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The Fortune of Francis Bacon determined that he should be born on the twenty-second of January 1560/1, at York House in the Strand. It laid him in a cradle among the rulers of kingdoms; the names of empires were to be his daily business, but it interfused with them another and invisible empire which was to belong to his holidays and his nights, the empire of man over nature. His Fortune prepared in him an energy which has protracted itself through three centuries, saluted and studied by such men as Descartes and Leibniz, and (in another kind) Voltaire; an energy which, by the scope of its vision and the vital lucidity of its speech, was to make even his enemies his debtors. There was in his lifetime but one other power of equal and superior greatness; in the year of Francis’s birth John Shakespeare was chosen to serve Stratford as a chamberlain, while Nicholas Bacon held the Great Seal of England. Men have been so astonished at the separate glories of the two children that they have refused to believe that the richness of God could put them in the world together. Yet the one is in a sense the measure of the other. The mortal greatness of Francis lacked but one thing—he was not Shakespeare; his judgment lacked but one intelligence—he would not have supposed the subordination was on his side.

His Fortune gave him energy and lucidity, but also a body troubled by ill-health. It set his cradle close by the Throne, but on the left side. There had been but recently another cradle on the right, in which the slightly deformed body of his cousin, Robert Cecil, had lain. Offices and powers loomed below the Throne and over the cradles that stood, for the future as for the present, so near the purple. Francis’s father was Lord Keeper; his grandfather had been governor to royalty; his uncle was Secretary and presently to be Treasurer. The two cousins might look forward to succeeding to such offices, or (if they preferred) to accepting convenient titles, large estates, and enormous houses, now being built for them, such as Burleigh House or Theobalds. Gorhambury was begun two years after Francis’s birth. His Fortune seemed to promise him everything he could want at the cost of a little industry. In fact, for all his unceasing industry, it kept him waiting for nearly fifty years for what he did want, providing him with unsatisfactory substitutes meanwhile, and having at last given it, immediately took it back again.

He emerged from his cradle into the world, a distracted and dangerous world, about which the rumours and uncertainties of a new reign ran thickly, through London, and to and from the ports, and overseas to other centres—The Hague, Paris, Madrid, Rome. He beheld the gardens of York House, and Whitehall away on one side; on the other, towards Saint Paul’s, among similar palaces, Essex House, where his elder brother Anthony was to sit, thirty-five years later, writing and dictating letters to those other centres of diplomacy. He grew vividly aware of his brother, dutifully aware of his mother and his father, of great personages; among them, greatest of all, of the Queen. She was thirty-seven when he was born; one day, by his deceitful Fortune, he was led to her feet, and presented. She asked him how old he was. “I am three years younger than your Majesty’s happy reign,” he said, and maintained the same tactful “gravity and maturity” during his further youthful intercourse with her whenever she teased him with questions, so that she laughed and was pleased and called him “her young Lord Keeper.” In Saint James’s Fields, years afterwards, he knew of an echo; biography almost demands that he shall be supposed to have found it then, and that fancy shall invent and observe the young Lord Keeper listening to the echo in the Fields, as a mere convenient prophecy of his future as “privy councillor to King James and to Nature.” “Probable conjectures,” the Essays remark, “many times turn themselves into prophecies”; but any one who attended to the Essays could never write modern biography; let us pretend it happened. Add that there was, then or later, a conjurer, and all that was ever exposed of the Lord St. Alban’s childhood is known.

The household in which the small Francis walked was industrious and serious, concerned with statecraft and religion. He inherited both, with a difference. His father, Nicholas Bacon, after the death of his first wife, had married again, as wives and husbands so often did then; hardly any period of history is fuller of those second marriages which contributed to the making of estates and the enriching of the Families. Sir Nicholas chose a lady as distinguished in her way as he in his, who became the mother of two sons—Anthony and Francis. She was Anne Cooke, the daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, governor of Edward VI, the prince to whom Sir John Cheke, the brother of William Cecil’s first wife, had taught Greek. Anne Cooke had herself been a tutor to the young Majesty. Her sister Mildred, William Cecil’s second wife, was reported to be one of the two most learned women in England; the other was Lady Jane Grey. And as that group of Bacons, Cecils, and Cookes, with its connections, belonged to the learned among the learned, so they belonged also to the reformers among the Reformers, and to the rich among the rich. Nothing quite like it has been seen since among the governors of England: Gladstone, pious, well-read, well-to-do, is, of all people, the nearest example, and Gladstone had no brother-in-law or successor of his own rank.

