SPECIAL INTRODUCTION ix 



reform. But great ideas and great principles need their ade- 

 quate interpreter, their rates saccr, if they are to influence the 

 history of mankind. . . . The disclosure, the interpreta- 

 tion, the development of that great intellectual revolution, 

 which was in the air, and which was practically carried forward 

 in obscurity, day by day, by the fathers of modern astronomy 

 and chemistry and physiology, had fallen to the task of a 

 genius, second only to Shakespeare. He had the power to 

 tell the story of what they were doing, and were to do, with a 

 force of imaginative reason of which they were utterly in- 

 capable. . . . The calculations of the astronomer, the in- 

 vestigations of the physician, were more or less a subject of 

 talk, as curious or possibly useful employments. But that 

 which bound them together in the unity of science, which gave 

 them their meaning beyond themselves, which raised them to 

 a higher level and gave them their real dignity among the 

 pursuits of men, which forced all thinking men to see what 

 new and unsuspected possibilities in the knowledge and in the 

 condition of mankind were open before them, was not Bacon's 

 own attempt at science, not even his collection of facts and 

 his rules of method, but that great idea of the reality and 

 boundless worth of knowledge, which Bacon's penetrating and 

 sure intuition had discerned, and which had taken possession 

 of his whole nature." 



