The Greatest Birth of Time," whatever it was, has perished,
though the name, altered to "Partus Temporis _Masculus_" has survived,
attached to some fragments of uncertain date and arrangement. But in
very truth the child was born, and, as Bacon says, for forty years grew
and developed, with many changes yet the same. Bacon was most
tenacious, not only of ideas, but even of the phrases, images, and turns
of speech in which they had once flashed on him and taken shape in his
mind. The features of his undertaking remained the same from first to
last, only expanded and enlarged as time went on and experience widened;
his conviction that the knowledge of nature, and with it the power to
command and to employ nature, were within the capacity of mankind and
might be restored to them; the certainty that of this knowledge men had
as yet acquired but the most insignificant part, and that all existing
claims to philosophical truth were as idle and precarious as the guesses
and traditions of the vulgar; his belief that no greater object could be
aimed at than to sweep away once and for ever all this sham knowledge
and all that supported it, and to lay an entirely new and clear
foundation to build on for the future; his assurance that, as it was
easy to point out with fatal and luminous certainty the rottenness and
hollowness of all existing knowledge and philosophy, so it was equally
easy to devise and practically apply new and natural methods of
investigation and construction, which should replace it by knowledge of
infallible truth and boundless fruitfulness. His object--to gain the key
to the interpretation of nature; his method--to gain it, not by the
means common to all previous schools of philosophy, by untested
reasonings and imposing and high-sounding generalisations, but by a
series and scale of rigorously verified inductions, starting from the
lowest facts of experience to discoveries which should prove and realise
themselves by leading deductively to practical results--these, in one
form or another, were the theme of his philosophical writings from the
earliest sight of them that we gain.

He had disclosed what was in his mind in the letter to Lord Burghley,
written when he was thirty-one (1590/91), in which he announced that he
had "taken all knowledge for his province," to "purge it of 'frivolous
disputations' and 'blind experiments,' and that whatever happened to
him, he meant to be a 'true pioneer in the mine of truth