, is
another. It would hardly be untrue to say that though Bacon is the
parent of modern science, his methods contributed nothing to its actual
discoveries; neither by possibility could they have done so. The great
and wonderful work which the world owes to him was in the idea, and not
in the execution. The idea was that the systematic and wide examination
of facts was the first thing to be done in science, and that till this
had been done faithfully and impartially, with all the appliances and
all the safeguards that experience and forethought could suggest, all
generalisations, all anticipations from mere reasoning, must be
adjourned and postponed; and further, that sought on these conditions,
knowledge, certain and fruitful, beyond all that men then imagined,
could be attained. His was the faith of the discoverer, the imagination
of the poet, the voice of the prophet. But his was not the warrior's
arm, the engineer's skill, the architect's creativeness. "I only sound
the clarion," he says, "but I enter not into the battle;" and with a
Greek quotation very rare with him, he compares himself to one of
Homer's peaceful heralds, [Greek: chairete kerukes, Dios angeloi ede kai
andron]. Even he knew not the full greatness of his own enterprise. He
underrated the vastness and the subtlety of nature. He overrated his own
appliances to bring it under his command. He had not that incommunicable
genius and instinct of the investigator which in such men as Faraday
close hand to hand with phenomena. His weapons and instruments wanted
precision; they were powerful up to a certain point, but they had the
clumsiness of an unpractised time. Cowley compared him to Moses on
Pisgah surveying the promised land; it was but a distant survey, and
Newton was the Joshua who began to take possession of it.

The idea of the great enterprise, in its essential outline, and with a
full sense of its originality and importance, was early formed, and was
even sketched on paper with Bacon's characteristic self-reliance when he
was but twenty-five. Looking back, in a letter written in the last year
of his life, on the ardour and constancy with which he had clung to his
faith--"in that purpose my mind never waxed old; in that long interval
of time it never cooled"--he remarks that it was then "forty years since
he put together a youthful essay on these matters, which with vast
confidence I called by the high-sounding title, The Greatest Birth of
Time." "