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Prose

Notes 3.2 Critical Analysis

The main focus of Bacon’s essay rests on explaining to the reader the importance of study knowledge
in terms of its practical application towards the individual and its society. Bacon through a syllogistic
tripartite statement begins his argument to validate the usefulness and advantage of study in our
life. Bacon has the power of compressing into a few words a great body of thought. Thus he puts
forward the three basic purposes of studies: “Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for
ability”. He later expands his sentence to bring lucidity and clearness. Studies fill us delight and
aesthetic pleasure when we remain private and solitary. While we discourse, our studies add
decoration to our speech. Further, the men of study can decide best on the right lines in business
and politics. Bacon deprecates too much studies and the scholar’s habit to make his judgment from
his reading instead of using his independent views.
Bacon is a consummate artist of Renaissance spirit. Thus he knows the expanse of knowledge and
utility of studies. He advocates a scientific enquiry of studies. Through an exquisite metaphor
drawn from Botany he compares human mind to a growing plant. As the growing plants need to
be pruned and watered and manured for optimum development, the new growing conscience of
us are to be tutored, mounded, oriented and devised by studies. But it is experience which ultimately
matures our perception and leads us to perfection:
“They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants
that need pruning by study”.
Next Bacon considers what persons despise studies and what people praise them and what people
make practical use of them. The crafty men condemn studies; simple men admire them while the
wise men make ultimate use of it. But it should be remembered that the inquisitive mind and keen
observation cultivate the real wisdom. Bacon advises his readers to apply studies to ‘weigh and
consider’ rather than useless contradictions and grandiloquence.
In The Advancement of Learning Bacon makes systematic classifications of studies and considers
different modes to be employed with different kinds of books: “Some books are to be tasted, others
to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested”.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed
and digested.

The books according to its value and utility are to be devised into various modes of articulations.
The worthy classical pragmatic sort are to be adorned by expertise reading with diligence while
the meaner sort of books or less important books are to be read in summary or by deputy. Again
the global span of knowledge is revealed in his analysis of various subjects and their beneficent
categories. The scholarly mind of Bacon here makes the subtle observation:
“Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral
grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend”.
Studies do not shape a perfect man without the needed conference and writing. “And therefore if
a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little he had need have much
cunning, to seem to know that he doth’ not”. Bacon further tells us that our studies pass into our
character (Abeunt studia in mores). Rightly so the constitution of our moral disposition is the
outcome of our learning and experience.
Every defect of the mind, Bacon says, may be cured by a proper choice of reading. Bacon here
draws a parallel between the physical exercise and intellectual exercise. As different games, sports,

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