into thy banks, and art enabled to buy the toil of foreigners and to raise thy standards on the farthest battlements of India and China.  These conquests and acquisitions are real, are practical; machinery over life, the triumph of physical forces, dominion over waves and winds,—­these are the great victories which consummate the happiness of man; and these are they which flow from the philosophy which Bacon taught.

Now Macaulay does not directly say all these things, but these are the spirit and gist of the interpretation which he puts upon Bacon’s writings.  The philosophy of Bacon leads directly to these blessings; and these constitute its great peculiarity.  And it cannot be denied that the new era which Bacon heralded was fruitful in these very things,—­that his philosophy encouraged this new development of material forces; but it may be questioned whether he had not something else in view than mere utility and physical progress, and whether his method could not equally be applied to metaphysical subjects; whether it did not pertain to the whole domain of truth, and take in the whole realm of human inquiry.  I believe that Bacon was interested, not merely in the world of matter, but in the world of mind; that he sought to establish principles from which sound deductions might be made, as well as to establish reliable inductions.  Lord Campbell thinks that a perfect system of ethics could be made out of his writings, and that his method is equally well adapted to examine and classify the phenomena of the mind.  He separated the legitimate paths of human inquiry, giving his attention to poetry and politics and metaphysics, as well as to physics.  Bacon does not sneer as Macaulay does at the ancient philosophers; he bears testimony to their genius and their unrivalled dialectical powers, even if he regards their speculations as frequently barren.  He does not flippantly ridicule the homoousian and the homoiousian as mere words, but the expression and exponent of profound theological distinctions, as every theologian knows them to be.  He does not throw dirt on metaphysical science if properly directed, still less on noble inquiries after God and the mysteries of life.  He is subjective as well as objective.  He treats of philosophy in its broadest meaning, as it takes in the province of the understanding, the memory, and the will, as well as of man in society.  He speaks of the principles of government and of the fountains of law; of universal justice, of eternal spiritual truth.  So that Playfair judiciously observes (and he was a scientist) “that it was not by sagacious anticipations of science, afterwards to be made in physics, that his writings have had so powerful an influence, as in his knowledge of the limits and resources of the human understanding.  It would be difficult to find another writer, prior to Locke, whose works are enriched with so many just observations on mere intellectual phenomena.  What he says of the laws of memory, of imagination, has