Bacon’s philosophy is, to use an expression of his own, “the servant and interpreter of nature;” he cultivated it in the leisure left him by the assiduous study and practice of the law and by the willing duties of a courtier; it was rather the recreation than the business of his life; “my business,” said he, “found rest in my contemplations;” but his very recreations rendered him, according to Leibnitz, the father of experimental philosophy, and, according to all, the originator of all its results, of all later discoveries in chemistry and the arts, in short, of all modern science and its applications. Mr. Macaulay is of opinion that the two leading principles of his philosophy are _utility_ and _progress_; that the ethics of his inductive method are to do good, to do more and more good, to mankind. Lord Campbell believes that a most perfect body of ethics might be made out from the writings of Bacon. The origin of his philosophy was the conviction with which he was impressed of the insufficiency of that of the ancients, or rather of that of Aristotle, which reigned with almost undisputed sway throughout Europe. He reverenced antiquity for its great works, its great men; but not because of its ancientness; he deemed its decrees worthy of reverential consideration, but did not think they admitted of no appeal; he was not a bigot to antiquity or a contemner of modern times. He happily combated that undue and blind submission to the authority of ancient times for the mere reason that they are older than our own, alleging truly that “ANTIQUITAS SECULI JUVENTUS MUNDI, that our times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient, _ordine retrogrado_, by a computation backward from ourselves.”[32] Throwing off, then, all allegiance to antiquity, he appealed directly from Aristotle to nature, from reasoning to experiment. But let us invoke the testimony of an eminent philosopher, Sir John Herschel:—