In regard to the other charges against Bacon, we think that Mr. Dixon has brought forward evidence which must materially modify the current opinions of Bacon’s personal character.  He has proved that Bacon, as a practical statesman, was in advance of his age, rather than behind it.  He has proved that his philosophy penetrated his politics, and that he gave wise advice, and recommended large, liberal, and humane measures to a generation which could not appreciate them.  He has proved that he did everything that a man in his situation could do for the cause of truth and justice which did not necessitate his retirement from public life.  The abuses by which he may have profited he not only did not defend, but tried to reform.  Among the statesmen of his day he appears not only intellectually superior, but conventionally respectable,—­a fact which would seem to be established by the bare statement, that he died wretchedly poor, while most of them died enormously rich.

But Mr. Dixon, in his advocacy of Bacon, overlooks the circumstance, that no man could hold high office under James I., without complying with abuses calculated to damage his reputation with posterity.  We have no doubt that Bacon’s compliance was connected with considerations which Mr. Dixon entirely ignores.  Far from discriminating between Bacon the philosopher and Bacon the politician, we have always thought that they were intimately connected.  Bacon’s Method, the thing on which, as a philosopher, he especially prided himself, was defective.  It left out that power by which all discoveries have since his time been made, namely, scientific genius.  Its successful working depended on an immense collection of facts, which no individual, and no society of individuals, could possibly make.  He himself was never weary of asserting that the Method could never produce its beneficent effects, unless it were assisted by the revenues of a nation.  Of the course which physical science really followed he had no prevision.  Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Gilbert, he never appreciated.  He was an intellectual autocrat, who had matured his own scheme of interpreting Nature, and thought, that, if it were systematically carried out, the inmost secrets of Nature could he mastered.  His desire to be Lord Chancellor of England was subsidiary to his larger desire to be Lord Chancellor of Nature herself.  He hoped, by managing James and Buckingham, to flatter them into aiding, by the revenues of the State, his grand philosophical scheme.  Combine the facts which Mr. Dixon has disinterred with the facts which every thoughtful reader of Bacon’s philosophical works already knows, and the vindication of Bacon as a man is complete.