Gathering the Instances
The first table Bacon constructs simply lists every case in which heat is present, however different the cases seem on the surface: sunlight, lightning, warm baths, the friction of rubbed wood, quicklime sprinkled with water, the bodies of animals. The point of assembling so heterogeneous a list is methodological — no premature theory has yet been allowed to filter which instances count.
The rays of the sun, particularly in summer, and at noon.
From Table to 'First Vintage'
Against this table of presence Bacon sets a table of absence — cases resembling the first but lacking heat — and a table of degree, tracking how heat varies. Only after all three are assembled does he permit a tentative conclusion, which he calls, with characteristic care about overclaiming, a 'first vintage': that heat is, in its form, an expansive, restrained motion striving among a body's smaller particles. It is a hypothesis earned by exhaustive comparison, not asserted by authority — exactly the discipline Book I promised and Book II delivers.
Drawn from Book II, Aphorisms XI and XX of Novum Organum, the Table of Instances Agreeing in the Nature of Heat and the First Vintage of the Form of Heat.
Related Concepts
