e then produces his complete list of human powers: understanding, reason, imagination, memory, appetite, and will. The human being knows and acts through these powers, and Bacon would understand the human being chiefly through these terms (Wallace 12).
In describing his ideas on scientific inquiry, Bacon says that he is laying the foundation for a new history:
For first, the object of the natural history which I propose is not so much to delight with variety of matter or to help with present use of experiments, as to give light to the discovery of causes and supply a suckling philosophy with its first food (Bacon 27).
Bacon takes images of the search for knowledge from earlier eras, and he talks of how the ancients made discoveries as "men sailed only by observation of the stars" (Bacon 13). Bacon sees the quest for scientific knowledge as a way of reaffirming the human bond with God, and he speaks directly to God of this:
Thou when thou turnedst to look upon the works which thy hands had made, sawest that all was very good, and didst rest from
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