The purpose of reading China people have a very utilitarian saying, that is, the book has its own Yan Ruyu, and the book has its own golden house. There are also written martial arts, sold to the imperial family and so on.
In contrast, Bacon, while talking about the skill doctrine of reading, also emphasized that reading can enrich and perfect a person's spiritual world. For example, it is written in the article that "reading is enough to make people feel happy, colorful and talented", so that people can cultivate their sentiments when they live in leisure, debate can increase their literary talent and help them judge when they do things. Reading different books has different gains. "Reading history makes people wise, reading poetry makes people witty, mathematics makes people careful, science makes people profound, ethics makes people solemn, and the study of logic and rhetoric makes people eloquent."
All these show that Bacon's On Reading shows the significance of reading to enrich and perfect one's spiritual world. As a philosopher, Bacon is bound to think deeply about the issue of human self-development, and thus extend to how to promote social progress. There is no doubt that he gave the solution to this problem to reading, because books are the condensation and transmission of human thoughts, and reading will make people break through the limitations of time and space, so as to know themselves and society on a broader scale and make correct choices.
This is the purpose of On Reading in Bacon's prose.