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elegies, epigrams, odes, and the like, from our discourse, and class 
them with philosophy and the arts of oratory.” In short, Bacon, 
though he had himself many of the characteristics of a poet, utterly 
misconceived the true nature of poetry, and in his theory reduced it 
to the level of prose. 
It is perhaps more excusable in Bacon that his outlook on the 
future of human knowledge was, after all, quite limited. He 
admitted that the instauration of the sciences would require some 
ages for its completion ; but he thought that, within the compass 
of no very long period, that completion would be effected. Bacon 
would not have realized what was implied by Goethe’s phrase, 
unendliche Natur. If you had asked him, he would probably have 
prophesied that, before the year 1877, all the mysteries of nature 
would have been cut and dried and garnered. He had some dim 
notion of the science of chemistry; of the sciences of geology, 
palaeontology, comparative philology, and political economy, which 
have done so much to change modern ways of thinking, he had not 
ftn inkling. Of the theory of evolution or of spectrum analysis, it 
is needless to speak. Bacon had not even heard of gravitation, 
and he held to the Ptolemaic system of the universe. After all, 
men’s imagination is restricted to what they have had experience of, 
or to some short flights of analogy beyond it, and we cannot in the 
least anticipate or set bounds to what our successors may be think- 
ing of some few centuries hence. 
Bacon has been charged with having led the way, by his philo- 
sophy, to empiricism, materialism, positivism, and sundry other 
amiable “ isms.” But this charge is rather unfair ; for though, in his 
physical philosophy, he seems to have tended more and more to an 
atomistic theory, and though in the interval between his Advance- 
ment of Learning and his Novum Organum he seems to have 
abandoned the idea of metaphysics as a useful science, still he 
himself always maintained a great respect for revealed religion. 
Though he, very properly, enjoined that ethics should be studied, 
like other sciences, inductively, he considered that mind itself is an 
emanation from God, and not subject to the laws of science. He 
thus, as Kuno Fischer remarks, entertained a dualism not dissimilar 
to that of Descartes. He held that faith should go side by side 
with science, and that we should “ render to Ceesar the things that 
