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that:
     
this kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the schoolmen, who having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator) as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or of time, did out of no great quantity of matter, and infinite agitation of wit, spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books … cobwebs of learning admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit.
    The clarity and cogency of his prose are the perfect instruments for his attack upon the ornateness and excessive ingenuity of the old learning. That is why Shelley cited Plato and Bacon as the two most influential of all the poet-philosophers.
    Bacon was assaulting the methods and principles of previous human learning in favour of experiment and observation, which he believed to be central to true natural science. He was suggesting that the scholars and experimenters of the time should confine themselves ‘to use and not to ostentation’ and to ‘matters of common sense and experience’. He warned that ‘the more you remove yourselves from particulars, the greater peril of error you do incur’. At a later date this would be described as the ‘scientific’ disposition.
    The purpose of all learning was, for Bacon, to promote the benefit and prosperity of humankind. The material world is to be understood and mastered by means of ‘the laborious and sober inquiry of truth’ which can be pursued only by ‘ascending from experiments to the invention of causes, and descending from causes to the invention of new experiments’. This was a revolutionary statement of intent that places Bacon, and the Jacobean period, at the opening of the modern age.
    Bacon desired an institutional, as well as an epistemological, change; he suggested that universities, colleges and schools be directed ‘by amplitude of reward, by soundness of direction, and by the conjunction of labours’. We may see here the origin of the attitude that was to guide the Royal Society and to inform the inventive energies that emerged in the first years of the Industrial Revolution. Bacon himself was of a puritan disposition. He believed in the power of individual agency above the manifold allures of tradition and authority; he believed in observation rather than contemplation as the true instrument of practical reason. The beacons of utility and progress were always before him.
    Bacon hoped that by their bright light ‘this third period of time will far surpass that of the Grecian and Roman learning’. It would be fair to say that he helped to change the pace and the direction of that new learning. He entitled a later work Instauratio Magna , ‘the great innovation’ or foundation; the frontispiece of that book shows a ship sailing through the two Pillars of Hercules that traditionally signified the limits of knowledge as well as of exploration. It is an emblem of a journey of discovery in defiance of the motto ‘ nec plus ultra’ , nothing further beyond. The reign of James I, therefore, can be said to mark the beginning of a voyage through strange seas of thought.

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    The god of money
     
    The treasury was bare; the officers of the Crown were demanding their salaries, but there was no money to be found. Parliament was reluctant to vote taxes, and local officials in the counties were not zealous in collecting the proper revenues from their neighbours; much of the money raised on custom duties was diverted into the pockets of those who collected it.
    When parliament reassembled in February 1610, it was in a fractious mood. Salisbury outlined the financial woes of the nation, but the members were more concerned to arrest the prodigal spending of the court rather than to vote new taxes. One of them, Thomas