Association of the names of Shakespeare and Bacon may recall to the minds of some the longstanding controversy over the authorship of the Shakespearean writings. Discussion of that matter is hardly in place here. It has been resolved by scholarly study, and the verdict has gone in favor of William Shakespeare. However, among the factors that gave rise to the strange hypothesis that the author of Shakespeare's plays was actually the philosopher Francis Bacon is one the significance of which goes (...) far beyond the confines of the superficial and unfounded conclusion that some sought to derive from it. We have in mind the similarity of thought between Shakespeare and Bacon, the similarity of their general philosophical viewpoint. The great poet, who described the world of human thoughts, feelings and deeds with the penetration of a philosopher, and the philosopher in whose conception of the cognition of nature through science and the mastery of its forces by technology there was deep poetic feeling, both belonged to the English Renaissance. Both were imbued with and expressed its atmosphere and the most powerful and progressive of its humanist strivings in the realm of ideas. And on this plane, a comparison of Shakespeare and Bacon is not only possible but valuable. (shrink)

1. One sometimes finds, in popular literature, the statement that formal logic is called formal because it studies the forms of thought: concepts, judgments, inferences. To confine the definition in this way would, to say the least, be an inaccuracy. Study of concepts and other forms of thought is generally assumed to be a task of philosophy; and it attains its highest development in dialectical philosophy. The fact is that statements such as the one we have cited are usually followed (...) by the explanation that formal logic studies thoughts — concepts, judgments, inferences — in terms of their formal structure and construction, that is, of various general ways of connecting parts of their concrete content. And it is observed that the logical structure of thought emerges as the result of abstraction, the identification and separation of the general from a multiplicity of individual facts differing in content, and that it is then recorded in terms of formulas. (shrink)