in England to employ and to defend the application of torture in judicial procedure. Bacon occupied the highest office of justice during four years, and exhibited, in the discharge of his great functions, the wisdom and eloquence which characterized his mind, and the servility and meanness which disgraced his conduct; and on the assembling of Parliament in 1621, the House of Commons, then filled with just indignation against the insupportable abuses, corruptions, and monopolies counte-. nanced by the Government, ordered a deliberate investigation into various acts of bribery of which the Chancellor was accused. The King and the favorite, though ready to do all in their power to screen a criminal who had always been their devoted servant, were not bold enough to face the indignation of the whole country; and the investigation was allowed to proceed. It was carried on before the House of Lords, and it resulted in his conviction, on the clearest evidence, of many acts of gross corruption as a judge.* Independently of the cases thus proved, it cannot be doubted that there must have existed numerous others which were not inquired into. Bacon himself fully confessed his own guilt; and in language which under other circumstances would have been profoundly pathetic, threw himself on the indulgence of his judges. The sentence, though it could not be otherwise than severe, was evidently just: it condemned him to be deprived of his place as Chancellor, to pay a fine of 40,000l. (a sum, be it remarked, not amounting to half the gains he was supposed to have corruptly made), to be imprisoned during the King's pleasure in the Tower, to be ever after incapable of holding any office in the State, and to be incapacitated from sitting in Parliament or coming within twelve miles of the Court. In imposing so severe a punishment it must be recollected that Bacon's judges well knew that much of it would be mitigated, or altogether remitted; and the result showed how just were these anticipations. The culprit was almost immediately released from confinement; the fine was not only remitted by royal favor, but by the manner of its remission converted into a sort of protection of the fallen Chancellor against the claims of his importunate creditors; and he was speedily restored to the privilege of presenting himself at Court. There can be no doubt that James and his favorite had felt great reluctance in abandoning Bacon to the indignation of Parliament, and that they only did so in the conviction that any attempt to save their servant would not only have been inevitably unsuccessful, but must have involved the Government itself in odium, without in the least alleviating the lot of the guilty Chancellor.

The life of the fallen minister was prolonged for five years after his severe but merited disgrace; and these years were passed in intriguing, flattering, and imploring pecuniary relief in his distresses. During his whole life he had lived splendidly and extravagantly. His taste for

*Many of the charges against Bacon, related in the text, have been proved by Mr. Hepworth Dixon, in his "Personal History of Lord Bacon," to be unfounded.

magnificence in houses, gardens, and trains of domestics had been such as may generally be found in men of lively imagination; and it was to escape from the perpetual embarrassments which are the natural consequences of such tastes that he in all probability owed that gradual deadening of the moral sense, and that blunting of the sentiment of honor and self-respect, which were the original source of his crimes. Common experience shows with what fatal rapidity rises the flood of corruption in the human heart when once the first barriers are removed. Bacon's death took place, after a few days' illness, on the 9th April, 1626, and was caused by a cold and fever caught in travelling near London, and in part is attributed to an experiment which he tried, of preserving meat by freezing. He got out of his carriage, bought a fowl, and filled the inside of the bird with snow, which then lay thick upon the ground. In doing this he received a chill, which was aggravated by being put into a damp bed at Lord Arundel's house near Highgate. Bacon was buried, by his own desire, by his mother's side in St. Michael's Church, St. Alban's, near which place was the magnificent seat of Gorhambury, constructed by himself. He had no children, and left his affairs involved in debt and confusion.