Sir Nicholas himself was a political lawyer. He had been the son of the sheep-steward at the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds; he had received grants of monastic lands, had become one of the official class, had been used by Henry, Edward, and Mary, and on the accession of Elizabeth had been given the Seal by his brother-in-law Cecil. He often served Cecil in the office of an unofficial opposition. There was certainly no marked difference in their views, but sometimes their judgments differed, or it was thought convenient they should differ, and the brothers-in-law could afford a luxury which had its use in State affairs. He was one of the great men of the growing Civil Service; he had drawn out a scheme by which some of the monastic revenues were to be spent on building a college for the sons of gentlemen where they could be trained for officialdom, some for foreign, some for home service. His father had been steward of the Abbey sheep; Sir Nicholas enlarged and exalted in civil affairs a similar capacity. He was not alone. Pastors of all kinds were thronging or anxious to throng to England; the hungry sheep were to be offered the most diverse food, and (but for the civil government) would have been considerably overfed. Mary’s stoled priests were in possession, and in Flanders a Nuncio from the Roman Shepherd lingered. There was talk of the Council of Trent; there was even a hinting at the removal of Elizabeth’s bastardy. Unfortunately, before it could be removed, it would have to be implicitly admitted. The Queen’s Majesty was not forward to admit her illegitimacy. At a Council held at Greenwich in May, while Francis still looked infantilely at the world, it was decided by his father, Cecil, and others, not to admit the Nuncio. But besides the stoles of those shepherds were the black gowns of others. The Marian exiles flocked back from Geneva, anxious to rebuild their fold. The Queen’s Majesty had no liking for Geneva in her heart. Cecil and Sir Nicholas shepherded the pastors as far as they could—slightly Genevawards, and the mysterious religious emotion of the Queen assisted to preserve the mystical spiritual integrity of the Church of England.

But the official pastorate of Nicholas is a less vivid thing to us than the personal passion of Lady Bacon, who recalls an earlier mother of greatness—St. Monica. Over the all-but-fatalistic doctrine which was part of Augustine’s contribution to Christian theology broods the all-but-fatalistic figure of the African matron whom her husband (setting an example to all English gentlemen) never struck, from whom her son was compelled to escape by deceit and stealth, who separated him from his paramour of ten years’ love and their child, who proposed for him Christian marriage and the Catholic Church, and, rationalized into something as near predestination as orthodoxy will allow, still terrifies the metaphysics of the Church; which seems to be saved from her influence only by the still earlier mother in whom the humanity as well as the piety of Christendom has taken refuge, the silent maid of meditation who is the mother of the Divine Word.^[1] But Anne Bacon found neither silence nor supremacy. She had always been religious; she was very much in her place in that group of governors. She was the kind of woman who could translate from its original Latin Bishop Jewel’s Apology for the Church of England. And she did. But it was in her later years that religion became her realized passion, and it is by her later years that we know her best. She appears, from a letter of hers to Cecil, to have undergone some sort of emotional change in 1577 or 1578, when Francis was about seventeen, and near the time when her husband died. She speaks in that letter of having “found mercy,” adding a pious acknowledgment of the fact that she has profited more by the opening of Scriptures in ordinary preaching during the last seven or eight years than for well-nigh twenty years in “odd sermons” at Paul’s. Her grief was for her two sons, Anthony and Francis; not having Monica’s genius, she had to content herself with lament and vain hope.

