"This presents one of the most extraordinary facts in the history of the human mind. It makes necessary the conclusion that two men, living contemporaneously in the same town, then a comparatively small city, --one a philosopher, endowed with the most brilliant imagination, the other a most imaginative poet, possessing the profoundest philosophical genius, and both reckoned among the greatest thinkers the world ever saw--did, possibly in the same year, at the same time, and certainly at the same period of their lives, write, without any interchange of views or opinions, upon the same identical subjects, follow the same train of thought, arrive at the same conclusions, and digest the results of their study, reading and meditation into the same system or body of philosophy, the which one stated to the world in abstract scientific propositions, while the other embodied it in poetic forms and framatic creations. No coincidence of mental action so remarkable as this can be found, it is believed, in any other age of the world."
--Henry J. Ruggles, 1870.
"Identification will come in due time. Meanwhile the admissions show how able men perceive in the works of Bacon indications of a mind gifted with the highest poetic power."
--William Thomson, 1880.
"Bacon desired nothing less than a natural history of the passions, the very thing that Shakespeare produced."
--Kuno Fischer, Prof. of Philosophy at Heidelberg, and a foremost literary critic. Also not a Baconian.
"It has often been said of Shakespeare that he was even more of a philosopher than a poet. Bacon's ambition was to grasp the universe, making all knowledge his province. Lessing has profoundly remarked of Shakespeare that his drama is the mirror of nature. And M. de Remussat has said that in Bacon's ordinary way of reflecting and representing the characters and affairs of men we cannot but notice something which brings Shakespeare to mind.' The analogy between the two is certainly very strong."
--Louis De Raynal, 1888
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