leaders, and they cannot conceal, yea, they do not care to conceal, their aversion, scorn, or contempt. They have a consciousness, too, of superiority, which also they do not conceal, or care to conceal. But even such minds are ever gentle in the presence of true greatness and true goodness. But thinkers such as Bacon have to do with vast and complicated problems, that tax, but do not provoke them. Even among such thinkers, Bacon appears distinguished by a lofty mental tranquillity; and were undue assumption consistent with the intellectual majesty of his genius, he had a certain grace of nature that would have counteracted or chastised it. He was calm, but not cold; calm with a mental fervor, which did not flash in starts, but steadily shone over the vast spaces of his searchings and deliberations. He knew the dignity of his office, which in the world of mind was judicial; and this office could not, like the chancellorship, be taken from him. If, as men have said, he compromised the dignity of the chancellorship, he maintained with transcendent honor the magisterial dignity of his genius. In this aspect of Bacon there is something most solemn and imposing, - a certain air of native grandeur such as the greatest men have seldom had by mere mind alone. Even at this distance of time he forbids obtrusion, rebukes impertinence, inspires reverence; with the most spontaneous inward consent we pay him homage, and in doing so we feel not humiliated, but ennobled. He undertook to judge all past thinkers and their methods. He assumed a most exalted function, and was equal to it. Human greatness has hardly any position imaginably higher; self-reliance is capable of nothing more daring; and the history of mind shows no intellectual undertaking so radical that can so little be accused of being rash.

Bacon in the mental realm was a judge; whatever did not befit that character was foreign to him, and in connection with him was never found. He was no pedagogue; he did not undertake to drill men in worn-out forms, or give them new editions of their old lessons. He was no partisan; he did not decry this school, and praise that; he put all schools on their trial; he asked them for reasons and for results; and on each as it came before him, he pronounced judicial sentence. He

was no advocate; it was not his part to plead or sophisticate on any side, but to hear all sides, to compare their statements, to weigh their testimonies, then to give judgment; and this was what he did.

Bacon was a judge in the realm of mind, but also he was more: he was a legislator, a legislator of the highest order; not one who merely methodizes particular customs and precepts, but one who suggests universal principles, one whose rules formulize practical knowledge, and in the following of whom there is the reward of practical achievement,-one whose direction gives life, as well as guidance, and who not only counsels, but inspires. Bacon has been even more than judge and legislator. These he was in the realm of mind; but he has been a creative reformer in the world of facts. He gave not only a new direction to science, but a new impulse to action; and in both his influence has been like a new power in the world. Even after his philosophy has passed into history, or is studied as mere literature, his influence is recognized as an element that gave early impetus to modern social and material progress, and the spirit of which may be felt in every social and material improvement.

Two contradictory opinions have been held about Bacon as a philosopher one is that he was an intellectual innovator, to whom is due the true method of discovery, and the progressive advancement of modern science; the other, that he introduced nothing which was new, and that modern science had received its onward impulse before his day, and has since then been cultivated with entire indifference to his method.

Neither of these propositions is strictly true; but, as in the case of all such extremes, the truth is to be found between them, or in a modification of both. It is said that Bacon did not originate the method of induction, because that is as old as philosophy, or indeed as old as human nature. Ancient sages, it is asserted, understood it, and Aristotle explained it. It is not scientific observers and experimentalists only that reason by it, but all men, women, and children, in the simplest exercise of their mental faculties. Now Bacon does not claim that he originated or invented the method of induction. What he does claim is that he originated a method

of induction, a special manner of directing the mental faculties in seeking truth, in testing truth, and in using truth. Whether his method is valuable or worthless, Bacon has a right to make this claim. A man does not pretend to be the author of sensations, conceptions, and ideas, because he publishes a system of psychology; he merely proposes to explain them. But Bacon did not mean merely to explain certain mental powers and their relations to existence; he meant also to direct and apply their activities in reference to certain issues and results. Simple induction is as likely to be wrong as right; but Bacon proposed to teach inquirers in what manner they must proceed so as to escape the wrong and attain to the right. Bacon may therefore be said to be the first that gave strict and philosophical expression to the inductive method, thus making it an instrument of mind at once detective and efficient, detective for noting error, efficient not only in the discovery of truth, but in the use of truth. Bacon, then, in his method, is thoroughly original; the method belongs to him, and to him alone; the invention and arrangement of the logical categories do not as surely belong to Aristotle as a certain special method of induction belongs to Bacon. But to what purpose, it has been asked, is this method? Bacon himself made but little application of it, and that little was without success. Nor have any scientific men followed it in their inquiries, or even thought of it. The method in detail has, indeed, never been, perhaps never could be, reduced to practice; but the spirit of it has nevertheless penetrated all the scientific meditation of the world.

