The Tory Imagination

Earlier this spring I was trying to write an article about Francis Bacon, a chief architect of our modern prosperities, when I went into New York to hear Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Bach’s hero is a philosopher who said that man cannot live by bread alone; Bacon ordained a revolution that has enabled us to make — an inconceivable number of different kinds of bread.

I don’t know whose version of truth was keener, but certainly in New York on that spring afternoon Bacon’s influence was more palpable. Bacon preached the virtues of the inductive method, which, by disclosing “all that is most hidden and secret in the world,” would “endow the life of man with infinite commodities.” And he was right: The revolution he foresaw, after it was given practical effect by the Whig thinkers and statesmen of a later age, has so far transformed our material life that when asked for forecasts of what is to be, we can but repeat Bacon’s own words — that the “knowledge which we now possess will not teach a man even what to wish.”