he conformed to the common judicial practice of his day, though he heedlessly took one or two of them at dates which brought him under suspicion, instead of in the annual or otherwise usual way of official routine. The folly of this heedlessness can hardly be exaggerated, inasmuch as it brought on him absolute ruin; and it can be explained only as it has been by Spedding, on the ground of his failure to check the scandalous profusion of his many underlings at home, which kept him in constant embarrassment. But his fault was laxity, never iniquity; and he could truly claim, while admitting the justice of the sentence passed on him by the House of Lords, that he had been the justest judge of his day. Not one of his thirty-six thousand decrees as Lord Chancellor appears to have been overturned on the score of corruption. And his one serious lapse from right conduct has a more profoundly pathetic aspect for us when we realize that, as Mr. Spedding puts the case in his preface to the De Interpretatione Nature Prooemium, it was an indirect consequence of his devotion to his disinterested intellectual enterprise.

"He began by conceiving that a wiser method of studying nature would give man the key to all her secrets, and therewith the mastery of her powers. . . . But the work would be long and arduous, and the event remote; and in the meantime he was not to neglect the immediate and peculiar service which as an Englishman he owed to his country, and as a Protestant to his religion. He set out with the intention of doing what he could towards the discharge of all three obligations, and planned his course accordingly. With regard to the two last, however, he found as life wore away that the means and opportunities which he hoped for did not present themselves; and fearing that all would fail together if he lost more time in waiting for them, he resolved to fall back upon the first as an enterprise which depended for success on himself alone.

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"So his case stood when [between forty and fifty] he drew up this paper. Afterwards, though new exigencies of state gave him an opening for service and drew him again into business and politics, he did not cease to devote his leisure to the prosecution of his main object; and as soon as his fall restored to him the entire command of his time, he again made it his sole occupation.

"So far, therefore, his actual course was quite consistent with his first design; and it is even probable that this very constancy was in some degree answerable for the great error and misfortune of his life. That an absorbing interest in one thing should induce negligence of others not less important, is an accident only too natural and familiar; and if he did not allow the Novum Organum to interfere with his attention to the causes which came before him in Chancery, it did probably prevent him from attending as carefully as he should, and otherwise would have done, to the proceedings of his servants and the state of his accounts."

II

If, finally, Bacon be judged in the only fair way, by comparison with his leading contemporaries, he is found to be in essentials a much better man than most of them. His successor in the Chancellorship, Bishop Williams, was convicted of real corruption, and disgraced accordingly. Another of his impeachers, Cranfield, was found guilty of gross and manifold embezzlement as Lord Treasurer, and disgraced likewise; and of most of those active against him it may be said that they were as much morally as intellectually his inferiors. No public man of that age of whose career we have any full knowledge makes after a close examination so strong an impression of general worthiness and fairness. "All that were great and good," says the unromantic Aubrey, "loved and honoured him". Spedding, generally held to be one of the most sagacious men of his age in England, has deliberately said of him, on the strength of a quite unrivalled knowledge of his whole career: "I doubt whether there was ever any man whose evidence upon matters of fact may be more absolutely trusted". The only ground on which that judgment is now likely to be disputed is the occasional semblance of servility in Bacon's relations to King James and his favourites. But in truth it is only a semblance. Bacon in his youth, by the admission of his detractors, bore himself rather haughtily than otherwise to his social equals; and it was only under the discipline of life, after suffering from

slow advancement and the sense of wasted powers, that he learned something of the necessary arts of courts. Those who check Macaulay's essay by Spedding's commentary will realize how far he was at all times from self-prostration, despite his own resolve in later life to put a check on his acquired habit of compliment. All the testimony goes to show that the impression he made on most of his contemporaries was one of noble dignity and courtesy; and if he flattered the King in his books, the measure of that weakness is not to be taken without comparing his eulogies with those passed by the bishops in the dedication of their version of the Bible. Of the King, indeed, the King's favoured officer might reasonably be panegyrical. To him, on his accession, Bacon looked with eager hope for help in his scheme for the advancement of science, James being of all monarchs of that day indisputably the most learned; and even when that hope was visibly not to be fulfilled, he could say with truth: "As my good old mistress [Elizabeth] was wont to call me her watch-candle, because it pleased her to say I did continually burn (and yet she suffered me to waste almost to nothing), so I must much more owe the like duty to your Majesty, by whom my fortunes have been settled and raised". From any point of view, he owed immeasurably more to James than he ever did to Essex. And when his entire political career is read in the light of Spedding's consummate knowledge and intimate appreciation, it stands out no less fully redeemed than his personal character from the charges so zealously pressed by Macaulay. The accusation of cherishing monopolies and judicial torture, and the lawless use of the King's prerogative, all fall to the ground on full confrontation with the facts. It is safe to say that had Bacon's life ended in undimmed official lustre, and not in technical disgrace, he would pass without challenge as one of the most sagacious and most upright public men of his day.

