Whatever may have been his sins, and they were many, he cannot have been the "meanest of mankind," who lived and died, holding unaltered, amid temptations and falls, so noble a conception of the use and calling of his life: the duty and service of helping his brethren to know as they had never yet learned to know.

That thought never left him; the obligations it imposed were never forgotten in the crush and heat of business; the toils, thankless at the time, which it heaped upon him in addition to the burdens of public life were never refused.

Nothing diverted him, nothing made him despair.

He was not discouraged because he was not understood.
There never was any one in whose life the "_Souverainete du but_" was more certain and more apparent; and that object was the second greatest that man can have.

To teach men to know is only next to making them good.
The Baconian philosophy, the reforms of the _Novum Organum_, the method of experiment and induction, are commonplaces, and sometimes lead to a misconception of what Bacon did.