was knighted in 1603: and in the following year
a pension of £60 was attached to his office of
learned counsel. In 1606 he succeeded in his
ambition to marry a wealthy woman b_y win-
ning the hand of Alice Barnham. In 1607 he
secured the long-coveted solicitor-generalship,
and thus came into the possession of what, in
money of to-day, would amount to £4000 a
year." This appointment Bacon had probably se-
cured by his defense of royal sui)remacy in
a dispute concerning the King's jurisdiction
over some Ijorder counties. From now on, he vol-
unteered much advice to his sovereign, who, how-
ever, refused to be guided by him. Bacon's
advice was marked by a strange mixture of great
wisdom and unworthy trivialities. He showed
wonderful insight into the political situation,
and suggested plans which, if carried out, might
have averted nmch of the trouble that ensued.
But .James was not a king to listen to sugges-
tions eonllicting with his inclinations; while
Bacon unfortunately did not possess a character
that could give weight to his advice. In the
coming struggle Bacon became more and more
obsequious. He justified himself in his own
eyes by the excuse that he was keeping in
touch with the King for the good of his country ;
but it was now obvious to every patriot that no
good would come to his country from the wilful
King. In 1613 Bacon was appointed attorney-
general ; and in this new office he soon became
entangled in dispute with Coke on constitutional
principles, and made himself obnoxious to the peo-
ple at large by his unscrupulous cupidity. His
subservience to the King, however, served him in
good stead for a few more years. In 1617 he
was appointe<l to the position his father had held
before him, that of Lord Keeper of the Great
Seal, and in the year following he attained to the
high dignity of the Lord Chancellorship and the
title of Baron Verulam. In 1621 he was created
Viscount Saint Albans. The enjoyment of his
new honors was, however, very brief. The storm
which had been gathering against the Govern-
ment broke first on Bacon's head. On the as-
sembling of Parliament he was charged with
bribery. During the trial he himself confessed
to the Lords that "there had been a great deal
of corruption and neglect," for which he "was
heartily and penitently sorry." On the first
of Hay he was deprived of tlie Seal, and then
followed sentence on him, condemning him to
pay a fine of £40,000, to be imprisoned during the
King's pleasure, and to be excluded from Parlia-
ment and from Court. The fine, however, was
remitted by the King, and the imprisonment
lasted only two days. Sometime afterwards he
was even allowed to appear at Court. It seems
that he now conceived the hope of reentering
I)olitical life; but even in those debauched days
this was impossible, and he thenceforth devoted
himself to literature and science. The imme-
diate occasion of his death was a cold caught in
making an experiment to test the power of snow
to preserve flesh. He died in the house of the
V,ar of Arundel, to which lie had lieen removed
with the fatal chill iijion him, .pril 9, 1626.
It may be seen from the preceding sketch that the political life of Bacon was, on the whole, not an achievement of which he could well l)c proud. His glory is in his literary and scientific work.
The first edition of his Essays appeared in 1597; his two books on the Advaticement of Learning in 160.5 (this work was afterwards treated as the first part of the projected Instau- ratio Mafina) ; his De iSapirntia Vetcrnm (Wis- dom of the Ancients), in 1609; a revised edi- tion of the Essai/s in 1612, while the final form was given to them in 1025; the Novum Organum (so called with reference to Aristotle's old Organon) appeared in Latin, in 1620, and was treated as the .second part of the Instatiratio. The third part of this comprehensively plaTined work, or at least a section of the third part, ap- peared in 1022, under the title Eistoria Natu- ralis et Expcritnentalis ad condendam Philo- sophiam ; sive Phwnomena Universi. Of the other three contemplated parts of the Instau- ratio only two prefaces remain. In 1022 he also published his chief historical work. History of the Reign of Henry VII. In 1623 appeared his De Augmentis Scientiariim, a Latin translation and extension of his Advancement of Learning. His last work, which 'as ])ublished posthu- mously (1627), was Sylva Sylvarum, a book whic^ showed very conclusively that he was not able, in practice, to live up to his scientific theory. The New Atlantis, which appeared at the same time with the last-mentioned work, had been written as early as 1617. Besides these, he wrote several minor books and papers, which need not here be named. It is enough to say that his writings embrace almost all subjects, from jurisprudence — which he treated not as a mere lawyer, but as a legislator and philoso- pher—to morality and medicine. The Essays are a treasury of rich knowledge of human rela- tions, and the style in which they are written has seldom been equaled by any English writer.
Bacon's reputation as an original philosopher, as an epoch-maker in philosophic and scientific thought, was higher a generation or two ago than it is now. Yet his Novum Organum has done, perhaps, more than any other single work to- ward inculcating into science the spirit of unbiased, aeciiTate, and careful observation and experimentation. In it he maintains that all prepossessions, called 'idols,' must be aban- doned, whether they be the common property of the race due to common modes of thought ('idols of the tribe'), or the peculiar possession of the individual ('idols of the cave') ; whether they arise from too great a dependence ou lan- guage ( 'idols of the market-place' ) , or from tradition ('idols of the theatre'). These idols once discarded, the seeker after truth must pro- ceed to interrogate nature, not contenting him- self with accepting what she has to say of her own accord. He nuist collect facts, arrange them in order, and then advance to the discovery of the laws that control their workings. This can- not be accomplished by the Aristotelian inductio per enumerationem simplieem, or mere inventory of all possible cases of the phenomena under investigation ; but negative instances, i.e. cases in which the phenomena are absent, must be ex- amined to discover wherein these instances diff'er from the affirmative instances — all this with a view to discover the 'form' of the phenomena, or their abiding essence. This insistence upon the formal cause has its significance only in connection with Bacon's exclusion of final causes or purposes from the domain of natural science. Not that purpose has no existence in the uni- verse. On the contrary. Bacon believed in an overruling Providence with a perverse piety ill