Modern biography suspects her of being the unknowing cause of her son’s preference of atheism to superstition. “I trust they will not mum or mask or sinfully revel,” she wrote of the Gray’s Inn Christmas festivities. She was difficult with her household; a servant of Anthony’s wrote to him that “nobody can please her long together,” and again pathetically, “She made me to buy starch and soap to wash my linen withal: more than was wont to be: yet I care not so she would be quiet.” It was probably what Anthony and Francis also wished. She complained of Anthony’s vain-glory in buying horses. She objected to his lending his coach. She regretted the lack of Christian behaviour in Francis’s cook. She was troubled by their personal habits. Anthony spent too much on coal when he was living at Essex House, and Francis at Gray’s Inn sat up too late and then, when he did go to bed, lay musing on she knew not what (she was quite right) when he ought to have been asleep, and so got up late, “whereby his men are made slothful and himself continueth sickly.” But for all her flurries and commands and entreaties and efforts after compulsion, she could not rule them. Anthony, angered by her treatment of his servant, once wrote: “However your Ladyship doth pretend and allege for reason your motherly affection towards us in that which concerneth Lawson; yet any man of judgment and indifferency must needs take it for a mere passion, springing either from presumption, that your ladyship can only judge and see that in the man, which never any man yet hath seen; or from a sovereign desire to over-rule your sons in all things, how little soever you may understand either the ground or the circumstances of their proceedings.”

From his mother and his father, Francis went up in 1573 with his elder brother Anthony to Trinity College, Cambridge. It was two years since another young student had left that College; Edward Coke, the son of an old Norfolk family, was by now reading law in Clifford’s Inn. A long antagonism awaited its beginning. At Cambridge again Francis’s life is hidden. He was ill; he had his windows glazed and his stockings dyed, shoes were bought for him, and a bow and arrows, silk points, and a dozen new buttons; a desk was put up in his study. That is all, except for one thing—he disliked the philosophy of Aristotle; in fact, he fell in love.

It may have been slow or sudden, but when he was in London ten years afterwards he was engaged on the first work done for the sake of that love, and the dislike of Aristotle had, it seems, that same love for its cause. At a distance in time and person, many years afterwards, from the pen of his chaplain, we have his account: “Whilst he was commorant in the University, about sixteen years of age (as his lordship hath been pleased to impart unto myself), he first fell into the dislike of the philosophy of Aristotle; not for the worthlessness of the author, to whom he would ever ascribe all high attributes, but for the unfruitfulness of the way; being a philosophy (as his lordship used to say) only strong for disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life of man; in which mind he continued to his dying day.”

Aristotle was still the master of those who thought. But Aristotle’s own concern with existence had been turned through the centuries into a concern with Aristotle’s method of thinking about existence, and even there the stress had been all on one side. As in religion texts had been used to prove opinions, so in natural science had facts; as in religion texts, so in natural science facts, had been taken almost at random, certainly without examination, classification, or relation. An observed fact or a reported fable held almost the same worth; for in argument they had the same worth; each supplied a premise, and it was the premise that mattered. Induction, or the drawing of general principles from particular instances, provided the material for the far more important business of deduction, or the application of general propositions to particular instances. The world, and all the innumerable things and relations of things that make up the world, were taken anyhow in order that the necessary general propositions could be furnished to theorists, philosophers, or theologians. They were all food for the syllogism, sacks of manure on the mind in which the necessary crop of conclusions could be grown. But Francis Bacon objected to the world being used as manure.

It is impossible not to believe that he had seen the method in use in York House. No doubt religion was “rather different”; in our modern phrase, it was not his subject. But the clash and challenge of text and text without examination of the context or consideration of the verbal intention had been going on, now this way, now that, for decades of years. Preconceived opinion, predetermined judgment, would seize phrases from Isaiah or Kings or St. Paul to prove what nothing would be allowed to disprove. The long examinations of heretics, under Mary or Elizabeth, meant only that in the end; in the end, therefore, both Majesties or their governments were driven back on offering their prisoners the choice between changing their preconceived opinions or being put to death, that being, as all mankind knows, the only certain way of dealing with a preconceived opinion. Bacon was never anxious to put people to death unless their preconceived opinions were in danger of overthrowing civil quiet. Later he observed the universal peril—“Men create oppositions which are not, and put them into new terms, so fixed as, whereas the meaning ought to govern the term, the term in effect governeth the meaning.” That was his note in the Essays, but in a paper on the controversies of the Church, while Lady Bacon from Gorhambury was unloading her heart, he let a similar warning sound: “The disease requireth rather rest than any other cure”; “if we did but know the virtues of silence and slowness to speech”—O mother! mother!—“a character of love more proper ... than that of zeal,” “peace, silence, and surceance.”