In

He was not indeed morally original in any noteworthy degree. In his readiness to advocate unnecessary war, to the end of national aggrandisement, he falls below Burleigh, and even below James. But such perversion of ethical judgment by the spirit of statecraft has been nearly normal in all ages, and may be noted, in that of Bacon, in so esteemed a spirit as Coligny. other regards he is at worst over-wary in precept, never unscrupulous. To infer from his inculcations of worldly wisdom in the Essays and elsewhere that he was abnormally crafty and self-seeking in his own life, is to misconceive his age in general and his environment in particular. Save for his one fatal lapse, his life comports worthily enough with his pretensions.

III

The case is somewhat otherwise, however, with Bacon's credit as a thinker. In his own day, amid a volume of praise not always authoritative, there was heard the note of not incompetent detraction, when Harvey, "though he esteemed him much for his wit and style," said of him that he wrote philosophy "like a Lord Chancellor". After two centuries in which that challenge was overborne by a chorus of admiration coming from men of science and men of letters alike, it has been revived and amplified with a zeal very different from that of Macaulay, who won the repute of impartiality by following up his expansion of the conventional censure with a reverberation of the conventional eulogy. That summing-up loosely credits" the Baconian philosophy " with having " performed the wonders of subsequent scientific progress", and the Novum Organum and De Augmentis with having "moved the intellects which have moved the world". It is true that Bacon has greatly impressed many great minds, beginning in his own century with Leibnitz, Comenius, and Vico; but it is also true that such great intellects as Descartes, Gassendi, and Newton, though they appreciated Bacon's work, did their own independently; while Galileo and Kepler and Gilbert, in Bacon's day, did theirs, which he did not assimilate, on the stimulus of Copernicus, whose vital doctrine he never accepted; and Harvey certainly owed him nothing. The problem must be disengaged from the rhetoric which obscures such facts.

No more searching and more judicial analysis of Bacon's scientific and

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philosophic work has ever been made than that of Mr. R. L. Ellis, in the prefaces and notes reproduced in the following pages; and he, without any lack of sympathy, disallows all the more specific claims made for Bacon as a renovator and reformer of scientific thought. The special Baconian method, he observes, is "nearly useless". And Spedding, the most devoted and the most effectual champion that a libelled reputation ever had, acquiesces in that verdict. In his preface to the third part of his and Ellis' edition-containing those works of Bacon originally designed to be included in the Instauratio Magna, but superseded or abandoned-Spedding thus writes of their author's unfinished system: "We no longer look for the discovery of any great treasure by following in that direction. His peculiar system of philosophy-that is to say, the peculiar method of investigation, the organum,' the formula,' the clavis,' thears ipsa interpretandi naturam,' the 'filum Labyrinthi,' or by whichever of its many names we choose to call that artificial process by which alone he believed that 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."

It is true that Spedding in his preface to the Parasceve repeats, as a kind of forlorn hope, the argument first put by him in the Evenings with a Reviewer, that Bacon counted mainly on the sheer collection of data for the attainment of that command over Nature which he desired for men. But that plea too is implicity disallowed by Ellis, and must be disallowed by the critical reader now. Spedding's half-abandoned contention that Bacon would not have dropped his theoretical work to make a great collection of facts if he had not felt the latter to be the vitally important procedure, does not advance the case if it be granted. In point of fact, Bacon's reason for undertaking his collection of data was obvious enough. There was little use in his telling men that his method of inquiry would yield them an unparalleled harvest of truth, unless he showed them some sheaves won by it; and this he sought to do. Spedding admits that he failed, but urges that if only men did systematically and comprehensively what Bacon asked, they might ere this have attained immense results. The answer is that men have always been doing what Bacon urged, to the best of their ability; and their slow progress has been partly due to what made his own success so small-the essential and irremovable difficulty of discovering general truths or natural laws. As Spedding actually remarks, Kepler had had to his hand a great mass of observations; and yet he fumbled long and variously before he hit upon true theories. It is arguable that a still larger collection of facts might have shortened his task; but on the one hand this is very doubtful, and on the other hand the decisive answer is given by Ellis, that beyond a certain point men do not know how to look for facts save in the light of a new hypothesis.

