Bacon certainly was not a
metaphysician, nor an exact and lucid reasoner. With wonderful flashes
of sure intuition or happy anticipation, his mind was deficient in the
powers which deal with the deeper problems of thought, just as it was
deficient in the mathematical faculty. The subtlety, the intuition, the
penetration, the severe precision, even the force of imagination, which
make a man a great thinker on any abstract subject were not his; the
interest of questions which had interested metaphysicians had no
interest for him: he distrusted and undervalued them. When he touches
the "ultimities" of knowledge he is as obscure and hard to be understood
as any of those restless Southern Italians of his own age, who shared
with him the ambition of reconstructing science. Certainly the science
which most interested Bacon, the science which he found, as he thought,
in so desperate a condition, and to which he gave so great an impulse,
was physical science. But physical science may be looked at and pursued
in different ways, in different tempers, with different objects.
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