activity of men in relation to the world of nature around them:  and this is his title to the great place assigned to him.  He not only understood and felt what science might be, but he was able to make others—­and it was no easy task beforehand, while the wonders of discovery were yet in the future—­understand and feel it too.  And he was able to do this because he was one of the most wonderful of thinkers and one of the greatest of writers.  The disclosure, the interpretation, the development of that great intellectual revolution which was in the air, and which was practically carried forward in obscurity, day by day, by the fathers of modern astronomy and chemistry and physiology, had fallen to the task of a genius, second only to Shakespeare.  He had the power to tell the story of what they were doing and were to do with a force of imaginative reason of which they were utterly incapable.  He was able to justify their attempts and their hopes as they themselves could not.  He was able to interest the world in the great prospects opening on it, but of which none but a few students had the key.  The calculations of the astronomer, the investigations of the physician, were more or less a subject of talk, as curious or possibly useful employments.  But that which bound them together in the unity of science, which gave them their meaning beyond themselves, which raised them to a higher level and gave them their real dignity among the pursuits of men, which forced all thinking men to see what new and unsuspected possibilities in the knowledge and in the condition of mankind were opened before them, was not Bacon’s own attempts at science, not even his collections of facts and his rules of method, but that great idea of the reality and boundless worth of knowledge which Bacon’s penetrating and sure intuition had discerned, and which had taken possession of his whole nature.  The impulse which he gave to the progress of science came from his magnificent and varied exposition of this idea; from his series of grand and memorable generalisations on the habits and faults of the human mind—­on the difficult and yet so obvious and so natural precautions necessary to guide it in the true and hopeful track.  It came from the attractiveness, the enthusiasm, and the persuasiveness of the pleading; from the clear and forcible statements, the sustained eloquence, the generous hopes, the deep and earnest purpose of the Advancement and the De Augmentis; from the nobleness, the originality, the picturesqueness, the impressive and irresistible truth of the great aphorisms of the Novum Organum.

     THE END