essentially sceptics, and resigned subjects to the inevitable and the inexplicable; there was an irony, open or covert, in their philosophy, their terminology, their transcendental mysticism, which showed how little they believed that they really knew. The vast and mighty intellects of the schoolmen never came into a real grapple with the immensity of the facts of the natural or even of the moral world; within the world of abstract thought, the world of language, with its infinite growths and consequences, they have never had their match for keenness, for patience, for courage, for inexhaustible toil; but they were as much disconnected from the natural world, which was their stage of life, as if they had been disembodied spirits. The Renaissance brought with it not only the desire to know, but to know comprehensively and in all possible directions; it brought with it temptations to the awakened Italian genius, renewed, enlarged, refined, if not strengthened by its passage through the Middle Ages, to make thought deal with the real, and to understand the scene in which men were doing such strange and wonderful things; but Giordano Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, and their fellows, were not men capable of more than short flights, though they might be daring and eager ones. It required more thoroughness, more humble-minded industry, to match the magnitude of the task. And there have been men of universal minds and comprehensive knowledge since Bacon, Leibnitz, Goethe, Humboldt, men whose thoughts were at home everywhere, where there was something to be known. But even for them the world of knowledge has grown too large. We shall never again see an Aristotle or a Bacon, because the conditions of knowledge have altered. Bacon, like Aristotle, belonged to an age of adventure, which went to sea little knowing whither it went, and ill furnished with knowledge and instruments. He entered with a vast and vague scheme of discovery on these unknown seas and new worlds which to us are familiar, and daily traversed in every direction. This new world of knowledge has turned out in many ways very different from what Aristotle or Bacon supposed, and has been conquered by implements and weapons very different in precision and power from what they purposed to rely on. But the combination of patient and careful industry, with the courage and divination of genius, in doing what none had done before, makes it equally stupid and idle to impeach their greatness.