CUL) becomes ‘position or firmament, namely’ (Harl.). As these instances suggest, revision would seem to be taking place from the version recorded in the Cambridge manuscript to the version recorded in the Harleian one.
There is further evidence to support the view that the Cambridge manuscript records a version of Bacon's text that is earlier than that of the Harleian manuscript. A passage at the opening of the Valerius Terminus is very similar indeed to one that also appears in Book i of Bacon's Advancement of learning (1605). In the Cambridge manuscript this passage asserts that the contemplation of God's creatures can provide no knowledge of the nature of God himself, but does give rise to ‘admiration’. But in both the Harleian manuscript and the published Advancement, the equivalent passage speaks not of ‘admiration’, but instead of ‘wonder’.Footnote 80 It would appear from its presence in print that this latter term reflects Bacon's considered decision on the most appropriate word – and therefore that the Harleian manuscript records the later version of the Valerius Terminus.
We have said, furthermore, that the ‘annotations of Hermes Stella’, promised in the title found in both manuscripts, are not extant. But by the time of the Harleian version, they are clearly planned, for at some point after the text had been copied, Bacon went through the manuscript and marked the passages to which each annotation should apply. These indications of the appearance of the commentary are, however, entirely absent from the – therefore presumptively earlier – Cambridge version.
Yet, the most striking difference between the two versions concerns the division of the treatise – or, rather, the lack of it. The Harleian text is divided into twenty-three different chapters numbered between one and twenty-six, but not in order, and at very various stages of completion. The Cambridge manuscript, by contrast, lacks the chapter-title that goes with its text in the Harleian manuscript, and indeed does not suggest that the treatise is divided into chapters at all. (It shares this undivided quality with another early philosophical writing by Bacon, the Cogitata et visa.) It is this difference above all which confirms that the two scribes were copying from quite different exemplars. It also strongly suggests that the version Leigh was copying was one that had not yet taken on the chapter divisions of the Harleian text. Hence, by extension, the Cambridge text does not seem to have taken on the ambitious scope that Bacon ultimately planned for the treatise in the Harleian version.
It is even possible that a very rough indication of how much Bacon had written at that earlier point may be provided by the blank pages in the Cambridge manuscript, for if its scribe had gone on to fill the thirteen pages left blank for his work then there would have been enough room (at c. 440 words per page) to copy out the whole of the first chapter of Bacon's text (as its c. 3100 words appear in the Harleian manuscript) and then the same amount again.Footnote 81 If this is the case, then the circulating copy of the Valerius Terminus will have been shorter and quite different from what it later became: a small mustard seed that would eventually multiply into a Great Instauration.
VI
The date of Leigh's notebook now provides us with an independent terminus ante quem of c. 1607 for Bacon's composition of one version, at least, of the Valerius Terminus, with vestigial indications that it may record a pre-1603 text. Moreover, for the owner of the notebook into which it was copied – a student of natural philosophy who, notwithstanding his medical reading, probably already suspected that it was his destiny to become a divine – Bacon's treatise seems to have been quite compatible with his MA studies of a wide variety of other printed works of late Renaissance philosophy. This student, the Lancashire scholarship boy Edmund Leigh, may even have found in Bacon's English treatise a example of the kind of oration on the theological lawfulness of human knowledge that he himself might hope in due course to deliver (though in Latin) in the Oxford schools.Footnote 82
Though he did not permit it for the Latin precursors of the Instauratio magna, Bacon does seem to have allowed his earliest English philosophical treatise to be made ‘publike’.Footnote 83 Leigh's manuscript is thus one of the earliest surviving testimonies to the reception of Francis Bacon's philosophy. Nonetheless, the absence of Bacon's name from the copy raises the intriguing possibility that, far from merely being a learned conceit, Bacon's adoption of the persona of ‘Valerius Terminus’ was deliberately done to conceal his authorship – and that it served this purpose successfully. It seems likely that his treatise’s readers would have been distinctly surprised to learn that its author was his majesty's solicitor-general.
As we have seen, the brief text in Leigh's manuscript sheds some potentially far-reaching light on the evolution of Bacon's treatise. But it is no less notable that this transcription of the Valerius Terminus is the first purely ‘user’ copy to be discovered of an early portion of Francis Bacon's Instauratio magna. It is the only unprinted portion of Bacon's philosophical life-work that is known to have escaped from Bacon's study and made its way, unchaperoned, in the acquisitive scribal republic of the earlier seventeenth century. As such, Edmund Leigh's modest scholastic notebook is an unexpectedly momentous document.
