Bacon | Page 8

confess that I have as vast contemplative ends as I have moderate civil
ends; for I have taken all knowledge to be my province; and if I could
purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous
disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind
experiments and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so
many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations,
grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries: the
best state of that province. This, whether it be curiosity or vain glory, or
nature, or (if one take it favourably) philanthropia, is so fixed in my
mind as it cannot be removed. And I do easily see, that place of any
reasonable countenance doth bring commandment of more wits than of
a man's own; which is the thing I greatly affect. And for your Lordship,
perhaps you shall not find more strength and less encounter in any
other. And if your Lordship shall find now, or at any time, that I do
seek or affect any place whereunto any that is nearer unto your
Lordship shall be concurrent, say then that I am a most dishonest man.
And if your Lordship will not carry me on, I will not do as Anaxagoras
did, who reduced himself with contemplation unto voluntary poverty,

but this I will do--I will sell the inheritance I have, and purchase some
lease of quick revenue, or some office of gain that shall be executed by
deputy, and so give over all care of service, and become some sorry
book-maker, or a true pioneer in that mine of truth which (he said) lay
so deep. This which I have writ unto your Lordship is rather thoughts
than words, being set down without all art, disguising, or reservation.
Wherein I have done honour both to your Lordship's wisdom, in
judging that that will be best believed of your Lordship which is truest,
and to your Lordship's good nature, in retaining nothing from you. And
even so I wish your Lordship all happiness, and to myself means and
occasions to be added to my faithful desire to do you service. From my
lodgings at Gray's Inn."
This letter to his unsympathetic and suspicious, but probably not
unfriendly relative, is the key to Bacon's plan of life; which, with
numberless changes of form, he followed to the end. That is, a
profession, steadily, seriously, and laboriously kept to, in order to
provide the means of living; and beyond that, as the ultimate and real
end of his life, the pursuit, in a way unattempted before, of all possible
human knowledge, and of the methods to improve it and make it sure
and fruitful. And so his life was carried out. On the one hand it was a
continual and pertinacious seeking after government employment,
which could give credit to his name and put money in his
pocket--attempts by general behaviour, by professional services when
the occasion offered, by putting his original and fertile pen at the
service of the government, to win confidence, and to overcome the
manifest indisposition of those in power to think that a man who
cherished the chimera of universal knowledge could be a useful public
servant. On the other hand, all the while, in the crises of his
disappointment or triumph, the one great subject lay next his heart,
filling him with fire and passion--how really to know, and to teach men
to know indeed, and to use their knowledge so as to command nature;
the great hope to be the reformer and restorer of knowledge in a more
wonderful sense than the world had yet seen in the reformation of
learning and religion, and in the spread of civilised order in the great
states of the Renaissance time. To this he gave his best and deepest
thoughts; for this he was for ever accumulating, and for ever

rearranging and reshaping those masses of observation and inquiry and
invention and mental criticism which were to come in as parts of the
great design which he had seen in the visions of his imagination, and of
which at last he was only able to leave noble fragments, incomplete
after numberless recastings. This was not indeed the only, but it was the
predominant and governing, interest of his life. Whether as solicitor for
Court favour or public office; whether drudging at the work of the law
or managing State prosecutions; whether writing an opportune
pamphlet against Spain or Father Parsons, or inventing a "device" for
his Inn or for Lord Essex to give amusement to Queen Elizabeth;
whether fulfilling his duties as member of Parliament or rising step by
step to the highest places in the Council Board and the State; whether
in the pride of success or under the amazement of unexpected