But, though he observed it, dogmatic theology was not his metier. At Cambridge, however, he found the same thing. At York House they did not ask what a text meant; it meant what their general principles needed it to mean. At Cambridge they did not ask what the facts were; the facts were what were convenient for their general principles. Slowly or suddenly, he became aware of his business, but his business was not a mere contradiction of existing methods. He did not concentrate for fifty years on a hatred of degenerate Aristotelianisms. He had fallen in love, not (as do most young lovers) with the universe concentrated and manifested in a particular person, but with the universe in itself. A romantic passion filled him, no less romantic (as in other modes of love) for its realism: the particularities of space and time were to him as the particularities in which the universal form expresses itself to many by means of the form of the beloved. “Light-bearing experiments” were his method of wooing, and the light that disseminates itself for mortal lovers from the shape of their ladies was for him perceptible in the thoroughfares of the nature of the world. Emotional and intellectual at once, this thing that was as vivid as a person was as exact as a formula. Such mortal revelations remain, even in less great minds, as a centre of union; so, a man may suddenly and in a moment understand that space and time are one thing diversely manifested, or that eternity is a unique state and not a process of everlastingness. For most of us such flashes remain as a memory or a doctrine; our emotions and our minds live separate lives, and our spirits cannot or dare not follow the unity that is revealed. Francis Bacon’s could and did; he fell in love and to the end of his life he remained passionately in love. He blamed himself sometimes for infidelity, but in fact his faithfulness continually filled and drove him, for he loved necessity.

The thing possessed him. The thing that was—fact—as distinct from words; the thing that was to be—knowledge—as distinct from fables; the thing that was to say it—truth—as distinct from argument. Man was still lost in subtle discussions, incurious, unlearned, accepting inaccuracy, rich only with insubstantial words. Words must be made substantial with truth; truth must be discovered by inquiry and observation, by rejection and selection. But to achieve that meant in fact nothing less than the entire reorganization of human thought. It seemed then that Francis Bacon must begin to reorganize human thought, must institute a great instauration of science. Back to observed fact, to right induction, to the world! Man must gain knowledge, discover the true causes of things, extend human empire; he must have certainty, not opinion; he must rely on infinite experiment, infinite study, out of which certainty would arise. The method had not been used; it had not even been tried; nay, it had not been so much as shaped for trial. It was utterly without precedent. But it could be shaped, tried, used. He could proclaim it to men. The “delicate, lively, hazel eyes” (“viper eyes,” Harvey called them, but Harvey did not love him), saw all possibilities open to the world of men; there lay before them the universe of things, and its thoroughfares were already filled with “God’s first creature, which is light.” A ray of that light fell upon the road before him and his business on the road. He was to cry to mankind till they too saw it and ran to work and experiment and understand, and the vision should lie, palpable fact, before future ages. In such a moment a man understands his primal duty, and feels it already completed. Unrealized perfection exists within him; his business is to preserve and define it.

York House, it may reasonably be presumed, would have displayed no intense feeling for the Great Instauration. The instauration of the Queen’s safety and success was his father’s business; the instauration of Christ’s kingdom on earth his mother’s. Francis read law, and acceded to Sir Nicholas’s intention of sending him to the Embassy at Paris. The proclamation of man’s chief moral duty on earth must be made, but it must be made with authority. The more notable the place from which it was made the wider and more effective would be the call to mankind. Great men must be brought to take an interest, scholars and students. He was offered the beginnings of a career; he accepted them. When in 1576 he went over to join Sir Amyas Paulet—another devout Evangelical—in Paris, he stood at the opening of affairs, and though on several occasions he was tempted to desert them he never did, till he was thrown out with violence. The reasons whereto (as he might have said), besides the Great Instauration, were four: first, he held it to be the duty of a man to serve the commonwealth; second, he thought himself peculiarly fitted to do so; third, it was to his immediate personal interest to do so; lastly, it was impossible for his imagination contentedly to withdraw from the public activities of men. Many poets and other creative minds do tend to occupy themselves so; they cannot be content in retirement. To retire from the world is to lose some part of their natures. It was not by accident that Dante was a politician, or Chaucer a civil servant, or Shakespeare a successful business man, or Milton Latin Secretary. They feel a summons not only to place but to great place; they desire to be among the chiefs. So very often does the youngest clerk. But with those makers the demand is more passionate, for men are part of that great whole of Nature which is the stuff of their peculiar work. They see things as a unity; to reject a part of that unity is to deny its true nature, therefore they desire to be involved in that nature. “Why did he not retire?” asked Macaulay. For the same reason that Macaulay’s essays are less deep than his; because the earlier mind had a profounder and wider scope. It would be easy for us to retire from the administration of government to work at the Great Instauration; that is one reason why we could not have imagined the Instauration.

