a series of aphorisms on the true methods of interpreting nature, and directing the mind in the true path of knowledge, and had begun them with the same famous aphorism with which the Novum Organum opens.  He now reverted to the form of the aphorism, and resolved to throw the materials of the Cogitata et Visa into this shape.  The result is the Novum Organum.  It contains, with large additions, the substance of the treatise, but broken up and rearranged in the new form of separate impersonal generalised observations.  The points and assertions and issues which, in a continuous discourse, careful readers mark and careless ones miss, are one by one picked out and brought separately to the light.  It begins with brief, oracular, unproved maxims and propositions, and goes on gradually into larger developments and explanations.  The aphorisms are meant to strike, to awaken questions, to disturb prejudices, to let in light into a nest of unsuspected intellectual confusions and self-misunderstandings, to be the mottoes and watchwords of many a laborious and difficult inquiry.  They form a connected and ordered chain, though the ties between each link are not given.  In this way Bacon put forth his proclamation of war on all that then called itself science; his announcement that the whole work of solid knowledge must be begun afresh, and by a new, and, as he thought, infallible method.  On this work Bacon concentrated all his care.  It was twelve years in hand, and twelve times underwent his revision.  “In the first book especially,” says Mr. Ellis, “every word seems to have been carefully weighed; and it would be hard to omit or change anything without injuring the meaning which Bacon intended to convey.”  Severe as it is, it is instinct with enthusiasm, sometimes with passion.  The Latin in which it is written answers to it; it has the conciseness, the breadth, the lordliness of a great piece of philosophical legislation.

The world has agreed to date from Bacon the systematic reform of natural philosophy, the beginning of an intelligent attempt, which has been crowned by such signal success, to place the investigation of nature on a solid foundation.  On purely scientific grounds his title to this great honour may require considerable qualification.  What one thing, it is asked, would not have been discovered in the age of Galileo and Harvey, if Bacon had never written?  What one scientific discovery can be traced to him, or to the observance of his peculiar rules?  It was something, indeed, to have conceived, as clearly as he conceived it, the large and comprehensive idea of what natural knowledge must be, and must rest upon, even if he were not able to realise his idea, and were mistaken in his practical methods of reform.  But great ideas and great principles need their adequate interpreter, their vates sacer, if they are to influence the history of mankind.  This was what Bacon was to science, to that great change in the thoughts and