thing he denounces, even as Aristotle did before him. After scolding Aristotle, in season and out, for his sins in that sort, the English moralist with perfect simplicity proceeds to solve the problem of sidereal motion by the principle, among others, that there ought to be rest in Nature. Hence a grievous sequence of miscarriages. But in the intellectual as in the social life it is happily possible for men to show the way they do not tread. It is with the ethic of opinion as with the Golden Rule of reciprocity, which has been current for ten millenniums, and dubbed divine through two of them, and is yet daily trodden under foot by millions who profess to revere it. And when we note the failure of Bacon's undertaking to frame an automatic organon or mechanical induction of truth, we shall miss half the significance of the matter if we do not realise that the very aspiration was possible only to a great intelligence and a great personality. Till the time of Comte, his was the only current classification of the sciences. In Bacon's day, every important new idea was arrested in the name of dogma, and as nearly strangled as was possible to those in authority. He himself, in the very books in which he is driven to protest against the procedure, gives it his countenance in the concrete as often as he censures it in the abstract. He could not realise the full truth of his own diagnosis, and he blessed tradition with the left hand, while banning it with the right. Those who have come after him have done the same, even unto the tenth generation. Untaught by the unvarying record of quashed vetoes, exploded rebuttals, and outlived dooms, the majority of men, having accepted all innovations but the last, proceed to treat that exactly as their fathers treated the earlier. Perhaps in our day, at least in the physical sciences, there has emerged a new intellectual self-consciousness, the result of the unceasing percussion of novelty; but to the moral and historical sciences we stand very much as Bacon's generation did to the physical. Hence the enduring significance of what is best in his message and finest in his phrase.. When all is said, we are listening to a man of genius, one of the great masters of English prose, and so great a master of the essentials of all diction that his Latin was to foreigners almost what his English was and is to his countrymen. The late Professor Bain was not a man likely to be caught by mere rhetoric, or to be lightly enthusiastic about anything; and he could find no word save "wonderful" to express his sense of the sustained power and splendour of the first book of the Novum Organum. There Bacon put forth all his power of gnomic concentration and august style; and the result would to-day have been still nobler had he left us his own English. Of how it might have gone, the English reader may get some idea from the earlier English Filum Labyrinthi, which approximates to it in purpose. The resort to Latin was part of the strategy by which he strove to counterbalance his own bias to over-confidence, now partly plain to himself. In youth he had begun with a Latin tractate headed The Greatest Birth of Time, the said birth being his proposed reform of investigation; but the walls of Jericho had not fallen before his trumpeting; and ere long he had silently altered the Maximus of his title to Masculus. Even after that, he had deliberately tried the experiment, in the second chapter of the Temporis Partus Masculus, of a style of scorn ful invective, to find whether haply he might win adherents by hectoring where persuasion had failed. Of that experiment in turn he had duly repented; and for his later works he took nearly every precaution that his ripened worldly wisdom could suggest, short of withdrawing his radical charges against men's average intellectual procedure. Finally, in his De Augmentis Scientiarum, published after his fall, he not only recast in Latin his earlier English work, but prudently softened or expunged every allusion to Catholicism that might offend the more liberal Catholics of the Continent, to whom, among others, he began to look for the hearing that he feared his own countrymen, daily more absorbed in theological disputes, might for ever deny him. At the same time to guard himself after his keen thrusts in the Novum Organum at theological hindrances to the sciences, he emphasised in the De Augmentis his authoritarian theology, which, after all, did not 'avail to prevent severe imputations on his orthodoxy. Once again he had miscalculated, by reason of the very over-hopefulness which was at the core of his character, and which gave him so much of his energy. No mere tactic of propitiation could countervail the force of the prejudices against which his work was a protest. If his way of working were so new as he claimed, it followed that it would be slow of adoption. If men could be at once docile to his appeal, his polemic against their intellectual vices would have been proved false. It happened to be true; and they treated his work, on the whole, as he ought to have expected. Foreigners were naturally less unready than his countrymen to listen to a disgraced judge who took a high tone of censure towards the average mind; and his compliments to the Jesuits naturally softened them. Meanwhile, however, as Bacon had with signal prescience predicted in his De Interpretatione Nature Procemium, English civil troubles drifted into civil war; and