SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY the operations of the soul These fall into two classes, one set belonging to the understanding or reason, whose function is judgement, and the other set belonging to the will or appetite, whose function is action or execution What of the imagination, which had a privileged place in Bacon’s initial classiWcation of human faculties? The Imagination is an agent or nuncius in both provinces, both the judicial and the ministerial For sense sendeth over to Imagination before Reason have judged: and Reason sendeth over to Imagination before the Decree can be acted; for Imagination ever precedeth Voluntary Motion: saving that this Janus of Imagination hath diVering faces; for the face towards Reason hath the print of Truth, but the face towards Action hath the print of Good (AL, 217) But imagination is no mere servant of the other faculties, Bacon insists: it can triumph over reason, and that is what happens in the case of religious belief It is clear that Bacon envisioned the mind as a kind of internal society, with the diVerent faculties enshrined in a constitution respecting the separation of powers When he comes to treat of the social sciences themselves he oVers another threefold division, corresponding to associations for friendship, for business, and for government Political theory is a part of civil philosophy, that branch of human philosophy that concerns the beneWts that humans derive from living in society Having Wnished his classiWcation, Bacon can boast ‘I have made as it were a small globe of the intellectual world’ (AL, 299) The various sciences which appear in his voluminous catalogue are not all at similar stages of development Some, he thinks, have achieved a degree of perfection, but others are deWcient, and some are almost non-existent One of the most deWcient is logic, and the defects of logic weaken other sciences also The problem is that logic lacks a theory of scientiWc discovery: Like as the West-Indies had never been discovered if the use of the mariner’s needle had not been Wrst discovered, though the one be vast regions and the other a small motion; so it cannot be found strange if sciences be no further discovered if the art itself of invention and discovery hath been passed over (AL, 219) Bacon set out to remedy this lack and to provide a compass to guide scientiWc researchers This was the task of his Novum Organum Bacon’s project of introducing discipline into research had a negative and a positive component The researcher’s Wrst, negative, task is to be on 30