He might have gone on to add, "the Wisest Counsellor; and yet none on whom rested heavier blame; none of whom England might more justly complain." Good counsels given, submissive acquiescence in the worst—this is the history of his statesmanship. Bacon, whose eye was everywhere, was not sparing of his counsels. On all the great questions of the time he has left behind abundant evidence, not only of what he thought, but of what he advised. And in every case these memorials are marked with the insight, the independence, the breadth of view, and the moderation of a mind which is bent on truth. He started, of course, from a basis which we are now hardly able to understand or allow for, the idea of absolute royal power and prerogative which James had enlarged and hardened out of the Kingship of the Tudors, itself imperious and arbitrary enough, but always seeking, with a tact of which James was incapable, to be in touch and sympathy with popular feeling. But it was a basis which in principle every one of any account as yet held or professed to hold, and which Bacon himself held on grounds of philosophy and reason. He could see no hope for orderly and intelligent government except in a ruler whose wisdom had equal strength to assert itself; and he looked down with incredulity and scorn on the notion of anything good coming out of what the world then knew or saw of popular opinion or parliamentary government. But when it came to what was wise and fitting for absolute power to do in the way of general measures and policy, he was for the most part right. He saw the inexorable and pressing necessity of putting the finance of the kingdom on a safe footing. He saw the necessity of a sound and honest policy in Ireland. He saw the mischief of the Spanish alliance in spite of his curious friendship with Gondomar, and detected the real and increasing weakness of the Spanish monarchy, which still awed mankind. He saw the growing danger of abuses in Church and State which were left untouched, and were protected by the punishment of those who dared to complain of them. He saw the confusion and injustice of much of that common law of which the lawyers were so proud; and would have attempted, if he had been able, to emulate Justinian, and anticipate the Code Napoleon, by a rational and consistent digest. Above all, he never ceased to impress on James the importance, and, if wisely used, the immense advantages, of his Parliaments. Himself, for great part of his life, an active and popular member of the House of Commons, he saw that not only it was impossible to do without it, but that, if fairly, honourably, honestly dealt with, it would become a source of power and confidence which would double the strength of the Government both at home and abroad. Yet of all this wisdom nothing came. The finance of the kingdom was still ruined by extravagance and corruption in a time of rapidly-developing prosperity and wealth. The wounds of Ireland were unhealed. It was neither peace nor war with Spain, and hot infatuation for its friendship alternated with cold fits of distrust and estrangement. Abuses flourished and multiplied under great patronage. The King's one thought about Parliament was how to get as much money out of it as he could, with as little other business as possible. Bacon's counsels were the prophecies of Cassandra in that so prosperous but so disastrous reign. All that he did was to lend the authority of his presence, in James's most intimate counsels, to policy and courses of which he saw the unwisdom and the perils. James and Buckingham made use of him when they wanted. But they would have been very different in their measures and their statesmanship if they had listened to him.

Mirabeau said, what of course had been said before him, "On ne vaut, dans la partie executive de la vie humaine, que par le caractere." This is the key to Bacon's failures as a judge and as a statesman, and why, knowing so much more and judging so much more wisely than James and Buckingham, he must be identified with the misdoings of that ignoble reign. He had the courage of his opinions; but a man wants more than that: he needs the manliness and the public spirit to enforce them, if they are true and salutary. But this is what Bacon had not. He did not mind being rebuffed; he knew that he was right, and did not care. But to stand up against the King, to contradict him after he had spoken, to press an opinion or a measure on a man whose belief in his own wisdom was infinite, to risk not only being set down as a dreamer, but the King's displeasure, and the ruin of being given over to the will of his enemies, this Bacon had not the fibre or the stiffness or the self-assertion to do. He did not do what a man of firm will and strength of purpose, a man of high integrity, of habitual resolution, would have done. Such men insist when they are responsible, and when they know that they are right; and they prevail, or accept the consequences. Bacon, knowing all that he did, thinking all that he thought, was content to be the echo and the instrument of the cleverest, the foolishest, the vainest, the most pitiably unmanly of English kings.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Calendar of State Papers (domestic), March 24, 1621.

[4] Commons' Journals, March 17, April 27; iii. 560, 594-6.

[5] Commons' Journals, iii. 578. In his copy of the Novum Organum, received ex dono auctoris, Coke wrote the same words.

"Auctori consilium. Instaurare paras veterum documenta sophorum: Instaura leges justitiamque prius."

He added, with allusion to the ship in the frontispiece of the Novum Organum,

"It deserveth not to be read in schools, But to be freighted in the ship of Fools."



CHAPTER VII.

BACON'S LAST YEARS.

[1621-1626.]

The tremendous sentences of those days, with their crushing fines, were often worse in sound than in reality. They meant that for the moment a man was defeated and disgraced. But it was quite understood that it did not necessarily follow that they would be enforced in all their severity. The fine might be remitted, the imprisonment shortened, the ban of exclusion taken off. At another turn of events or caprice the man himself might return to favour, and take his place in Parliament or the Council as if nothing had happened. But, of course, a man might have powerful enemies, and the sentence might be pressed. His fine might be assigned to some favourite; and he might be mined, even if in the long run he was pardoned; or he might remain indefinitely a prisoner. Raleigh had remained to perish at last in dishonour. Northumberland, Raleigh's fellow-prisoner, after fifteen years' captivity, was released this year. The year after Bacon's condemnation such criminals as Lord and Lady Somerset were released from the Tower, after a six years' imprisonment. Southampton, the accomplice of Essex, Suffolk, sentenced as late as 1619 by Bacon for embezzlement, sat in the House of Peers which judged Bacon, and both of them took a prominent part in judging him.

To Bacon the sentence was ruinous. It proved an irretrievable overthrow as regards public life, and, though some parts of it were remitted and others lightened, it plunged his private affairs into trouble which weighed heavily on him for his few remaining years. To his deep distress and horror he had to go to the Tower to satisfy the terms of his sentence. "Good my Lord," he writes to Buckingham, May 31, "procure my warrant for my discharge this day. Death is so far from being unwelcome to me, as I have called for it as far as Christian resolution would permit any time these two months. But to die before the time of his Majesty's grace, in this disgraceful place, is even the worst that could be." He was released after two or three days, and he thanks Buckingham (June 4) for getting him out to do him and the King faithful service—"wherein, by the grace of God, your Lordship shall find that my adversity hath neither spent nor pent my spirits." In the autumn his fine was remitted—that is, it was assigned to persons nominated by Bacon, who, as the Crown had the first claim on all his goods, served as a protection against his other creditors, who were many and some of them clamorous—and it was followed by his pardon. His successor, Williams, now Bishop of Lincoln, who stood in great fear of Parliament, tried to stop the pardon. The assignment of the fine, he said to Buckingham, was a gross job—"it is much spoken against, not for the matter (for no man objects to that), but for the manner, which is full of knavery, and a wicked precedent. For by this assignment he is protected from all his creditors, which (I dare say) was neither his Majesty's nor your Lordship's meaning." It was an ill-natured and cowardly piece of official pedantry to plunge deeper a drowning man; but in the end the pardon was passed. It does not appear whether Buckingham interfered to overrule the Lord Keeper's scruples. Buckingham was certainly about this time very much out of humour with Bacon, for a reason which, more than anything else, discloses the deep meanness which lurked under his show of magnanimity and pride. He had chosen this moment to ask Bacon for York House. This meant that Bacon would never more want it. Even Bacon was stung by such a request to a friend in his condition, and declined to part with it; and Buckingham accordingly was offended, and made Bacon feel it. Indeed, there is reason to think with Mr. Spedding that for the sealing of his pardon Bacon was indebted to the good offices with the King, not of Buckingham, but of the Spaniard, Gondomar, with whom Bacon had always been on terms of cordiality and respect, and who at this time certainly "brought about something on his behalf, which his other friends either had not dared to attempt or had not been able to obtain."

