Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 December 1879 — “Knowledge Is Power.” [ARTICLE]

“Knowledge Is Power.”

A few days since a lady asked us the origin of the phrase “Knowledge is power,” and we replied by mail that it was attributed to Lord Bacon. She now replies by an extract from Bulwer’s “My Novel,” in which the expres ion is quoted, accompanied by a statement that no such sentence is to be found in all Lord Bacon’s works. We saw Bulwer’s statement when the novel appeared in Harper’s Magazine, and smiled complacently over our own superior knowledge, as we had traced the quotation to the treatise of Bacon on sects and opinions {de Hceresiis), where it occurs in parenthesis, and reads. u nam et rosa scienta potest as est.” Bulwer and others naturally looked for the thought in Bacon’s “Advancement of Learning,” and, not finding anything like it there, gave up the search. In the connection, Bacon is describing a sect which hold peculiar views on the subject of predestination. He says that they give wider limits to the knowledge than to the power of God (implying that He may foreknow acts without necessarily preordaining them), or, rather, they restrict His power of doing more than His power of knowing, “lorknowledge itself is a power.” This does not mean that knowledge ooniers power,

but that the oapacity to know may be termed a power.— New York Journal of Commerce.