xiv PREFACE 



vellian sound in the advice that nothing is more 

 politic than to make the wheels of our minds con 

 centric and voluble with the wheels of fortune ! , 

 there is an anti-Machiavellian ring in the counsel 

 that the continual habit of dissimulation is but a 

 weak and sluggish cunning, and not greatly politic 2 . 



The fact is that Bacon grasped Machiavel s wisdom 

 in isolated maxims, such as that the sinews of war are 

 the sinews of men s arms 3 , but set himself against the 

 Machiavellian system of evil arts with all the weight 

 of his most impressive eloquence 4 . The reason is that 

 Bacon s ethics are founded on the distinction between 

 private and public good, and the subordination of the 

 former to the latter, so that the conservation of duty 

 to the public ought to be much more precious than 

 the conservation of life and being 6 ; his politics are 

 based not only on good arms, but still more on good 

 laws 6 ; and his religion is grounded on the conviction 

 that a man cannot search too far in the book of God s 

 word or in the book of God s works, and that the 

 further he studies Nature the nearer he comes to God 7 . 

 In short, his whole philosophy, speculative and prac 

 tical, springs from comprehensiveness guided by 

 philanthropy ; and in his survey of all learning he 

 stands by the side of Plato and Aristotle as a universal 

 philosopher. 



Naturally, then, has Bacon become the prophet of 

 modern science. He owed his far-seeing power 

 of prevision to no accident, but to many causes in 

 himself, of which the first is that quality noticed 

 in him by Rawley, and exhibited throughout the 

 Advancement his deep and universal apprehension ; 

 or what Dr. Johnson calls in another reference, 

 that comprehension and expanse of thought, which 

 at once fills the whole mind, and of which the 

 first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second 



1 Post, p. 209. 2 Post, p. 211. 3 Post, p. 212. 



4 Post, p. 215. 5 Post, p. 166. 6 Post, pp. 218-9. 



7 D^,.J -^^ 1 A 11 



* Post, p. 215. 

 7 Post, pp. 10-11, 



