THIS STUDY IS AN ENLARGEMENT of a series of lectures delivered
at the University of Southern California in the spring of 1957 as
part of the Arensberg Lectures sponsored by that institution.

Now printed in book form, on the occasion of the four-
hundredth anniversary of Francis Bacon's birth, the study is, in
design, an account of that thinker's place within the perspectives
of his time. It is hoped that its appearance may mark an advance,
however modest, in Baconian exegesis through its attempt to
relate certain of Bacon's opinions to traditional and contempo-
rary philosophies; by its emphasis on his originality as a system-
atic thinker and not merely an exponent of scientific method; by
its statement of reasons for his political support of the Royal
Prerogative; and by its stress on the place in his thinking of the
generic conception of the three kingdoms--of nature, of politics,
and of Divine Grace.

This conception, in the writer's opinion, is basic to the plural-
istic philosophy which contains within its structure the widely
diverse principles of Verulam's thought. Not all, by any means,
of his more striking and characteristic undertakings are recorded
in the present book--lest, as the saying goes, the reader should
fail to see the wood for the trees--but mainly those which have
occasioned continuous controversy since that statesman and phi-

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