it was at the close of the struggle that, in the new order of things, his teaching began to have the "stupendous" success ascribed to it by Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Royal Society, in the preface to the collected Philosophical Transactions for 1672-77. As Sprat recognizes, the convulsion of the civil war had broken down many old walls and stirred many stagnant waters. Even during the progress of the strife, every species of discussion was quickened and deepened; and under the new regimen of the Restoration, in which Dutch practice and French ideas were thrust upon English usage, especially when London was burnt down and had to be rebuilt, Bacon's better day began, in such sort that scolding old Dr. Henry Stubbe, one of the last of the out-and-out Aristotelians in England, designated the experimental philosophers of his day a "Bacon-faced generation". In later times the debate has turned as we have seen; but down to our own day Bacon's fame is relatively undiminished, having survived even the attempt of some of his worshippers to prove that he wrote the plays of Shakspere, and a whole library besides. And it is perhaps to-day that he can be best appreciated, seeing that our day knows more fully than any other how true are his charges against men's way of living their mental life-nay, how true they are against himself—and how fundamentally right was his prediction that men's power over Nature would be increased a thousand-fold when they learned to interpret her with the humility of truthseekers, casting aside all prepossessions. That much of the purification of spirit of modern science is due to Bacon will hardly be denied by any one who will make a "Baconian" induction from the records, instead of arguing a priori, with Carlyle and Liebig and Lange, that a pioneer who himself went so far astray cannot have helped or stirred men to do otherwise. As Columbus found the New World in seeking for the Asiatic Indies, and while believing he had actually found them, so Bacon, by his teaching, "builded better than he knew". Like Columbus, he was the hero of an Idea; and like so many heroes of fabulous quests, he bore a magic sword, to wit, his unrivalled power of speech. Hence, of all those who in or before his time warred by precept against the tyranny of tradition, he alone retains his spell. Ramus was slain by fanaticism; but even his martyr's death has not moved posterity to cherish his works. Telesius, being dull, is simply buried under the dust of time. Only Descartes, with his masterly Discours de la Méthode, written in his mother tongue for the next generation, compares with Bacon in his sustained hold upon posterity. And when we are making so many comparisons, it is meet to remember that Descartes in his turn, with all his scientific faculty, showed constant disrespect to the great Galileo, perhaps for a worse reason than that of Bacon's attitude to Copernicus, namely, a mere concern to propitiate the Catholic Church. However that may be, the spectacle of the strength and weakness, the successes and failures, of two such men recalls us to the true and final attitude of retrospective criticism, a recognisant compassion before the mysterious self-frustration of men, xiv EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION The work he did we ought t' admire, And were unjust if we should more require Of low Affliction and high Happiness: For who on things remote can fix his sight, That's always in a Triumph, or a Fight?" The last question is worth remembering. Spedding, despite his devotion, is fain to explain Bacon's practical failure in science as being due to a lack of "the faculty of distinguishing differences". While disposed to qualify some of Spedding's approbations, I hesitate to assent to this criticism; and venture to suggest that a sounder explanation is conveyed by Cowley. Bacon missed success in detail because he was striving to compass nearly the whole field of Nature in a life which was engrossed with work enough of other kinds to keep a strong man busy. No gift of distinguishing differences in things natural could have availed for success under such circumstances. The gift must be allowed, by implication, to Descartes and Galileo, who both made great scientific discoveries, the former in a life of peculiar seclusion, the latter in periods of partial relief from less drudgery than Bacon's. And yet both Descartes and Galileo made notable scientific blunders; the former, in particular, reasoning often in as arbitrary a fashion as Bacon ever did. The enormous range of mere observation shown by Bacon-a range seldom noted, either by friends or foes-is hardly compatible with a positive lack of faculty for discrimination. Rather we are led by the history of scientific discovery to think that new truth is reached in a way ultimately obscure, by the long absorption of a competent mind in a certain subject matter, the recognition of a new meaning coming at last suddenly, rather than by any quasi-mechanical process of reasoning. Now, Bacon never could have been long enough absorbed in any one problem to attain to this kind of consummation. His field of speculation was too vast to be anywhere minutely and intensely explored. The sheer amount of mental power expended by him is marvellous; but with his fixed determination to find Nature finite, his ardent ambition to make the entire circuit, he never roots himself, never grows tranced in