2X4 THE WORLD MACHINE 



upon the opinions of mankind ; but they have produced it 

 through the operation of intermediate agents. 



"No book ever made so great a revolution in the mode of 

 thinking, overthrew so many prejudices, introduced so many 

 new opinions. . . . Cowley, who was among the most ardent, 

 and not among the least discerning followers of the new philo- 

 sophy, has, in one of his finest poems, compared Bacon to 

 Moses standing on Mount Pisgah. It is to Bacon, we think, 

 as he appears in the first book of the Novum Organum, that the 

 comparison applies with peculiar felicity. There we see the great 

 Lawgiver looking round from his lonely elevation on an infinite 

 expanse ; behind him a wilderness of dreary sands and bitter 

 waters, in which successive generations have sojourned, always 

 moving, yet never advancing, reaping no harvest and building 

 no abiding city ; before him a goodly land, a land of promise, 

 a land flowing with milk and honey. While the multitude 

 below saw only the flat, sterile desert in which they had so 

 long wandered, bounded on every side by a near horizon, or 

 diversified only by some deceitful mirage, he was gazing from a 

 far higher stand on a far lovelier country, following with his 

 eye the long course of fertilising rivers, through ample pastures, 

 and under the bridges of great capitals, measuring the distances 

 of marts and havens, .-and portioning out all those wealthy 

 regions from Dan to Beersheba." 1 



The picture is enchanting, but from it the opinions of men 

 of science differ widely. The obverse of the shield you may 

 find in the candid pages of Liebig and in many another. " If," 

 said Sir David Brewster, " Bacon had never lived, those who 

 study nature would have found in the writings and in the 

 work of Galileo not only the principles of his vaunted Inductive 

 Philosophy, but likewise their practical application to the 

 highest efforts of invention and discovery." His real place is 

 uncompromisingly laid down in a savage page of Draper : 



" Bacon never produced any great practical result himself ; 

 no great physicist ever made any use of his method. He has had 

 the same to do with the development of modern science that 

 the inventor of the orrery had to do with the discovery of the 

 mechanism of the world. Of all the important physical dis- 

 coveries, there is not one which shows that its author made it 

 by the Baconian instrument. 



1 Collected Essays : Francis Bacon. 



