interest for him: he distrusted and undervalued them. When he touches
the "ultimities" of knowledge he is as obscure and hard to be understood
as any of those restless Southern Italians of his own age, who shared
with him the ambition of reconstructing science. Certainly the science
which most interested Bacon, the science which he found, as he thought,
in so desperate a condition, and to which he gave so great an impulse,
was physical science. But physical science may be looked at and pursued
in different ways, in different tempers, with different objects. It may
be followed in the spirit of Newton, of Boyle, of Herschel, of Faraday;
or with a confined and low horizon it may be dwarfed and shrivelled into
a mean utilitarianism. But Bacon's horizon was not a narrow one. He
believed in God and immortality and the Christian creed and hope. To him
the restoration of the Reign of Man was a noble enterprise, because man
was so great and belonged to so great an order of things, because the
things which he was bid to search into with honesty and truthfulness
were the works and laws of God, because it was so shameful and so
miserable that from an ignorance which industry and good-sense could
remedy, the tribes of mankind passed their days in self-imposed darkness
and helplessness. It was God's appointment that men should go through
this earthly stage of their being. Each stage of man's mysterious
existence had to be dealt with, not according to his own fancies, but
according to the conditions imposed on it; and it was one of man's first
duties to arrange for his stay on earth according to the real laws which
he could find out if he only sought for them. Doubtless it was one of
Bacon's highest hopes that from the growth of true knowledge would
follow in surprising ways the relief of man's estate; this, as an end,
runs through all his yearning after a fuller and surer method of
interpreting nature. The desire to be a great benefactor, the spirit of
sympathy and pity for mankind, reign through this portion of his
work--pity for confidence so greatly abused by the teachers of man, pity
for ignorance which might be dispelled, pity for pain and misery which
might be relieved. In the quaint but beautiful picture of courtesy,
kindness, and wisdom, which he imagines in the _New Atlantis_, the
representative of true philosophy, the "Father of Solomon's House," is
introduced as one who "had an aspect as if he pitied men." But unless it
is