FRANCIS BACON (1560-1910) 495 



THE PROPHECY OF FRANCIS BACON (1560-1910) 



Br Professor RALPH BARTON PERRY 



HARVARD UNIVERSITY 



I. Bacon and the Spirit of Discovery. — There are several ways in 

 which the importance of a philosopher may be estimated. He may be 

 regarded as an exponent of his times; that is, as a representation in 

 which the manifold tendencies of an age are focalized and idealized. 

 Or he may be regarded as the author of a panorama of existence, of a 

 world-view or system, which, while it may be superseded, will always 

 retain enough of logical and imaginative coherence to make it typical 

 and classic. Or the philosopher, like other servants of mankind, may 

 be judged according to the degree in which he has been confirmed by 

 posterity. Judged by this last standard, the great philosopher will be 

 the philosopher who, while he may, like Bacon, have been born three 

 hundred and fifty years ago, is nevertheless modern, in the sense that 

 he is identified with important ideas which are now generally held to 

 be true. This brief summary aims to present the Bacon that is living 

 to-day in our common opinion, in our expert knowledge, and in our 

 dominant ideals. 



Any one who considers Bacon in relation to European civilization 

 of the modern period must be impressed with the degree to which he 

 represents its progressive ideas. Those characteristics of the sixteenth 

 and seventeenth centuries which are most marked in Bacon are the 

 characteristics in which they anticipate later centuries. It is possible 

 for our immediate purposes to reduce these characteristics to one : the 

 disposition, namely, to look for a betterment of human life from the 

 advancement of knowledge. " Advancement of knowledge " does not 

 here mean the education of the individual, but the winning of new 

 truths by the race and for the good of the race. We may call this the 

 spirit of discovery, where " discovery " is used both in the theoretical 

 and in the practical sense. Bacon himself was not a discoverer of new 

 scientific truths, but the discoverer of the art of discovery. As he ex- 

 pressed it, he " rang the bell that called the other wits together." 

 "While it is doubtless inaccurate to attribute so general an idea to any 

 individual authorship, Bacon was its greatest prophet. His brilliant 

 literary gifts, his imagination, his sanguine temperament, his breadth 

 of view and his native regard for utility, the very qualities that helped 

 to unfit him for exact research, made him the most important medium 

 through which the idea of discovery, or of intellectual conquest, has 

 gradually become the hope of mankind. 



