But this picture, as so often drawn, and as seemingly fixed in the popular mind, is not only impossible, but is demonstrably false. To review all the facts which correct it in detail would lead us far beyond our limits. It must suffice to refer to the great work of Spedding, in which the entire records of the case are found, and which would long ago have made the world just to Bacon's fame, but that the author's comment on his own complete and fair record is itself partial and extravagant. But the materials for a final judgment are accessible to all in Spedding's volumes, and a candid reading of them solves the enigma. Bacon was condemned without a trial, on his own confession, and this confession was consistent with the tenor of his life. Its substance was that he had failed to put a stop effectually to the immemorial custom in his court of receiving presents from suitors, but that he had never deviated from justice in his decrees. There was no instance in which he was accused of yielding to the influence of gifts, or passing judgment for a bribe. No act of his as Chancellor was impeached as illegal, or reversed as corrupt. Suitors complained that they had sent sums of money or valuable presents to his court, and had been disappointed in the result; but no one complained of injustice in a decision. Bacon was a conspicuous member of the royal party; and when the storm of popular fury broke in Parliament upon the court, the King and the ministry abandoned him. He had stood all his life upon the royal favor as the basis of his strength and hope; and when it was gone from under him, he sank helplessly, and refused to attempt a defense. But he still in his humiliation found comfort in the reflection that his ruin would put an end to "anything that is in the likeness of corruption" among the judges. And he wrote, in the hour of his deepest distress, that he had been "the justest Chancellor that hath been in the five changes that have been since Sir Nicholas Bacon's time." Nor did any man of his time venture to contradict him, when in later years he summed up his case in the words, "I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years. But it was the justest censure in Parliament that was these two hundred years."
No revolution of modern times has been more complete than that which the last two centuries have silently wrought in the customary morality of British public life, and in the standards by which it is judged. Under James I. every office of state was held as the private property of its occupant. The highest places in the government were conferred only on condition of large payments to the King. He openly sold the honors and dignities of which he was the source. "The making of a baron," that is, the right to sell to some rich plebeian a patent of nobility, was a common grant to favorites, and was actually bestowed on Bacon, to aid him in maintaining the state of his office. We have the testimony of James himself that all the lawyers, of whom the judges of the realm were made, were "so bred and nursed in corruption that they cannot leave it." But the line between what the King called corruption and that which he and all his ministers practiced openly and habitually, as part of the regular work of government, is dim and hard to define. The mind of the community had not yet firmly grasped the conception of public office as a trust for the public good, and the general opinion which stimulates and sustains the official conscience in holding this trust sacred was still unformed. The courts of justice were the first branch of the government to feel the pressure of public opinion, and to respond to the demand for impersonal and impartial right. But this process had only begun when Bacon, who had never before served as judge, was called to preside in Chancery. The Chancellor's office was a gradual development: originally political and administrative rather than judicial, and with no salary or reward for hearing causes, save the voluntary presents of suitors who asked its interference with the ordinary courts, it step by step became the highest tribunal of the equity which limits and corrects the routine of law, and still the custom of gifts was unchecked. A careful study of Bacon's career shows that in this, as every other branch of thought, his theoretic convictions were in advance of his age; and in his advice to the King and in his inaugural promises as Chancellor, he foreshadows all the principles on which the wisest reformers of the public service now insist. But he failed to apply them with that heroic self-sacrifice which alone would have availed him, and the forces of custom and example continually encroached upon his views of duty. Having through a long life sought advancement and wealth for the purpose of using leisure and independence to carry out his beneficent plans on the largest scale, he eagerly accepted the traditional emoluments of his new position, in the conviction that they would become in his hands the means of vast good to mankind. It was only the public exposure which fully awakened him to a sense of the inconsistency and wrong of his conduct; and then he was himself his severest judge, and made every reparation in his power, by the most unreserved confession, by pointing out the danger to society of such weakness as his own in language to whose effectiveness nothing could be added, and by devoting the remainder of his life to the noblest work for humanity.
During the years of Bacon's splendor as a member of the government and as spokesman for the throne, his real life as a thinker, inspired by the loftiest ambition which ever entered the mind of man, that of creating a new and better civilization, was not interrupted. It was probably in 1603 that he wrote his fragmentary 'Prooemium de Interpretatione Naturae,' or 'Preface to a Treatise on Interpreting Nature,' which is the only piece of autobiography he has left us. It was found among his papers after his death; and its candor, dignity, and enthusiasm of tone are in harmony with the imaginative grasp and magnificent suggestiveness of its thought. Commending the original Latin to all who can appreciate its eloquence, we cite the first sentences of it in English:--
"Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the Commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.
