This work is designed to propose to the consideration, not of the learned world only, but of all ingenuous and practical minds, a new development of that system of practical philosophy from which THE SCIENTIFIC ARTS of the Modern Ages proceed, and which has already become, just to the extent to which it has been hitherto opened, the wisdom,--the universally approved, and practically adopted, Wisdom of the _Moderns_.

It is a development of this philosophy, which was deliberately postponed by the great Scientific Discoverers and Reformers, in whose Scientific Discoveries and Reformations our organised advancements in speculation and practice have their origin;--Reformers, whose scientific acquaintance with historic laws forbade the idea of any immediate and sudden cures of the political and social evils which their science searches to the root, and which it was designed to eradicate.

The proposition to be demonstrated in the ensuing pages is this: That the new philosophy which strikes out from the Court--from _the Court_ of that despotism that names and gives form to the Modern Learning,--which comes to us from the Court of the last of the Tudors and the first of the Stuarts,--that new philosophy which we have received, and accepted, and adopted as a practical philosophy, not merely in that grave department of learning in which it comes to us professionally _as_ philosophy, but in that not less important department of learning in which it comes to us in the disguise of amusement,--in the form of fable and allegory and parable,--the proposition is, that this Elizabethan philosophy is, in these two forms of it,--not two philosophies,--not two Elizabethan philosophies, not two new and wondrous philosophies of nature and practice, not two new Inductive philosophies, but one,--one and the same: that it is philosophy in both these forms, with its veil of allegory and parable, and without it; that it is philosophy applied to much more important subjects in the disguise of the parable, than it is in the open statement; that it is philosophy in both these cases, and not philosophy in one of them, and a brutish, low-lived, illiterate, unconscious spontaneity in the other.

The proposition is that it proceeds, in both cases, from a reflective deliberative, eminently deliberative, eminently conscious, _designing_ mind; and that the coincidence which is manifest not in the design only, and in the structure, but in the detail to the minutest points of execution, is _not_ accidental.

It is a proposition which is demonstrated in this volume by means of evidence derived principally from the books of this philosophy--books in which the safe delivery and tradition of it to the future was artistically contrived and triumphantly achieved:--the books of a new 'school' in philosophy; books in which the connection with the school is not always openly asserted; books in which the true names of the authors are not always found on the title-page;--the books of a school, too, which was compelled to have recourse to translations in some cases, for the safe delivery and tradition of its new learning.