im
was compatible, as it has been in others, with grave faults of
temperament and character. But it is impossible to doubt that it was
honest, that it elevated his thoughts, that it was a refuge and stay in
the times of trouble.

CHAPTER VIII.

BACON'S PHILOSOPHY.

Bacon was one of those men to whom posterity forgives a great deal for
the greatness of what he has done and attempted for posterity. It is
idle, unless all honest judgment is foregone, to disguise the many
deplorable shortcomings of his life; it is unjust to have one measure
for him, and another for those about him and opposed to him. But it is
not too much to say that in temper, in honesty, in labour, in humility,
in reverence, he was the most perfect example that the world had yet
seen of the student of nature, the enthusiast for knowledge. That such a
man was tempted and fell, and suffered the Nemesis of his fall, is an
instance of the awful truth embodied in the tragedy of _Faust_. But his
genuine devotion, so unwearied and so paramount, to a great idea and a
great purpose for the good of all generations to come, must shield him
from the insult of Pope's famous and shallow epigram. Whatever may have
been his sins, and they were many, he cannot have been the "meanest of
mankind," who lived and died, holding unaltered, amid temptations and
falls, so noble a conception of the use and calling of his life: the
duty and service of helping his brethren to know as they had never yet
learned to know. That thought never left him; the obligations it imposed
were never forgotten in the crush and heat of business; the toils,
thankless at the time, which it heaped upon him in addition to the
burdens of public life were never refused. Nothing diverted him, nothing
made him despair. He was not discouraged because he was not understood.
There never was any one in whose life the "_Souverainete du but_" was
more certain and more apparent; and that object was the second greatest
that man can have. To teach men to know is only next to making them
good.

The Baconian philosophy, the reforms of the _Novum Organum_, the method
of experiment and induction, are commonplaces, and sometimes lead to a
misconception of what Bacon did. Bacon is, and is not, the founder of
modern science. What Bacon believed could be done, what he hoped and
divined, for the correction and development of human knowledge, was one
thing; what his methods were, and how far they were successful