It is also true that modern science had received its impulse before the time of Bacon. Ever since the times of the Crusades, the civilized mind of the West had been uneasy and excited. It seemed to long for larger space. That space was given it in the discoveries of Columbus and his followers. The larger space led to wider life and bolder action; this wider life and bolder action gathered in experience, stimulated curiosity, and deepened the desire for knowledge. The mind and its faculties had been so often analyzed, had been put into such an infinity of combinations, that men at length grew tired of playing an everlasting game of metaphysical

chess. They began to think that the body also deserved examination, and thus, long before Bacon was born, the science of anatomy had been made eminent by the genius of Vesalius. When land and sea had been widened for movement' and enterprise, men began to dream of more expansive heavens, and to send forth thoughts that wandered through eternity and through the boundless universe. This small globe could not be the centre of the stars, the source of all motion, and thereby of all time. Thence wise and wondering men questioned the planets and the sun; after a while the light within them explained the light outside them, and gradually they divined these solemn mysteries of our Kosmos, in whose revelation creation was amplified and the Divine glory made more manifest. Such discoveries had begun before Bacon, and were continued without the aid of Bacon. Thirty years before Bacon was born, Copernicus had been at work amidst the heavens. Tycho Brahe carried on the work while Bacon was yet a boy; and it is not likely that any influence from Bacon ever reached Kepler or Galileo. It is then indeed true, that interest in the natural sciences, and the study of them, did not wait for the appearance of Bacon; it is true, also, that the course of discovery had been opened and had proceeded independently of his influence or his system. Many brilliant results, it must be confessed, were attained; but the modes of attaining them were disconnected and empirical. Bacon did not originate natural science; he did not himself, personally, advance natural science; but he did organize a philosophy of natural science,—of that organic philosophy he, and he alone, was the true and primal author.

But since Bacon did not begin modern science, did not contribute to it, or in any way enlarge it, how then did he act on it? First, by urgency, by insistence, and by intensity of direction. Men were still looking too much within them for that which should be sought outside them. They were still ready to take abstractions and words for existences and facts. Bacon, with all the force of his intellect, impelled the minds of inquirers toward reality and nature. He pointed out the sources of error in the constitution of humanity, in the character of the individual, in the forms of language and of society,

in the teachings and traditions of the schools. He taught men how to discriminate substance from illusion. He taught them where truth was to be found, and how it was to be sought. Of course we mean especially the truth which distinctly belongs to the natural sciences. This, as Bacon showed, could not be reached by any amount of misdirected diligence, learning, and labor, but only by inquiry, patiently conducted, carefully scrutinized, and rightly ordered. And therefore a second powerful influence which Bacon exercised on modern science was by enforcing the necessity of method. His own particular method might, in the structure which he gave it, be of no avail, but in spirit it was indubitable. Yet even if it had been as erroneous as it was veracious, the reasoning of Bacon as to the need of method would still have been sound. If his consisted of false elements, it would remain for some one else to construct a method of true elements. If such a method were not discovered, natural inquiries must always have been merely capricious and casual attempts, with accidental and empirical results. Each result, instead of being one in a series of sequences, would in itself be an end; it could only be again mechanically reproduced, and the process, if of any utility, must be traditionally repeated and preserved. Paradoxical as it may seem, the rigor of method is the liberty of science. We might, perhaps, say that method is science: it is at least its essential condition. For no number of facts, no amount of experiment, no acuteness or extent of observation, no accumulation of knowledge, will enable any man to create a science, to think scientifically, or, indeed, to think or speak or write with structural cohesion or any living sequence. There must be the uniting, informing, plastic soul of method, or all is shapeless and disparate.

Coleridge brings out this idea very finely. In illustrating his philosophy of method from the works of Shakespeare, he remarks: "We may define the excellence of their method as consisting in that just proportion, that union and interpenetration of the universal and particular, which must ever pervade all works of decided genius and true science. For method implies progressive transition, and it is the meaning of the word in the original language. The Greek pélodos is