26. The Advancement of Learning, II.18.4.

27. Karl R. Wallace, in two very good studies, Francis Bacon on Communication and Rhetoric, Chapel Hill, 1943, and Francis Bacon on the Nature of Man, Urbana, Chicago, 1967, has done much to explain what Bacon understood by the imagination and reason, and how rhetoric worked upon them. According to Wallace (1943, Chapter 12) Bacon’s major contribution to rhetoric was to free it from its old inferiority to logic. Rhetoric was to direct the imagination, rather than just deploy language in everyday circumstances. Nevertheless there were to be strict limits to its inventiveness: it was not supposed to create anything it pleased. What is claimed in this Introduction is that Bacon’s own rhetoric slips the leash and discovers what no scholastic logic or simple-minded induction could arrive at. Margaret Willey has some very interesting things to say on this subject in her paper ‘Bacon: Induction and/or Rhetoric’ in Studies in the Literary Imagination, IV (April 1971), 65–79.