But, though Bacon had his pardon, he had not received permission to come within the verge of the Court, which meant that he could not live in London. His affairs were in great disorder, his health was bad, and he was cut off from books. He wrote an appeal to the Peers who had condemned him, asking them to intercede with the King for the enlargement of his liberty. "I am old," he wrote, "weak, ruined, in want, a very subject of pity." The Tower at least gave him the neighbourhood of those who could help him. "There I could have company, physicians, conference with my creditors and friends about my debts and the necessities of my estate, helps for my studies and the writings I have in hand. Here I live upon the sword-point of a sharp air, endangered if I go abroad, dulled if I stay within, solitary and comfortless, without company, banished from all opportunities to treat with any to do myself good, and to help out my wrecks." If the Lords would recommend his suit to the King, "You shall do a work of charity and nobility, you shall do me good, you shall do my creditors good, and it may be you shall do posterity good, if out of the carcase of dead and rotten greatness (as out of Samson's lion) there may be honey gathered for the use of future times." But Parliament was dissolved before the touching appeal reached them; and Bacon had to have recourse to other expedients. He consulted Selden about the technical legality of the sentence. He appealed to Buckingham, who vouchsafed to appear more placable. Once more he had recourse to Gondomar, "in that solitude of friends, which is the base-court of adversity," as a man whom he had "observed to have the magnanimity of his own nation and the cordiality of ours, and I am sure the wit of both"—and who had been equally kind to him in "both his fortunes;" and he proposed through Gondomar to present Gorhambury to Buckingham "for nothing," as a peace-offering. But the purchase of his liberty was to come in another way. Bacon had reconciled himself to giving up York House; but now Buckingham would not have it: he had found another house, he said, which suited him as well. That is to say, he did not now choose to have York House from Bacon himself; but he meant to have it. Accordingly, Buckingham let Bacon know through a friend of Bacon's, Sir Edward Sackville, that the price of his liberty to live in London was the cession of York House—not to Buckingham, but of all men in the world, to Lionel Cranfield, the man who had been so bitter against Bacon in the House of Commons. This is Sir Edward Sackville's account to Bacon of his talk with Buckingham; it is characteristic of every one concerned:

"In the forenoon he laid the law, but in the afternoon he preached the gospel; when, after some revivations of the old distaste concerning York House, he most nobly opened his heart unto me; wherein I read that which augured much good towards you. After which revelation the book was again sealed up, and must in his own time only by himself be again manifested unto you. I have leave to remember some of the vision, and am not forbidden to write it. He vowed (not court like), but constantly to appear your friend so much, as if his Majesty should abandon the care of you, you should share his fortune with him. He pleased to tell me how much he had been beholden to you, how well he loved you, how unkindly he took the denial of your house (for so he will needs understand it); but the close for all this was harmonious, since he protested he would seriously begin to study your ends, now that the world should see he had no ends on you. He is in hand with the work, and therefore will by no means accept of your offer, though I can assure you the tender hath much won upon him, and mellowed his heart towards you, and your genius directed you aright when you writ that letter of denial to the Duke. The King saw it, and all the rest, which made him say unto the Marquis, you played an after-game well; and that now he had no reason to be much offended.

"I have already talked of the Revelation, and now am to speak in apocalyptical language, which I hope you will rightly comment: whereof if you make difficulty, the bearer can help you with the key of the cypher.

"My Lord Falkland by this time hath showed you London from Highgate. If York House were gone, the town were yours, and all your straitest shackles clean off, besides more comfort than the city air only. The Marquis would be exceeding glad the Treasurer had it. This I know; yet this you must not know from me. Bargain with him presently, upon as good conditions as you can procure, so you have direct motion from the Marquis to let him have it. Seem not to dive into the secret of it, though you are purblind if you see not through it. I have told Mr. Meautys how I would wish your Lordship now to make an end of it. From him I beseech you take it, and from me only the advice to perform it. If you part not speedily with it, you may defer the good which is approaching near you, and disappointing other aims (which must either shortly receive content or never), perhaps anew yield matter of discontent, though you may be indeed as innocent as before. Make the Treasurer believe that since the Marquis will by no means accept of it, and that you must part with it, you are more willing to pleasure him than anybody else, because you are given to understand my Lord Marquis so inclines; which inclination, if the Treasurer shortly send unto you about it, desire may be more clearly manifested than as yet it hath been; since as I remember none hitherto hath told you in terminis terminantibus that the Marquis desires you should gratify the Treasurer. I know that way the hare runs, and that my Lord Marquis longs until Cranfield hath it; and so I wish too, for your good; yet would not it were absolutely passed until my Lord Marquis did send or write unto you to let him have it; for then his so disposing of it were but the next degree removed from the immediate acceptance of it, and your Lordship freed from doing it otherwise than to please him, and to comply with his own will and way."

It need hardly be said that when Cranfield got it, it soon passed into Buckingham's hands. "Bacon consented to part with his house, and Buckingham in return consented to give him his liberty." Yet Bacon could write to him, "low as I am, I had rather sojourn in a college in Cambridge than recover a good fortune by any other but yourself." "As for York House," he bids Toby Matthews to let Buckingham know, "that whether in a straight line or a compass line, I meant it for his Lordship, in the way which I thought might please him best." But liberty did not mean either money or recovered honour. All his life long he had made light of being in debt; but since his fall this was no longer a condition easy to bear. He had to beg some kind of pension of the King. He had to beg of Buckingham; "a small matter for my debts would do me more good now than double a twelvemonth hence. I have lost six thousand by the year, besides caps and courtesies. Two things I may assure your Lordship. The one, that I shall lead such a course of life as whatsoever the King doth for me shall rather sort to his Majesty's and your Lordship's honour than to envy; the other, that whatsoever men talk, I can play the good husband, and the King's bounty shall not be lost."

It might be supposed from the tone of these applications that Bacon's mind was bowed down and crushed by the extremity of his misfortune. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In his behaviour during his accusation there was little trace of that high spirit and fortitude shown by far inferior men under like disasters. But the moment the tremendous strain of his misfortunes was taken off, the vigour of his mind recovered itself. The buoyancy of his hopefulness, the elasticity of his energy, are as remarkable as his profound depression. When the end was approaching, his thoughts turned at once to other work to be done, ready in plan, ready to be taken up and finished. At the close of his last desperate letter to the King he cannot resist finishing at once with a jest, and with the prospect of two great literary undertakings—

"This is my last suit which I shall make to your Majesty in this business, prostrating myself at your mercy seat, after fifteen years service, wherein I have served your Majesty in my poor endeavours with an entire heart, and, as I presumed to say unto your Majesty, am still a virgin for matters that concern your person and crown; and now only craving that after eight steps of honour I be not precipitated altogether. But because he that hath taken bribes is apt to give bribes, I will go furder, and present your Majesty with a bribe. For if your Majesty will give me peace and leisure, and God give me life, I will present your Majesty with a good history of England, and a better digest of your laws."

The Tower did, indeed, to use a word of the time, "mate" him. But the moment he was out of it, his quick and fertile mind was immediately at work in all directions, reaching after all kinds of plans, making proof of all kinds of expedients to retrieve the past, arranging all kinds of work according as events might point out the way. His projects for history, for law, for philosophy, for letters, occupy quite as much of his thoughts as his pardon and his debts; and they, we have seen, occupied a good deal. If he was pusillanimous in the moment of the storm, his spirit, his force, his varied interests, returned the moment the storm was past. His self-reliance, which was boundless, revived. He never allowed himself to think, however men of his own time might judge him, that the future world would mistake him. "Aliquis fui inter vivos," he writes to Gondomar, "neque omnino intermoriar apud posteros." Even in his time he did not give up the hope of being restored to honour and power. He compared himself to Demosthenes, to Cicero, to Seneca, to Marcus Livius, who had been condemned for corrupt dealings as he had been, and had all recovered favour and position. Lookers-on were puzzled and shocked. "He has," writes Chamberlain, "no manner of feeling of his fall, but continuing vain and idle in all his humours as when he was at the highest." "I am said," Bacon himself writes, "to have a feather in my head."

Men were mistaken. His thoughts were, for the moment, more than ever turned to the future; but he had not given up hope of having a good deal to say yet to the affairs of the present. Strangely enough, as it seems to us, in the very summer after that fatal spring of 1621 the King called for his opinion concerning the reformation of Courts of Justice; and Bacon, just sentenced for corruption and still unpardoned, proceeds to give his advice as if he were a Privy Councillor in confidential employment. Early in the following year he, according to his fashion, surveyed his position, and drew up a paper of memoranda, like the notes of the Commentarius Solutus of 1608, about points to be urged to the King at an interview. Why should not the King employ him again? "Your Majesty never chid me;" and as to his condemnation, "as the fault was not against your Majesty, so my fall was not your act." "Therefore," he goes on, "if your Majesty do at any time find it fit for your affairs to employ me publicly upon the stage, I shall so live and spend my time as neither discontinuance shall disable me nor adversity shall discourage me, nor anything that I do give any new scandal or envy upon me." He insists very strongly that the King's service never miscarried in his hands, for he simply carried out the King's wise counsels. "That his Majesty's business never miscarried in my hands I do not impute to any extraordinary ability in myself, but to my freedom from any particular, either friends or ends, and my careful receipt of his directions, being, as I have formerly said to him, but as a bucket and cistern to that fountain—a bucket to draw forth, a cistern to preserve." He is not afraid of the apparent slight to the censure passed on him by Parliament. "For envy, it is an almanack of the old year, and as a friend of mine said, Parliament died penitent towards me." "What the King bestows on me will be further seen than on Paul's steeple." "There be mountebanks, as well in the civil body as in the natural; I ever served his Majesty with modesty; no shouting, no undertaking." In the odd fashion of the time—a fashion in which no one more delighted than himself—he lays hold of sacred words to give point to his argument.

"I may allude to the three petitions of the Litany—Libera nos Domine; parce nobis, Domine; exaudi nos, Domine. In the first, I am persuaded that his Majesty had a mind to do it, and could not conveniently in respect of his affairs. In the second, he hath done it in my fine and pardon. In the third, he hath likewise performed, in restoring to the light of his countenance."

But if the King did not see fit to restore him to public employment, he would be ready to give private counsel; and he would apply himself to any "literary province" that the King appointed. "I am like ground fresh. If I be left to myself I will graze and bear natural philosophy; but if the King will plough me up again, and sow me with anything, I hope to give him some yield." "Your Majesty hath power; I have faith. Therefore a miracle may be wrought." And he proposes, for matters in which his pen might be useful, first, as "active" works, the recompiling of laws; the disposing of wards, and generally the education of youth; the regulation of the jurisdiction of Courts; and the regulation of Trade; and for "contemplative," the continuation of the history of Henry VIII.; a general treatise de Legibus et Justitia; and the "Holy War" against the Ottomans.

