He overrated his own appliances to bring it under his command.

He had not that incommunicable genius and instinct of the investigator which in such men as Faraday close hand to hand with phenomena.

His weapons and instruments wanted precision; they were powerful up to a certain point, but they had the clumsiness of an unpractised time.

Cowley compared him to Moses on Pisgah surveying the promised land; it was but a distant survey, and Newton was the Joshua who began to take possession of it.
The idea of the great enterprise, in its essential outline, and with a full sense of its originality and importance, was early formed, and was even sketched on paper with Bacon's characteristic self-reliance when he was but twenty-five.

Looking back, in a letter written in the last year of his life, on the ardour and constancy with which he had clung to his faith--"in that purpose my mind never waxed old; in that long interval of time it never cooled"-- he remarks that it was then "forty years since he put together a youthful essay on these matters, which with vast confidence I called by the high-sounding title, The Greatest Birth of Time." "The Greatest Birth of Time," whatever it was, has perished, though the name, altered to "Partus Temporis _Masculus_" has survived, attached to some fragments of uncertain date and arrangement.