Bacon's time and been used to much better
effect than he was able to apply it. Personally, I have always felt
that he has almost less right to all the praise that has been bestowed
on him for what he is supposed to have done for science, than he has
for any addition to his reputation because of the attribution to him
by so many fanatics of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. It is
rather difficult to understand how his reputation ever came about.
Lord {284} Macaulay is much more responsible for it than is usually
thought; his brilliancy often overreached itself or went far beyond
truth; his favorite geese were nearly always swans, in his eyes.

De Maistre, in his review of Bacon's Novum Organum, points out that
this work is replete with prejudices; that Bacon makes glaring
blunders in astronomy, in logic, in metaphysics, in physics, in
natural history, and fills the pages of his work with childish
observations, trifling experiments, and ridiculous explanations. Our
own Professor Draper, in his Intellectual Development of Europe, has
been even more severe, and has especially pointed out that Bacon never
received the Copernican System, but "with the audacity of ignorance he
presumed to criticise what he did not understand, and with a superb
conceit disparaged the great Copernicus."--"The more closely we
examine the writings of Lord Bacon," he says farther on, "the more
unworthy does he seem to have been of the great reputation which has
been awarded to him. . . The popular delusion, to which he owes so
much, originated at a time when the history of science was unknown.
This boasted founder of a new philosophy could not comprehend and
would not accept the greatest of all scientific discoveries when it
was plainly set before his eyes."

As a student of the history of medicine, it has always been especially
irritating to me to hear Francis Bacon's name heralded as the Father
of Experimental Science. Literally hundreds of physicians had applied
the experimental method in its perfect form to many problems in
medicine and surgery during at least three centuries or more before
Bacon's time. They did not need to have the principles of it set forth
for them by this {285} publicist, who knew how to write about
scientific method, but did not know how to apply it, so far as we know
anything about him; and who was utterly unable to see the great
discoveries that had been made by the experimental method in the
century before his t