When he wrote this he had already shown what his unquelled energy could accomplish. In the summer and autumn after his condemnation, amid all the worries and inconveniences of that time, moving about from place to place, without his books, and without free access to papers and records, he had written his History of Henry VII. The theme had, no doubt, been long in his head. But the book was the first attempt at philosophical history in the language, and it at once takes rank with all that the world had yet seen, in classical times and more recently in Italy, of such history. He sent the book, among other persons, to the Queen of Bohemia, with a phrase, the translation of a trite Latin commonplace, which may have been the parent of one which became famous in our time; and with an expression of absolute confidence in the goodness of his own work.

"I have read in books that it is accounted a great bliss for a man to have Leisure with Honour. That was never my fortune. For time was, I had Honour without Leisure; and now I have Leisure without Honour.... But my desire is now to have Leisure without Loitering, and not to become an abbey-lubber, as the old proverb was, but to yield some fruit of my private life.... If King Henry were alive again, I hope verily he would not be so angry with me for not flattering him, as well pleased in seeing himself so truly described in colours that will last and be believed."

But the tide had turned against him for good. A few fair words, a few grudging doles of money to relieve his pressing wants, and those sometimes intercepted and perhaps never rightly granted from an Exchequer which even Cranfield's finance could not keep filled, were all the graces that descended upon him from those fountains of goodness in which he professed to trust with such boundless faith. The King did not want him, perhaps did not trust him, perhaps did not really like him. When the Novum Organum came out, all that he had to say about it was in the shape of a profane jest that "it was like the peace of God—it passed all understanding." Other men had the ear of Buckingham; shrewd, practical men of business like Cranfield, who hated Bacon's loose and careless ways, or the clever ecclesiastic Williams, whose counsel had steered Buckingham safely through the tempest that wrecked Bacon, and who, with no legal training, had been placed in Bacon's seat. "I thought," said Bacon, "that I should have known my successor." Williams, for his part, charged Bacon with trying to cheat his creditors, when his fine was remitted. With no open quarrel, Bacon's relations to Buckingham became more ceremonious and guarded; the "My singular good Lord" of the former letters becomes, now that Buckingham had risen so high and Bacon had sunk so low, "Excellent Lord." The one friend to whom Bacon had once wished to owe everything had become the great man, now only to be approached with "sweet meats" and elaborate courtesy. But it was no use. His full pardon Bacon did not get, though earnestly suing for it, that he might not "die in ignominy." He never sat again in Parliament. The Provostship of Eton fell vacant, and Bacon's hopes were kindled. "It were a pretty cell for my fortune. The College and School I do not doubt but I shall make to flourish." But Buckingham had promised it to some nameless follower, and by some process of exchange it went to Sir Henry Wotton. His English history was offered in vain. His digest of the Laws was offered in vain. In vain he wrote a memorandum on the regulation of usury; notes of advice to Buckingham; elaborate reports and notes of speeches about a war with Spain, when that for a while loomed before the country. In vain he affected an interest which he could hardly have felt in the Spanish marriage, and the escapade of Buckingham and Prince Charles, which "began," he wrote, "like a fable of the poets, but deserved all in a piece a worthy narration." In vain, when the Spanish marriage was off and the French was on, he proposed to offer to Buckingham "his service to live a summer as upon mine own delight at Paris, to settle a fast intelligence between France and us;" "I have somewhat of the French," he said, "I love birds, as the King doth." Public patronage and public employment were at an end for him. His petitions to the King and Buckingham ceased to be for office, but for the clearing of his name and for the means of living. It is piteous to read the earnestness of his requests. "Help me (dear Sovereign lord and master), pity me so far as that I who have borne a bag be not now in my age forced in effect to bear a wallet." The words are from a carefully-prepared and rhetorical letter which was not sent, but they express what he added to a letter presenting the De Augmentis; "det Vestra Majestas obolum Belisario." Again, "I prostrate myself at your Majesty's feet; I your ancient servant, now sixty-four years old in age, and three years and five months old in misery. I desire not from your Majesty means, nor place, nor employment, but only after so long a time of expiation, a complete and total remission of the sentence of the Upper House, to the end that blot of ignominy may be removed from me, and from my memory and posterity, that I die not a condemned man, but may be to your Majesty, as I am to God, nova creatura." But the pardon never came. Sir John Bennett, who had been condemned as a corrupt judge by the same Parliament, and between whose case and Bacon's there was as much difference, "I will not say as between black and white, but as between black and gray," had got his full pardon, "and they say shall sit in Parliament." Lord Suffolk had been one of Bacon's judges. "I hope I deserve not to be the only outcast." But whether the Court did not care, or whether, as he once suspected, there was some old enemy like Coke, who "had a tooth against him," and was watching any favour shown him, he died without his wish being fulfilled, "to live out of want and to die out of ignominy."

Bacon was undoubtedly an impoverished man, and straitened in his means; but this must be understood as in relation to the rank and position which he still held, and the work which he wanted done for the Instauratio. His will, dated a few months before his death, shows that it would be a mistake to suppose that he was in penury. He no doubt often wanted ready money, and might be vexed by creditors. But he kept a large household, and was able to live in comfort at Gray's Inn or at Gorhambury. A man who speaks in his will of his "four coach geldings and his best caroache," besides many legacies, and who proposes to found two lectures at the universities, may have troubles about debts and be cramped in his expenditure, but it is only relatively to his station that he can be said to be poor. And to subordinate officers of the Treasury who kept him out of his rights, he could still write a sharp letter, full of his old force and edge. A few months before his death he thus wrote to the Lord Treasurer Ley, who probably had made some difficulty about a claim for money:

"MY LORD,—I humbly entreat your Lordship, and (if I may use the word) advise your Lordship to make me a better answer. Your Lordship is interested in honour, in the opinion of all that hear how I am dealt with. If your Lordship malice me for Long's cause, surely it was one of the justest businesses that ever was in Chancery. I will avouch it; and how deeply I was tempted therein, your Lordship knoweth best. Your Lordship may do well to think of your grave as I do of mine; and to beware of hardness of heart. And as for fair words, it is a wind by which neither your Lordship nor any man else can sail long. Howsoever, I am the man that shall give all due respects and reverence to your great place.

"20th June, 1625. FR. ST. ALBAN."

Bacon always claimed that he was not "vindicative." But considering how Bishop Williams, when he was Lord Keeper, had charged Bacon with "knavery" and "deceiving his creditors" in the arrangements about his fine, it is not a little strange to find that at the end of his life Bacon had so completely made friends with him that he chose him as the person to whom he meant to leave his speeches and letters, which he was "willing should not be lost," and also the charge of superintending two foundations of L200 a year for Natural Science at the universities. And the Bishop accepted the charge.

The end of this, one of the most pathetic of histories, was at hand; the end was not the less pathetic because it came in so homely a fashion. On a cold day in March he stopped his coach in the snow on his way to Highgate, to try the effect of cold in arresting putrefaction. He bought a hen from a woman by the way, and stuffed it with snow. He was taken with a bad chill, which forced him to stop at a strange house, Lord Arundel's, to whom he wrote his last letter—a letter of apology for using his house. He did not write the letter as a dying man. But disease had fastened on him. A few days after, early on Easter morning, April 9, 1626, he passed away. He was buried at St. Albans, in the Church of St. Michael, "the only Christian church within the walls of old Verulam." "For my name and memory," he said in his will, "I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages." So he died: the brightest, richest, largest mind but one, in the age which had seen Shakespeare and his fellows; so bright and rich and large that there have been found those who identify him with the writer of Hamlet and Othello. That is idle. Bacon could no more have written the plays than Shakespeare could have prophesied the triumphs of natural philosophy. So ended a career, than which no other in his time had grander and nobler aims—aims, however mistaken, for the greatness and good of England; aims for the enlargement of knowledge and truth, and for the benefit of mankind. So ended a career which had mounted slowly and painfully, but resolutely, to the highest pinnacle of greatness—greatness full of honour and beneficent activity—suddenly to plunge down to depths where honour and hope were irrecoverable. So closed, in disgrace and disappointment and neglect, the last sad chapter of a life which had begun so brightly, which had achieved such permanent triumphs, which had lost itself so often in the tangles of insincerity and evil custom, which was disfigured and marred by great misfortunes, and still more by great mistakes of his own, which was in many ways misunderstood not only by his generation but by himself, but which he left in the constant and almost unaccountable faith that it would be understood and greatly honoured by posterity. With all its glories, it was the greatest shipwreck, the greatest tragedy, of an age which saw many.

