200 Professor Nichol [Feb. 16, 



sets it on the forefront of his comprehensive survey, and the lamented 

 Tyndall, with literary graces only less unique than those of his 

 master, are at one with historians like Hallam in proclaiming him 

 the first mover in a mighty impulse. 



Bacon's self-criticism is sound, " Fungar vice cotis acutum reddere 

 quae ferrum valet expers ipsa secandi." He sharpened the instruments 

 for others to use ; he pointed the path which he could not follow, 

 to the walls of the citadel he failed to storm. His claim to have 

 moved the intellects that move the world does not rest alone on 

 his forecasts of discovery. He opened a way to " unpathed waters, 

 undreamed shores," by training his contemporaries to habits of ob- 

 servation which he first set on a rank of equal dignity with abstract 

 thought. He invented nothing, but he called the Sciences back to 

 their sources, and so, in the phrase of Remusat, " threw out a thought 

 full of the future." His predecessors spoke in lower tones. It was 

 only Bacon's enthusiasm, through half a century maintained, his 

 dauntless tenacity and his splendid powers of speech that first gave 

 to modern science wings to make way through the minds of men. 



Nor Leonardo nor Galileo had his far-ranging view of the Unity 

 of Nature and of Science, or of the ultimate consilience of knowledge 

 and practical power. His rubric was " all things by scale to unity." 

 His perception of analogies, however " portentous," led him right in 

 tracing a nexus in the scheme of things. Bacon reflects and repeats 

 the old vague efforts in the same direction, from Heraclitus's finer fire, 

 the start and goal of the way up and down, to Plato's Triads ; from 

 the speculations on phenomena and noumena that ran through the 

 period from Xenocrates to Zeno, to the metaphysical paradigms of 

 the mediaeval realists, physically realised in Owen's archetijpal skeleton. 

 But, with all its uncritical want of precision, his own view is no mere 

 summary : it is a real, though sometimes shadowy premonition of the 

 later discoveries that have linked together, under the conception of 

 the " Correlation of Forces," the polarity of magnetism, the spark of 

 electricity, the affinity of chemical elements and of crystalline poles, 

 the unification of heat, light and picture-rendering rays as undulations 

 of the universal air. 



Similar conceptions are embodied in Schelling's " Harmonies of 

 Nature " and the comprehensive anticipation of Hegel, " Magnetism 

 is the universal act of investing multiplicity with unity " ; but they 

 are nowhere clad in such imaginative reality as in Bacon's extension 

 of the world by the revelation of an unseen universe, a Fairyland of 

 Science in which " we are citizens of no mean city." 



The epochs of Comte revolve, but in widening circles, as the 

 positive again merges in the religious. The Greeks followed a 

 mirage of the land they never reached. The forces of Nature address 

 the child in images and myths ; Heaven lies about him, because his 

 fancies do not transcend the dome of blue ; and he sees in the twilight 

 the celestial gates. The stars to him are gods, and make a sphery 

 chime. Later, "the intellectual power through words and things 