"Now, among all the benefits that could be conferred upon mankind, I found none so great as the discovery of new arts for the bettering of human life. For I saw that among the rude people of early times, inventors and discoverers were reckoned as gods. It was seen that the works of founders of States, law-givers, tyrant-destroyers, and heroes cover but narrow spaces and endure but for a time; while the work of the inventor, though of less pomp, is felt everywhere and lasts forever. But above all, if a man could, I do not say devise some invention, however useful, but kindle a light in nature--a light which, even in rising, should touch and illuminate the borders of existing knowledge, and spreading further on should bring to light all that is most secret--that man, in my view, would be indeed the benefactor of mankind, the extender of man's empire over nature, the champion of freedom, the conqueror of fate.
"For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth: as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to discern resemblances in things (the main point), and yet steady enough to distinguish the subtle differences in them; as being endowed with zeal to seek, patience to doubt, love of meditation, slowness of assertion, readiness to reconsider, carefulness to arrange and set in order; and as being a man that affects not the new nor admires the old, but hates all imposture. So I thought my nature had a certain familiarity and kindred with Truth."
During the next two years he applied himself to the composition of the treatise on the 'Advancement of Learning,' the greatest of his English writings, and one which contains the seed-thoughts and outline principles of all his philosophy. From the time of its publication in 1605 to his fall in 1621, he continued to frame the plan of his 'Great Instauration' of human knowledge, and to write out chapters, books, passages, sketches, designed to take their places in it as essential parts. It was to include six great divisions: first, a general survey of existing knowledge; second, a guide to the use of the intellect in research, purging it of sources of error, and furnishing it with the new instrument of inductive logic by which all the laws of nature might be ascertained; third, a structure of the phenomena of nature, included in one hundred and thirty particular branches of natural history, as the materials for the new logic; fourth, a series of types and models of the entire mental process of discovering truth, "selecting various and remarkable instances"; fifth, specimens of the new philosophy, or anticipations of its results, in fragmentary contributions to the sixth and crowning division, which was to set forth the new philosophy in its completeness, comprehending the truths to be discovered by a perfected instrument of reasoning, in interpreting all the phenomena of the world. Well aware that the scheme, especially in its concluding part, was far beyond the power and time of any one man, he yet hoped to be the architect of the final edifice of science, by drawing its plans and making them intelligible, leaving their perfect execution to an intellectual world which could not fail to be moved to its supreme effort by a comprehension of the work before it. The 'Novum Organum,' itself but a fragment of the second division of the 'Instauration,' the key to the use of the intellect in the discovery of truth, was published in Latin at the height of his splendor as Lord Chancellor, in 1620, and is his most memorable achievement in philosophy. It contains a multitude of suggestive thoughts on the whole field of science, but is mainly the exposition of the fallacies by which the intellect is deceived and misled, and from which it must be purged in order to attain final truth, and of the new doctrine of "prerogative instances," or crucial observations and experiments in the work of discovery.
In short, Bacon's entire achievement in science is a plan for an impossible universe of knowledge. As far as he attempted to advance particular sciences by applying his method to their detailed phenomena, he wrought with imperfect knowledge of what had been done, and with cumbrous and usually misdirected efforts to fill the gaps he recognized. In a few instances, by what seems an almost superhuman instinct for truth, rather than the laborious process of investigation which he taught, he anticipated brilliant discoveries of later centuries. For example, he clearly pointed out the necessity of regarding heat as a form of motion in the molecules of matter, and thus foreshadowed, without any conception of the means of proving it, that which, for investigators of the nineteenth century, has proved the most direct way to the secrets of nature. But the testimony of the great teachers of science is unanimous, that Bacon was not a skilled observer of phenomena, nor a discoverer of scientific inductions; that he contributed no important new truth, in the sense of an established law, to any department of knowledge; and that his method of research and reasoning is not, in its essential features, that which is fruitfully pursued by them in extending the boundaries of science, nor was his mind wholly purged of those "idols of the cave," or forms of personal bias, whose varying forms as hindrances to the "dry light" of sound reason he was the first to expose. He never appreciated the mathematics as the basis of physics, but valued their elements mainly as a mental discipline. Astronomy meant little to him, since he failed to connect it directly with human well-being and improvement; to the system of Copernicus, the beginning of our insight into the heavens, he was hostile, or at least indifferent; and the splendid discoveries successively made by Tycho Brahe, Galileo, and Kepler, and brought to his ears while the 'Great Instauration' filled his mind and heart, met with but a feeble welcome with him, or none. Why is it, then, that Bacon's is the foremost name in the history of English, and perhaps, as many insist, of all modern thought? Why is it that "the Baconian philosophy" is another phrase, in all the languages of Europe, for that splendid development of the study and knowledge of the visible universe which since his time has changed the life of mankind?