But in these gloomy and dreary days of depression and vain hope to which his letters bear witness—"three years and five months old in misery," again later, "a long cleansing week of five years' expiation and more"—his interest in his great undertaking and his industry never flagged. The King did not want what he offered, did not want his histories, did not want his help about law. Well, then, he had work of his own on which his heart was set; and if the King did not want his time, he had the more for himself. Even in the busy days of his Chancellorship he had prepared and carried through the press the Novum Organum, which he published on the very eve of his fall. It was one of those works which quicken a man's powers, and prove to him what he can do; and it had its effect. His mind was never more alert than in these years of adversity, his labour never more indefatigable, his powers of expression never more keen and versatile and strong. Besides the political writings of grave argument for which he found time, these five years teem with the results of work. In the year before his death he sketched out once more, in a letter to a Venetian correspondent, Fra Fulgenzio, the friend of Sarpi, the plan of his great work, on which he was still busy, though with fast diminishing hopes of seeing it finished. To another foreign correspondent, a professor of philosophy at Annecy, and a distinguished mathematician, Father Baranzan, who had raised some questions about Bacon's method, and had asked what was to be done with metaphysics, he wrote in eager acknowledgment of the interest which his writings had excited, and insisting on the paramount necessity, above everything, of the observation of facts and of natural history, out of which philosophy may be built. But the most comprehensive view of his intellectual projects in all directions, "the fullest account of his own personal feelings and designs as a writer which we have from his own pen," is given in a letter to the venerable friend of his early days, Bishop Andrewes, who died a few months after him. Part, he says, of his Instauratio, "the work in mine own judgement (si nunquam fallit imago) I do most esteem," has been published; but because he "doubts that it flies too high over men's heads," he proposes "to draw it down to the sense" by examples of Natural History. He has enlarged and translated the Advancement into the De Augmentis. "Because he could not altogether desert the civil person that he had borne," he had begun a work on Laws, intermediate between philosophical jurisprudence and technical law. He had hoped to compile a digest of English law, but found it more than he could do alone, and had laid it aside. The Instauratio had contemplated the good of men "in the dowries of nature;" the Laws, their good "in society and the dowries of government." As he owed duty to his country, and could no longer do it service, he meant to do it honour by his history of Henry VII. His Essays were but "recreations;" and remembering that all his writings had hitherto "gone all into the City and none into the Temple," he wished to make "some poor oblation," and therefore had chosen an argument mixed of religious and civil considerations, the dialogue of "an Holy War" against the Ottoman, which he never finished, but which he intended to dedicate to Andrewes, "in respect of our ancient and private acquaintance, and because amongst the men of our times I hold you in special reverence."

The question naturally presents itself, in regard to a friend of Bishop Andrewes, What was Bacon as regards religion? And the answer, it seems to me, can admit of no doubt. The obvious and superficial thing to say is that his religion was but an official one, a tribute to custom and opinion. But it was not so. Both in his philosophical thinking, and in the feelings of his mind in the various accidents and occasions of life, Bacon was a religious man, with a serious and genuine religion. His sense of the truth and greatness of religion was as real as his sense of the truth and greatness of nature; they were interlaced together, and could not be separated, though they were to be studied separately and independently. The call, repeated through all his works from the earliest to the last, Da Fidel quae Fidel sunt, was a warning against confusing the two, but was an earnest recognition of the claims of each. The solemn religious words in which his prefaces and general statements often wind up with thanksgiving and hope and prayer, are no mere words of course; they breathe the spirit of the deepest conviction. It is true that he takes the religion of Christendom as he finds it. The grounds of belief, the relation of faith to reason, the profounder inquiries into the basis of man's knowledge of the Eternal and Invisible, are out of the circle within which he works. What we now call the philosophy of religion is absent from his writings. In truth, his mind was not qualified to grapple with such questions. There is no sign in his writings that he ever tried his strength against them; that he ever cared to go below the surface into the hidden things of mind, and what mind deals with above and beyond sense—those metaphysical difficulties and depths, as we call them, which there is no escaping, and which are as hard to explore and as dangerous to mistake as the forces and combinations of external nature. But it does not follow, because he had not asked all the questions that others have asked, that he had not thought out his reasonable faith. His religion was not one of mere vague sentiment: it was the result of reflection and deliberate judgment. It was the discriminating and intelligent Church of England religion of Hooker and Andrewes, which had gone back to something deeper and nobler in Christianity than the popular Calvinism of the earlier Reformation; and though sternly hostile to the system of the Papacy, both on religious and political grounds, attempted to judge it with knowledge and justice. This deliberate character of his belief is shown in the remarkable Confession of Faith which he left behind him: a closely-reasoned and nobly-expressed survey of Christian theology—"a summa theologiae, digested into seven pages of the finest English of the days when its tones were finest." "The entire scheme of Christian theology," as Mr. Spedding says, "is constantly in his thoughts; underlies everything; defines for him the limits of human speculation; and, as often as the course of inquiry touches at any point the boundary line, never fails to present itself. There is hardly any occasion or any kind of argument into which it does not at one time or another incidentally introduce itself." Doubtless it was a religion which in him was compatible, as it has been in others, with grave faults of temperament and character. But it is impossible to doubt that it was honest, that it elevated his thoughts, that it was a refuge and stay in the times of trouble.



CHAPTER VIII.

BACON'S PHILOSOPHY.

Bacon was one of those men to whom posterity forgives a great deal for the greatness of what he has done and attempted for posterity. It is idle, unless all honest judgment is foregone, to disguise the many deplorable shortcomings of his life; it is unjust to have one measure for him, and another for those about him and opposed to him. But it is not too much to say that in temper, in honesty, in labour, in humility, in reverence, he was the most perfect example that the world had yet seen of the student of nature, the enthusiast for knowledge. That such a man was tempted and fell, and suffered the Nemesis of his fall, is an instance of the awful truth embodied in the tragedy of Faust. But his genuine devotion, so unwearied and so paramount, to a great idea and a great purpose for the good of all generations to come, must shield him from the insult of Pope's famous and shallow epigram. Whatever may have been his sins, and they were many, he cannot have been the "meanest of mankind," who lived and died, holding unaltered, amid temptations and falls, so noble a conception of the use and calling of his life: the duty and service of helping his brethren to know as they had never yet learned to know. That thought never left him; the obligations it imposed were never forgotten in the crush and heat of business; the toils, thankless at the time, which it heaped upon him in addition to the burdens of public life were never refused. Nothing diverted him, nothing made him despair. He was not discouraged because he was not understood. There never was any one in whose life the "Souverainete du but" was more certain and more apparent; and that object was the second greatest that man can have. To teach men to know is only next to making them good.

The Baconian philosophy, the reforms of the Novum Organum, the method of experiment and induction, are commonplaces, and sometimes lead to a misconception of what Bacon did. Bacon is, and is not, the founder of modern science. What Bacon believed could be done, what he hoped and divined, for the correction and development of human knowledge, was one thing; what his methods were, and how far they were successful, is another. It would hardly be untrue to say that though Bacon is the parent of modern science, his methods contributed nothing to its actual discoveries; neither by possibility could they have done so. The great and wonderful work which the world owes to him was in the idea, and not in the execution. The idea was that the systematic and wide examination of facts was the first thing to be done in science, and that till this had been done faithfully and impartially, with all the appliances and all the safeguards that experience and forethought could suggest, all generalisations, all anticipations from mere reasoning, must be adjourned and postponed; and further, that sought on these conditions, knowledge, certain and fruitful, beyond all that men then imagined, could be attained. His was the faith of the discoverer, the imagination of the poet, the voice of the prophet. But his was not the warrior's arm, the engineer's skill, the architect's creativeness. "I only sound the clarion," he says, "but I enter not into the battle;" and with a Greek quotation very rare with him, he compares himself to one of Homer's peaceful heralds, [Greek: chairete kerukes, Dios angeloi ede kai andron]. Even he knew not the full greatness of his own enterprise. He underrated the vastness and the subtlety of nature. He overrated his own appliances to bring it under his command. He had not that incommunicable genius and instinct of the investigator which in such men as Faraday close hand to hand with phenomena. His weapons and instruments wanted precision; they were powerful up to a certain point, but they had the clumsiness of an unpractised time. Cowley compared him to Moses on Pisgah surveying the promised land; it was but a distant survey, and Newton was the Joshua who began to take possession of it.

The idea of the great enterprise, in its essential outline, and with a full sense of its originality and importance, was early formed, and was even sketched on paper with Bacon's characteristic self-reliance when he was but twenty-five. Looking back, in a letter written in the last year of his life, on the ardour and constancy with which he had clung to his faith—"in that purpose my mind never waxed old; in that long interval of time it never cooled"—he remarks that it was then "forty years since he put together a youthful essay on these matters, which with vast confidence I called by the high-sounding title, The Greatest Birth of Time." "The Greatest Birth of Time," whatever it was, has perished, though the name, altered to "Partus Temporis Masculus" has survived, attached to some fragments of uncertain date and arrangement. But in very truth the child was born, and, as Bacon says, for forty years grew and developed, with many changes yet the same. Bacon was most tenacious, not only of ideas, but even of the phrases, images, and turns of speech in which they had once flashed on him and taken shape in his mind. The features of his undertaking remained the same from first to last, only expanded and enlarged as time went on and experience widened; his conviction that the knowledge of nature, and with it the power to command and to employ nature, were within the capacity of mankind and might be restored to them; the certainty that of this knowledge men had as yet acquired but the most insignificant part, and that all existing claims to philosophical truth were as idle and precarious as the guesses and traditions of the vulgar; his belief that no greater object could be aimed at than to sweep away once and for ever all this sham knowledge and all that supported it, and to lay an entirely new and clear foundation to build on for the future; his assurance that, as it was easy to point out with fatal and luminous certainty the rottenness and hollowness of all existing knowledge and philosophy, so it was equally easy to devise and practically apply new and natural methods of investigation and construction, which should replace it by knowledge of infallible truth and boundless fruitfulness. His object—to gain the key to the interpretation of nature; his method—to gain it, not by the means common to all previous schools of philosophy, by untested reasonings and imposing and high-sounding generalisations, but by a series and scale of rigorously verified inductions, starting from the lowest facts of experience to discoveries which should prove and realise themselves by leading deductively to practical results—these, in one form or another, were the theme of his philosophical writings from the earliest sight of them that we gain.

