of phenomena, nor a discoverer of scientific inductions; that he contributed no important new truth, in the sense of an established law, to any department of knowledge; and that his method of research and reasoning is not, in its essential features, that which is fruitfully pursued by them in extending the boundaries of science, nor was his mind wholly purged of those “idols of the cave,” or forms of personal bias, whose varying forms as hindrances to the “dry light” of sound reason he was the first to expose.  He never appreciated the mathematics as the basis of physics, but valued their elements mainly as a mental discipline.  Astronomy meant little to him, since he failed to connect it directly with human well-being and improvement; to the system of Copernicus, the beginning of our insight into the heavens, he was hostile, or at least indifferent; and the splendid discoveries successively made by Tycho Brahe, Galileo, and Kepler, and brought to his ears while the ‘Great Instauration’ filled his mind and heart, met with but a feeble welcome with him, or none.  Why is it, then, that Bacon’s is the foremost name in the history of English, and perhaps, as many insist, of all modern thought?  Why is it that “the Baconian philosophy” is another phrase, in all the languages of Europe, for that splendid development of the study and knowledge of the visible universe which since his time has changed the life of mankind?

A candid answer to these questions will expose an error as wide in the popular estimate of Bacon’s intellectual greatness as that which has prevailed so generally regarding his character.  He is called the inventor of inductive reasoning, the reformer of logic, the lawgiver of the world of thought; but he was no one of these.  His grasp of the inductive method was defective; his logic was clumsy and impractical; his plan for registering all phenomena and selecting and generalizing from them, making the discovery of truth almost a mechanical process, was worthless.  In short, it is not as a philosopher nor as a man of science that Bacon has carved his name in the high places of enduring fame, but rather as a man of letters; as on the whole the greatest writer of the modern world, outside of the province of imaginative art; as the Shakespeare of English prose.  Does this seem a paradox to the reader who remembers that Bacon distrusted all modern languages, and thought to make his ‘Advancement of Learning’ “live, and be a citizen of the world,” by giving it a Latin form?  That his lifelong ambition was to reconstruct methods of thought, and guide intellect in the way of work serviceable to comfort and happiness?  That the books in which his English style appears in its perfection, the ‘History of Henry VII.,’ the ‘Essays,’ and the papers on public affairs, were but incidents and avocations of a life absorbed by a master purpose?