se, in all the languages of Europe, for that
splendid development of the study and knowledge of the visible universe
which since his time has changed the life of mankind?

A candid answer to these questions will expose an error as wide in the
popular estimate of Bacon's intellectual greatness as that which has
prevailed so generally regarding his character. He is called the
inventor of inductive reasoning, the reformer of logic, the lawgiver of
the world of thought; but he was no one of these. His grasp of the
inductive method was defective; his logic was clumsy and impractical;
his plan for registering all phenomena and selecting and generalizing
from them, making the discovery of truth almost a mechanical process,
was worthless. In short, it is not as a philosopher nor as a man of
science that Bacon has carved his name in the high places of enduring
fame, but rather as a man of letters; as on the whole the greatest
writer of the modern world, outside of the province of imaginative art;
as the Shakespeare of English prose. Does this seem a paradox to the
reader who remembers that Bacon distrusted all modern languages, and
thought to make his 'Advancement of Learning' "live, and be a citizen of
the world," by giving it a Latin form? That his lifelong ambition was to
reconstruct methods of thought, and guide intellect in the way of work
serviceable to comfort and happiness? That the books in which his
English style appears in its perfection, the 'History of Henry VII.,'
the 'Essays,' and the papers on public affairs, were but incidents and
avocations of a life absorbed by a master purpose?

But what is literature? It is creative mind, addressing itself in worthy
expression to the common receptive mind of mankind. Its note is
universality, as distinguished from all that is technical, limited, and
narrow. Thought whose interest is as broad as humanity, suitably clothed
in the language of real life, and thus fitted for access to the general
intelligence, constitutes true literature, to the exclusion of that
which, by its nature or by its expression, appeals only to a special
class or school. The 'Opus Anglicanum' of Duns Scotus, Newton's
'Principia,' Lavoisier's treatise 'Sur la Combustion,' Kant's 'Kritik
der Reinen Vernunft' (Critique of Pure Reason), each made an epoch in
some vast domain of knowledge or belief; but none of them is literature.
Yet the thoughts they, through a limited and specially trained class of
stude