1894.] on Bacon's Key to Nature. 201 



pursues its dim and perilous way " to the same goal, and nature once 

 more appears as the garment of divinity. The world is one ; " one 

 law, one element " is the first utterance and the last, the Alpha and 

 Omega of philosophy; but at the close the fictitious has been ex- 

 changed for the real, when Faith, Fancy and Truth are blended in a 

 higher metaphysics. 



These ideas are common to Bacon with other theorists. He 

 stands by himself in his belief in being able to make them live. His 

 philosophy is no Oewpia or dream ; but a ministration to the wants 

 of the mankind he loved with a philanthropy often inconsistent with 

 personal devotion. With him knowledge alone had no satiety ; in age, 

 when the Loves are changed into the Graces, he ran the race as in the 

 heyday, never feeling the weariness of Faust, and only at times the 

 suave mari magno. His philosophy has its concrete presentation in 

 the ' New Atlantis,' that rises from the sea in our memories, like 

 Prospero's Isle, the most practical and among the most poetic of the 

 anticipations of the future. It is an allegory of his fragmentary 

 work ; and, in closing the records of his varied life, we linger on the 

 sound of the sea rippling by the beach of its richly coloured shore. 

 Its details may be faulty, its design is prophetic ; nor in Plato or 

 Augustine, nor in More or Sidney, Campanella or Milton is there so 

 much sympathy with our increasing purpose, combined with so much 

 sense of its limitations. Bacon never soars away from life, he realises 

 its complexity, its temptations and the indefinite range of its aggre- 

 gate power. Like Shakespeare, he " puts a girdle round the world," 

 and has left a name not to " point a moral or adorn a tale," but to be a 

 beacon as well as a warning from one who, in a sense of the infanti 

 perduti, has also been among the eternal benefactors of his race. 



[J. N.j 



Vol. XIV. (No. 88.) 



