What Bacon _did_, indeed, and what he _meant_, are separate matters.

He _meant_ an infallible method by which man should be fully equipped for a struggle with nature; he meant an irresistible and immediate conquest, within a definite and not distant time.

It was too much.

He himself saw no more of what he _meant_ than Columbus did of America.

But what he _did_ was to persuade men for the future that the intelligent, patient, persevering cross-examination of things, and the thoughts about them, was the only, and was the successful road to know.