attempt, which has been
crowned by such signal success, to place the investigation of nature on
a solid foundation. On purely scientific grounds his title to this great
honour may require considerable qualification. What one thing, it is
asked, would not have been discovered in the age of Galileo and Harvey,
if Bacon had never written? What one scientific discovery can be traced
to him, or to the observance of his peculiar rules? It was something,
indeed, to have conceived, as clearly as he conceived it, the large and
comprehensive idea of what natural knowledge must be, and must rest
upon, even if he were not able to realise his idea, and were mistaken in
his practical methods of reform. But great ideas and great principles
need their adequate interpreter, their _vates sacer_, if they are to
influence the history of mankind. This was what Bacon was to science, to
that great change in the thoughts and activity of men in relation to the
world of nature around them: and this is his title to the great place
assigned to him. He not only understood and felt what science might be,
but he was able to make others--and it was no easy task beforehand,
while the wonders of discovery were yet in the future--understand and
feel it too. And he was able to do this because he was one of the most
wonderful of thinkers and one of the greatest of writers. The
disclosure, the interpretation, the development of that great
intellectual revolution which was in the air, and which was practically
carried forward in obscurity, day by day, by the fathers of modern
astronomy and chemistry and physiology, had fallen to the task of a
genius, second only to Shakespeare. He had the power to tell the story
of what they were doing and were to do with a force of imaginative
reason of which they were utterly incapable. He was able to justify
their attempts and their hopes as they themselves could not. He was able
to interest the world in the great prospects opening on it, but of which
none but a few students had the key. The calculations of the astronomer,
the investigations of the physician, were more or less a subject of
talk, as curious or possibly useful employments. But that which bound
them together in the unity of science, which gave them their meaning
beyond themselves, which raised them to a higher level and gave them
their real dignity among the pursuits of men, which forced all thinking
men to see what new and unsuspected possibilities in the kno