But he was one of those--and the chief one--who, in that age of what is called the childhood of experimental philosophy, helped to clear away the mists of error, and prepare for the present sunshine of truth.

"I have been laboring," says some writer, (quoted by Bishop Whately, Pref.

to Essay XIV.,) "to render myself useless." Such was Bacon's task, and such the task of the greatest inventors, discoverers, and benefactors of the human race.
Nor did Bacon rank high even as a natural philosopher or physicist in his own age: he seems to have refused credence to the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, which had stirred the scientific world into great activity before his day; and his investigations in botany and vegetable physiology are crude and full of errors.
His mind, eminently philosophic, searched for facts only to establish principles and discover laws; and he was often impatient or obstinate in this search, feeling that it trammelled him in his haste to reach conclusions.
In the consideration of the reason, he unduly despised the _Organon_ of Aristotle, which, after much indignity and misapprehension, still remains to elucidate the universal principle of reasoning, and published his new organon--_Novum Organum_--as a sort of substitute for it: Induction unjustly opposed to the Syllogism.

In what, then, consists that wonderful excellence, that master-power which has made his name illustrious?
HIS FAME .-- I.

He labored earnestly to introduce, in the place of fanciful and conjectural systems--careful, patient investigation: the principle of the procurement of well-known facts, in order that, by severe induction, philosophy might attain to general laws, and to a classification of the sciences.