4.

But will the new period of advance, which Bacon expected and strove to secure, be of indefinite duration?  He does not consider the question.  His view that he lived in the old age of the world implies that he did not anticipate a vast tract of time before the end of mankind’s career on earth.  And an orthodox Christian of that time could hardly be expected to predict.  The impression we get is that, in his sanguine enthusiasm, he imagined that a “prudent interrogation” of nature could extort all her secrets in a few generations.  As a reformer he was so engaged in the immediate prospect of results that his imagination did not turn to the possibilities of a remoter future, though these would logically follow from his recognition of “the inseparable propriety of time which is ever more and more to disclose truth.”  He hopes everything from his own age in which learning has made her third visitation to the world, a period which he is persuaded will far surpass that of Grecian and Roman learning. [Footnote:  Advancement, ii. 24.] If he could have revisited England in 1700 and surveyed what science had performed since his death his hopes might have been more than satisfied.

But, animated though he was with the progressive spirit, as Leonardo da Vinci had been before him, all that he says of the prospects of an increase of knowledge fails to amount to the theory of Progress.  He prepares the way, he leads up to it; but his conception of his own time as the old age of humanity excludes the conception of an indefinite advance in the future, which is essential if the theory is to have significance and value.  And in regard to progress in the past, though he is clearer and more emphatic than Bodin, he hardly adds anything to what Bodin had observed.  The novelty of his view lies not in his recognition of the advance of knowledge and its power to advance still further, but in the purpose which he assigned to it. [Footnote:  Campanella held its purpose to be the contemplation of the wisdom of God; cp., for instance, De sensu rerum, Bk. iv. epilogus, where the world is described as statua Dei altissimi (p. 370; ed. 1620).] The end of the sciences is their usefulness to the human race.  To increase knowledge is to extend the dominion of man over nature, and so to increase his comfort and happiness, so far as these depend on external circumstances.  To Plato or Seneca, or to a Christian dreaming of the City of God, this doctrine would seem material and trivial; and its announcement was revolutionary:  for it implied that happiness on earth was an end to be pursued for its own sake, and to be secured by co-operation for mankind at large.  This idea is an axiom which any general doctrine of Progress must presuppose; and it forms Bacon’s great contribution to the group of ideas which rendered possible the subsequent rise of that doctrine.