The idea of Progress is glaringly incongruous with his vision of the world.

If his programme of revolutionising secular learning had been accepted--it fell completely dead, and his work was forgotten for many ages,--he would have been the author of a progressive reform; but how many reformers have there been before and after Bacon on whose minds the idea of Progress never dawned?
[Footnote: Bacon quotes Seneca: See Opus Majus, i.pp.37, 55, 14.
Much has been made out of a well-known passage in his short Epistle de secretis operibus artis et naturae et de militate magiae, c.iv.

(ed.
Brewer, p.

533), in which he is said to PREDICT inventions which have been realised in the locomotives, steam navigation, and aeroplanes of modern times.

But Bacon predicts nothing.