hat the methods hitherto adopted
in research were but treadmill work, returning upon itself, or at best
could produce but fragmentary and accidental additions to the sum of
knowledge. All nature is crammed with truth, he believed, which it
concerns man to discover; the intellect of man is constructed for its
discovery, and needs but to be purged of errors of every kind, and
directed in the most efficient employment of its faculties, to make sure
that all the secrets of nature will be revealed, and its powers made
tributary to the health, comfort, enjoyment, and progressive improvement
of mankind.

This stupendous conception, of a revolution which should transform the
world, seems to have taken definite form in Bacon's mind as early as his
twenty-fifth year, when he embodied the outline of it in a Latin
treatise; which he destroyed in later life, unpublished, as immature,
and partly no doubt because he came to recognize in it an unbecoming
arrogance of tone, for its title was 'Temporis Partus Maximus' (The
Greatest Birth of Time.) But six years later he defines these "vast
contemplative ends" in his famous letter to Burghley, asking for
preferment which will enable him to prosecute his grand scheme and to
employ other minds in aid of it. "For I have taken all knowledge to be
my province," he says, "and if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers,
whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and
verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular traditions
and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in
industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable
inventions and discoveries: the best state of that province. This,
whether it be curiosity or vain glory, or nature, or (if one take it
favorably) _philanthropia_ is so fixed in my mind as it cannot
be removed."

This letter reveals the secret of Bacon's life, and all that we know of
him, read in the light of it, forms a consistent and harmonious whole.
He was possessed by his vast scheme, for a reformation of the
intellectual world, and through it, of the world of human experience, as
fully as was ever apostle by his faith. Implicitly believing in his own
ability to accomplish it, at least in its grand outlines, and to leave
at his death the community of mind at work, by the method and for the
purposes which he had defined, with the perfection of all science in
full view, he subordinated every other ambition to t