all that knowledge had lost by the faults and errors of men and the misfortunes of time, all that knowledge might be pushed to in all directions by faithful and patient industry and well-planned methods for the elevation and benefit of man in his highest capacities as well as in his humblest.  And he further sought to teach them how to know; to make them understand that difficult achievement of self-knowledge, to know what it is to know; to give the first attempted chart to guide them among the shallows and rocks and whirlpools which beset the course and action of thought and inquiry; to reveal to them the “idols” which unconsciously haunt the minds of the strongest as well as the weakest, and interpose their delusions when we are least aware—­“the fallacies and false appearances inseparable from our nature and our condition of life.”  To induce men to believe not only that there was much to know that was not yet dreamed of, but that the way of knowing needed real and thorough improvement; that the knowing mind bore along with it all kinds of snares and disqualifications of which it is unconscious; and that it needed training quite as much as materials to work on, was the object of the Advancement.  It was but a sketch; but it was a sketch so truly and forcibly drawn, that it made an impression which has never been weakened.  To us its use and almost its interest is passed.  But it is a book which we can never open without coming on some noble interpretation of the realities of nature or the mind; some unexpected discovery of that quick and keen eye which arrests us by its truth; some felicitous and unthought-of illustration, yet so natural as almost to be doomed to become a commonplace; some bright touch of his incorrigible imaginativeness, ever ready to force itself in amid the driest details of his argument.

The Advancement was only one shape out of many into which he cast his thoughts.  Bacon was not easily satisfied with his work; even when he published he did so, not because he had brought his work to the desired point, but lest anything should happen to him and it should “perish.”  Easy and unstudied as his writing seems, it was, as we have seen, the result of unintermitted trouble and varied modes of working.  He was quite as much a talker as a writer, and beat out his thoughts into shape in talking.  In the essay on Friendship he describes the process with a vividness which tells of his own experience—­

“But before you come to that [the faithful counsel that a man receiveth from his friend], certain it is that whosoever hath his mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do clarify and break up in the communicating and discoursing with another.  He tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them more orderly; he seeth how they look when they are turned into words; finally, he waxeth wiser than himself, and that more by an hour’s discourse than by a day’s meditation.  It