Bacon knew very well that atheism was apt to follow in the steps of his adored physical science, and consoled himself by assuming that "a little philosophy inclines man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion". He deemed that without belief there could be no sense of honour, for atheists have died for their opinion, whereas, if they believe that there is no God, "why should they trouble themselves?" "Against atheists the very savages take part with the very subtlest philosophers," which is perfectly true. To the dog "man is instead of a God, or melior natura." "As atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty," yet martyr atheists have despised human frailty. "For martyrdoms, I reckon them among miracles; because they seem to exceed the force of human nature."

Concerning the extreme Reformers, Bacon says "there is a superstition in avoiding superstition, when men think to do best if they go furthest from the superstition formerly received," as in the Scottish Presbyterian burial of the Christian dead with no religious service, one of Knox's innovations. In his Essay on "Wisdom for a Man's Self," Bacon speaks, wittingly or unwittingly, of his own mischance: "Whereas they have all their times sacrificed to themselves, they become in the end themselves sacrifices to the inconstancy of fortune". A word of Bacon's is always apt. "Let no nation expect to be great that is not awake upon any just cause of arming." Of colonization, "it is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of the people and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant". "If you plant where savages are... use them justly and graciously." Always the counsel is excellent, always the adviser is unheard! Bacon even advises on the stage management of Masques. On Gardening he writes at much length and with manifest pleasure. His advice to keep caged birds in "little turrets with a belly"—is not that of a poetical imagination. He did not like the Ars Topiaria, "images cut out in juniper" or box. His garden contained "a heath of a natural wildness," with many artificial additions.

Bacon's Promus of Elegancies is a commonplace book, full of germs of essays, pensées. The essays themselves are strings of connected aphorisms, without much consecutiveness of style or skilled transitions. "Aphorisms," says Bacon himself, "except they should be ridiculous, cannot be made but of the pith and heart of Sciences." His Aphorisms certainly were more popular, as he knew, than his connected work of 1605, "The Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane".

In the Dedication of this work to James I, Bacon admires his Majesty's genius, "a light of nature I have observed in your Majesty," who certainly was a clever man, and interested in literature. The book is a plea for the organization of knowledge: Bacon styles it "a small globe of the intellectual world". He surveys all knowledge, and maps it out, with a view to organized study. He meets religious objections in his usual way. It is argued that ignorance is a fine thing, making "a more devout dependence on God as the first cause". Bacon replies in the words of Job, "will you lie for God, as one man will do for another to gratify him?" Will you "offer the author of Truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie"? Bacon attacks the schoolmen as darkening counsel by words and spinning cobwebs out of assumed first principles, instead of collecting facts, and questioning nature by experiments. Practically, experimental philosophy, and the endowment of special research, are the burdens of his argument. He divides knowledge into History (the original sense of the word being inquiry), Human, Natural, and Divine. Anxious that nothing should escape him, he even classifies Ciphers, then much used in the secret correspondence of statesmen and conspirators. He had invented a cipher when a young diplomatist in Paris, and, in the later Latin translation of this book, the "De Augmentis," he is copious on the subject. The secrets of each writing were usually discovered by the simple process of torturing the conspirators who used them.

"Poesy," he says, "was ever thought to have some anticipation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things." He conceived that there was a mystic meaning, a record of lost wisdom, in the myths of the Greeks (which are mainly decorated survivals of savage guesses at the causes of things). He asks for more biographies, in an age very careless of biography. He speaks of the "inductive" method, as opposed to the scholastic reasoning from invented assumptions; and his mind was always busy with a perfect system, "Instauratio Magna," of the interpretation of nature, and the encyclopædic organization of knowledge. This work he never completed; the "Novum Organum" (1620), written in Latin, is the most important fragment. He "had a vision of his own," but what his great and perfect method really was, in practical operation, he probably did not know himself. Fallacies he could detect and classify in brilliant fashion, the "Eidola" or shadowy Dwellers on the Threshold of Truth, bewildering men who would enter that sanctuary. His work in this kind, especially the "Novum Organum," is immensely stimulating: he saw in vision the Promised Land of Science into which he did not enter, and he would have been much disenchanted by the results, as regards human happiness, of the discoveries which he, not vainly, summoned men to make. He did not urge haste in practical application—the commercializing of science. He insisted on the collection of "contradictory instances," a method always, in accordance with human eagerness, too much neglected.[1]

Bacon's mind, in fact, was encyclopædic, and shared the faults common to encyclopædias. The contemporary specialist, like Gilbert with his remarkable experiments in magnetism, is spoken of but slightingly by Bacon; nor has he much praise for other students who, in his time, were practising what he was preaching.

