It was more than that in that "greatest and radical difference, which he himself observes" between minds, the difference between minds which were apt to note _distinctions_, and those which were apt to note _likenesses_, he was, without knowing it, defective in the first.

It was that in many instances he exemplified in his own work the very faults which he charged on the older philosophies: haste, carelessness, precipitancy, using words without thinking them out, assuming to know when he ought to have perceived his real ignorance.
What, then, with all these mistakes and failures, not always creditable or pardonable, has given Bacon his preeminent place in the history of science?
1.

The answer is that with all his mistakes and failures, the principles on which his mode of attaining a knowledge of nature was based were the only true ones; and they had never before been propounded so systematically, so fully, and so earnestly.

His was not the first mind on whom these principles had broken.

Men were, and had been for some time, pursuing their inquiries into various departments of nature precisely on the general plan of careful and honest observation of real things which he enjoined.