He had disclosed what was in his mind in the letter to Lord Burghley, written when he was thirty-one (1590/91), in which he announced that he had "taken all knowledge for his province," to "purge it of 'frivolous disputations' and 'blind experiments,' and that whatever happened to him, he meant to be a 'true pioneer in the mine of truth.'" But the first public step in the opening of his great design was the publication in the autumn of 1605 of the Advancement of Learning, a careful and balanced report on the existing stock and deficiencies of human knowledge. His endeavours, as he says in the Advancement itself, are "but as an image in a cross-way, that may point out the way, but cannot go it." But from this image of his purpose, his thoughts greatly widened as time went on. The Advancement, in part at least, was probably a hurried work. It shadowed out, but only shadowed out, the lines of his proposed reform of philosophical thought; it showed his dissatisfaction with much that was held to be sound and complete, and showed the direction of his ideas and hopes. But it was many years before he took a further step. Active life intervened. In 1620, at the height of his prosperity, on the eve of his fall, he published the long meditated Novum Organum, the avowed challenge to the old philosophies, the engine and instrument of thought and discovery which was to put to shame and supersede all others, containing, in part at least, the principles of that new method of the use of experience which was to be the key to the interpretation and command of nature, and, together with the method, an elaborate but incomplete exemplification of its leading processes. Here were summed up, and stated with the most solemn earnestness, the conclusions to which long study and continual familiarity with the matters in question had led him. And with the Novum Organum was at length disclosed, though only in outline, the whole of the vast scheme in all its parts, object, method, materials, results, for the "Instauration" of human knowledge, the restoration of powers lost, disused, neglected, latent, but recoverable by honesty, patience, courage, and industry.

The Instauratio, as he planned the work, "is to be divided," says Mr. Ellis, "into six portions, of which the first is to contain a general survey of the present state of knowledge. In the second, men are to be taught how to use their understanding aright in the investigation of nature. In the third, all the phenomena of the universe are to be stored up as in a treasure-house, as the materials on which the new method is to be employed. In the fourth, examples are to be given of its operation and of the results to which it leads. The fifth is to contain what Bacon had accomplished in natural philosophy without the aid of his own method, ex eodem intellectus usu quem alii in inquirendo et inveniendo adhibere consueverunt. It is therefore less important than the rest, and Bacon declares that he will not bind himself to the conclusions which it contains. Moreover, its value will altogether cease when the sixth part can be completed, wherein will be set forth the new philosophy—the results of the application of the new method to all the phenomena of the universe. But to complete this, the last part of the Instauratio, Bacon does not hope; he speaks of it as a thing, et supra vires et ultra spes nostras collocata."—Works, i. 71.

The Novum Organum, itself imperfect, was the crown of all that he lived to do. It was followed (1622) by the publication, intended to be periodical, of materials for the new philosophy to work upon, particular sections and classes of observations on phenomena—the History of the Winds, the History of Life and Death. Others were partly prepared but not published by him. And finally, in 1623, he brought out in Latin a greatly enlarged recasting of the Advancement; the nine books of the "De Augmentis." But the great scheme was not completed; portions were left more or less finished. Much that he purposed was left undone, and could not have been yet done at that time.

But the works which he published represent imperfectly the labour spent on the undertaking. Besides these there remains a vast amount of unused or rejected work, which shows how it was thought out, rearranged, tried first in one fashion and then in another, recast, developed. Separate chapters, introductions, "experimental essays and discarded beginnings," treatises with picturesque and imaginative titles, succeeded one another in that busy work-shop; and these first drafts and tentative essays have in them some of the freshest and most felicitous forms of his thoughts. At one time his enterprise, connecting itself with his own life and mission, rose before his imagination and kindled his feelings, and embodied itself in the lofty and stately "Proem" already quoted. His quick and brilliant imagination saw shadows and figures of his ideas in the ancient mythology, which he worked out with curious ingenuity and often much poetry in his Wisdom of the Ancients. Towards the end of his life he began to embody his thoughts and plans in a philosophical tale, which he did not finish—the New Atlantis—a charming example of his graceful fancy and of his power of easy and natural story-telling. Between the Advancement and the Novum Organum (1605-20) much underground work had been done. "He had finally (about 1607) settled the plan of the Great Instauration, and began to call it by that name." The plan, first in three or four divisions, had been finally digested into six. Vague outlines had become definite and clear. Distinct portions had been worked out. Various modes of treatment had been tried, abandoned, modified. Prefaces were written to give the sketch and purpose of chapters not yet composed. The Novum Organum had been written and rewritten twelve times over. Bacon kept his papers, and we can trace in the unused portion of those left behind him much of the progress of his work, and the shapes which much of it went through. The Advancement itself is the filling-out and perfecting of what is found in germ, meagre and rudimentary, in a Discourse in Praise of Knowledge, written in the days of Elizabeth, and in some Latin chapters of an early date, the Cogitationes de Scientia Humana, on the limits and use of knowledge, and on the relation of natural history to natural philosophy. These early essays, with much of the same characteristic illustration, and many of the favourite images and maxims and texts and phrases, which continue to appear in his writings to the end, contain the thoughts of a man long accustomed to meditate and to see his way on the new aspects of knowledge opening upon him. And before the Advancement he had already tried his hand on a work intended to be in two books, which Mr. Ellis describes as a "great work on the Interpretation of Nature," the "earliest type of the Instauratio," and which Bacon called by the enigmatical name of Valerius Terminus. In it, as in a second draft, which in its turn was superseded by the Advancement, the line of thought of the Latin Cogitationes reappears, expanded and more carefully ordered; it contains also the first sketch of his certain and infallible method for what he calls the "freeing of the direction" in the search after Truth, and the first indications of the four classes of "Idols" which were to be so memorable a portion of Bacon's teaching. And between the Advancement and the Novum Organum at least one unpublished treatise of great interest intervened, the Visa et Cogitata, on which he was long employed, and which he brought to a finished shape, fit to be submitted to his friends and critics, Sir Thomas Bodley and Bishop Andrewes. It is spoken of as a book to be "imparted sicut videbitur," in the review which he made of his life and objects soon after he was made Solicitor in 1608. A number of fragments also bear witness to the fierce scorn and wrath which possessed him against the older and the received philosophies. He tried his hand at declamatory onslaughts on the leaders of human wisdom, from the early Greeks and Aristotle down to the latest "novellists;" and he certainly succeeded in being magnificently abusive. But he thought wisely that this was not the best way of doing what in the Commentarius Solutus he calls on himself to do—"taking a greater confidence and authority in discourses of this nature, tanquam sui certus et de alto despiciens;" and the rhetorical Redargutio Philosophiarum and writings of kindred nature were laid aside by his more serious judgment. But all these fragments witness to the immense and unwearied labour bestowed in the midst of a busy life on his undertaking; they suggest, too, the suspicion that there was much waste from interruption, and the doubt whether his work would not have been better if it could have been more steadily continuous. But if ever a man had a great object in life, and pursued it through good and evil report, through ardent hope and keen disappointment, to the end, with unwearied patience and unshaken faith, it was Bacon, when he sought the improvement of human knowledge "for the glory of God and the relief of man's estate." It is not the least part of the pathetic fortune of his life that his own success was so imperfect.

When a reader first comes from the vague, popular notions of Bacon's work to his definite proposals the effect is startling. Every one has heard that he contemplated a complete reform of the existing conceptions of human knowledge, and of the methods by which knowledge was to be sought; that rejecting them as vitiated, by the loose and untested way in which they had been formed, he called men from verbal generalisations and unproved assumptions to come down face to face with the realities of experience; that he substituted for formal reasoning, from baseless premises and unmeaning principles, a methodical system of cautious and sifting inference from wide observation and experiment; and that he thus opened the path which modern science thenceforth followed, with its amazing and unexhausted discoveries, and its vast and beneficent practical results. We credit all this to Bacon, and assuredly not without reason. All this is what was embraced in his vision of a changed world of thought and achievement. All this is what was meant by that Regnum Hominis, which, with a play on sacred words which his age did not shrink from, and which he especially pleased himself with, marked the coming of that hitherto unimagined empire of man over the powers and forces which encompassed him. But the detail of all this is multifarious and complicated, and is not always what we expect; and when we come to see how his work is estimated by those who, by greatest familiarity with scientific ideas and the history of scientific inquiries, are best fitted to judge of it, many a surprise awaits us.

