in 1608.  A number of fragments also bear witness to the fierce scorn and wrath which possessed him against the older and the received philosophies.  He tried his hand at declamatory onslaughts on the leaders of human wisdom, from the early Greeks and Aristotle down to the latest “novellists;” and he certainly succeeded in being magnificently abusive.  But he thought wisely that this was not the best way of doing what in the Commentarius Solutus he calls on himself to do—­“taking a greater confidence and authority in discourses of this nature, tanquam sui certus et de alto despiciens;” and the rhetorical Redargutio Philosophiarum and writings of kindred nature were laid aside by his more serious judgment.  But all these fragments witness to the immense and unwearied labour bestowed in the midst of a busy life on his undertaking; they suggest, too, the suspicion that there was much waste from interruption, and the doubt whether his work would not have been better if it could have been more steadily continuous.  But if ever a man had a great object in life, and pursued it through good and evil report, through ardent hope and keen disappointment, to the end, with unwearied patience and unshaken faith, it was Bacon, when he sought the improvement of human knowledge “for the glory of God and the relief of man’s estate.”  It is not the least part of the pathetic fortune of his life that his own success was so imperfect.

When a reader first comes from the vague, popular notions of Bacon’s work to his definite proposals the effect is startling.  Every one has heard that he contemplated a complete reform of the existing conceptions of human knowledge, and of the methods by which knowledge was to be sought; that rejecting them as vitiated, by the loose and untested way in which they had been formed, he called men from verbal generalisations and unproved assumptions to come down face to face with the realities of experience; that he substituted for formal reasoning, from baseless premises and unmeaning principles, a methodical system of cautious and sifting inference from wide observation and experiment; and that he thus opened the path which modern science thenceforth followed, with its amazing and unexhausted discoveries, and its vast and beneficent practical results.  We credit all this to Bacon, and assuredly not without reason.  All this is what was embraced in his vision of a changed world of thought and achievement.  All this is what was meant by that Regnum Hominis, which, with a play on sacred words which his age did not shrink from, and which he especially pleased himself with, marked the coming of that hitherto unimagined empire of man over the powers and forces which encompassed him.  But the detail of all this is multifarious and complicated, and is not always what we expect; and when we come to see how his work is estimated by those who, by greatest familiarity with scientific ideas and the history of scientific inquiries, are best fitted to judge of it, many a surprise awaits us.