remains yet to be
written. The personal narrative of this master-genius or inventor must
for ever be separated from the _scala intellectus_ he was perpetually
ascending: and the domestic history of this creative mind must be
consigned to the most humiliating chapter in the volume of human life; a
chapter already sufficiently enlarged, and which has irrefutably proved
how the greatest minds are not freed from the infirmities of the most
vulgar.

The parent of our philosophy is now to be considered in a new light, one
which others do not appear to have observed. My researches into
contemporary notices of Bacon have often convinced me that his
philosophical works, in his own days and among his own countrymen, were
not only not comprehended, but often ridiculed, and sometimes
reprobated; that they were the occasion of many slights and
mortifications which this depreciated man endured; but that from a very
early period in his life, to that last record of his feelings which
appears in his will, this "servant of posterity," as he prophetically
called himself, sustained his mighty spirit with the confidence of his
own posthumous greatness. Bacon cast his views through the maturity of
ages, and perhaps amidst the sceptics and the rejectors of his plans,
may have felt at times all that idolatry of fame, which has now
consecrated his philosophical works.

At college, Bacon discovered how "that scrap of Grecian knowledge, the
peripatetic philosophy," and the scholastic babble, could not serve the
ends and purposes of knowledge; that syllogisms were not things, and
that a new logic might teach us to invent and judge by induction. He
found that theories were to be built upon experiments. When a young man,
abroad, he began to make those observations on nature, which afterwards
led on to the foundations of the new philosophy. At sixteen, he
philosophised; at twenty-six, he had framed his system into some form;
and after forty years of continued labours, unfinished to his last hour,
he left behind him sufficient to found the great philosophical
reformation.

On his entrance into active life, study was not however his prime
object. With his fortune to make, his court connexions and his father's
example opened a path for ambition. He chose the practice of common law
as his means, while his inclinations were looking upwards to political
affairs as his end. A passion for study, however, had strongly marked
him; he had read much more tha