work as a Child of Time rather than as a Child of Wit. The New Logic is expressly declared to be of a nature to level all understandings. And besides, the very grandeur and novelty of his discoveries, so far from stimulating, are antidotes against conceit. A Prophet does not speak or think about himself; and Bacon is the Prophet of the New Logic.

What therefore gave Bacon his great confidence, untired by forty-five years of philosophic work, was not his sense of his own powers, but his insight into the unity of nature. The sense of the simplicity of the universal order had so taken hold of him that it inspired him with such certainty as might be felt by one who had seen and touched the very springs of the machinery of Creation. We have seen above what importance he attached to his possession of a mind versatile enough for the recognition of the similitudes of things. This versatile mind, blending itself compliantly with the phenomena of earth and heaven, giving to its owner a Filum Labyrinthi, a clue to thread the mazes of Nature, and enabling him to trace unity and similitude where others could see nothing but dissimilitude and confusion-this is the secret at once of Bacon's scientific successes and moral failures, and it is an essential part of his nature, peeping cut of his versatile style, his versatile handwriting, and many other trifling traits in his character. For example, it is the sense of likeness, the recognition of similitudes, that is the source of wit and playing upon words: and that Bacon was given to this kind of word-playing, although he disliked it and suppressed it on paper, is clear from the suggestive exception made by his eulogist Ben Jonson, when speaking of his eloquence: 'his language (where he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censorious.' Again, it is the recognition of similitudes that originates

1 Works, Vol. iii. p. 519.

the rich exuberance of metaphor, and the picturesque names with which Bacon maps out the Provinces of Science before subduing them. Even in music (and perhaps in colour) the same power of recognition of similitudes appears in his dislike of complications and love of simple effects. In music, he says, I ever loved easy airs that go full, all the parts together, and not these strange points of accord or discord. As it was with Bacon in music, so was it in his views of nature : he loved easy airs that go full, all the parts together, not the accords and discords that make up the Universal Harmony. In many cases this faculty guided him right, as when it taught him that the rainbow is made in the sky out of a dripping-cloud; it is also made here below with a jet of water. Still, therefore, it is nature which governs everything; or when he protests against the doctrine that the heat of the sun and fire differ in kind, as being the useless fruit of that philosophy which is now in vogue, the purpose of which is to persuade men that nothing difficult, nothing by which nature may be commanded and subdued, can be expected from art or human labour-which things tend wholly to the unfair circumscription of human power, and to a deliberate and factitious despair. But in other cases this faculty led him wrong, inducing him to expect to arrive too easily at the underlying causes of phenomena, and, in this expectation, to ignore slight differences and points of detail apparently unimportant, but really essential to the formation of a just conclusion. It is the singular pre

1

dominance of this faculty in Bacon that justifies the saying that his character is a prominent instance of the rule that 'the will produces the understanding.' In despite of all his aphorisms, Bacon's philosophy sprang from Works, Vol. iv. p. 294. 2 Ib. p. 87.

3 Fischer's Francis of Verulam, p. 29.

his will, and from the same source came perhaps his imperfect morality. He saw unity in the Universe, the Great Common World, as he was fond of calling it, because he willed to see it; and there he was often right he saw unity and consistency in his own tortuous morality, in his own Little World, because he willed to see it; and there he was often wrong. Few men were so self-deceived as he was, or did such bad deeds as he did without being hypocrites. But this dangerous power of seeing what he willed to see was the secret source of that confidence which enabled him amid the pressure of debt, and the cares of place-hunting, and the anxieties of fruitless expectations, and the distractions of legal practice and parliamentary business, and, in later years, amid the duties of office and the necessities of flattery, to maintain, still unimpaired, his zeal for philosophic Truth.

Of this he never despairs. A stranger in all other occupations, he is always longing to return to his true home, philosophy, to all knowledge which he has taken as his province. Grant him but life and leisure, and he is certain of success. It is the hope of his life, and he offers up earnest prayers to God for it. But, when he prays, it is not so much that he may succeed, as that success may not make him vain, presumptuous, and faithless that, not failure, is the danger. His fear is not for science but for religion; not that he may fail of gaining scientific light, but that scientific light may blind the mind to celestial mysteries. Nothing can be more sublimely confident, and yet free from all suspicion of self-conceit, than his prayer that men confine the sense within the limits of duty in respect of things divine: for the sense is like the sun, which reveals the face of earth, but seals andshuts up the face of heaven.

In the next place, as to Bacon's love of Science, we

shall best express it by saying that he was enamoured of it. This is the only subject on which his passionless nature can express itself passionately. Science is his substitute for love, for friendship, we may almost say for religion itself. Indeed, it is Science that makes him in any sense a religious man. Non-religious in conduct, he rises nearest to the language of prophetic ecstacy when he speaks of his great Mission to reunite in wedlock the Universe and the Mind of Man. He believes in a God, it is true; he would rather believe all the fables in the Legend and the Talmud than that this universal frame is without a Mind. But this belief in the existence of a Mind of the Universe does not materially affect his advice upon conduct or matters of morals. So far as it influences him at all, his belief in a God influences him rather scientifically than morally, strengthening his sanguine trust that all nature is based, by one divine Mind, upon one divinely simple order, which it is the highest privilege of man to discover and proclaim. That God is in any sense a Person, that is to say, a Being capable of loving and of being loved, or that He is a Father conforming His human children more and more nearly, century by century, to the divine image-this, the Christian theory-seems to form no perceptible part of Bacon's moral system. What he needs, and feels sure of, is the existence, not of a Person, but of a Mind. Even in the Essay where he condemns Atheism as destroying magnanimity and the raising of human nature, it is obvious that he attaches no special importance to the Christian faith. Some god, or Melior Natura, is useful as a point to draw towards itself the aspirations of humanity; without it, the pyramid is incomplete ; there is a sense of something missing and unfinished. But any Melior Natura will answer the purpose: and, as his example of its utility, he chooses the magnanimity derived from

their religion by the ancient Romans. Whatever passages may be quoted to the contrary from the formal philosophical works, it is an undoubted fact that in the Essays—a far more trustworthy guide to Bacon's real thoughts on such a subject—the Christian religion is seldom recognised as a powerful influence on conduct, except in the perverted form of Superstition.

We are dealing at present with what Bacon was in himself, not with what he taught as a theologian, or as a moralist; but it is important, even for the appreciation of his conduct, to note how his views of human nature were affected by his too sharp distinction between theology and philosophy. He will not, like Plato, intermingle his philosophy with theology, and therefore he accepts human nature and life as they are, without taking account of tendencies, aspirations, and impossible ideals. Hence his hopelessness in morals as compared with his hopefulness in science: hence his preference of youth as being, morally at all events, superior to old age; hence his deficiency in the Christian Enthusiasm of Humanity, so that his nearest approximation to it is a pity for the miseries of mankind; hence his want of the virtue of resentment, that righteous recoil from injustice and oppression; hence his general distrust of human nature, and his low standard of conduct for himself and others. If any man should do wrong merely out of ill nature, why yet it is but like the thorn or briar which prick and scratch because they can do no other; hence his coldness in friendship; hence his tolerance of falsehood, not as being pleasant, but as being necessary, like physic for a frame diseased.

If philosophy was Bacon's love, his first love and his last.

religion, it was also his Human love finds small

space in his writings. He had no children to teach him

1 Works, Vol. iii. p. 293.