1894.] on Bacon's Key to Nature. 193 



finite, that the time is at hand when all essential knowledge may be 

 grasped, the world well won, and the age of the Garden before the Fall 

 restored. 



Bacon insists that we must enter the Kingdom of Nature sub 

 persona infantis, but he has himself the air of one taking possession of 

 a throne. He had little of the submissive spirit which led Newton to 

 confess himself " a child gathering pebbles on the shore of the infinite 

 sea," or that of the modern poet, " moving about in worlds not 

 realised." His always proud humility lay in his acceptance of the 

 dictum of the ' Parmenides ' that the least of Nature's manifestations 

 is worthy of our note : but his aspirations as a thinker dwarfed his 

 ambition as a statesman. By every image at command, of a fancy 

 among the masters of prose equalled by Plato alone, he impresses us 

 with his belief in his possession of a clue, a KEY, a secret, that had 

 come to him by a sort of inspiration. He had unlocked the door 

 barred alike to Aristotle and Aquinas ; learned the " Open, Sesame " 

 where Paracelsus had been calling " wheat and rye." He had grazed 

 the beach of the " New Atlantis " though he might only live to blow 

 the clarion for colonising generations ; he had realised the magic of 

 which the Magi only dreamt. The gods had answered his prayer as 

 that of Pygmalion ; he knew the tune of the ' Winter's Tale ' to call the 

 marble statues of the old Philosophy down from their pedestals to 

 take life and colour, and move fostering, gladdening and restoring 

 among men. 



Bacon's " Interpretation of Nature " receives some light from the 

 crude Pre-Socratic speculations on the one side, and on the other 

 from the modern " Correlation of Forces " and conjectures as those of 

 Leibnitz and Bosco witch on the borderland where physics seem to 

 merge into metaphysic. Like the earliest recorded thinkers of 

 Greece, Bacon founded his Unity on Examination of the External world 

 rather than on a Mental Analysis. He accepts the conclusions of 

 neither Thales nor Heraclitus ; but he holds that in looking behind 

 appearances to some physical basis into which the shows of the 

 Universe may be resolved, they were on a path more fruitful than the 

 impossible attempt to separate non-existent substances from attributes, 

 or paradigms from realities. He is as ready as any Greek or 

 German to admit that " things are not what they seem " ; but, setting 

 aside the inscrutable truths of religion, he has no faith in anything 

 that is not physical. His " noumena " are " phenomena " interrogated 

 and explained ; Proteus grappled with through every alias till he 

 returns to his proper shape ; Heat confessing itself to be an expansive 

 motion. In dealing as with the ultimate Nature of things Bacon 

 suggests rather than dogmatises; hazarding the view that all the 

 assumed elements may be reduced to one, as has been imagined by 

 chemists like Samuel Brown, who have tried to establish what the 

 alchemists vaguely guessed. Bacon is nowhere bold enough to assert 

 with Pythagoras, that all apparent varieties of quality are resolvable 

 into arrangements of form ; but he feels confident in having gone 



