is content with a loose and superficial treatment of them.  Bacon certainly was not a metaphysician, nor an exact and lucid reasoner.  With wonderful flashes of sure intuition or happy anticipation, his mind was deficient in the powers which deal with the deeper problems of thought, just as it was deficient in the mathematical faculty.  The subtlety, the intuition, the penetration, the severe precision, even the force of imagination, which make a man a great thinker on any abstract subject were not his; the interest of questions which had interested metaphysicians had no interest for him:  he distrusted and undervalued them.  When he touches the “ultimities” of knowledge he is as obscure and hard to be understood as any of those restless Southern Italians of his own age, who shared with him the ambition of reconstructing science.  Certainly the science which most interested Bacon, the science which he found, as he thought, in so desperate a condition, and to which he gave so great an impulse, was physical science.  But physical science may be looked at and pursued in different ways, in different tempers, with different objects.  It may be followed in the spirit of Newton, of Boyle, of Herschel, of Faraday; or with a confined and low horizon it may be dwarfed and shrivelled into a mean utilitarianism.  But Bacon’s horizon was not a narrow one.  He believed in God and immortality and the Christian creed and hope.  To him the restoration of the Reign of Man was a noble enterprise, because man was so great and belonged to so great an order of things, because the things which he was bid to search into with honesty and truthfulness were the works and laws of God, because it was so shameful and so miserable that from an ignorance which industry and good-sense could remedy, the tribes of mankind passed their days in self-imposed darkness and helplessness.  It was God’s appointment that men should go through this earthly stage of their being.  Each stage of man’s mysterious existence had to be dealt with, not according to his own fancies, but according to the conditions imposed on it; and it was one of man’s first duties to arrange for his stay on earth according to the real laws which he could find out if he only sought for them.  Doubtless it was one of Bacon’s highest hopes that from the growth of true knowledge would follow in surprising ways the relief of man’s estate; this, as an end, runs through all his yearning after a fuller and surer method of interpreting nature.  The desire to be a great benefactor, the spirit of sympathy and pity for mankind, reign through this portion of his work—­pity for confidence so greatly abused by the teachers of man, pity for ignorance which might be dispelled, pity for pain and misery which might be relieved.  In the quaint but beautiful picture of courtesy, kindness, and wisdom, which he imagines in the New Atlantis, the representative of true philosophy, the “Father of Solomon’s House,” is introduced as one who “had