There had been nothing like it in its ardour of hope, in the glory which it threw around the investigation of nature.

It was the presence and the power of a great idea--long become a commonplace to us, but strange and perplexing at first to his own generation, which probably shared Coke's opinion that it qualified its champion for a place in the company of the "Ship of Fools," which expressed its opinion of the man who wrote the _Novum Organum_, in the sentiment that "a fool _could_ not have written it, and a wise man _would_ not"-- it is this which has placed Bacon among the great discoverers of the human race.
It is this imaginative yet serious assertion of the vast range and possibilities of human knowledge which, as M.de Remusat remarks--the keenest and fairest of Bacon's judges--gives Bacon his claim to the undefinable but very real character of greatness.

Two men stand out, "the masters of those who know," without equals up to their time, among men--the Greek Aristotle and the Englishman Bacon.

They agree in the universality and comprehensiveness of their conception of human knowledge; and they were absolutely alone in their serious practical ambition to work out this conception.

In the separate departments of thought, of investigation, of art, each is left far behind by numbers of men, who in these separate departments have gone far deeper than they, have soared higher, have been more successful in what they attempted.
But Aristotle first, and for his time more successfully, and Bacon after him, ventured on the daring enterprise of "taking all knowledge for their province;" and in this they stood alone.