GENERAL PREFACE TO 



they can subdue but a small part of the new world which 

 lies before them. 



(19.) In this respect then, as in others, the hopes of Francis 

 Bacon were not destined to be fulfilled. It is neither to the 

 technical part of his method nor to the details of his view of 

 the nature and progress of science that his great fame is justly 

 owing. His merits are of another kind. They belong to the 

 spirit rather than to the positive precepts of his philosophy. 



He did good service when he declared with all the weight of 

 his authority and of his eloquence that the true end of know- 

 ledge is the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate. 

 The spirit of this declaration runs throughout his writings, and 

 we trust has worked for good upon the generations by which 

 they have been studied. And as he showed his wisdom in 

 coupling together things divine and human, so has he shown it 

 also in tracing the demarcation between them, and in rebuking 

 those who by confounding religion and philosophy were in 

 danger of making the one heretical and the other superstitious. 



When, not long before Bacon's time, philosophy freed itself 

 from the tutelage of dogmatic theology, it became a grave ques- 

 tion how their respective claims to authority might be most 

 fitly co-ordinated. It was to meet, perhaps rather to evade, this 

 question, that the distinction between that which is true in 

 philosophy and that which is true in religion was proposed and 

 adopted. But it is difficult to believe that the mind of any 

 sincere and truth-loving man was satisfied by this distinction. 

 Bacon has emphatically condemned it. " There is," he affirms, 

 " no such opposition between God's word and his works." 

 Both come from Him who is the father of lights, the fountain 

 of all truth, the author of all good ; and both are therefore to 

 be studied with diligence and humility. To those who wish to 

 discourage philosophy in order that ignorance of second causes 

 may lead men to refer all things to the immediate agency of 

 the first, Bacon puts Job's question, " An oportet mentiri pro 

 Deo," will you offer to the God of truth the unclean sacrifice 

 of a lie ? 



The religious earnestness of Bacon's writings becomes more 

 remarkable when we contrast it with the tone of the most il- 

 lustrious of his contemporaries. Galileo's works are full of in- 

 sincere deference to authority and of an affected disbelief in his 

 own discoveries. Surely he who loves truth earnestly will be 