A candid answer to these questions will expose an error as wide in the popular estimate of Bacon's intellectual greatness as that which has prevailed so generally regarding his character. He is called the inventor of inductive reasoning, the reformer of logic, the lawgiver of the world of thought; but he was no one of these. His grasp of the inductive method was defective; his logic was clumsy and impractical; his plan for registering all phenomena and selecting and generalizing from them, making the discovery of truth almost a mechanical process, was worthless. In short, it is not as a philosopher nor as a man of science that Bacon has carved his name in the high places of enduring fame, but rather as a man of letters; as on the whole the greatest writer of the modern world, outside of the province of imaginative art; as the Shakespeare of English prose. Does this seem a paradox to the reader who remembers that Bacon distrusted all modern languages, and thought to make his 'Advancement of Learning' "live, and be a citizen of the world," by giving it a Latin form? That his lifelong ambition was to reconstruct methods of thought, and guide intellect in the way of work serviceable to comfort and happiness? That the books in which his English style appears in its perfection, the 'History of Henry VII.,' the 'Essays,' and the papers on public affairs, were but incidents and avocations of a life absorbed by a master purpose?
But what is literature? It is creative mind, addressing itself in worthy expression to the common receptive mind of mankind. Its note is universality, as distinguished from all that is technical, limited, and narrow. Thought whose interest is as broad as humanity, suitably clothed in the language of real life, and thus fitted for access to the general intelligence, constitutes true literature, to the exclusion of that which, by its nature or by its expression, appeals only to a special class or school. The 'Opus Anglicanum' of Duns Scotus, Newton's 'Principia,' Lavoisier's treatise 'Sur la Combustion,' Kant's 'Kritik der Reinen Vernunft' (Critique of Pure Reason), each made an epoch in some vast domain of knowledge or belief; but none of them is literature. Yet the thoughts they, through a limited and specially trained class of students, introduced to the world, were gradually taken up into the common stock of mankind, and found their broad, effective, complete expression in the literature of after generations. If we apply this test to Bacon's life work, we shall find sufficient justification for honoring him above all special workers in narrower fields, as next to Shakespeare the greatest name in the greatest period of English literature.
It was not as an experimenter, investigator, or technical teacher, but as a thinker and a writer, that he rendered his great service to the world. This consisted essentially in the contribution of two magnificent ideas to the common stock of thought: the idea of the utility of science, as able to subjugate the forces of nature to the use of man; and the idea of continued and boundless progress in the comfort and happiness of the individual life, and in the order and dignity of human society. It has been shown how, from early manhood, he was inspired by the conception of infinite resources in the material world, for the discovery and employment of which the human mind is adapted. He never wearied of pointing out the imperfection and fruitlessness of the methods of inquiry and of invention hitherto in use, and the splendid results which could be rapidly attained if a combined and systematic effort were made to enlarge the boundaries of knowledge. This led him directly to the conception of an improved and advancing civilization; to the utterance, in a thousand varied, impressive, and fascinating forms, of that idea of human progress which is the inspiration, the characteristic, and the hope of the modern world. Bacon was the first of men to grasp these ideas in all their comprehensiveness as feasible purposes, as practical aims; to teach the development of them as the supreme duty and ambition of his contemporaries, and to look forward instead of behind him for the Golden Age. Enforcing and applying these thoughts with a wealth of learning, a keenness of wit, a soundness of judgment, and a suggestiveness of illustration unequaled by any writer before him, he became the greatest literary power of modern times to stimulate minds in every department of life to their noblest efforts and their worthiest achievements.
Literature has a twofold aspect: its ideal is pure truth, which is the noblest thought embodied in perfect beauty of form. It is the union of science and art, the final wedding in which are merged the knowledge worthy to be known and the highest imagination presenting it. There is a school calling itself that of pure art, to which substance is nothing and form is everything. Its measure of merit is applied to the manner only; and the meanest of subjects, the most trivial and even the most degraded of ideas or facts, is welcomed to its high places if clothed in a satisfying garb. But this school, though arrogant in the other arts of expression, has not yet been welcomed to the judgment-seat in literature, where indeed it is passing even now to contempt and oblivion. Bacon's instinct was for substance. His strongest passion was for utility. The artistic side of his nature was receptive rather than creative. Splendid passages in the 'Advancement' and 'De Augmentis' show his profound appreciation of all the arts of expression, but show likewise his inability to glorify them above that which they express. In his mind, language is subordinate to thought, and the painting to the picture, just as the frame is to the painting or the binding to the book. He writes always in the grand style. He reminds us of "the large utterance of the early gods." His sentences are weighted with thought, as suggestive as Plato, as condensed as Thucydides. Full of wit, keen in discerning analogies, rich in intellectual ornament, he is yet too concentrated in his attention to the idea to care for the melody of language. He decorates with fruits, not with flowers. For metrical movement, for rhythmic harmony, he has no ear nor sense. Inconceivable as it is that Shakespeare could have written one aphorism of the 'Novum Organum,' it would be far more absurd to imagine Bacon writing a line of the Sonnets. With the loftiest imagination, the liveliest fancy, the keenest sense of precision and appropriateness in words, he lacks the special gift of poetic form, the faculty divine which finds new inspiration in the very limitations of measured language, and whose natural expression is music alike to the ear and to the mind. His powers were cramped by the fetters of metre, and his attempts to versify even rich thought and deep feeling were puerile. But his prose is by far the weightiest, the most lucid, effective, and pleasing of his day. The poet Sprat justly says:--