excitement, or in their trances
or intoxications of genius,--so good, so noble, so serene! Alas, that Bacon
too in his own way should after all be but the fellow of those heathen
philosophers who in their disadvantages had some excuse for their
inconsistency, and who surprise us rather in what they did say than in
what they did not do! Alas, that he too, like Socrates or Seneca, must be
stripped of his holy-day coat, which looks so fair, and should be but a
mockery amid his most majestic gravity of phrase; and, for all his vast
abilities, should, in the littleness of his own moral being, but typify
the intellectual narrowness of his school! However, granting all this,
heroism after all was not his philosophy:--I cannot deny he has abundantly
achieved what he proposed. His is simply a Method whereby bodily
discomforts and temporal wants are to be most effectually removed from the
greatest number; and already, before it has shown any signs of exhaustion,
the gifts of nature, in their most artificial shapes and luxurious
profusion and diversity, from all quarters of the earth, are, it is
undeniable, by its means brought even to our doors, and we rejoice in
them.

9.

Useful Knowledge then, I grant, has done its work; and Liberal Knowledge
as certainly has not done its work,--that is, supposing, as the objectors
assume, its direct end, like Religious Knowledge, is to make men better;
but this I will not for an instant allow, and, unless I allow it, those
objectors have said nothing to the purpose. I admit, rather I maintain,
what they have been urging, for I consider Knowledge to have its end in
itself. For all its friends, or its enemies, may say, I insist upon it,
that it is as real a mistake to burden it with virtue or religion as with
the mechanical arts. Its direct business is not to steel the soul against
temptation or to console it in affliction, any more than to set the loom
in motion, or to direct the steam carriage; be it ever so much the means
or the condition of both material and moral advancement, still, taken by
and in itself, it as little mends our hearts as it improves our temporal
circumstances. And if its eulogists claim for it such a power, they commit
the very same kind of encroachment on a province not their own as the
political economist who should maintain that his science educated him for
casuistry or diplomacy. Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good
sense is not conscience, refinemen