to the intellect of Bacon when he wrote this Aphorism.
-----------------

If such then are the consequences, such the tendencies of experimental
inquiries, when prosecuted as the criterion of truth, and daily
experience[15] unhappily shows that they are, there can be no other remedy
for this enormous evil than the intellectual philosophy of Plato. So
obviously excellent indeed is the tendency of this philosophy, that its
author, for a period of more than two thousand years, has been universally
celebrated by the epithet of divine. Such too is its preeminence, that it
may be shown, without much difficulty, that the greatest men of antiquity,
from the time in which its salutary light first blessed the human race,
have been more or less imbued with its sacred principles, have been more or
less the votaries of its divine truths. Thus, to mention a few from among a
countless multitude. In the catalogue of those endued with sovereign power,
it had for its votaries Dion of Siracusian, Julian the Roman, and Chosroes
the Persian, emperor; among the leaders of armies, it had Chabrias and
Phocion, those brave generals of the Athenians; among mathematicians, those
leading stars of science, Eudoxus, Archimedes[16] and Euclid; among
biographers, the inimitable Plutarch; among physicians, the admirable
Galen; among rhetoricians, those unrivaled orators Demosthenes and Cicero;
among critics, that prince of philologists, Longinus; and among poets, the
most learned and majestic Virgil. Instances, though not equally illustrious,
yet approximating to these in splendour, may doubtless be adduced after
the fall of the Roman empire; but then they have been formed on these
great ancients as models, and are, consequently, only rivulets from
Platonic streams. And instances of excellence in philosophic attainments,
similar to those among the Greeks, might have been enumerated among the
moderns, if the hand of barbaric despotism had not compelled philosophy
to retire into the deepest solitude, by demolishing her schools, and