mutual importance and relations of all knowledge.  We do not know where to find a clearer statement of the connection of the sciences than in the following words:—­“All sciences are connected, and support each other with mutual aid, as parts of the same whole, of which each performs its work, not for itself alone, but for the others as well:  as the eye directs the whole body, and the foot supports the whole; so that any part of knowledge taken from the rest is like an eye torn out or a foot cut off."[32]

Such, then, in brief, appears to have been Bacon’s general system of philosophy.  He has nowhere presented it in a compact form; and his style of writing is often so corrupt, and his use of terms so inexact, that any exposition of his views, exhibiting them in a methodical arrangement, is liable to the charge of possessing a definiteness of statement beyond that which his opinions had assumed in his own mind.  Still, the view that has now been given of his philosophy corresponds as nearly as may be with the indications afforded by his works.  The details of his system present many points of peculiar interest.  He was not merely a theorist, with speculative views of a character far in advance of those of the mass of contemporary schoolmen, but a practical investigator as well, who by his experiments and discoveries pushed forward the limits of knowledge, and a sound scholar who saw and displayed to others the true means by which progress in learning was to be secured.  In this latter respect, no parts of his writings are more remarkable than those in which he urges the importance of philological and linguistic studies.  His remarks on comparative grammar, on the relations of languages, on the necessity of the study of original texts, are distinguished by good sense, by extensive and (for the time) exact scholarship, and by a breadth of view unparalleled, so far as we are aware, by any other writer of his age.  The treatise on the Greek Grammar—­which occupies a large portion of the incomplete “Compendium Studii Philosophiae,” and which is broken off in the middle by the mutilation of the manuscript—­contains, in addition to many curious remarks illustrative of the learning of the period, much matter of permanent interest to the student of language.  The passages which we have quoted in regard to the defects of the translations of Greek authors show to how great a degree the study of Greek and other ancient tongues had been neglected.  Most of the scholars of the day contented themselves with collecting the Greek words which they found interpreted in the works of St. Augustine, St. Jerome, Origen, Martianus Capella, Boethius, and a few other later Latin authors; and were satisfied to use these interpretations without investigation of their exactness, or without understanding their meaning.  Hugo of Saint Victor, (Dante’s “Ugo di Sanvittore e qui con elli,”) one of the most illustrious of Bacon’s predecessors, translates, for instance, mechanica by adulterina,