For we find that the greatest differences of opinion exist on the value of what he did. Not only very unfavourable judgments have been passed upon it, on general grounds—as an irreligious, or a shallow and one-sided, or a poor and "utilitarian" philosophy, and on a definite comparison of it with the actual methods and processes which as a matter of history have been the real means of scientific discovery—but also some of those who have most admired his genius, and with the deepest love and reverence have spared no pains to do it full justice, have yet come to the conclusion that as an instrument and real method of work Bacon's attempt was a failure. It is not only De Maistre and Lord Macaulay who dispute his philosophical eminence. It is not only the depreciating opinion of a contemporary like Harvey, who was actually doing what Bacon was writing about. It is not only that men who after the long history of modern science have won their place among its leaders, and are familiar by daily experience with the ways in which it works—a chemist like Liebig, a physiologist like Claude Bernard—say that they can find nothing to help them in Bacon's methods. It is not only that a clear and exact critic like M. de Remusat looks at his attempt, with its success and failure, as characteristic of English, massive, practical good sense rather than as marked by real philosophical depth and refinement, such as Continental thinkers point to and are proud of in Descartes and Leibnitz. It is not even that a competent master of the whole domain of knowledge, Whewell, filled with the deepest sense of all that the world owes to Bacon, takes for granted that "though Bacon's general maxims are sagacious and animating, his particular precepts failed in his hands, and are now practically useless;" and assuming that Bacon's method is not the right one, and not complete as far as the progress of science up to his time could direct it, proceeds to construct a Novum Organum Renovatum. But Bacon's writings have recently undergone the closest examination by two editors, whose care for his memory is as loyal and affectionate as their capacity is undoubted, and their willingness to take trouble boundless. And Mr. Ellis and Mr. Spedding, with all their interest in every detail of Bacon's work, and admiration of the way in which he performed it, make no secret of their conclusion that he failed in the very thing on which he was most bent—the discovery of practical and fruitful ways of scientific inquiry. "Bacon," says Mr. Spedding, "failed to devise a practicable method for the discovery of the Forms of Nature, because he misconceived the conditions of the case.... For the same reason he failed to make any single discovery which holds its place as one of the steps by which science has in any direction really advanced. The clew with which he entered the labyrinth did not reach far enough; before he had nearly attained his end he was obliged either to come back or to go on without it."

"His peculiar system of philosophy," says Mr. Spedding in another preface, "that is to say, the peculiar method of investigation, the "organum," the "formula," the "clavis," the "ars ipsa interpretandi naturam," the "filum Labyrinthi," or by whatever of its many names we choose to call that artificial process by which alone he believed man could attain a knowledge of the laws and a command over the powers of nature—of this philosophy we can make nothing. If we have not tried it, it is because we feel confident that it would not answer. We regard it as a curious piece of machinery, very subtle, elaborate, and ingenious, but not worth constructing, because all the work it could do may be done more easily another way."—Works, iii. 171.

What his method really was is itself a matter of question. Mr. Ellis speaks of it as a matter "but imperfectly apprehended." He differs from his fellow-labourer Mr. Spedding, in what he supposes to be its central and characteristic innovation. Mr. Ellis finds it in an improvement and perfection of logical machinery. Mr. Spedding finds it in the formation of a great "natural and experimental history," a vast collection of facts in every department of nature, which was to be a more important part of his philosophy than the Novum Organum itself. Both of them think that as he went on, the difficulties of the work grew upon him, and caused alterations in his plans, and we are reminded that "there is no didactic exposition of his method in the whole of his writings," and that "this has not been sufficiently remarked by those who have spoken of his philosophy."

In the first place, the kind of intellectual instrument which he proposed to construct was a mistake. His great object was to place the human mind "on a level with things and nature" (ut faciamus intellectum humanum rebus et naturae parem), and this could only be done by a revolution in methods. The ancients had all that genius could do for man; but it was a matter, he said, not of the strength and fleetness of the running, but of the rightness of the way. It was a new method, absolutely different from anything known, which he proposed to the world, and which should lead men to knowledge, with the certainty and with the impartial facility of a high-road. The Induction which he imagined to himself as the contrast to all that had yet been tried was to have two qualities. It was to end, by no very prolonged or difficult processes, in absolute certainty. And next, it was to leave very little to the differences of intellectual power: it was to level minds and capacities. It was to give all men the same sort of power which a pair of compasses gives the hand in drawing a circle. "Absolute certainty, and a mechanical mode of procedure" says Mr. Ellis, "such that all men should be capable of employing it, are the two great features of the Baconian system." This he thought possible, and this he set himself to expound—"a method universally applicable, and in all cases infallible." In this he saw the novelty and the vast importance of his discovery. "By this method all the knowledge which the human mind was capable of receiving might be attained, and attained without unnecessary labour." It was a method of "a demonstrative character, with the power of reducing all minds to nearly the same level." The conception, indeed, of a "great Art of knowledge," of an "Instauration" of the sciences, of a "Clavis" which should unlock the difficulties which had hindered discovery, was not a new one. This attempt at a method which should be certain, which should level capacities, which should do its work in a short time, had a special attraction for the imagination of the wild spirits of the South, from Raimond Lulli in the thirteenth century to the audacious Calabrians of the sixteenth. With Bacon it was something much more serious and reasonable and business-like. But such a claim has never yet been verified; there is no reason to think that it ever can be; and to have made it shows a fundamental defect in Bacon's conception of the possibilities of the human mind and the field it has to work in.

In the next place, though the prominence which he gave to the doctrine of Induction was one of those novelties which are so obvious after the event, though so strange before it, and was undoubtedly the element in his system which gave it life and power and influence on the course of human thought and discovery, his account of Induction was far from complete and satisfactory. Without troubling himself about the theory of Induction, as De Remusat has pointed out, he contented himself with applying to its use the precepts of common-sense and a sagacious perception of the circumstances in which it was to be employed. But even these precepts, notable as they were, wanted distinctness, and the qualities needed for working rules. The change is great when in fifty years we pass from the poetical science of Bacon to the mathematical and precise science of Newton. His own time may well have been struck by the originality and comprehensiveness of such a discriminating arrangement of proofs as the "Prerogative Instances" of the Novum Organum, so natural and real, yet never before thus compared and systematized. But there is a great interval between his method of experimenting, his "Hunt of Pan"—the three tables of Instances, "Presence," "Absence" and "Degrees, or Comparisons," leading to a process of sifting and exclusion, and to the First Vintage, or beginnings of theory—and say, for instance, Mill's four methods of experimental inquiry: the method of agreement, of differences, of residues, and of concomitant variations. The course which he marked out so laboriously and so ingeniously for Induction to follow was one which was found to be impracticable, and as barren of results as those deductive philosophies on which he lavished his scorn. He has left precepts and examples of what he meant by his cross-examining and sifting processes. As admonitions to cross-examine and to sift facts and phenomena they are valuable. Many of the observations and classifications are subtle and instructive. But in his hands nothing comes of them. They lead at the utmost to mere negative conclusions; they show what a thing is not. But his attempt to elicit anything positive out of them breaks down, or ends at best in divinations and guesses, sometimes—as in connecting Heat and Motion—very near to later and more carefully-grounded theories, but always unverified. He had a radically false and mechanical conception, though in words he earnestly disclaims it, of the way to deal with the facts of nature. He looked on them as things which told their own story, and suggested the questions which ought to be put to them; and with this idea half his time was spent in collecting huge masses of indigested facts of the most various authenticity and value, and he thought he was collecting materials which his method had only to touch in order to bring forth from them light and truth and power. He thought that, not in certain sciences, but in all, one set of men could do the observing and collecting, and another be set on the work of Induction and the discovery of "axioms." Doubtless in the arrangement and sorting of them his versatile and ingenious mind gave itself full play; he divides and distinguishes them into their companies and groups, different kinds of Motion, "Prerogative" instances, with their long tale of imaginative titles. But we look in vain for any use that he was able to make of them, or even to suggest. Bacon never adequately realised that no promiscuous assemblage of even the most certain facts could ever lead to knowledge, could ever suggest their own interpretation, without the action on them of the living mind, without the initiative of an idea. In truth he was so afraid of assumptions and "anticipations" and prejudices—his great bugbear was so much the "intellectus sibi permissus" the mind given liberty to guess and imagine and theorise, instead of, as it ought, absolutely and servilely submitting itself to the control of facts—that he missed the true place of the rational and formative element in his account of Induction. He does tell us, indeed, that "truth emerges sooner from error than from confusion." He indulges the mind, in the course of its investigation of "Instances," with a first "vintage" of provisional generalisations. But of the way in which the living mind of the discoverer works, with its ideas and insight, and thoughts that come no one knows whence, working hand in hand with what comes before the eye or is tested by the instrument, he gives us no picture. Compare his elaborate investigation of the "Form of Heat" in the Novum Organum, with such a record of real inquiry as Wells's Treatise on Dew, or Herschel's analysis of it in his Introduction to Natural Philosophy. And of the difference of genius between a Faraday or a Newton, and the crowd of average men who have used and finished off their work, he takes no account. Indeed, he thinks that for the future such difference is to disappear.

