then imagined, could be attained.  His was the faith of the discoverer, the imagination of the poet, the voice of the prophet.  But his was not the warrior’s arm, the engineer’s skill, the architect’s creativeness.  “I only sound the clarion,” he says, “but I enter not into the battle;” and with a Greek quotation very rare with him, he compares himself to one of Homer’s peaceful heralds, [Greek:  chairete kerukes, Dios angeloi ede kai andron].  Even he knew not the full greatness of his own enterprise.  He underrated the vastness and the subtlety of nature.  He overrated his own appliances to bring it under his command.  He had not that incommunicable genius and instinct of the investigator which in such men as Faraday close hand to hand with phenomena.  His weapons and instruments wanted precision; they were powerful up to a certain point, but they had the clumsiness of an unpractised time.  Cowley compared him to Moses on Pisgah surveying the promised land; it was but a distant survey, and Newton was the Joshua who began to take possession of it.

The idea of the great enterprise, in its essential outline, and with a full sense of its originality and importance, was early formed, and was even sketched on paper with Bacon’s characteristic self-reliance when he was but twenty-five.  Looking back, in a letter written in the last year of his life, on the ardour and constancy with which he had clung to his faith—­“in that purpose my mind never waxed old; in that long interval of time it never cooled”—­he remarks that it was then “forty years since he put together a youthful essay on these matters, which with vast confidence I called by the high-sounding title, The Greatest Birth of Time.”  “The Greatest Birth of Time,” whatever it was, has perished, though the name, altered to “Partus Temporis Masculus” has survived, attached to some fragments of uncertain date and arrangement.  But in very truth the child was born, and, as Bacon says, for forty years grew and developed, with many changes yet the same.  Bacon was most tenacious, not only of ideas, but even of the phrases, images, and turns of speech in which they had once flashed on him and taken shape in his mind.  The features of his undertaking remained the same from first to last, only expanded and enlarged as time went on and experience widened; his conviction that the knowledge of nature, and with it the power to command and to employ nature, were within the capacity of mankind and might be restored to them; the certainty that of this knowledge men had as yet acquired but the most insignificant part, and that all existing claims to philosophical truth were as idle and precarious as the guesses and traditions of the vulgar; his belief that no greater object could be aimed at than to sweep away once and for ever all this sham knowledge and all that supported it, and to lay an entirely new and clear foundation to build on for the future; his assurance that, as it was easy to point out with fatal and luminous