1894.] on Bacon's Key to Nature. 191 



creation rather than analysis, of conquest more than appreciation, and 

 his aim made it impossible for him to realise that of the earlier 

 thinkers even had they come down to him less obscured by the 

 mists of commentary. A Declaration of Rights against the greatest 

 thinkers of Greece was the signal of sixteenth century indepen- 

 dence. The modern student of philosophy sees a chain of thought 

 in all the schools : they lean on those that went before, and make 

 some advance as they roll, like tides, after one another ; but this 

 advance is unconscious. Each new philosopher seems to have found 

 the secret of the earth, and proclaimed it with a religious zeal. 



How little has modern Europe added to the pure speculation of 

 the Greeks ! How little of physical discovery has Greece bequeathed 

 to modern Europe ! There is no greater contrast in history than 

 such sterility and such luxuriance. The ancients had no instru- 

 ments to work with but language and logical forms. They had 

 hardly any notion of what we mean by a law of nature, and only 

 thought of law as an idea. The same causes that retarded progress on 

 one side, during the ages of antiquity, retarded it on every side during 

 those succeeding, in which the world seemed to re-enact its childhood. 

 Scholasticism had turned away from Nature : to the study of which 

 Bacon first, with sufficient eloquence, recalled men's minds. He 

 himself had, in a sense, less claim to the title of a physical philoso- 

 pher than Roger Bacon, who is said to have made gunpowder, while 

 Francis thought the courage of soldiers might be increased by eating 

 it. He calls Copernicus that cabman who drives the earth about, 

 and expresses a wish that the Italian astronomers would give up 

 their stargazing. 



IL 



The mass of Analysis and Criticism accumulated about the 

 Baconian philosophy still leaves room for difference of opinion as to 

 its degree of inaccuracy in detail and failure in direct result* for 

 doubt regarding many of the beliefs of its author, recorded with 

 frequent inconsistency and some confusion in so many various tenta- 

 tive forms; but there is no room for rational difference as to its 

 design, which was to explore the Universe, and under constant protest 

 of reverence for the mysteries of Faith, to make men its masters. 



Bacon's audacity was native to the times in which he was born. 

 All the features^ bright and dark, of our Elizabethan age — its splen- 

 dour, the wearisomeness of its intrigue, in chief its daring — are con- 

 spicuously reflected in his career. The hundred years preceding had 

 all over Europe been rife in changes, changes in moment hardly 

 approached during the interval since the assertion of Greek inde- 

 pendence. So much was going out, so much coming in, that the 

 previously established order of things seemed like an unsubstantial 

 pageant. Men's minds were dazzled and their fancies inflamed at 

 the opening of the gates of the modern world. The age was adventur- 

 ing in more paths than even the author of the ' Instauratio Magna ' 



