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At twelve he entered the University of Cambridge; at fifteen he quitted it, already disgusted with its pedantries and sophistries; at sixteen he rebelled against the authority of Aristotle, and took up his residence at Gray's Inn; the same year, 1576, he was sent to Paris in the suite of Sir Amias Paulet, ambassador to the court of France, and delighted the salons of the capital by his wit and profound inquiries; at nineteen he returned to England, having won golden opinions from the doctors of the French Sanhedrim, who saw in him a second Daniel; and in 1582 he was admitted as a barrister of Gray's Inn, and the following year composed an essay on the Instauration of Philosophy.
He had one conspicuous and strange defect for a man who undertook what he did. He was not a mathematician: he did not see the indispensable necessity of mathematics in the great Instauration which he projected; he did not much believe in what they could do. He cared so little about them that he takes no notice of Napier's invention of Logarithms.
This volume, and another which has been mentioned here, contain the THIRD and FOURTH PARTS of the Great Instauration, whether this man who describes them here, and who forgot, it would seem, to fulfil his promise in reference to them, be aware of it or not.
And he reported the speeches of such persons as Lord Salisbury, probably throwing into them both form and matter of his own. At length, "silently, on the 25th of June," 1607, he was appointed Solicitor-General. He was then forty-seven. "It was also probably about this time," writes Mr. Spedding, "that Bacon finally settled the plan of his 'Great Instauration, and began to call it by that name."
'I have either told, or designed to tell, all, says the expositor of these plays. 'What I cannot speak, I point out with my finger. For all the building of this genius is a building on that scientific ground-plan he has left us; and that is a plan which includes all the human field. It is the plan of the Great Instauration. 'My boy Marcius approaches.
Considering who the author of it is, and that it is on the face of it, a new method of dealing with facts in general, a new method of obtaining axioms of practice from history in general, and not a specific method of obtaining them from that particular department of history from which his instances are taken; and, considering, too, that the author was himself aware of the whole sweep of its applications, and that he has taken pains to include in his description of its powers, the assertion, the distinct, deliberate assertion that it is capable of being applied as efficiently, to those nobler departments of the human need, which are marked out for it in the Great Instauration those very departments in which he was known himself to be so deeply interested, and in which he had been all his life such a diligent explorer and experimenter.
Warm friendship, indeed, he felt for her; but whatever that might have done towards the instauration of a former dream was now hopelessly barred by the rivalry of the thing itself in the guise of a lineal successor. Pierston had been about to leave, but he sat down again on being asked if he would stay and have a cup of tea.
Peter's, Giacomo della Porta had ornamented the Vatican with mosaics, Copernicus had taught the true centre of planetary motion, Dumoulin had introduced into French jurisprudence the principles of the Justinian code, Ariosto had published the "Orlando Furioso," Cervantes had written "Don Quixote," Spenser had dedicated his "Fairy Queen," Shakspeare had composed his immortal dramas, Hooker had devised his "Ecclesiastical Polity," Cranmer had published his Forty-two Articles, John Calvin had dedicated to Francis I. his celebrated "Institutes," Luther had translated the Bible, Bacon had begun the "Instauration of Philosophy," Bellarmine had systematized the Roman Catholic theology, Henry IV. had signed the Edict of Nantes, Queen Elizabeth had defeated the Invincible Armada, and William the Silent had achieved the independence of Holland.
The Essay itself is lost, but it was the first outline of that great design which he afterwards pursued and finished in his "Instauration of the Sciences." LOCKE himself has informed us, that his great work on "The Human Understanding," when he first put pen to paper, he thought "would have been contained in one sheet, but that the farther he went on, the larger prospect he had."
To the first years of his official life belong three very interesting fragments, intended to find a provisional place in the plan of the "Great Instauration."
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