Bacon was really on a truer track when he began by arguing for a better discipline in inference, and a rigorous revision of beliefs. Here, despite the final miscarriage of the method he schemed, which was to have worked as it were mechanically, enabling even ordinary minds to arrive at new and true scientific generalisations, there is perhaps more to be said for him than is in effect allowed either by Macaulay in his summing-up or by Ellis in his. Macaulay's is finally void, resolving itself into his characteristic bracketing of unresolved contradictions. On one page he declares that "if by wit be meant the power of perceiving analogies between things which appear to have nothing in common", the feats of Bacon's wit in the Wisdom of the Ancients and the second book of the De Augmentis were not merely admirable, but portentous, almost shocking". "Indeed he possessed this faculty, or rather the faculty possessed him, to a morbid degree." On the next page we are told, of the same man, that "no imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly subjugated. It never stirred but at a signal from good sense. It stopped at the first check from good sense." In the same fashion we are told on the one hand that Bacon the person who first turned the minds of speculative men, long occupied in verbal disputes, to the discovery of new and useful truth"; and on the other hand

was

that Bacon's inductive rules "though accurate, are not wanted, because in truth they only tell us to do what we are all doing". That is to say, Macaulay also holds that Bacon had achieved nothing in the matter of method, but claims that he first taught men what kind of truth was best worth seeking for. "He was the person who first called the public attention to an inexhaustible mine of wealth, which had been utterly neglected, and which was accessible by that road alone "[i.e. by the inductive method-the doing of what "we are all doing"]. "By doing so he caused that road, which had previously been trodden only by peasants and higglers, to be frequented by a higher class of travellers."

This claim in turn, which repeats Bacon's most sanguine estimate of his own performance, cannot stand for a moment. The kinds of truth which Bacon sought, were the kinds that many other men before and around him had sought for. The six names of Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Galileo, Gilbert, and Harvey, suffice to dispose of Macaulay's generalization. It was indeed one that so erudite a man could hardly have framed, little as he knew of the detail history of the sciences and the useful arts, had he not been bent on making out anyhow a case which should justify him in his endorsement of the conventional admiration for Bacon's works after he had endorsed the conventional blame of Bacon's life. Bacon was really deficient in his appreciation of what had been achieved by his predecessors in the way of "fruits" of right reasoning. From the prefaces of his colleague, Spedding has compiled a formidable list of the oversights and signs of ignorance in the various treatises. The would-be reformer of astronomy "appears to have been utterly ignorant of the discoveries which had just been made by Kepler's calculations. Though he complained in 1623 of the want of compendious methods for facilitating arithmetical computations, especially with regard to the doctrine of Series... he does not say a word about Napier's Logarithms, which had been printed only nine years before, and reprinted more than once in the interval. He complained that no considerable advance had been made in geometry beyond Euclid, without taking any notice of what had been done by Archimedes and Apollonius." Seeking to determine specific gravities, he shows ignorance of the better methods previously tried by Archimedes, Ghetaldus, and Porta. Discussing the back. wardness of mechanics, he names neither any of these, nor Galileo, nor Stevinus, nor Guldinus. He discusses the rate of fall of weights in ignorance of Galileo's doctrine, published thirty years before, and makes inquiries concerning the lever without knowledge of the theory of it, which was well established in his day. Speaking of the poles of the earth as fixed, he shows inacquaintance with the then familiar fact of the precession of the equinoxes. There is no sign that he sought the acquaintance of able contemporary English astronomers like Harriot; and though Harvey was court physician, and had been publicly discussing his theory for at least nine years before he published his great treatise (1628), Bacon gives no indication of having heard of it.

