this, and he did it.  His writings were a public recognition of real science, in its humblest tasks about the commonplace facts before our feet, as well as in its loftiest achievements.  “The man who is growing great and happy by electrifying a bottle,” says Dr. Johnson, “wonders to see the world engaged in the prattle about peace and war,” and the world was ready to smile at the simplicity or the impertinence of his enthusiasm.  Bacon impressed upon the world for good, with every resource of subtle observation and forcible statement, that “the man who is growing great by electrifying a bottle” is as important a person in the world’s affairs as the arbiter of peace and war.

2.  Yet this is not all.  An inferior man might have made himself the mouthpiece of the hopes and aspirations of his generation after a larger science.  But to Bacon these aspirations embodied themselves in the form of a great and absorbing idea; an idea which took possession of the whole man, kindling in him a faith which nothing could quench, and a passion which nothing could dull; an idea which, for forty years, was his daily companion, his daily delight, his daily business; an idea which he was never tired of placing in ever fresh and more attractive lights, from which no trouble could wean him, about which no disaster could make him despair; an idea round which the instincts and intuitions and obstinate convictions of genius gathered, which kindled his rich imagination and was invested by it with a splendour and magnificence like the dreams of fable.  It is this idea which finds its fitting expression in the grand and stately aphorisms of the Novum Organum, in the varied fields of interest in the De Augmentis, in the romance of the New Atlantis.  It is this idea, this certainty of a new unexplored Kingdom of Knowledge within the reach and grasp of man, if he will be humble enough and patient enough and truthful enough to occupy it—­this announcement not only of a new system of thought, but of a change in the condition of the world—­a prize and possession such as man had not yet imagined; this belief in the fortunes of the human race and its issue, “such an issue, it may be, as in the present condition of things and men’s minds cannot easily be conceived or imagined,” yet more than verified in the wonders which our eyes have seen—­it is this which gives its prerogative to Bacon’s work.  That he bungled about the processes of Induction, that he talked about an unintelligible doctrine of Forms, did not affect the weight and solemnity of his call to learn, so full of wisdom and good-sense, so sober and so solid, yet so audaciously confident.  There had been nothing like it in its ardour of hope, in the glory which it threw around the investigation of nature.  It was the presence and the power of a great idea—­long become a commonplace to us, but strange and perplexing at first to his own generation, which probably shared Coke’s opinion that it qualified its champion for a place in the company of the “Ship of Fools,” which expressed its opinion of the man who wrote the Novum Organum, in the sentiment that “a fool could not have written it, and a wise man would not”—­it is this which has placed Bacon among the great discoverers of the human race.