192 Professor Nichol [Feb. 16, 



was ready to approve ; but lie was the first fully to recognise its 

 increasing purpose. It was an age at once of scepticism and of 

 credulity. When a new world of fact, so full of authentic marvels, 

 bad been so suddenly revealed, to doubt regarding a new marvel 

 seemed as unnatural as it would now seem to accept it. The image 

 in the ' De Augmentis' of the child emerging from Plato's cave 

 applies, in a way scarce intended, to the great actor of the time, and 

 to the great thinker himself. When the memory of the Incas was 

 fresh, what wonder that the former was lured from his manor and 

 home fields to seek the Eldorado, whose battlements seem to gleam 

 through the arch of experience ; or that the other rose from the 

 study of Paracelsus and Agricola to lay the foundations of a new 

 Atlantis, where the coarser metals might be transmuted into gold 

 " by superinducing the ' forms ' of the precious ore. Similarly, 

 while modern History and Science were yet in infancy, long ere 

 Specialism had made havoc of " the grand style," it was by an 

 equally characteristic and natural audacity that the one essayed to 

 bring together the records of all the nations, while the other aspired 

 to catalogue the " Phenomena Universi " and to supply an Organum 

 " to storm and occupy the castles and strongholds of the Nature of 

 Things." 



During the last thirty years of the sixteenth century, the 

 Renaissance and the Reformation met and were blended in the 

 writings of Sidney, Hooker, Spenser, Harlow, Shakespeare, Raleigh 

 and Bacon. Liberty was still restrained within jealously guarded 

 bounds, but there was emancipation enough to bring with it the feeling 

 of a freer atmosphere ; after a feverish night men breathed the 

 morning, and social peace was the more secure that it was the calm 

 of a sky cleared by storms. There was time to look before and after, 

 to read Drayton's poetical antiquities, and the well-languaged Daniel, 

 to weave a more gorgeous web out of the cycle of Arthurian Romance, 

 and lay down a new scheme for interpreting Nature. 



What then was Bacon's central Idea, and how far was it capable 

 of realisation ? To these questions we must now confine ourselves. 

 He has been accepted as an often incisive critic and a keen observer. 

 His own idea of his position was that of a discoverer of a mundus alter 

 et idem, a new world of more moment to mankind than the Indies of 

 Columbus. He would have received with indignation the verdict 

 that his work was mainly negative, that he would be known to the 

 future by his incidental wisdom and commended by rhetoricians for 

 his popular aims. He arraigned the thinkers of the Past because he 

 fancied himself to have found what they had missed. He assailed 

 their love of system because he had a supplanting system. He 

 despised their a priori views because, by the exercise of an imagina- 

 tion almost Shakespearian in its daring, he conceived to have 

 banished from the future of the physical drama all need for further 

 imaginings. Nowhere do we find a more exalted conception of Nature 

 than in his pages, but he holds it as a cardinal doctrine that she is 



