Whatever may have
been his sins, and they were many, he cannot have been the "meanest of
mankind," who lived and died, holding unaltered, amid temptations and
falls, so noble a conception of the use and calling of his life: the
duty and service of helping his brethren to know as they had never yet
learned to know. That thought never left him; the obligations it imposed
were never forgotten in the crush and heat of business; the toils,
thankless at the time, which it heaped upon him in addition to the
burdens of public life were never refused. Nothing diverted him, nothing
made him despair. He was not discouraged because he was not understood.
There never was any one in whose life the "_Souverainete du but_" was
more certain and more apparent; and that object was the second greatest
that man can have. To teach men to know is only next to making them
good.
The Baconian philosophy, the reforms of the _Novum Organum_, the method
of experiment and induction, are commonplaces, and sometimes lead to a
misconception of what Bacon did.
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