Scholastics and the Italian speculators to reprobation and scorn.  The clearness of his thinking was often overlaid by the immense profusion of decorative material which his meditation brought along with it.  The defect was greater than that which even his ablest defenders admit.  It was more than that in that “greatest and radical difference, which he himself observes” between minds, the difference between minds which were apt to note distinctions, and those which were apt to note likenesses, he was, without knowing it, defective in the first.  It was that in many instances he exemplified in his own work the very faults which he charged on the older philosophies:  haste, carelessness, precipitancy, using words without thinking them out, assuming to know when he ought to have perceived his real ignorance.

What, then, with all these mistakes and failures, not always creditable or pardonable, has given Bacon his preeminent place in the history of science?

1.  The answer is that with all his mistakes and failures, the principles on which his mode of attaining a knowledge of nature was based were the only true ones; and they had never before been propounded so systematically, so fully, and so earnestly.  His was not the first mind on whom these principles had broken.  Men were, and had been for some time, pursuing their inquiries into various departments of nature precisely on the general plan of careful and honest observation of real things which he enjoined.  They had seen, as he saw, the futility of all attempts at natural philosophy by mere thinking and arguing, without coming into contact with the contradictions or corrections or verifications of experience.  In Italy, in Germany, in England there were laborious and successful workers, who had long felt that to be in touch with nature was the only way to know.  But no one had yet come before the world to proclaim this on the house-tops, as the key of the only certain path to the secrets of nature, the watchword of a revolution in the methods of interpreting her; and this Bacon did with an imposing authority and power which enforced attention.  He spoke the thoughts of patient toilers like Harvey with a largeness and richness which they could not command, and which they perhaps smiled at.  He disentangled and spoke the vague thoughts of his age, which other men had not the courage and clearness of mind to formulate.  What Bacon did, indeed, and what he meant, are separate matters.  He meant an infallible method by which man should be fully equipped for a struggle with nature; he meant an irresistible and immediate conquest, within a definite and not distant time.  It was too much.  He himself saw no more of what he meant than Columbus did of America.  But what he did was to persuade men for the future that the intelligent, patient, persevering cross-examination of things, and the thoughts about them, was the only, and was the successful road to know.  No one had yet done