BACON’S DEFECTS.—­Further than this tabular outline, neither our space nor the scope of our work will warrant us in going; but it is important to consider briefly the elements of Bacon’s remarkable fame.  His system and his knowledge are superseded entirely.  Those who have studied physics and chemistry at the present day, know a thousand-fold more than Bacon could; for such knowledge did not exist in his day.  But he was one of those—­and the chief one—­who, in that age of what is called the childhood of experimental philosophy, helped to clear away the mists of error, and prepare for the present sunshine of truth.  “I have been laboring,” says some writer, (quoted by Bishop Whately, Pref. to Essay XIV.,) “to render myself useless.”  Such was Bacon’s task, and such the task of the greatest inventors, discoverers, and benefactors of the human race.

Nor did Bacon rank high even as a natural philosopher or physicist in his own age:  he seems to have refused credence to the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, which had stirred the scientific world into great activity before his day; and his investigations in botany and vegetable physiology are crude and full of errors.

His mind, eminently philosophic, searched for facts only to establish principles and discover laws; and he was often impatient or obstinate in this search, feeling that it trammelled him in his haste to reach conclusions.

In the consideration of the reason, he unduly despised the Organon of Aristotle, which, after much indignity and misapprehension, still remains to elucidate the universal principle of reasoning, and published his new organon—­Novum Organum—­as a sort of substitute for it:  Induction unjustly opposed to the Syllogism.  In what, then, consists that wonderful excellence, that master-power which has made his name illustrious?

HIS FAME.—­I.  He labored earnestly to introduce, in the place of fanciful and conjectural systems—­careful, patient investigation:  the principle of the procurement of well-known facts, in order that, by severe induction, philosophy might attain to general laws, and to a classification of the sciences.  The fault of the ages before him had been hasty, careless, often neglected observation, inaccurate analysis, the want of patient successive experiment.  His great motto was experiment, and again and again experiment; and the excellent maxims which he laid down for the proper conduct of experimental philosophy have outlived his own facts and system and peculiar beliefs.  Thus he has fitly been compared to Moses.  He led men, marshalled in strong array, to the vantage ground from which he showed them the land of promise, and the way to enter it; while he himself, after all his labors, was not permitted to enjoy it.  Such men deserve the highest fame; and thus the most practical philosophers of to-day revere the memory of him who showed them from the mountain-top, albeit in dim vision, the land which they now occupy.