WorkFrancis Bacon
Novum Organum (London, 1620) Inferred
Francis Bacon (1561–1626) · London, 1620
AnalyzedReadMentioned
Documented 1836
Additional passages preserved in the Memoirs (1852)
Letters
Selected engagements, in chronological order.
Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →
Passages where the evidence goes beyond allusion to indicate that Fuller had this work in hand — an explicit statement of reading, sustained excerpting or translation, or a specific reading episode recorded by those who knew her.
“do not let him expect anything of me because I have ventured on a book so profound as the Novum Organum.”
Mem-2 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli · March 17th, 1836
"I have ventured on a book so profound as the Novum Organum" is a first-person statement of engaging with the specific book.
“I have, for the time, laid aside De Stael and Bacon, for Martineau and Southey.”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. I. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Inferred Fuller names Bacon as reading she has temporarily set aside; a cross-reference to Letter 123 confirms she was reading the Novum Organum, which Herschel's Preliminary Discourse served as a commentary on.
“do not let him expect anything of me because I have ventured on a book so profound as the Novum Organum.”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. I. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.
“left to herself, and in her correspondence, she was much the victim of Lord Bacon's idol of the cave, or self-deceived by her own phantasms.”
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, eds. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 2 vols. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1852.
Inferred Margaret Fuller's reading touches upon Francis Bacon's Novum Organum (1620), specifically referencing his concept of the "idol of the cave." This philosophical idea, which describes how individual prejudices and unique experiences can distort perception, is identified as a lens through which Fuller's intellectual struggles, both in isolation and in her correspondence, were understood.