§ 7. In order to appreciate the services which Bacon rendered to the cause of truth and knowledge, and which have placed his name foremost among the benefactors of the human race, two precautions are indispensable. First we must form a distinct idea of the nature of the philosophical methods which his system of investigation supplanted forever in physical research; and, secondly, we must dismiss from our minds that common and most erroneous imagination that Bacon was an inventor or a discoverer in any specific branch of knowledge. His mission was not to teach mankind a philosophy, but to teach them how to philosophize. A contrary supposition would be as gross an error as that of the clown who imagined that Newton was the discoverer of gravitation. The task which Bacon proposed to himself was loftier and more useful than that of the mere inventor in any branch of science; and the excellence of his method can be nowhere more clearly seen than in the instances in which he has himself applied it to facts which in his day were imperfectly known or erroneously explained. The most brilliant name among the ancient philosophers is incontestably that of Aristotle: the immensity of his acquirements, which extended to almost every branch of physical, political, moral, and intellectual research, and the powers of a mind unrivalled at once for grasp of view, and subtlety of discrimination, have justly secured to him the very highest place among the greatest intellects of the earth: he was indeed, in the fullest sense,

"'l maestro di color che sanno."

But the instrumental or mechanical part of his system, the mode by which he taught his followers that they could arrive at true deductions in scientific investigation, when falling into inferior hands, was singularly liable to be abused. That careful examination of nature, and

that wise and cautious prudence in the application to particular phenomena, of general formulas of reasoning, which are so perceptible in the works of the master, were very soon neglected by the disciples, who, finding themselves in possession of a mode of research which seemed to them to promise an infallible correctness in the results obtained, were led, by their very admiration for the genius of Aristotle, to leave out of sight his prudent reserve in the employment of his method. The synthetic mode of reasoning flatters the pride of human intellect by causing the truths discovered to appear the conquest made by its unassisted powers; and the great part played in the investigation by those powers renders the method peculiarly susceptible of that kind of corruption which arises from over-subtlety and the vain employment of words. Nor must we leave out of account the deteriorating influence of the various nations and epochs through which the ancient deductive philosophy had been handed down from the time of Aristotle himself till the days of Bacon, when its uselessness for the attainment of truth had become so apparent that a great reform was inevitable—had been indeed inevitable from a much more remote period. The acute, disputatious spirit of the Greek character had already from the very first commenced that tendency towards vain word-catching which was still further accelerated in the schools of the Lower Empire. It was from the schools of the Lower Empire that the Orientals received the philosophical system already corrupted, and the mystical and over-subtle genius of the Jewish and Arabian speculators added new elements of decay. It was in this state that the doctrines were received among the monastic speculators of the Middle Ages, and to the additional errors arising from the abstract and excessive refinements of the cloister were added those proceeding from the unfortunate alliance between the philosophical system of the Schools and the authority of the Church. The solidarity established between the orthodoxy of the Vatican and the methods of philosophy was indirectly as fatal to the authority of the one as ruinous to the value of the other. In this unhallowed union between physical science and dogmatic theology, the Church, by its arrogation to itself of the character of infallibility, put it out of its own power ever to recognize as false any opinion that it had once recognized as true; and theology being in its essence a stationary science, while philosophy is as inevitably a progressive one, the discordance between the two ill-matched members of the union speedily struck the one with impotence and destroyed the influence of the other. Independently, too, of the sources of corruption which I have been endeavoring to point out, the Aristotelian method of investigation, even in its pure and normal state, had been always obnoxious to the charge of infertility, and of being essentially stationary and unprogressive. The ultimate aim and object of its speculations were, by the attainment of abstract truth, to exercise, purify, and elevate the human faculties, and to carry the mind higher and higher towards a contemplation of the Supreme Good and the Supreme Beauty: the investigation of nature was merely a means to this end. Practical utility was regarded as a result which

might or might not be attained in this process of raising the mind to a certain ideal height of wisdom; but an end which, whether attained or not, was below the dignity of the true sage. Now, the aim proposed by the modern philosophy is totally different; and it follows that the methods by which that end is pursued should be as different. Since the time of Bacon all the powers of human reason, and all the energies of invention and research, have been concentrated on the object of improving the happiness of human life of diminishing the sufferings and increasing the enjoyments of our imperfect existence here below of extending the empire of man over the realms of nature -in short, of making our earthly state, both physical and moral, more happy. This is an aim less ambitious than that ideal virtue and that impossible wisdom which were the aspiration of the older philosophy; but it has the advantage of being attainable, while the experience of twenty centuries had sufficiently proved that the lofty pretensions of the former system had been followed by no corresponding results; nay, that the incessant disputations of the most acute and powerful intellects, during so many generations, not only had left the greatest and most vital questions where they had found them at first, but had degraded philosophy to the level of an ignoble legerdemain.

