English, is that by Spedding, Ellis, and
Heath, which has been republished in America.

BACON'S DEFECTS.--Further than this tabular outline, neither our space nor
the scope of our work will warrant us in going; but it is important to
consider briefly the elements of Bacon's remarkable fame. His system and
his knowledge are superseded entirely. Those who have studied physics and
chemistry at the present day, know a thousand-fold more than Bacon could;
for such knowledge did not exist in his day. But he was one of those--and
the chief one--who, in that age of what is called the childhood of
experimental philosophy, helped to clear away the mists of error, and
prepare for the present sunshine of truth. "I have been laboring," says
some writer, (quoted by Bishop Whately, Pref. to Essay XIV.,) "to render
myself useless." Such was Bacon's task, and such the task of the greatest
inventors, discoverers, and benefactors of the human race.

Nor did Bacon rank high even as a natural philosopher or physicist in his
own age: he seems to have refused credence to the discoveries of
Copernicus and Galileo, which had stirred the scientific world into great
activity before his day; and his investigations in botany and vegetable
physiology are crude and full of errors.

His mind, eminently philosophic, searched for facts only to establish
principles and discover laws; and he was often impatient or obstinate in
this search, feeling that it trammelled him in his haste to reach
conclusions.

In the consideration of the reason, he unduly despised the _Organon_ of
Aristotle, which, after much indignity and misapprehension, still remains
to elucidate the universal principle of reasoning, and published his new
organon--_Novum Organum_--as a sort of substitute for it: Induction
unjustly opposed to the Syllogism. In what, then, consists that wonderful
excellence, that master-power which has made his name illustrious?

HIS FAME.--I. He labored earnestly to introduce, in the place of fanciful
and conjectural systems--careful, patient investigation: the principle of
the procurement of well-known facts, in order that, by severe induction,
philosophy might attain to general laws, and to a classification of the
sciences. The fault of the ages before him had been hasty, careless, often
neglected observation, inaccurate analysis, the want of patient successive
experiment. His great motto was experiment, and again and again
experiment; and the exc