Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

166 FRANCIS BACON
sailing or discovery in science?" He proceeds to indicate the
various parts of his method hy which learning was to he collected,
rectified, and finally stored up in the " receptacles "
which he would have provided in " places of learning, in books,
and in the persons of the learned." In other words, he would
provide schools, colleges, and libraries; he would facilitate
printing, the publication of good books, and tbe institution of
lectures, with paid professors of all arts and sciences. We look
around, and are overwhelmed with admiration of all that has
been accomplished upon Bacon's method. But he did not live
to see it. Doubtless his life was one long series of disappointments,
lightened only by his joyous, hopeful spirit, and by the
absolute conviction which possessed him that he had truth on
his side, and that " Time, that great arbitrator, would decide " in
his favour.
" Fpr myself," he says, " I may truly say that, both in this
present work, and in those I intend to publish hereafter, I often
advisedly and deliberately throiv aside the dignity of my name
and wit (if such thing be) in my endeavour to advance human
interests; and being one that should properly, perhaps, be an architect
in philosophy and the sciences, I turn common labourer, hodman,
anything that is wanted; taking upon myself the burden
and execution of many things which must needs be done,
and which others, through an inborn pride, shrink from and
decline." *
Dr. Rawley records Bacon's gentle regret that he that should
be an architect in this erecting and building of the new philosophy
" should be forced to be a workman and a labourer, to
dig the clay and make the brick, and, like the Israelites, to
gather the stubble and straw over all the fields, to burn the
bricks withal. But he knoweth that, except he do it, nothing
will be done : men are so set to despise the means of their own
good. And as for the baseness of many of the experiments, as
long as they be God's works, they are honourable enough ; true
axioms must be drawn from plain experience, and not from
1 De Aug. vii. X.