The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII, page 119 by Francis W. Halsey
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wing was debated in a very polite and learned company, viz., Who was the greatest man, Cæsar, Alexander, Tamerlane, Cromwell, etc.?
[Footnote 40: From the "Letters on England." Voltaire's visit to England followed immediately upon his release from imprisonment in the Bastille. During the two years he spent there, he acquired an intimate knowledge of English life, and came to know most of the eminent Englishmen of the time.
An English version of Voltaire's writings, in thirty-five volumes, was published in 1761-69, with notes by Smollett and others. The "Letters from England" seem to have first appeared in English in 1734.]
Somebody answered that Sir Isaac Newton excelled them all. The gentleman's assertion was very just; for if true greatness consists in having received from heaven a mighty genius, and in having employed it to enlighten our own mind and that of others, a man like Sir Isaac Newton, whose equal is hardly found in a thousand years, is the truly great man. And those politicians and conquerors (and all ages produce some) were generally so many illustrious wicked men. That man claims our respect who commands over the minds of the rest of the world by the force of truth, not those who enslave their fellow creatures; he who is acquainted with the universe, not they who deface it.
The most singular and the best of all his pieces is that which, at this time, is the most useless and the least read. I mean his "Novum Scientiarum Organum." This is the scaffold with which the new philosophy was raised; and when the edifice was built, part of it, at least the scaffold was no longer of service.
Lord Bacon was not yet acquainted with nature, but then he knew, and pointed out the several paths that lead to it. He had despised in his younger years the thing called philosophy in the universities, and did all that lay in his power to prevent those societies of men instituted to improve human reason from depraving it by their quiddities, their horrors of the vacuum, their subst