"That his method is impracticable," says Mr. Ellis, "cannot, I think, be denied, if we reflect not only that it never has produced any result, but also that the process by which scientific truths have been established cannot be so presented as even to appear to be in accordance with it. In all cases this process involves an element to which nothing corresponds in the Tables of 'Comparence' and 'Exclusion,' namely, the application to the facts of observation of a principle of arrangement, an idea, existing in the mind of the discoverer antecedently to the act of induction. It may be said that this idea is precisely one of the naturae into which the facts of observation ought in Bacon's system to be analysed. And this is in one sense true; but it must be added that this analysis, if it be thought right so to call it, is of the essence of the discovery which results from it. In most cases the act of induction follows as a matter of course as soon as the appropriate idea has been introduced."—Ellis, General Preface, i. 38.

Lastly, not only was Bacon's conception of philosophy so narrow as to exclude one of its greatest domains; for, says Mr. Ellis, "it cannot be denied that to Bacon all sound philosophy seemed to be included in what we now call the natural sciences," and in all its parts was claimed as the subject of his inductive method; but Bacon's scientific knowledge and scientific conceptions were often very imperfect—more imperfect than they ought to have been for his time. Of one large part of science, which was just then beginning to be cultivated with high promise of success—the knowledge of the heavens—he speaks with a coldness and suspicion which contrasts remarkably with his eagerness about things belonging to the sphere of the earth and within reach of the senses. He holds, of course, the unity of the world; the laws of the whole visible universe are one order; but the heavens, wonderful as they are to him, are—compared with other things—out of his track of inquiry. He had his astronomical theories; he expounded them in his "Descriptio Globi Intellectualis" and his Thema Coeli He was not altogether ignorant of what was going on in days when Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were at work. But he did not know how to deal with it, and there were men in England, before and then, who understood much better than he the problems and the methods of astronomy. He had one conspicuous and strange defect for a man who undertook what he did. He was not a mathematician: he did not see the indispensable necessity of mathematics in the great Instauration which he projected; he did not much believe in what they could do. He cared so little about them that he takes no notice of Napier's invention of Logarithms. He was not able to trace how the direct information of the senses might be rightly subordinated to the rational, but not self-evident results of geometry and arithmetic. He was impatient of the subtleties of astronomical calculations; they only attempted to satisfy problems about the motion of bodies in the sky, and told us nothing of physical fact; they gave us, as Prometheus gave to Jove, the outside skin of the offering, which was stuffed inside with straw and rubbish. He entirely failed to see that before dealing with physical astronomy, it must be dealt with mathematically. "It is well to remark," as Mr. Ellis says, "that none of Newton's astronomical discoveries could have been made if astronomers had not continued to render themselves liable to Bacon's censure." Bacon little thought that in navigation the compass itself would become a subordinate instrument compared with the helps given by mathematical astronomy. In this, and in other ways, Bacon rose above his time in his conceptions of what might be, but not of what was; the list is a long one, as given by Mr. Spedding (iii. 511), of the instances which show that he was ill-informed about the advances of knowledge in his own time. And his mind was often not clear when he came to deal with complex phenomena. Thus, though he constructed a table of specific gravities—"the only collection," says Mr. Ellis, "of quantitative experiments that we find in his works," and "wonderfully accurate considering the manner in which they were obtained;" yet he failed to understand the real nature of the famous experiment of Archimedes. And so with the larger features of his teaching it is impossible not to feel how imperfectly he had emancipated himself from the power of words and of common prepossessions; how for one reason or another he had failed to call himself to account in the terms he employed, and the assumptions on which he argued. The caution does not seem to have occurred to him that the statement of a fact may, in nine cases out of ten, involve a theory. His whole doctrine of "Forms" and "Simple natures," which is so prominent in his method of investigation, is an example of loose and slovenly use of unexamined and untested ideas. He allowed himself to think that it would be possible to arrive at an alphabet of nature, which, once attained, would suffice to spell out and constitute all its infinite combinations. He accepted, without thinking it worth a doubt, the doctrine of appetites and passions and inclinations and dislikes and horrors in inorganic nature. His whole physiology of life and death depends on a doctrine of animal spirits, of which he traces the operations and qualities as if they were as certain as the nerves or the blood, and of which he gives this account—"that in every tangible body there is a spirit covered and enveloped in the grosser body;" "not a virtue, not an energy, not an actuality, nor any such idle matter, but a body thin and invisible, and yet having place and dimension, and real." ... "a middle nature between flame, which is momentary, and air which is permanent." Yet these are the very things for which he holds up Aristotle and the Scholastics and the Italian speculators to reprobation and scorn. The clearness of his thinking was often overlaid by the immense profusion of decorative material which his meditation brought along with it. The defect was greater than that which even his ablest defenders admit. It was more than that in that "greatest and radical difference, which he himself observes" between minds, the difference between minds which were apt to note distinctions, and those which were apt to note likenesses, he was, without knowing it, defective in the first. It was that in many instances he exemplified in his own work the very faults which he charged on the older philosophies: haste, carelessness, precipitancy, using words without thinking them out, assuming to know when he ought to have perceived his real ignorance.

What, then, with all these mistakes and failures, not always creditable or pardonable, has given Bacon his preeminent place in the history of science?

1. The answer is that with all his mistakes and failures, the principles on which his mode of attaining a knowledge of nature was based were the only true ones; and they had never before been propounded so systematically, so fully, and so earnestly. His was not the first mind on whom these principles had broken. Men were, and had been for some time, pursuing their inquiries into various departments of nature precisely on the general plan of careful and honest observation of real things which he enjoined. They had seen, as he saw, the futility of all attempts at natural philosophy by mere thinking and arguing, without coming into contact with the contradictions or corrections or verifications of experience. In Italy, in Germany, in England there were laborious and successful workers, who had long felt that to be in touch with nature was the only way to know. But no one had yet come before the world to proclaim this on the house-tops, as the key of the only certain path to the secrets of nature, the watchword of a revolution in the methods of interpreting her; and this Bacon did with an imposing authority and power which enforced attention. He spoke the thoughts of patient toilers like Harvey with a largeness and richness which they could not command, and which they perhaps smiled at. He disentangled and spoke the vague thoughts of his age, which other men had not the courage and clearness of mind to formulate. What Bacon did, indeed, and what he meant, are separate matters. He meant an infallible method by which man should be fully equipped for a struggle with nature; he meant an irresistible and immediate conquest, within a definite and not distant time. It was too much. He himself saw no more of what he meant than Columbus did of America. But what he did was to persuade men for the future that the intelligent, patient, persevering cross-examination of things, and the thoughts about them, was the only, and was the successful road to know. No one had yet done this, and he did it. His writings were a public recognition of real science, in its humblest tasks about the commonplace facts before our feet, as well as in its loftiest achievements. "The man who is growing great and happy by electrifying a bottle," says Dr. Johnson, "wonders to see the world engaged in the prattle about peace and war," and the world was ready to smile at the simplicity or the impertinence of his enthusiasm. Bacon impressed upon the world for good, with every resource of subtle observation and forcible statement, that "the man who is growing great by electrifying a bottle" is as important a person in the world's affairs as the arbiter of peace and war.

2. Yet this is not all. An inferior man might have made himself the mouthpiece of the hopes and aspirations of his generation after a larger science. But to Bacon these aspirations embodied themselves in the form of a great and absorbing idea; an idea which took possession of the whole man, kindling in him a faith which nothing could quench, and a passion which nothing could dull; an idea which, for forty years, was his daily companion, his daily delight, his daily business; an idea which he was never tired of placing in ever fresh and more attractive lights, from which no trouble could wean him, about which no disaster could make him despair; an idea round which the instincts and intuitions and obstinate convictions of genius gathered, which kindled his rich imagination and was invested by it with a splendour and magnificence like the dreams of fable. It is this idea which finds its fitting expression in the grand and stately aphorisms of the Novum Organum, in the varied fields of interest in the De Augmentis, in the romance of the New Atlantis. It is this idea, this certainty of a new unexplored Kingdom of Knowledge within the reach and grasp of man, if he will be humble enough and patient enough and truthful enough to occupy it—this announcement not only of a new system of thought, but of a change in the condition of the world—a prize and possession such as man had not yet imagined; this belief in the fortunes of the human race and its issue, "such an issue, it may be, as in the present condition of things and men's minds cannot easily be conceived or imagined," yet more than verified in the wonders which our eyes have seen—it is this which gives its prerogative to Bacon's work. That he bungled about the processes of Induction, that he talked about an unintelligible doctrine of Forms, did not affect the weight and solemnity of his call to learn, so full of wisdom and good-sense, so sober and so solid, yet so audaciously confident. There had been nothing like it in its ardour of hope, in the glory which it threw around the investigation of nature. It was the presence and the power of a great idea—long become a commonplace to us, but strange and perplexing at first to his own generation, which probably shared Coke's opinion that it qualified its champion for a place in the company of the "Ship of Fools," which expressed its opinion of the man who wrote the Novum Organum, in the sentiment that "a fool could not have written it, and a wise man would not"—it is this which has placed Bacon among the great discoverers of the human race.