Textual note. The following edition of CUL, MS Additional 102, fos. 28v–29r is collated against BL, MS Harley 6463, pp. 1–4 (assigned the siglum Ha). Roman type is used for the scribe's principal secretary hand; italic indicates his use of a display script. Underlining indicates letters supplied by editorial expansion. [Square brackets] in the text appear in the original manuscript; text enclosed in 〈angle brackets〉 is editorial; text within ‹guillemets› has been deleted; `primes´ indicate supralinear insertion. Boldface indicates where the Cambridge text varies substantively from the Harleian version. In the textual notes, Sans Serif indicates the presence of Bacon's own hand in the Harleian manuscript, while a paraph (¶) indicates a new line. The call-outs in Ha for the planned annotations of ‘Hermes Stella’ are not recorded here.
〈fo. 28v〉 Valerius Terminus of the interpretation of nature with the annotations of Hermes Stella.Footnote 1
In the divine nature both religion & philosophie hath acknowledged goodnes in perfection, science or providence comprehending all thinges, and absolute soveraignty or dominion.Footnote 2
In aspiring to the throne of power the Angells transgressed & fell. In presuming to come within the oracle of godesFootnote 3 knowledge man transgressed & fell. But in pursute toward the similitude of Godes goodnesFootnote 4 putt in motion or applied, neither man nor spirite hathFootnote 5 transgressed or shall transgresse.
The Angell of light that was, when hee presumed before his fall said within himselfe I will ascend and bee like vnto the highest [not God] but the highest.] To bee likeFootnote 6 god in goodnes was no parte of his æmulation: knowledge (being by creation an Angell of light) was not the want thatFootnote 7 didFootnote 8 sollicite him: onely because hee was a minister hee aymed att a supremacy therefore his clyming or ascension was turned toFootnote 9 a throwing downe or precipitation.
Man on the other side, when hee was tempted before hee fell had this suggestion offered to him,Footnote 10 That hee wouldFootnote 11 bee like vnto God, but howe? not simply, but in parte knowing good & evill. For being in his creation invested with soveraignty of all creaturesFootnote 12 hee was not soFootnote 13 needy of power &Footnote 14 dominion: But againe being a spirite newly inclosed in a body of earth, hee was fittFootnote 15 to bee allured with appetite of light & liberty of knowledge. Therefore hisFootnote 16 approaching & intruding into Godes secrettes & mysteries was rewarded with a fartherFootnote 17 removing & estranging from Godes presence.
But as to the goodnes of God there is no danger ofFootnote 18 contending or advancing towardes a similitude thereof, as that which is open & propounded to our imitation. For that voice whereof the heathen & all other errors of religion haue confessed everFootnote 19 that it soundes not like man Love your enemies, Bee like Footnote 20unto your hea〈fo. 29r〉venly father who Footnote 21suffereth his raine to fall Footnote 22uppon the just & vnjust. Footnote 23 doth well declare that wee can in that point committ no excesse. So againe wee find it often repeated in the ould lawe. Bee yee Footnote 24holy as I am holy. And what is holiness elles but goodnes, as wee considerFootnote 25 seperate & guarded from all mixture & excesse of ill:Footnote 26 wherefore seeing that knowledge is of the number of those thinges which are to bee accepted of with caution & distinction: being nowe to open a fountaine, such as it is not easie to discerne, where the issues & streames thereof will take & fall I haueFootnote 27 thought it good & necessarie in the first place to make a stronge and sound head or bancke to guide & ruleFootnote 28 the course of the waters, by setting downe this positionFootnote 29That all knowledge is to bee limitted by religion & to bee referred to use & action.
For if any man shall thinke by viewe & enquiry into theise sensible & materiall thinges to attaine to anie light for the revealing of the nature &Footnote 30 will of God, hee shall dangerously abuse himselfe. It is trewe that the contemplation of the creatures of God hath for end as to the natureFootnote 31 of the creatures themselues knowledge, but as to the nature of God no knowledge, but admiration,Footnote 32 which is nothing elles but contemplation broken of, or loosing it selfe.
Nay farther (as it was aptlie said by one of Plato's schoole) the Sense of man resembledFootnote 33 the Sunne, which openeth & revealeth the terrestriall globe, but obscureth & concealeth the ‹terrestriall› `celestiall´:Footnote 34 So doth the sense discover naturall thinges, but darken & shutt upp divine. And this appeareth sufficiently in that there is no proceeding in invention of knowledge but by similitude, and God is only selfelike having nothing in common with any creaturesFootnote 35 otherwise than inFootnote 36 shadowe & trope. Therfore attend his will as heeFootnote 37 himselfe openeth it, and giue vnto faith that which vnto faith beelongeth For more worthie it is to beleiue than to thinke or knowe, considering that in knowledge (as wee nowe are capable of it) the mind suffreth from the impression ofFootnote 38 inferior natures; but 〈catchword: ‘in all’〉 〈fo. 29v〉
