"The mind is the man, and the knowledge is the mind. A man is but what he knoweth. The mind itself is but an accident to knowledge, for knowledge is a double of that which is. The truth of being and the truth of knowing is all one." Thus has Brian Vickers rendered, in his critical edition of the major English works in the Oxford Authors Series, Francis Bacon (1996), the words that Sir Francis Bacon wrote in one of his earliest works, the device "Of Tribute; Or, Giving That Which is Due" (written 1595; published 1734). From his own time to the present, there has been much debate over exactly what is due to Bacon. In his History of the Royal Society (1667) Thomas Sprat hailed him as the father of modern science; late-nineteenth-century scholars derided his work as derivative and amateurish. More recent research, however, has restored his place as...