The want of success, which attended his first efforts to gain official recognition, caused Bacon to decide, once and for all, upon his choice of a career. His path lay either in the way of politics, which meant preferment, power, and wealth; or science, philosophy, and the development of the arts and inventions that tend to civilise the life of man. No work seemed to him so meritorious as the latter, and for this he considered himself best adapted. “Whereas, I believe myself born for the service of mankind,” he declared, in 1603, in the preface to _The Interpretation of Nature_; and in a letter to Lord Treasurer Burghley, “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” Again, “I found in my own nature a special adaptation for the contemplation of truth.... Imposture in every shape I utterly detested.” But, as he proceeds to explain, “my birth, my rearing, and education,” pointed not towards philosophy, but towards “politics;” love of truth and detestation of imposture was in his heart, but “the power to feign if there be no remedy” was there engraved also; the practical value of the “mixture of falsehood” was in his blood. And the want of money influenced him in forming his decision. In 1621, when his public career came to its disgraceful close, he declared that his greatest sin had been his desertion of philosophy and his having allowed himself to be diverted into politics. “Besides my innumerable sins,” he cries out in his confession to the “Searcher of Souls,” “I confess before Thee that I am debtor to Thee for the gracious talent of Thy gifts and graces, which I have neither put into a napkin, nor put it as I ought to exchangers, where it might have made most profit; but misspent it in things for which I was least fit, so that I may truly say, my soul has been a stranger in the course of my pilgrimage.” At the beginning of his history, Bacon pleads his birth, his rearing and education as excuses for his choice of a career, and at its close, in _De Augmentis_, he throws the blame on “destiny” for carrying him into a political vortex. Dr. Abbott sums up his life-story in a phrase--_multum incola_; with it his public career began and ended. _Bacon, the Friend of Essex and Cecil._