omething to be known. But even for them the
world of knowledge has grown too large. We shall never again see an
Aristotle or a Bacon, because the conditions of knowledge have altered.
Bacon, like Aristotle, belonged to an age of adventure, which went to
sea little knowing whither it went, and ill furnished with knowledge and
instruments. He entered with a vast and vague scheme of discovery on
these unknown seas and new worlds which to us are familiar, and daily
traversed in every direction. This new world of knowledge has turned out
in many ways very different from what Aristotle or Bacon supposed, and
has been conquered by implements and weapons very different in precision
and power from what they purposed to rely on. But the combination of
patient and careful industry, with the courage and divination of genius,
in doing what none had done before, makes it equally stupid and idle to
impeach their greatness.

3. Bacon has been charged with bringing philosophy down from the
heights, not as of old to make men know themselves, and to be the
teacher of the highest form of truth, but to be the purveyor of material
utility. It contemplates only, it is said, the "_commoda vitae_;" about
the deeper and more elevating problems of thought it does not trouble
itself. It concerns itself only about external and sensible nature,
about what is "of the earth, earthy." But when it comes to the questions
which have attracted the keenest and hardiest thinkers, the question,
what it is that thinks and wills--what is the origin and guarantee of
the faculties by which men know anything at all and form rational and
true conceptions about nature and themselves, whence it is that reason
draws its powers and materials and rules--what is the meaning of words
which all use but few can explain--Time and Space, and Being and Cause,
and consciousness and choice, and the moral law--Bacon is content with a
loose and superficial treatment of them. Bacon certainly was not a
metaphysician, nor an exact and lucid reasoner. With wonderful flashes
of sure intuition or happy anticipation, his mind was deficient in the
powers which deal with the deeper problems of thought, just as it was
deficient in the mathematical faculty. The subtlety, the intuition, the
penetration, the severe precision, even the force of imagination, which
make a man a great thinker on any abstract subject were not his; the
interest of questions which had interested metaphysicians had no