you should ask what are my thoughts on this head, I shall answer you in
the words which I heard the Lord Bolingbroke use on another occasion.
Several gentlemen were speaking, in his company, of the avarice with
which the late Duke of Marlborough had been charged, some examples
whereof being given, the Lord Bolingbroke was appealed to (who, having
been in the opposite party, might perhaps, without the imputation of
indecency, have been allowed to clear up that matter): "He was so great a
man," replied his lordship, "that I have forgot his vices."

I shall therefore confine myself to those things which so justly gained
Lord Bacon the esteem of all Europe.

The most singular and the best of all his pieces is that which, at this
time, is the most useless and the least read, I mean his _Novum
Scientiarum Organum_. This is the scaffold with which the new philosophy
was raised; and when the edifice was built, part of it at least, the
scaffold was no longer of service.

The Lord Bacon was not yet acquainted with Nature, but then he knew, and
pointed out, the several paths that lead to it. He had despised in his
younger years the thing called philosophy in the Universities, and did
all that lay in his power to prevent those societies of men instituted to
improve human reason from depraving it by their quiddities, their horrors
of the vacuum, their substantial forms, and all those impertinent terms
which not only ignorance had rendered venerable, but which had been made
sacred by their being ridiculously blended with religion.

He is the father of experimental philosophy. It must, indeed, be
confessed that very surprising secrets had been found out before his
time--the sea-compass, printing, engraving on copper plates,