COLOURS OF GOOD AND EVIL.

VOL. XIII.

17

PREFACE.

THE fragment entitled Of the Colours of Good and Evil (the beginning of a collection of colourable arguments on questions of good and evil, with answers to them,) appears in a more perfect shape, though still a fragment, in the sixth book of the De Augmentis Scientiarum, cap. iii. As it stands here, it formed part of Bacon's earliest publication; being printed in the same volume with the Essays and Meditationes Sacræ (1597), in the title of which it is called "Places of persuasion and dissuasion ;" and was probably composed not long before.

In a bundle of manuscripts in the British Museum (of which a more particular account will be found, under the title of Promus of Formularies and Elegancies, in the next volume), written in Bacon's hand and apparently about the years 1595 and 1596, there is a considerable collection of these "colours;" but being set down without the explanations, and with only here and there a note to suggest the answer, they are valuable only as an example of his manner of working and of the activity of his industry. There are seventy or eighty altogether. The following are on a separate sheet, and may serve as a specimen of the least naked

of them.

Media via nulla est quæ nec amicos parit nec inimicos tollit.

Solon's law that in states every man should declare himself of one faction. Neutralitye.

Utinam esses calidus aut frigidas: sed quoniam tepidus es eveniet ut te expuam ex ore meo.

Dixerunt fatui medium tenuere beati.

Cujus origo occasio bona, bonum: cujus mala malum.

Non tenet in iis malis quæ vel mentem informant, vel affectum corrigunt, sive resipiscentiam inducendo sive necessitatem, nec etiam in fortuitis.

No man gathereth grapes of thornes nor figges of thistells.
The nature of everything is best consydered in the seed.
Primum mobile turnes about all the rest of the orbes.
A good or yll foundacon.

Ex malis moribus bonæ leges.

παθήματα μαθήματα.

When things are at the periode of yll they turn agayne.
Many effects like the serpent that devoureth her moother, so

they destroy their first cause, as inopia, luxuria &c.

The fashon of D. Hect. to the dames of Lond. your way is to be sicker.

Usque adeo latet utilitas.

Aliquisque malo fuit usus in illo.

Quod ad bonum finem dirigitur bonum, quod ad malum malum.1

The sheet on which this is written, and of which the rest is left blank, is docqueted in Bacon's hand, but

1 Harl. MSS. 7017. fo. 128.