spent. He has indeed said himself that he was
better fitted to hold a book in his hands than to shine upon the stage
of the world. In his studies he had only science itself and the whole
of the world before his eyes.

The scholastic system founded on Aristotle, the inheritance of
centuries of ecclesiastical supremacy, had been assailed some time
before he took up the subject; and the inductive method which he
opposed to that system was not anything quite new. But the idea of
Bacon had the most comprehensive tendency: it tended to free the
thoughts and enquiries of men of science from the assumptions of a
speculative theology which regulated their spiritual horizon. The most
renowned adversaries of scholasticism he had to encounter in turn,
because they covered things with a new web of words and theories which
he could not accept. He thought to free men from the deceptive notions
by which their minds are prepossessed, from the fascination of words
which throw a veil over things, and of tradition consecrated by great
names, and to open to them the sphere of the certain knowledge of
experience. Nature is in his eyes God's book, which man must study
directly for His glory and for the relief of man's estate; he thought
that men must start from sense and experience, in order that by
intercourse with things they might discover the cause of phenomena.
He would have preferred for his own part to have been the architect of
an universal science, an outline of which he had already composed; but
he possessed the self-restraint to hold back from this in the first
instance, to work at details, and to make experiments, or, as he once
says, to contribute the bricks and stones which might serve for the
great work in the future. He only wanted more complete devotion and
more adequate knowledge for his task. His method is imperfect, his
results are untrustworthy in points of detail; but his object is
grand. He designates the insight for which he labours by the
Heraclitean name of dry light, that is, a light which is obscured by
no partiality and no subordinate aim. He would place the man who
possesses it as it were upon the mountain top, at the foot of which
errors chase one another like clouds. And in his eyes the satisfaction
of the mind is not the only interest at stake, but such discoveries as
rouse the activity of men and promote their welfare. Nature is at the
same time the great storehouse of God: the dominion over nature which
me