It is this imaginative yet serious assertion of the vast range and possibilities of human knowledge which, as M. de Remusat remarks—the keenest and fairest of Bacon's judges—gives Bacon his claim to the undefinable but very real character of greatness. Two men stand out, "the masters of those who know," without equals up to their time, among men—the Greek Aristotle and the Englishman Bacon. They agree in the universality and comprehensiveness of their conception of human knowledge; and they were absolutely alone in their serious practical ambition to work out this conception. In the separate departments of thought, of investigation, of art, each is left far behind by numbers of men, who in these separate departments have gone far deeper than they, have soared higher, have been more successful in what they attempted. But Aristotle first, and for his time more successfully, and Bacon after him, ventured on the daring enterprise of "taking all knowledge for their province;" and in this they stood alone. This present scene of man's existence, this that we call nature, the stage on which mortal life begins and goes on and ends, the faculties with which man is equipped to act, to enjoy, to create, to hold his way amid or against the circumstances and forces round him—this is what each wants to know, as thoroughly and really as can be. It is not to reduce things to a theory or a system that they look around them on the place where they find themselves with life and thought and power; that were easily done, and has been done over and over again, only to prove its futility. It is to know, as to the whole and its parts, as men understand knowing in some one subject of successful handling, whether art or science or practical craft. This idea, this effort, distinguishes these two men. The Greeks—predecessors, contemporaries, successors of Aristotle—were speculators, full of clever and ingenious guesses, in which the amount of clear and certain fact was in lamentable disproportion to the schemes blown up from it; or they devoted themselves more profitably to some one or two subjects of inquiry, moral or purely intellectual, with absolute indifference to what might be asked, or what might be known, of the real conditions under which they were passing their existence. Some of the Romans, Cicero and Pliny, had encyclopaedic minds; but the Roman mind was the slave of precedent, and was more than satisfied with partially understanding and neatly arranging what the Greeks had left. The Arabians looked more widely about them; but the Arabians were essentially sceptics, and resigned subjects to the inevitable and the inexplicable; there was an irony, open or covert, in their philosophy, their terminology, their transcendental mysticism, which showed how little they believed that they really knew. The vast and mighty intellects of the schoolmen never came into a real grapple with the immensity of the facts of the natural or even of the moral world; within the world of abstract thought, the world of language, with its infinite growths and consequences, they have never had their match for keenness, for patience, for courage, for inexhaustible toil; but they were as much disconnected from the natural world, which was their stage of life, as if they had been disembodied spirits. The Renaissance brought with it not only the desire to know, but to know comprehensively and in all possible directions; it brought with it temptations to the awakened Italian genius, renewed, enlarged, refined, if not strengthened by its passage through the Middle Ages, to make thought deal with the real, and to understand the scene in which men were doing such strange and wonderful things; but Giordano Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, and their fellows, were not men capable of more than short flights, though they might be daring and eager ones. It required more thoroughness, more humble-minded industry, to match the magnitude of the task. And there have been men of universal minds and comprehensive knowledge since Bacon, Leibnitz, Goethe, Humboldt, men whose thoughts were at home everywhere, where there was something to be known. But even for them the world of knowledge has grown too large. We shall never again see an Aristotle or a Bacon, because the conditions of knowledge have altered. Bacon, like Aristotle, belonged to an age of adventure, which went to sea little knowing whither it went, and ill furnished with knowledge and instruments. He entered with a vast and vague scheme of discovery on these unknown seas and new worlds which to us are familiar, and daily traversed in every direction. This new world of knowledge has turned out in many ways very different from what Aristotle or Bacon supposed, and has been conquered by implements and weapons very different in precision and power from what they purposed to rely on. But the combination of patient and careful industry, with the courage and divination of genius, in doing what none had done before, makes it equally stupid and idle to impeach their greatness.

3. Bacon has been charged with bringing philosophy down from the heights, not as of old to make men know themselves, and to be the teacher of the highest form of truth, but to be the purveyor of material utility. It contemplates only, it is said, the "commoda vitae;" about the deeper and more elevating problems of thought it does not trouble itself. It concerns itself only about external and sensible nature, about what is "of the earth, earthy." But when it comes to the questions which have attracted the keenest and hardiest thinkers, the question, what it is that thinks and wills—what is the origin and guarantee of the faculties by which men know anything at all and form rational and true conceptions about nature and themselves, whence it is that reason draws its powers and materials and rules—what is the meaning of words which all use but few can explain—Time and Space, and Being and Cause, and consciousness and choice, and the moral law—Bacon is content with a loose and superficial treatment of them. Bacon certainly was not a metaphysician, nor an exact and lucid reasoner. With wonderful flashes of sure intuition or happy anticipation, his mind was deficient in the powers which deal with the deeper problems of thought, just as it was deficient in the mathematical faculty. The subtlety, the intuition, the penetration, the severe precision, even the force of imagination, which make a man a great thinker on any abstract subject were not his; the interest of questions which had interested metaphysicians had no interest for him: he distrusted and undervalued them. When he touches the "ultimities" of knowledge he is as obscure and hard to be understood as any of those restless Southern Italians of his own age, who shared with him the ambition of reconstructing science. Certainly the science which most interested Bacon, the science which he found, as he thought, in so desperate a condition, and to which he gave so great an impulse, was physical science. But physical science may be looked at and pursued in different ways, in different tempers, with different objects. It may be followed in the spirit of Newton, of Boyle, of Herschel, of Faraday; or with a confined and low horizon it may be dwarfed and shrivelled into a mean utilitarianism. But Bacon's horizon was not a narrow one. He believed in God and immortality and the Christian creed and hope. To him the restoration of the Reign of Man was a noble enterprise, because man was so great and belonged to so great an order of things, because the things which he was bid to search into with honesty and truthfulness were the works and laws of God, because it was so shameful and so miserable that from an ignorance which industry and good-sense could remedy, the tribes of mankind passed their days in self-imposed darkness and helplessness. It was God's appointment that men should go through this earthly stage of their being. Each stage of man's mysterious existence had to be dealt with, not according to his own fancies, but according to the conditions imposed on it; and it was one of man's first duties to arrange for his stay on earth according to the real laws which he could find out if he only sought for them. Doubtless it was one of Bacon's highest hopes that from the growth of true knowledge would follow in surprising ways the relief of man's estate; this, as an end, runs through all his yearning after a fuller and surer method of interpreting nature. The desire to be a great benefactor, the spirit of sympathy and pity for mankind, reign through this portion of his work—pity for confidence so greatly abused by the teachers of man, pity for ignorance which might be dispelled, pity for pain and misery which might be relieved. In the quaint but beautiful picture of courtesy, kindness, and wisdom, which he imagines in the New Atlantis, the representative of true philosophy, the "Father of Solomon's House," is introduced as one who "had an aspect as if he pitied men." But unless it is utilitarianism to be keenly alive to the needs and pains of life, and to be eager and busy to lighten and assuage them, Bacon's philosophy was not utilitarian. It may deserve many reproaches, but not this one. Such a passage as the following—in which are combined the highest motives and graces and passions of the soul, love of truth, humility of mind, purity of purpose, reverence for God, sympathy for man, compassion for the sorrows of the world and longing to heal them, depth of conviction and faith—fairly represents the spirit which runs through his works. After urging the mistaken use of imagination and authority in science, he goes on—

"There is not and never will be an end or limit to this; one catches at one thing, another at another; each has his favourite fancy; pure and open light there is none; every one philosophises out of the cells of his own imagination, as out of Plato's cave; the higher wits with more acuteness and felicity, the duller, less happily, but with equal pertinacity. And now of late, by the regulation of some learned and (as things now are) excellent men (the former license having, I suppose, become wearisome), the sciences are confined to certain and prescribed authors, and thus restrained are imposed upon the old and instilled into the young; so that now (to use the sarcasm of Cicero concerning Caesar's year) the constellation of Lyra rises by edict, and authority is taken for truth, not truth for authority. Which kind of institution and discipline is excellent for present use, but precludes all prospect of improvement. For we copy the sin of our first parents while we suffer for it. They wished to be like God, but their posterity wish to be even greater. For we create worlds, we direct and domineer over nature, we will have it that all things are as in our folly we think they should be, not as seems fittest to the Divine wisdom, or as they are found to be in fact; and I know not whether we more distort the facts of nature or of our own wits; but we clearly impress the stamp of our own image on the creatures and works of God, instead of carefully examining and recognising in them the stamp of the Creator himself. Wherefore our dominion over creatures is a second time forfeited, not undeservedly; and whereas after the fall of man some power over the resistance of creatures was still left to him—the power of subduing and managing them by true and solid arts—yet this too through our insolence, and because we desire to be like God and to follow the dictates of our own reason, we in great part lose. If, therefore, there be any humility towards the Creator, any reverence for or disposition to magnify His works, any charity for man and anxiety to relieve his sorrows and necessities, any love of truth in nature, any hatred of darkness, any desire for the purification of the understanding, we must entreat men again and again to discard, or at least set apart for a while, these volatile and preposterous philosophies which have preferred theses to hypotheses, led experience captive, and triumphed over the works of God; and to approach with humility and veneration to unroll the volume of Creation, to linger and meditate therein, and with minds washed clean from opinions to study it in purity and integrity. For this is that sound and language which "went forth into all lands," and did not incur the confusion of Babel; this should men study to be perfect in, and becoming again as little children condescend to take the alphabet of it into their hands, and spare no pains to search and unravel the interpretation thereof, but pursue it strenuously and persevere even unto death."—Preface to Historia Naturalis: translated, Works, v. 132-3.