ABSTRACT
Of the closeness of the connexion thus indicated, the career of Lord Bacon will serve to furnish an illustration. The services of that great genius to the cause of science were not due to any new insight into nature’s actual operations, but to the stimulating effect of his untiring curiosity, his largeness of conception and his boldness of
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speculation upon the thought of his own and of succeeding generations. But these high gifts of imagination, which are of the utmost value in the theoretical sphere, are apt to involve grave perils when they are exercised in human affairs, unless they are constantly restrained by an informing and a chastening sense of moral proportion; and the lack of this sense was the fatal defect alike of Bacon’s character and of his statesmanship. ‘His thoughts were constantly occupied,’ says Gardiner, ‘with the largest and most sweeping plans of r e f o r m . . . . The union with Scotland, the civilization of Ireland, the colonization of America, the improvement of the law . . . were only a few of the vast schemes upon which his mind loved to dwell. With such views as these, it was but natural that Bacon should fix his hopes upon the Sovereign and his Council rather than upon the House of C o m m o n s . . . . He had always before him the idea of the variety of cases in which the Government might be called on to act, and he allowed himself to believe that it would be better qualified to act rightly if it were not fettered by strict r u l e s . . . . He left out of his calculations . . . the inevitable tendencies to misgovernment which beset all bodies of men who are possessed of irresponsible power. The very largeness of his view led him to regard with complacency actions from which a smaller mind would have shrunk at once1.’ In the political atmosphere represented by this attitude of mind, Colbertism is a natural and almost an inevitable growth. Accordingly we find Bacon not only defending the royal prerogative of taxation, but giving as Chancellor the highest legal sanction to commercial and industrial monopoly, and taking a warm interest in the fantastic scheme, which we shall have later to consider, for forcing English manufactures on the unwilling foreigner.
