FRANCIS BACON. CHAPTER I. BACON'S AGE AND SURROUNDINGS. “I HAVE taken all knowledge to be my province.” "Reputation and fame, not for themselves, but as instruments of power for good." "To this (the 'oblation' of the History of Great Britain') I add these petitions. First, that if your Majesty do dislike anything, I can amend it at your least beck." These are the leading notes, not of two contrasted lives, inner and outer, real and assumed, the "closet penman" and the restless suitor; but of the same personality, consistent in its very inconsistencies, though checkered like the age in which it was set, "aiming at things beyond the reach of mortality," and descending to the lanes of "crooked wisdom." Bacon's triumphs and defeats in speculation, as in practice, emphasise the fact that while men lead manners, manners make men. The strongest minds do P.-XIII. A most to mould circumstance; the most discursive are, in general, the most readily conditioned. Serene independence may be the pure integrity of the patriot or sage, of a Cato Major or a Fichte; it may, on the other hand, be the easy boast of ignorance, fanaticism, or apathy. Whereas those endowed with an excess of sympathy for others and for themselves, are hampered by the dramatic gifts that give them sway: they are servants of their stage, prone to become puppets of the party to which they honestly adhere, or of the patrons they sincerely admire; they bend to princes or to mobs, and float with the stream, not because they are hirelings, but because a sometimes amiable weakness makes them believe that rulers or majorities must be in the right. All natures are more or less subdued to what they work in, but in a degree that varies with the kind and tenor of their work. An abstract thinker may have his vision narrowed by the idol of his cave, but of the tribe around him he need take as small account as the ancient geometrician of the Roman soldiery, or the analyst of Königsberg of the ups and downs at Berlin. The relation of the tangent to the circle, of sensation to apperception, is the same under the despotism of a Grand Turk as amid the orgies of a red republic. But Bacon had no kinship to Archimedes or to Kant. Pure mathematics was one of the few things of which he knew little; hence the failure to recognise the limits of its rigid range which led to one of his most obvious errors. His metaphysics proper-i.e., other than his faith in the unity of the universe-is a golden cloud made to do duty for the apex of an uncompleted pyra Bacon and his Age. 3 He was There mid. His philosophy, though far from merely utilitarian, had for its aim to help life as well as to solve secrets, and his ministration to men made it necessary for him to learn their wants and study their humours. more than a philosopher even in this wider sense. is no more flagrant freak of criticism than to treat his public life as that of one playing truant from his Academy or Porch. However he may have deceived himself, half of Bacon's heart was set on politics. Like Cicero he was a born orator, with all the defects of the orator's temperament; a statesman whose ambition was constantly overleaping itself, a man of letters whose speculative genius was more extensive than profound. Despite manifold differences, he was like Sir Walter Raleigh, at his highest a pioneer, at his lowest an adventurer. All three failed by lack of the single-eye that might have averted the tragedy of their all being foiled as actors by men indefinitely meaner than themselves. Bacon was a representative, as much as he was a leader, of his time, and neither his life nor his philosophy can be even proximately understood without constant reference to its history. All the features, bright and dark, of our Elizabethan age, its splendour, its daring, and the wearisomeness of its intrigue, are conspicuous in his career and character. The group of great men who clustered round each other and the Court, variously inspired by genius, emulation, opportunity, had, in common, caught the spirit which then moved over the face of England. The fact that the close of the fifteenth and the whole of the sixteenth century was a period of transition has been so reiterated that we are apt to for get how much the truism involves, especially that in studying such periods we find ourselves brought into contact with the ideas, methods, and leverages, often theoretically irreconcilable, of two ages; and that from the divided allegiance to really antagonistic systems no one then living, who thought at all, could wholly escape. The hundred years preceding the audacious claim of the "Temporis Partus Maximus" had, all over Europe, been rife in secular changes in moment hardly approached during the interval since the assertion of Greek independence. So much was going out, so much coming in, that the previously established framework of things seemed like an unsubstantial pageant. Men's minds were dazzled, while their fancies were inflamed at the opening of the gates of the modern world. There was a revolution in their conceptions of the physical globe almost equal in effect to an actual change in its conformation. America had been found in the sunset, and the highroad to Cathay reopened in the dawn. Copernicus had removed the cycles and epicycles that staggered the faith of Alphonso, the spheres "inlaid with patines of bright gold" that still lingered in the imaginations of the poets, and unfolded at once the simplicity and the immensity of the universe; but the earth reduced to an atom in the abyss seemed, in another point of view, to have enlarged her bounds when the mariners of Italy, Portugal, and England burst through the old walls of the sea, and "men saw beneath their feet the Indies of both hemispheres." Two generations elapsed during which the fortunes of all the leading States had passed between the Pillars of Hercules to hitherto unsuspected realms. The close of the sixteenth century found us still in the stress of the sail, leaving the old authorities stretching out hands to a new faith, adventuring in more paths than even the author of the 'Instauratio Magna' was ready to approve. Standing on the confines of two worlds, and consciously pressing toward the future, he was still unconsciously influenced by the spirit of the past; but he was the first philosophic spokesman in being the first fully to recognise the increasing purpose of the time he thus congratulates: "For this great building of the world has, in our age, been wonderfully opened and thorough-lighted; and though the ancients had knowledge of the zones and antipodes— 'Nosque ubi primus equis oriens afflavit anhelis, -yet that might be by demonstration rather than travel. In this and similar passages we have the air of the same breezes that blow through 'The Tempest,' and Raleigh's voyages, and much of the 'Faery Queen'the Queen of England, Ireland, "and Virginia." The spirit of the Conquisador gazing on the Pacific from a |