THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
salvation of man. But he recognized, much more clearly than Plato (and
the distinction announces the modern age), the necessity of specialist
science, and of soldiers and armies of specialist research. No one mind,
not even Bacon's, could cover the whole field, though he should look
from Olympus' top itself. He knew he needed help, and keenly felt his
loneliness in the mountain-air of his unaided enterprise. "What comrades
have you in your work?" he asks a friend. "As for me, I am in the
completest solitude." 71 He dreams of scientists coordinated in specialization
by constant communion and cooperation, and by some great organi-
zation holding them together to a goal. "Consider what may be expected
from men abounding in leisure, and from association of labors, and from
successions of ages; the rather because it is not a way over which only
one man can pass at a time (as is the case with that of reasoning) , but
within which the labors and industries of men (especially
as regards the
collecting of experience) may with the best effort be collected and distributed,
and then combined. For then only will men begin to know their
strength when, instead of great numbers doing all the same things, one
shall take charge of one thing, and another of another." 72 Science, which
is the organization of knowledge, must itself be organized.
And this organization must be international; let it pass freely over the
frontiers, and it may make Europe intellectually one. "The next want I
discover is the little sympathy and correspondence which exists between
colleges and universities, as well throughout Europe as in the same state
73 and kingdom." Let all these universities allot subjects and problems
among themselves, and cooperate both in research and in publication. So
organized and correlated, the universities might be deemed worthy of
such royal support as would make them what they shall be in Utopia
centers of impartial learning ruling the world. Bacon notes "the mean
salaries apportioned to public lectureships, whether in the sciences or
the arts"; 74 and he feels that this will continue till governments take over
the great tasks of education. "The wisdom of the ancientest and best
times always complained that states were too busy with laws, and too
remiss in point of education." 75 His great dream is the socialization of
science for the conquest of nature and the enlargement of the power of
man.
And so he appeals to James I, showering upon him the flattery which he
knew his Royal Highness loved to sip. James was a scholar as well as a
monarch, prouder of his pen than of his sceptre or his sword; something
might be expected of so literary and erudite a king. Bacon tells James
that the plans he has sketched are "indeed opera basilica/' kingly tasks
"towards which the endeavors of one man can be but as an image on a
cross-road, which points out the way but cannot tread it." Certainly these
^In Nichol, ii, 4. Nov. Org., i, 113. "Ibid.
Adv. of L., ii. i. n lbid., L