Bacon's prose, beyond the region of essays and of science, may best be studied in his "Reign of Henry VII," the fruit of a few months' labour, after his banishment to the country, in 1621. He had no access to manuscripts of the period, except in copies made for him in the great collection of Sir Robert Cotton, now in the British Museum. The printed books concerning the reign, those of Polydore Virgil, Holinshed (translating Polydore), Stowe, and Speed, led Bacon into some mistakes about facts. But the book is lucid and sagacious; the character of the king is clearly depicted, without favour or deliberate fault-finding. The study of Perkin Warbeck is full of subtle interest. "Himself with long and continued counterfeiting and with often telling a lie was turned, by habit, almost into the thing he seemed to be, and from a liar to a believer." Ford makes Henry VII express the same opinion in his tragedy of "Perkin Warbeck". Bacon treats the strange career of Perkin in terms of the Stage, speaks of the prompter with his prompt-book, and, in the last Act, says, "therefore now, like the end of a play, a great number came upon the stage at once". The nature of the statecraft of Henry VII, not very apprehensive or forecasting of future events, afar off, "but an entertainer of Fortune by the day," is admirably analysed. "I have not flattered the king," says Bacon in his dedication to Charles, Prince of Wales, "but took him to life as well as I could, sitting so far off, and having no better light." Henry's attempt to secure the canonization of Henry VI is amusingly described. Cardinals were set to examine that poor prince's career, "but it died under the reference. The general opinion was that Pope Julius was too dear, and that the king would not come to his rates." But Bacon holds that the Pope did not wish to cheapen saintliness, and chose to "keep a distance between innocents and Saints". The virtues of Henry VI had not the necessary quality of being heroic.

"The New Atlantis," unfinished in 1624, was published with the "Sylva Sylvarum," after Bacon's death, in 1627. Here our author appears as the framer of a philosophical romance, not unlike More's "Utopia," but concerned, as far as it goes, with the organization of experiment and of knowledge, as practised by the people of Bensalem, somewhere in the southern seas. Bacon makes no long story of how he and his company arrived at Bensalem, an unheard of land, where civilization has survived since the time of Plato's mythical lost Atlantis. Bacon was inclined to suspect that there must have been "in the dark backward and abysm of time," a race more advanced in knowledge than the Greeks or the men of his own age. The Bensalemites are survivors of that race, people very stately, peaceable (though well provided with improved artillery), and Christian. The tale of their miraculous conversion, through St. Bartholomew, "about twenty years after the ascension of our Saviour"; and of their acquisition of the Old Testament and the New (including parts of it not yet written) about 53 a.d., is the most romantic part of the romance. The Bensalemites, who are rich in everything, make trading voyages, not for lucre, but "for Light," knowledge. They have every kind of museum, library, and scientific apparatus which the mind of Bacon could desire, regardless of expense, nor do they seem to have shrunk from vivisection in their search for the secrets of nature. "We have some degrees of flying in the air," they have Christian temples: they are extremely moral, kind, and industrious, in fact are a sort of scientific Phæacians; "far apart they dwell, in the midst of the wash of the waves, and with them are no men conversant," for they help, but do not welcome mariners.

Bacon's Latin tracts are numerous: he believed that Latin was a permanent, English a less stable speech, but of course, since his day, knowledge of Latin has more and more decreased, owing to the progress of education and the march of science. The prophetic enthusiasm of his insistence on experimental philosophy, the brilliance of his illustrations, and the sagacity of his aphoristic observations, are the bases of his literary fame. He was not so well fitted to be an experimental philosopher himself, as to be the cause of experimental philosophy in others.

Raleigh.