script in the King's Library. He died in the 1294, at the age of eighty.

year

For the age in which he flourished Bacon was a miracle, and altogether deserving of the title by which his contemporaries distinguished him the Wonderful Doctor. In his genius and intellectual character, indeed, he did not belong to his age. He scarcely participated in its prevailing tastes, or gave himself at all to its favourite studies. He complains, in one of his treatises, of the futile speculations which passed under the name of learning and philosophy in his time; when the Roman law was the sole object of attention among secular scholars, and those of his own order occupied themselves about nothing_except the most perplexed subtleties of theology. Elegant literature and true science were alike neglected on all hands. Even those, he tells us, who professed the warmest admiration and most earnest study of the works of Aristotle had no acquaintance with that philosopher except through the medium of translations, so wretched that they seldom conveyed the meaning of their originals nor any other meaning. He asserts, in another place, that there were not above four scholars in Christendom who knew even the rudiments of either Greek or Hebrew, much less of Arabic; while the Latin itself was so imperfectly understood that there was scarce one living writer who expressed himself in it with any degree of elegance or purity. Nor was the number of even tolerable mathematicians greater. Of those who applied themselves to that study, most stopped, he says, at the fifth proposition of Euclid. Hence this proposition used to be called the Pons Asininus, or Asses' Bridge, a name by which it is still known.

His own attainments, even as a scholar, to say nothing of his discoveries, were most extraordinary. He had travelled, indeed, the whole circle of lite

as

rature and the sciences, in so far as it had been extended in those days, and surpassed his contemporaries as much in the depth and accuracy in the universality of his knowledge. His Latin style, though by no means perfectly classical, is distinguished by an ease, neatness, and perspicuity, which we look for in vain in almost any other writer of those days. He was distinguished besides for his knowledge of both the Greek and Hebrew languages, of the former of which he wrote a Grammar, which still exists in manuscript. It is remarkable for a curious passage it contains, in which it is gravely proposed, as a piece of ecclesiastical reform, that every bishop, in consecrating a church, should be obliged to write the characters of the Greek alphabet on the floor with the end of his pastoral staff, or, if that were two much for his scholarship, at least the three marks which were employed by the Greeks, in addition to their alphabetical characters, in the notation of numbers. The study of languages was one, indeed, to which Bacon had given a great deal of attention. It forms the subject of the third book of his Opus Majus, and its importance is there vindicated by much ingenious and philosophical reasoning.

Ethics, theology, logic, and metaphysics, enjoyed each of them its share of the attention of this universal genius, as we learn either from those of his works that still exist, or from others, now lost, that are recorded to have been written by him. But it is his scientific researches and discoveries that make the most brilliant part of his fame.

Some have gone so far as to consider Bacon the greatest mechanical genius that has appeared since the days of Archimedes. It is evident, from the testimony of his own writings, that he had at least specculated profoundly as to what might be done by

mechanic power, and meditated many curious contrivances, some of which we can hardly doubt that he had actually executed, from the terms in which he speaks of them. In a little work, which he calls his Discovery of the Miracles of Art and Nature, and of the Nullity of Magic,' and which has been translated into English, he has a chapter on 6 Admirable Artificial Instruments,' which, in reference to this point, is in the highest degree interesting. Among other machines which he speaks of here, although he does not describe their construction, are a ship which might be managed by one man as well as one of the common construction could by a whole crew; a chariot which ran with inconceivable swiftness entirely by machinery; an apparatus for flying; and an engine for depressing or elevating the greatest weights by the application of a very small force, which he describes as only three fingers high and four broad. Another instrument, he says, may be easily made whereby one man may, in despite of all opposition, draw a thousand men to himself, or any other thing that is tractable. A contrivance to serve the same purpose as the modern diving-bell is also mentioned. 'Such engines as these,' he remarks, ( were of old, and are made even in our days.' All of them, he tells us, he has himself seen, excepting only,' he adds, that instrument of flying,' (we use the words of the old English translation), which I never saw, or know any who hath seen it, though I am exccedingly acquainted with a very prudent man who hath invented the whole artifice.'

'

The errors into which this great man occasionally falls, read us a valuable lesson in the right method of philosophizing. He was, to an extent very re

lived, an experimental philosopher;* but still he had not learned by any means the whole importance of that diligent inquisition of nature which was, some centuries later, demonstrated by his illustrious namesake, to be the one sure foundation of philosophy. There is one thing, accordingly, with which we cannot fail to be struck in following his speculations. His experiments are almost all directed, not to the ascertainment of principles, but only to their exemplification. It may sometimes have chanced that he did in this way discover, or rather obtain a hint of, a new truth in science, or a hitherto unsuspected property in the substances or instruments he was employing; but this was always merely an accidental result, and never the direct object of his examination of them. Hence, although he made some important additions to the truths of philosophy, he effected no diminution in the long list of errors and falsehoods by which it was in his time encumbered. With him, as with all his contemporaries, all was true that was generally believed, or that was to be found in any of those works which it was customary to regard as authorities. It is abundantly plain that he had no clear conception of the true grounds of belief in philosophy. With all the ingenious and original views, accordingly, in which his writings abound, they contain at the same time, it must be admitted, not a little of both hasty and extravagant inference. For not only does it never enter his imagination to doubt the correctness of anything that has been stated by his predecessors, or to examine nature with a view to ascertain the reality of those properties which they

*Whoever,' says Mr Hallam, reads the sixth part of the Opus Majus," upon experimental science, must be struck by it as the prototype, in spirit, of the Novum Organon.' — History of the Middle Ages, ii, § 81.

have imputed to her, but, with a corresponding ignorance, or disregard of the true laws of evidence as to such matters, he continually advances to his general conclusions from much too limited an induction of particulars, and without anything like a sufficient consideration of the whole circumstances, even of the cases to which his attention is directed. Thus, there can be little doubt that some even of the mechanical designs we have just mentioned were merely his imaginations of what might be accomplished by the most perfect combinations of certain natural powers, which, however, he had never actually applied, so as to produce such effects, nor contemplated very attentively in any case with reference to all the conditions of his supposed invention. It is with the same looseness that we find him in another place asserting the possibility of making lamps that would burn for ever, and talking, on the authority of Pliny, of a certain stone which attracts gold, silver, and all other metals, 'the consideration whereof,', he remarks with some simplicity, makes me think there is not anything, whether in divine or outward matters, too difficult for my faith.' And, indeed, it appears to be so; for many of the stories which he quotes, especially those from Aristotle's Secretum Secretorum,* which is one of his greatest authorities, are such as one should think could hardly have failed to prove too monstrous for his belief, if it had not been of this infinite capacity.

The influence of this sanguine and over credulous disposition is very discernible in his optical speculations. He was here blinded and misled in the most extraordinary manner by certain notions he had imbibed from the prevailing philosophy, upon the subject of

*Literally The Secret of Secrets,- -a spurious production, attributed to Aristotle, in high favour in the dark ages, and filled with the most ridiculous marvels and absurdities.