does not consist in his contribution to the content of philosophy or to his successful formulation of the scientific method. Wherein then lies the value of Bacon’s work as a philosopher?[10] Bacon was the first in England to collect the fruits of the Renaissance and give them a secular character. Taking them out of the hands of the theologian, he, a lawyer, “gave them a legal existence by the most eloquent plea that has ever been made for them.” It was a time when philosophy and science were passing out of the hands of the theologian; and Bacon, feeling that science, including philosophy, should be secularized, drew a sharp line between the work of science and that of theology. Out of his great contempt for antiquity, Bacon voiced for England the contemporary reaction against the old scholastic methods. _He set up the ideal_ and gave directions for following it. He issued the call to go from abstractions back to things. A man of worldly wisdom and pungency, his nature was buoyant in its belief in the coming age. He had confidence amounting to an optimism that final principles would be found to explain all the particulars of the “new world.” He was a prophet who outlined his prophecy. He felt that not only nature but all the activities of man would be reduced to some simple principles. He shared and expressed the confidence of his time that wonderful things were to be revealed; that nothing is impossible to man, provided man hits upon the right key to nature’s secrets. Just as every age, that feels itself upon the threshold of a new epoch, writes Utopias,[11] so Bacon wrote the _New Atlantis_, the Utopian fragment, for his age. This is the literary expression of his optimism about the future of a distinctively secular science. The world of the _New Atlantis_ is the world of new machines. Bacon’s most ambitious scientific contribution to the same end is his _Instauratio Magna_. Of this only two parts were completed: _De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum_ and _Novum Organum_. Bacon is best known in philosophy by the second part, which was thus named to contrast it with the “old” _Organum_ of Aristotle.