octrine of _Forms_,
did not affect the weight and solemnity of his call to learn, so full of
wisdom and good-sense, so sober and so solid, yet so audaciously
confident. There had been nothing like it in its ardour of hope, in the
glory which it threw around the investigation of nature. It was the
presence and the power of a great idea--long become a commonplace to us,
but strange and perplexing at first to his own generation, which
probably shared Coke's opinion that it qualified its champion for a
place in the company of the "Ship of Fools," which expressed its opinion
of the man who wrote the _Novum Organum_, in the sentiment that "a fool
_could_ not have written it, and a wise man _would_ not"--it is this
which has placed Bacon among the great discoverers of the human race.

It is this imaginative yet serious assertion of the vast range and
possibilities of human knowledge which, as M. de Remusat remarks--the
keenest and fairest of Bacon's judges--gives Bacon his claim to the
undefinable but very real character of greatness. Two men stand out,
"the masters of those who know," without equals up to their time, among
men--the Greek Aristotle and the Englishman Bacon. They agree in the
universality and comprehensiveness of their conception of human
knowledge; and they were absolutely alone in their serious practical
ambition to work out this conception. In the separate departments of
thought, of investigation, of art, each is left far behind by numbers of
men, who in these separate departments have gone far deeper than they,
have soared higher, have been more successful in what they attempted.
But Aristotle first, and for his time more successfully, and Bacon after
him, ventured on the daring enterprise of "taking all knowledge for
their province;" and in this they stood alone. This present scene of
man's existence, this that we call nature, the stage on which mortal
life begins and goes on and ends, the faculties with which man is
equipped to act, to enjoy, to create, to hold his way amid or against
the circumstances and forces round him--this is what each wants to know,
as thoroughly and really as can be. It is not to reduce things to a
theory or a system that they look around them on the place where they
find themselves with life and thought and power; that were easily done,
and has been done over and over again, only to prove its futility. It is
to know, as to the whole and its parts, as men understand _knowing_ in
s