At Paris, or rather at Pont-Charenton, he found another echo. “I did hear it return the voice thirteen several times: and I have heard of others, that it would return sixteen times: for I was there about three of the clock in the afternoon; and it is best (as all other echoes are) in the evening.... I remember well, that when I went to the echo at Pont-Charenton, there was an old Parisian who took it to be the work of spirits, and of good spirits. For (said he) call Satan, and the echo will not deliver back the devil’s name; but will say va-t’en; which is as much in French as apage or avoid. And thereby I did hap to find that an echo would not return ‘S,’ being but a hissing and an interior sound.”

It is the first example of the new method in contact with the old, directly and indirectly. Long afterwards Francis was to write in the Novum Organum of the leaping directly from the evidence of the senses to the most general principles instead of proceeding through middle axioms. The evidence of the senses was that the echo said “va-t’en” in reply to “Satan.” The old method leapt directly to the principle of divine intervention, which is one of the most general principles possible. The new method, as eventually defined, would gather particulars of all echoes—St. James’s Fields, Pont-Charenton, and the rest—and discover by careful comparison what echoes actually did do; that in fact, no echo ever said “S.” In which case, it would be less probable that Divinity disliked the letter “S” than that the nature of an echo forbade the reproduction of sibilants. But indirectly also the thing ratifies a distinction. All the world around him was crying out “Satan” and hearing the answer of the Holy Spirit, “va-t’en”; only—or almost only—Francis conceived that the reply might be due to an incapacity for a particular interior sound; that, in short, the Holy Spirit could not hiss.

He did not succeed in finding an immediate explanation of another curious fact. He was troubled with one of the distresses of adolescence. “I had, from my childhood, a wart upon one of my fingers: afterwards, when I was about sixteen years old, being then at Paris, there grew upon both my hands a number of warts (at the least an hundred) in a month’s space. The English ambassador’s lady, who was a woman far from superstition, told me one day, she would help me away with my warts: whereupon she got a piece of lard, with the skin on, and rubbed the warts all over with the fat sides; and amongst the rest, that wart which I had had from my childhood: then she nailed the piece of lard, with the fat towards the sun, upon a post of her chamber window, which was to the south. The success was, that within five weeks’ space all the warts went quite away: and that wart which I had so long endured, for company.”

Between actual echoes and diplomatic rumours, warts on the hands and plots in the mind, conversations with studious Frenchmen and inventions of convenient ciphers, two years wore away, and the winter of 1578 was drawing to its close. One night in February he dreamed. He saw Gorhambury, the house that his father had built, plastered all over with black mortar. He might have been dreaming of the house of his own life, prophesied in his visionary mind of power, so covered with black. For the first separation between him and his end had begun; unexpectedly, without his realization, the universe had intervened between him and his desire. His father had died suddenly. Francis, by that swift accident of an open window and a great thaw after heavy snow, was left without expected provision. Sir Nicholas had meant to purchase an estate for him as he had done for his other sons; but now there was no estate and not very much money. He would have to work. In March he returned to England, bearing letters of commendation from Sir Amyas to the Queen; and set himself deliberately to study law.

It was not, however, in law that he put his trust. On the other, the more important, side of the Throne, to which his eyes were turned, stood his uncle. It seemed to Francis that nothing could be simpler than for the Lord Treasurer, who, as everybody knew, had the Queen’s ear, to recommend his nephew to the Queen and find him some post under Government. He applied to him, writing youthful, solemn, respectful letters. He was to go on applying to him for a year, three ... seven ... ten years. The Lord Treasurer continued to treasure his own council, and to lay up his powers for the use of the baby who had lain in the cradle to the right of the Throne.

[1] What would have happened to Christendom if her husband had ventured to beat Monica, as other African husbands beat their wives? to Luther, Calvin, Trent, and the doctrine of grace?