Now it is important to observe in passing that this rich harvest of fruit is primarily due to the genius of Bacon, who was himself not a specialist. In his day, scientific specialists were still in the main alchemists, astrologers, or magicians, who could no more see a scientific relation in its simple truth and nakedness, and except through such a multicoloured play of phantasms as has never been known in the world before or since - the influence of stars, mystic numbers, figures, and symbols, of cycles and epicycles, of scholastic theology, final causes, and especially the syllogism of Aristotle - than the courtiers in Hans Andersen's tale could see the real nakedness of the emperor, owing to the illusory clothes which their imaginations had woven for him. It was Bacon who transfixed and chased away these phantoms of the night, as the morning sun its vapours, and by sweeping the garrets of the mind of all this mediaeval rubbish, and separating definitely the kingdom of Science from that of Theology and Metaphysics, released science once for all from its chains.

It is part of the foppery of too many of the younger generation of physical scientists to dismiss the work of Bacon with a wave of the hand, on the ground that from the beginning of time men who wanted to find out anything must have proceeded by the Baconian method of observation, experiment, and induction. Quite true; but by this method only so far, be it observed, as it was directed by some ghostly demonistic will or theologico-metaphysical preconception as its guiding spirit. And there is no reason why, but for Bacon, the mere scientific specialist, as such, should not have gone on working under the dominion of these and other the like illusions to this hour. For although the work done by scientific specialists as a body is of the utmost importance to mankind, there is no reason for thinking that the individual specialists themselves, any more than the pyramid builders, are possessed of an order of mind that would safeguard them from the general illusions current in their time. On the contrary, given patience, minuteness, accuracy, and fidelity (and making exception of the great constructive minds in each department, who map out new provinces, and point to the methods and processes by which their problems are to be approached and solved), in the minute specialist of the German type, the narrower and more pin-pointed the mind of the observer, the better is he fitted to sift and disintegrate the material placed before him.

In an atmosphere of minute specialism like this, indeed, the spacious intellect of Bacon, knowing all measures, would have suffocated, as it did among the waste subtleties and the attenuated logic-chopping of the schoolmen. To imagine, therefore, that he who cleared the intellectual heaven for men, and freed scientific specialism from the overarching dome of illusions under which it was working; that he who like another Moses, as Macaulay has said, pointed the way to the Promised Land, which he, himself, was not to enter, and to the discovery of those far-reaching generalisations under which it now marches so triumphantly; to imagine, I say, that the great Bacon, who was not only the supreme legislator, but the supreme guide and inspirer of all this, is to be challenged on to the public stage to give proof and exhibition of himself, as if he were a mere swordsman, and that, too, by his own rank and file, is as if Buonaparte after his fall should have been challenged to a personal encounter by the privates of his bodyguard whom he had himself led to victory, and is to lose all sense of proportion and even of decency.

We now come to our second class of specialisms, namely, those that deal with Organic Nature - plants, animals, and men - and which are at present organised under the different departments of Biology and of Medicine. Of them, too, we may say that they are all good and fruitful throughout, and that they can hardly be too minutely subdivided for purposes of research. For like the physical sciences, they also work under the inspiration and sovereignty of great over-arching laws - the general Law of Evolution, to wit, with its more specialised form of 'natural selection,' and the laws of the human body as a whole. Into this general menstruum all the specialist workers are baptised and indoctrinated before they set out, and by means of it each specialty is kept in touch with all the rest, so that any new discovery in one department is quickly passed on until it becomes equally diffused among them all; and with this result, that more solid work is now done in a decade than was done in a century, before Bacon released all these specialisms alike from the fetters of theological, metaphysical, and scholastic tyranny.

But they differ from the physical sciences in this, that dealing as they do with living things (and no living thing is as yet completely explained by any single general law or combination of laws), their results cannot be handed over to the public as absolute truths for its guidance, in the same way as the results of the physical sciences can. The most that can be said is, that they are the most reliable yet known. For it is to be observed that although evolution is an absolutely true fact of all life, the particular law of evolution, under which the Biological Sciences are now working, namely the law of Natural Selection, is not, in my judgment, the final and entire truth. I have read most of the works written on the subject during the last thirty years, have ransacked the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, and inspected its record of missing links, have attended year after year the Swiney and other lectures bearing on the subject, by the most eminent of the specialists; and yet whenever I go to the Zoological Gardens, 1 come away with the feeling that, except in certain broad generalities which have become the common-places of Biology, I am really as far from understanding the secret inner cause or causes that have given this vast miscellany of creatures their characteristic peculiarities, forms, and modes of life, as before.