It is not only the depreciating opinion of a contemporary like Harvey, who was actually doing what Bacon was writing about.

It is not only that men who after the long history of modern science have won their place among its leaders, and are familiar by daily experience with the ways in which it works--a chemist like Liebig, a physiologist like Claude Bernard--say that they can find nothing to help them in Bacon's methods.

It is not only that a clear and exact critic like M.de Remusat looks at his attempt, with its success and failure, as characteristic of English, massive, practical good sense rather than as marked by real philosophical depth and refinement, such as Continental thinkers point to and are proud of in Descartes and Leibnitz.

It is not even that a competent master of the whole domain of knowledge, Whewell, filled with the deepest sense of all that the world owes to Bacon, takes for granted that "though Bacon's general maxims are sagacious and animating, his particular precepts failed in his hands, and are now practically useless;" and assuming that Bacon's method is not the right one, and not complete as far as the progress of science up to his time could direct it, proceeds to construct a _Novum Organum Renovatum_.

But Bacon's writings have recently undergone the closest examination by two editors, whose care for his memory is as loyal and affectionate as their capacity is undoubted, and their willingness to take trouble boundless.