Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

218 FRANCIS BACON
amount of works of infinitely varied kinds in which we find
Bacon engaged? Is it possible that he could have found time
to read, cogitate, write, and publish this enormous quantity of
valuable works, each pre-eminent in its own way; to have filled
some of them with elaborate ciphers, and to have made many of
them means of conveying information secret as well as ostensible?
With all this can we conceive him also experimenting to
the extent which we know he did in every branch of natural
philosophy, breaking a gap into every fresh matter, noting deficiencies
in old studies, and setting to work to supply them; in
each case originating and inaugurating new ideas— a very different
affair from merely imitating, or following where another
has gone before ?
In truth, a hasty judgment would pronounce these things to
be impossible and contrary to common sense. But this merely
means unparalleled in the speaker's experience. No other man
has ever been known to perform such work as we claim for
Francis Bacon.
But Bacon was no ordinary man. He was an intellectual
giant, born into a world which seemed to him to be chiefly peopled
with pigmies; the spiritual and intellectual life of the
world stunted, deformed, diseased, and sick unto death through
ignorance and the sins which ignorance nourishes and strengthens.
With his herculean powers and eagle-sighted faculties of
imagination, keen to perceive, subtle to devise, prompt to act,
skilful in practical details, what might he not do with four
"pensioned" able pens continually at his "command," and
sixty-three of the choicest
scholars of the universities to assist
in the more mechanical parts of the work; to transcribe, collate,
and reduce into orderly form the " collections, " historical, scientific,
ethical, or phraseological, which, during his life, were to
stand for him and for them in the place of modern books of
reference, and which, after his death, were to be published as
" histories," " dictionaries," " collections, "etc., under the names
of those who were the ostensible editors or " producers" of
works which they would have been incapable of originating?
Whilst these men were thus writing under his eye, or accord-