Further, there now came into play the manifold influence of Francis Bacon, whose case illustrates perhaps more fully than any other the difficulties, alike external and internal, in the way of right thinking. Taken as a whole, his work is on account of those difficulties divided against itself, insisting as he does alternately on a strict critical method and on the subjection of reason to the authority of revelation. He sounds a trumpet-call to a new and universal effort of free and circumspect intelligence; and on the instant he stipulates for the prerogative of Scripture. Though only one of many who assailed alike the methodic tyranny of Aristotelianism [95] and the methodless empiricism of the ordinary "scientific" thought of the past, he made his attack with a sustained and manifold force of insight and utterance which still entitles him to pre-eminence as the great critic of wrong methods and the herald of better. Yet he not only transgresses often his own principal precepts in his scientific reasoning; he falls below several of his contemporaries and predecessors in respect of his formal insistence on the final supremacy of theology over reason, alike in physics and in ethics. Where Hooker is ostensibly seeking to widen the field of rational judgment on the side of creed, Bacon, the very champion of mental emancipation in the abstract, declares the boundary to be fixed. Of those lapses from critical good faith, part of the explanation is to be found in the innate difficulty of vital innovation for all intelligences; part in the special pressures of the religious environment. On the latter head Bacon makes such frequent and emphatic protest that we are bound to infer on his part a personal experience in his own day of the religious hostility which long followed his memory. "Generally," he wrote of himself in one fragment, "he perceived in men of devout simplicity this opinion, that the secrets of nature were the secrets of God, and part of that glory whereinto the mind of man if it seek to press shall be oppressed;... and on the other side, in men of a devout policy he noted an inclination to have the people depend upon God the more when they are less acquainted with second causes, and to have no stirring in philosophy, lest it may lead to innovation in divinity or else should discover matter of further contradiction to divinity" [96]--a summary of the whole early history of the resistance to science. [97] In the works which he wrote at the height of his powers, especially in his masterpiece, the Novum Organum (1620), where he comes closest to the problems of exact inquiry, he specifies again and again both popular superstition and orthodox theology as hindrances to scientific research, commenting on "those who out of faith and veneration mix their philosophy with theology and traditions," [98] and declaring that of the drawbacks science had to contend with "the corruption of philosophy by superstition and