§ 8. Many attempts had been made, by vigorous and independent minds, long before the appearance of Bacon, to throw off the yoke of the scholastic philosophy; but that yoke was so riveted with the shackles of Catholic orthodoxy, that the efforts, being made in countries and at epochs when the Church was all-powerful, could not possibly be successful: all they could do was to shake the foundations of an intellectual tyranny which had so long weighed upon mankind, and to prepare the way for its final overthrow. The Reformation, breaking up the hard-bound soil, opened and softened it so that the seeds of true science and philosophy, instead of falling upon a rock, brought forth fruit a hundred fold. Long and splendid is the list of the great and liberal minds who had revolted against the tyranny of the schools before the appearance of the New Philosophy. In the writings of that wonderful monk, the anticipator of his great namesake - in the controversy between the Nominalists and Realists in the disputes which preceded the Reformation - the standard of revolt against the tyranny of the ancient system had been raised by a succession of brave and vigorous hands; and though many of these champions had fallen in their contest against an enemy intrenched in the fortifications of religious orthodoxy, and though the stake and the dungeon had apparently silenced them forever, nevertheless the tradition of their exploits had formed a still-increasing treasury of arguments against orthodox tyranny. England, in the reign of Elizabeth and James I., was precisely the country, and a country precisely in the particular state, in which the great revolution in philosophy was possible; and it was a most providential combination of circumstances and qualities that was concentrated in Francis Bacon so as to make him, and perhaps him alone, the apostle of the new philosophical faith.

§ 9. The great object which Bacon proposed to himself, in proclaiming the advantages of the Inductive Method, was fruit: the improvement of the condition of mankind; and his object being different from that of the elder philosophers, the mode by which it was to be attained was different likewise. From an early age he had been struck with the defects, with the stationary and unproductive character, of the Deductive Method; and during the whole of his brilliant, agitated, and, alas! too often ignominious career, he had constantly and patiently labored, adding stone after stone to that splendid edifice which will enshrine his name when his crimes and weaknesses, his ambition and servility, shall be forgotten. His philosophical system is contained in the great work, or rather series of works, to which he intended to give the general title of Instauratio Magna, or Great Institution of True Philosophy. The whole of this neither was nor ever could have been executed by one man or by the labors of one age; for every new addition to the stock of human knowledge, would, as Bacon plainly saw, modify the conclusions, though it would not affect otherwise than by confirming the soundness, of the philosophical method he propounded. The Instauratio was to consist of six separate parts or books, of which the following is a short synoptical arrangement:

I. Partitiones Scientiarum: a summary or classification of all knowledge, with indications of those branches which had been more or less imperfectly treated.

II. Novum Organum: the New Instrument, an exposition of the methods to be adopted in the investigation of truth, with indications of the principal sources of human error, and the remedies against that error in future.

III. Phænomena Universi, sive Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis ad condendam Philosophiam: a complete body of well-observed facts and experiments in all branches of human knowledge, to furnish the raw material upon which the new method was to be applied, in order to obtain results of truth.

IV. Scala Intellectus, sive Filum Labyrinthi: rules for the gradual ascent of the mind from particular instances or phenomena, to principles continually more and more abstract; and warnings against the danger of advancing otherwise than gradually and cautiously.

V. Prodromi, sive Anticipationes Philosophiæ Secundæ; anticipations or forestallings of the New Philosophy, i. e. such truths as could be, so to say, provisionally established, to be afterwards tested by the application of the New Method.

VI. Philosophia Secunda, sive Scientia activa; the result of the just, careful, and complete application of the methods previously laid down to the vast body of facts to be accumulated and observed in accordance with the rules and precautions contained in the IId and IVth parts.

Let us compare the position of Bacon, with respect to science in gen