The First Form Created
Bacon notes that in Genesis, light is created before any of the material things it will later illuminate — sun, plants, animals, man. He reads this ordering as symbolically exact: light stands to the physical world as knowledge stands to the mind, the precondition that makes everything else visible and intelligible rather than one item among others.
we read the first form that was created was light, which hath a relation and correspondence in nature and corporal things to knowledge in spirits and incorporal things
A Sabbath of Contemplation
Bacon reinforces the point by noting that of all the days of creation, only the seventh — the day of rest and contemplation rather than making — is blessed. For a philosopher whose reputation rests on demanding useful, active knowledge, it is a telling concession: contemplation itself, not only its fruits, carries a dignity that Bacon traces to the very structure of Genesis.
Drawn from Chapter I of The Advancement of Learning (Book I, section VI), on the dignity of knowledge as revealed in the acts of God.
Related Concepts
