Francis Bacon

Bacon enters Emerson's argument as proof that great men serve us pictorially and representatively rather than by direct gift — each one connected by secret liking to some district of nature he converts to human use, like the inventors of fire, iron, or decimal notation. Against the boy's belief that a teacher can sell him wisdom, Bacon stands for the slower, endogenous unfolding of the mind, where what is learned is delightful in the doing and the effect remains. He matters to the book's middle arc because he lets Emerson show how a philosopher becomes an institution: not by handing over truth, but by making an easy way for all through unknown and impossible confusions.