The word at the heart of his natural philosophy is “species.” This is potentially confusing, because we’ve so often seen the word in the context of logic, as when species is contrasted with genus. Originally, though, the Latin word species means the outward appearance of something, and that’s somewhat closer to the way Bacon is using it. A good English rendering might be “effect.” Bacon’s idea is that natural things influence the world around them by imposing a “species” or “effect” on other things; hence his official definition of species as “the first effect of any natural agent” (§1.1,
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