itings were a public recognition of real science, in its humblest
tasks about the commonplace facts before our feet, as well as in its
loftiest achievements. "The man who is growing great and happy by
electrifying a bottle," says Dr. Johnson, "wonders to see the world
engaged in the prattle about peace and war," and the world was ready to
smile at the simplicity or the impertinence of his enthusiasm. Bacon
impressed upon the world for good, with every resource of subtle
observation and forcible statement, that "the man who is growing great
by electrifying a bottle" is as important a person in the world's
affairs as the arbiter of peace and war.

2. Yet this is not all. An inferior man might have made himself the
mouthpiece of the hopes and aspirations of his generation after a larger
science. But to Bacon these aspirations embodied themselves in the form
of a great and absorbing idea; an idea which took possession of the
whole man, kindling in him a faith which nothing could quench, and a
passion which nothing could dull; an idea which, for forty years, was
his daily companion, his daily delight, his daily business; an idea
which he was never tired of placing in ever fresh and more attractive
lights, from which no trouble could wean him, about which no disaster
could make him despair; an idea round which the instincts and intuitions
and obstinate convictions of genius gathered, which kindled his rich
imagination and was invested by it with a splendour and magnificence
like the dreams of fable. It is this idea which finds its fitting
expression in the grand and stately aphorisms of the _Novum Organum_, in
the varied fields of interest in the _De Augmentis_, in the romance of
the _New Atlantis_. It is this idea, this certainty of a new unexplored
Kingdom of Knowledge within the reach and grasp of man, if he will be
humble enough and patient enough and truthful enough to occupy it--this
announcement not only of a new system of thought, but of a change in the
condition of the world--a prize and possession such as man had not yet
imagined; this belief in the fortunes of the human race and its issue,
"such an issue, it may be, as in the present condition of things and
men's minds cannot easily be conceived or imagined," yet more than
verified in the wonders which our eyes have seen--it is this which gives
its prerogative to Bacon's work. That he bungled about the processes of
Induction, that he talked about an unintelligible d