NOTICE OF FRANCIS BACON.

It cannot be expected that a work destined completely to change the state of science, we had almost said of nature, should not be assailed by that prejudice which is ever ready to raise its loud but unmeaning voice against whatever is new, how great or good soever it may be. Bacon’s doctrine was accused of being calculated to produce “dangerous revolutions,” to “subvert governments and the authority of religion.” Some called on the present age and posterity to rise high in their resentment against “the Bacon-faced generation,” for so were the experimentalists termed. The old cry of irreligion, nay, even of atheism, was raised against the man who had said: > “I would rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind.”¹³ But Bacon had to encounter the prejudices even of the learned. * Cuffe, the Earl of Essex’s secretary, a man celebrated for his attainments, said of the Instauratio Magna, “a fool could not have written such a book, and a wise man would not.” * King James said, it was “like the peace of God, that surpasseth all understanding.” * And even Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, said to Aubrey: “Bacon is no great philosopher; he writes philosophy like