suit; for when the mind has once arrived at a true method of philosophic investigation-when, in fact, it has attained that without which it will never attain to philosophy, namely, a philosophic spirit, the rest is comparatively easy. The mind may then turn itself to material science, to moral science, to religious investigation, or to the actions of life in which there will be but little opportunity of philosophic investigation; but into all it will carry the same character of mind, the same thirst for exactness and rectitude, and the determined faithfulness in the publication of its convictions.The age of Bacon was a great age in the pursuit of truth; it was a new age of inquiry, commencing with Gallileo; we may call him the Huss, if it be not better to call him the Columbus of science. That age, the close of the sixteenth, and the beginning of the seventeenth century, was the time of the kindling of the lamps in the great Temple of Knowledge. How affectionately our minds turn to Gallileo, the prophetic and archangelic man! His great maxim embodies in some degree the philosophy of Bacon, that "we cannot teach truth to another-we can only help him to find it." How one's breast throbs with deep human emotion, when we read the history of this mighty spiritthis serene and heavenly intelligence, whose eyes were darkened by looking at the stars and the sun; bereaved of his daughter; at seventy years of age

dragged to the tribunal of the Inquisition; bound to the rack; defenceless-on his bare knees before the cruel judges of that infernal court. From all this our Bacon was safe; from all this, my young friend, you are safe, although we have not yet quite learned the lesson of homage to an independent mind and hearty truth-seeker. We cannot in the pursuit of truth, then, profit our young reader more than by pointing out to him some of those characteristics which make Bacon pre-eminently the apostle of science.

The first circumstance about Bacon we notice, is his attitude of OBSERVATION; in this he was original. Previous to his day men had written, parleyed, imagined, raved-had done, in fact, anything, everything, but observe: Lord Bacon's mission to us was to build a new science on observation, and he gives to us, in his own instance, an illustrious example. There is not a field of knowledge where his ever active eye has not travelled; he came into a temple filled with phantoms, and the blaze of light he let in banished the motley group, the collection of so many ages and nations. Up to this time there had been no genuine observation: men had seen things, but they had not really looked at them; they had not explored their meaning, and investigated their origin. Lord Bacon taught the doctrine that we know nothing independent of facts; facts and phenomena

he described as the language of Nature. Thus he may be described as the father of science, the father of experimental philosophy.

No science can exist without method; this our great Author gave to the world. There had been, up to his time, no division of labour among the observers; there was an heterogeneousness about their pursuits, which precluded high attainment; and this resulted to a great degree from the pointless mode of study pursued, and the exceedingly vague objects of speculation to which they gave themselves. There had been in the world profound men, too, but their minds had been unused to draw inferences from Nature. Inferences they had drawn from the Logic of the Schools, but they had failed to perceive that Nature had an order and a plan in her working. Their philosophy was founded rather on exceptions than system, and searching after the ridiculously wonderful; they failed to perceive the highest wonder, Nature's order of exquisite beauty and Divine arrangement; and amongst this strange medley of teachers came Bacon, and he put them all to flight. Science was no longer a mere speculation upon the distant, the intangible, the impossible, and the unknown; it was a sober enquiry into the method of knowledge; it was an investigation of the causes of shallowness and ignorance; it was an exhibition of the onl legitimate principles of Science: an enquiry into

the known and the unknown, and an attempt further to reduce all knowledge to method.

To Bacon, then, belongs the honour of propounding the object into which man should enquire, and the method by which he should enquire; you have learned much when you have learned these two important divisions of duty; in other words we may say that Bacon has developed to us the theory of Mental Conduct. What are we to seek to know? how are we to attain to the highest knowledge? I have before said that up to the time of Bacon, there was an attempt to enter into the occult, the supernatural, the cloudy regions of mere abstraction, the origin of being, the nature of form. Bacon broke through all this. There had been, before his time, bold and independent thinking, but he gave a practical tone to Thought. The labour of his whole philosophy was to give to physical enquiry that attention which it had never until his day received. Fontenelle has said that "All philosophy is founded on these two things; that we have a great deal of curiosity and very bad eyes." Until the time of Bacon, the Philosopher may be regarded as a short-sighted man, rejecting the aid of glasses, yet insisting in indulging in speculations upon the form, size, and orbits of the most distant stars. Nothing is more certain than the restlessness and curiosity of the old philosophers, and nothing is more laughable than the

pertinacity with which they rejected all aid in their researches. The very first paragraph of Lord Bacon's "Novum," already cited, is an era in the History of Science.

"Man, as the minister and interpreter of Nature does, and understands as much, as his own observations on the order of Nature, either with regard to things, or the mind permit him, and neither knows, nor is capable of more." It was in fact to tell Man that he could only observe the observable, and only see with or by his eyes.

It has been said, that this is a saying, so trite, that it cannot be supposed to be of much value.— Dr. Brown has given to us some of the subjects which engaged the attention of the great masters of Divinity as follows:- :

"Whether angels could pass from one point of space to another without passing through the intermediate points?

"Whether they could see in the dark?

"Whether two could exist in the same physical point at the same moment?

"Whether they could exist in a perfect vacuum? and whether existing in a perfect vacuum, the vacuum in which they existed could be said to be perfect?"

And all these discussions took place beneath the sanction of the very highest authority.

It needed some very bold soul to trample upon