Lord Bacon was undoubtedly a great man, indeed one of the greatest that have adorned this or any other country. He was a man of a clear and active spirit, of a most fertile genius, of vast designs, of general knowledge, and of profound wisdom. He united the powers of imagination and understanding in a greater degree than almost any other writer. He was one of the most remarkable instances of those men, who, by the rare privilege of their nature, are at once poets and philosophers, and see equally in both worlds—the individual and sensible, and the abstracted and intelligible forms of things. The Schoolmen and their followers attended to nothing but names, to essences and species, to laboured analyses and artificial deductions. They seem to have alike disregarded all kinds of experience, whether relating to external objects, or to the observation of our own internal feelings. From the imperfect state of knowledge, they had not a sufficient number of facts to guide them in their experimental researches; and intoxicated with the novelty of their vain distinctions, learnt by rote, they were tempted to despise the clearest and most obvious suggestions of their own minds. Subtle, restless, and self-sufficient, they thought that truth was only made to be disputed about, and existed no where but in their demonstrations and syllogisms. Hence arose their ‘logomachies’—their everlasting word-fights, their sharp debates, their captious, bootless controversies. As Lord Bacon expresses it, ‘they were made fierce with dark keeping,’ signifying that their angry and unintelligible contests with one another were owing to their not having any distinct objects to engage their attention. They built altogether on their own whims and fancies; and, buoyed up by their specific levity, they mounted in their airy disputations in endless flights and circles, clamouring like birds of prey, till they equally lost sight of truth and nature. This great man, therefore, intended an essential service to philosophy, in wishing to recall the attention to facts and experience which had been almost entirely neglected; and thus, by incorporating the abstract with the concrete, and general reasoning with individual observation, to give to our conclusions that solidity and firmness which they must otherwise always want. He did nothing but insist on the necessity of experience, more particularly in natural science; and from the wider field that is open to it there, as well as the prodigious success it has met with, this latter application of the word, in which it is tantamount to physical experiment, has so far engrossed the whole of our attention, that mind has, for a good while past, been in some danger of being overlaid by matter. We run from one error into another, and as we were wrong at first, so in altering our course, we have passed into the opposite extreme. We despised experience altogether before: now we would have nothing but experience, and that of the grossest kind.