clairvoyant insight. At times, indeed, as in his discussion of the inconceivability of the atom-which extorted from Leibnitz a glowing eulogy at the expense of Descartes, and which in a manner anticipates the latest scientific speculation-he shows original force which challenges us to reconsider all our detractions; but the fact remains that, miscalculating the scope of his problem to begin with, he aimed at the impossible. With splendid powers, he undertook what no powers could achieve; and he did it in the random leisures of a responsible official career. What such powers might have done had they been concentrated for long periods on separate problems, is a question not to be lightly answered. In any case it must be reckoned one of the supreme flights of human perversity to surmise that the man so immeasurably preoccupied with the two orbs of natural and civil lore actually wrought, in addition to what he vainly sought to do, the stupendous imaginative performance of Shakspere. V We come back to the recognition of Bacon's enduring success—his magistral indictment of what can best be described as intellectual barbarism-the dogged adhesion to superstitious tradition, the wayward subjection of facts to feelings, the obstinate refusal to part with a predilection, the puerile imposition of a fanciful order on the face of things, the feudal partisanship towards the dicta of authority--all the stiff-necked and self-complacent follies arraigned under the classic nomenclature of Idols of the Cave, the Tribe, the Theatre, and the Forum. Some day that arraignment may be out of date; but the time is not yet. Its force, as put finally in the first book of the Novum Organum, is in no way lessened by the fact that Bacon a hundred times flatly transgressed his own precepts. Protesting against the self-will of those who would make their anthropomorphic guess the measure of Nature, he again and again does the EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION xiii thing else, and borne by some destiny against the inclination of his genius into active life". In rightly recognizing the predominance of his literary gift, he has implicitly undervalued his gift for public life, which was only less great, his moral sagacity being so keen that only his chronic failure to reck his own rede -the disparity between his insight and his force of will-put him at any disadvantage as a man of action. And it is in virtue of his combination of the gifts of speech and of moral insight that he is so memorable and so convincing in his demonstration of the why of most men's failure to think rightly. It is between his commanding and irrefutable censure of the vices of normal mental habit, and his thrilling prediction of the great things to be done when those vices are amended, that he holds still the admiration which he had conquered within a generation of his death. But The question of Bacon's "influence" has been somewhat obscured by the inference of some of his later censors that writings so far from reaching right scientific results can never have helped men to be scientific. long before Macaulay wrote, the fact of the influence had been established by the research of Macvey Napier, published in the Edinburgh Philosophical Transactions for 1818. The many proofs there given of the delighted stir set up by Bacon in the English and European mind during the greater part of the seventeenth century have been supplemented somewhat in Thomas Martin's Character of Lord Bacon (1835), and in Professor Fowler's praiseworthy edition of the Novum Organum; and the general fact cannot be gainsaid. What had happened was not the sudden calling of all hands to the work of useful invention, as imagined by Macaulay, but the pervading thrill of a new critical perception and a new hope. And that impact was not the less momentous because it was felt by many men who did no scientific work. It can hardly be better realized than in a perusal of Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667), unless it be in Cowley's impressive though precariously poetic Ode, prefixed to that work. The Ode is substantially a celebration of Bacon, of whom it sings that "Autority, which did a Body boast, Though 'twas but Air condens'd, and stalked about Like some old Giant's more Gigantic Ghost To terrifie the Learned Rout, With the plain Magique of tru Reason's Light He chac'd out of our sight; Nor suffered living Men to be misled By the vain Shadows of the Dead." No doubt some of Bacon's errors passed muster for truths with pupils of this temper, beginning to swear by the new master who had adjured them so persuasively not to swear by any. But there is no mistaking the sense of liberation, the instinct of new destinies, which pulsates in that generation at Bacon's touch, not only among Englishmen, but among continentals such as Comenius and Leibnitz, and later in Vico. Cowley becomes positively inspired by it: "Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last; The barren Wilderness he past; Did on the very Border stand Of the blest promised Land; And from the Mountain Top of his Exalted Wit, Saw it himself, and shew'd us it." And with all his adoration, Cowley takes note, in duly descending diction, of an allowance that is reasonably to be made for the main circumstances of Bacon's life; going on to sigh- "But Life did never to one Man allow Time to Discover Worlds, and Conquer too; To fadome the vast depths of Nature's Sea: |