Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

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CHAPTER VI.
DEFICIENCIES OF LEAENING IN THE TIMES OF ELIZABETH
AND JAMES I.
"Defect is a reptile that basely crawls upon the earth." Bacon.
"What a piece of work is man ! noble in reason ! how infinite in faculty
! . . . Yet man delights not me. . . What should such fellows as I do,
crawling between heaven and earth ? " — Hamlet.
BEFORE trying to follow Bacon in his inquiries as to the
deficiencies of learning, let us reflect upon the herculean
nature of the work which he was proposing to himself. He
might satirise his own vast speculations; he may even have heen
perfectly well aware that his enthusiastic visions could never he
realised, hut a universal reformation was his aim, and who will
say that he failed to achieve it ?
Those " good old times " in which Bacon lived were anything
hut good ; they were coarse, ignorant, violent, " dark and
dangerous." The church, Bacon said, "which should he the
chief hand of religion, was turned to superstition, or made the
matter of quarrelling and execrable actions; of murdering
princes, butchery of people, and subversion of states and governments.
The land full of oppression, taxation, privileges broken,
factions desperate, poverty great, knowledge at a standstill;
learning barren, discredited by the errors, contentions, conceit,
and fantastical pedantry of so-called learned men. The literary
spirit of the ancients dead. At the universities and schools
words were taught, but not matter. He even questions whether
it would not be well to abolish the scholastic system altogether,
and to set up a new form of teaching. The list of sciences
taught, and which he finds to be full of follies and errors, or
totally deficient, forbids any wonder at his verdict, that, whereas
present methods were rotten and useless to advance learning,
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