Bacon was born out of due time, and his contemporaries had little sympathy with his philosophy, and still less with his mechanical schemes and inventions.

From the days of the Greeks, no one had had so keen an appreciation of what experiment meant in the development of human knowledge, and he was obsessed with the idea, so commonplace to us, that knowledge should have its utility and its practical bearing.

"His chief merit is that he was one of the first to point the way to original research--as opposed to the acceptance of an authority--though he himself still lacked the means of pursuing this path consistently.

His inability to satisfy this impulse led to a sort of longing, which is expressed in the numerous passages in his works where he anticipates man's greater mastery over nature."(23) (23) Dannemann: Die Naturwissenschaften in ihrer Entwicklung und in ibrem Zusammenhange, Leipzig, 1910, Vol.

I, pp.