THE PATH OF EVOLUTION 



was imprisoned, heavily fined and disgraced. The 

 penalties were remitted, and his imprisonment was for 

 a short time only. Much has been written in pallia- 

 tion of the confessed charges of corruption. It is 

 pretty well shown that Essex was guilty of the 

 political crimes for which he suffered ; but it is im- 

 possible to find a reasonable excuse for the active part 

 that Bacon took in his conviction, or to see that it 

 was other than a selfish care for his own interest that 

 prompted it. 



It is a relief to turn from the actions of the politi- 

 cian to the writings of the man of science. Macau- 

 lay rightly says : " The chief peculiarity of Bacon's 

 philosophy is that it aimed at things altogether differ- 

 ent from those which his predecessors had proposed 

 to themselves. . . . The ancient philosophers did not 

 entirely neglect natural science, but they cultivated it 

 solely because it tended to raise the mind above low 

 cares and to exercise its subtlety in the solution of 

 very obscure questions. . . . Bacon, on the other 

 hand, valued this branch of knowledge, only on ac- 

 count of its use with reference to that visible and 

 tangible world which Plato and others so much de- 

 spised. . . . Bacon was not the inventor of the induc- 

 tive method. He was not the person who first showed 

 that by the inductive method alone new truth could 

 be discovered ; but he was the person who first turned 



86 



