1620).] The end of the sciences is their usefulness to the human race.

To increase knowledge is to extend the dominion of man over nature, and so to increase his comfort and happiness, so far as these depend on external circumstances.

To Plato or Seneca, or to a Christian dreaming of the City of God, this doctrine would seem material and trivial; and its announcement was revolutionary: for it implied that happiness on earth was an end to be pursued for its own sake, and to be secured by co-operation for mankind at large.

This idea is an axiom which any general doctrine of Progress must presuppose; and it forms Bacon's great contribution to the group of ideas which rendered possible the subsequent rise of that doctrine.
Finally, we must remember that by Bacon, as by most of his Elizabethan contemporaries, the doctrine of an active intervening Providence, the Providence of Augustine, was taken as a matter of course, and governed more or less their conceptions of the history of civilisation.

But, I think, we may say that Bacon, while he formally acknowledged it, did not press it or emphasise it.