And on the side of the advances in mechanics and the useful arts he was equally ill-informed. Not only did he repel Copernicus, ignore Kepler, and disparage Gilbert where Gilbert was substantially right and he wrong as on the nature and movement of the stellar bodies, and the existence of lightless globes-but, as Dean Kitchin has noted, he was denying progress even in the mechanical arts when fly-clocks, telescopes, and miscroscopes were being newly made around him. Macaulay speaks as if until Bacon's day thinking men had been merely marking time in metaphysics and theology, taking no thought of utilities. To a lamentable extent, certainly, time had been so wasted; but throughout the sixteenth and in the early years of the seventeenth century, thousands had been toiling at physics, mechanics, astronomy, anatomy, physiology, botany, and medicine. By Macaulay's own showing, they must have been using the inductive method, because we all use it all the time. And as regards the kind of progress that Macaulay seems to regard as alone worth reckoning, that made in the applied sciences or the useful arts, much if not most of it since Bacon's day has been made by men who probably never read one of his treatises. The great inventions in spinning and weaving made in the eighteenth century, like the locomotive, were the work of practical men, who would

have been so had Bacon never written. The Marquis of Worcester's steam engine was probably an improvement on a previous contrivance described by Porta; and it has not been shown that he, or De Caus, or Papin, or Savery, or Newcomen, or Watt, was a Baconian student. And the economic circumstances which delayed till the eighteenth century the commercial exploitation of the idea were not to be overruled by the popularity of Bacon's works among the early members of the Royal Society. Macaulay's praise, in short, is wrong, as his blame was wrong.

How little could be done for men by a mere exhortation to look about them for facts in the fashion of the authorities of Solomon's House in the New Atlantis, may be realized after a glance through Sprat's History of the Royal Society. The narrative part of that extremely interesting work ends with an account of the Society's procedure in "gathering and dispersing Queries"; and the first questions tabulated (with the answers to them by Sir Philiberti Vernatti, Resident in Batavia) are these

"Q. 1. Whether diamonds and other precious stones grow again after three or four years, in the same places where they have been digged out?

"Q. 2. Whether the quarries of stone in India, near Fetipoca, not far from Agra, may be cleft like logs, and sawn like planks.

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Q. 3. Whether there be a hill in Sumatra which burneth continually, and a fountain which runneth pure balsam?

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"Q. 4. What river is there in Java Major that turns wood into stone?

"Q. 5. Whether it be true that upon the coast of Achin in Sumatra the sea, though it be calm, groweth very high when no rain falls, but is smooth in rain, though it blows hard?"

There are many more of the same order, one of which, with the answer, may serve to round our extract

"Q. 8. What ground there may be for that relation, concerning Horns taking root and growing about Goa?

"A. Inquiring about this, a Friend laught and told me it was a jeer put upon the Portugees."

It may be said that this was not the sort of questioning that Bacon counselled; but it was the sort natural to men undisciplined and unguided by scientific study. It is only fair to note that the answers are much more intelligent than the questions, and that in this way some enlightenment was being circuitously gathered; but it was not on these lines that the useful arts flourished, that Newton reached his conclusions, and that Franklin was led to his experiment and Galileo to his discoveries.

IV

We are on much sounder ground when we come to the finding of Mr. Ellis, that "It is neither to the technical part of his method nor to the details of his view of the nature and progress of science that his fame is justly owing. His merits are of another kind. They belong to the spirit rather than to the positive precepts of his philosophy." The last words, however, I would venture to modify, by way of bringing out the writer's real intention. It is rather the concrete conclusions and the alleged potentialities of the method of investigation in Bacon that have to be disallowed: the precepts, in the proper sense of that term, are for the most part admirable; and it is in the unique force and insight with which he urged them that the real triumph of Bacon lies. Without fully compassing any important new truths, and without recognizing many of those reached by other men, he yet saw and stated, with a vividness never surpassed, the intellectual vices which incapacitated most men for either discovering or appreciating truth. To Bacon belonged in the very highest degree two faculties that of utterance or statement, and that of insight into human character. He has truly written of himself, addressing the King in the De Augmentis (below, p. 606), that he was "a man naturally fitted rather for literature than for any