{437}whether he has an arched roof or any roof. Philosophy has nothing
to do with teaching men the uses of metals. She teaches us to be
independent of all material substances, of all mechanical contrivances.
The wise man lives according; to nature. Instead of attempting to add
to the physical comforts of his species, he regrets that his lot was not
cast in that golden age when the human race had no protection against
the cold but the skins of wild beasts, no screen from the sun but
a cavern. To impute to such a man any share in the invention or
improvement of a plough, a ship, or a mill, is an insult. “In my
own time,” says Seneca, “there have been inventions of this sort,
transparent windows, tubes for diffusing warmth equally through all
parts of a building, short-hand, which has been carried to such a
perfection that a writer can keep pace with the most rapid speaker.
But the inventing of such things is drudgery for the lowest slaves;
philosophy lies deeper. It is not her office to teach men how to use
their hands. The object of her lessons is to form the soul. Non est,
inqueim, instrumentorum ad usas necessaries opfex.” If the non were
left out, this last sentence would be no bad description of the Baconian
philosophy, and would, indeed, very much resemble several expressions in
the _Novum Organum_. “We shall next be told,” exclaims Seneca, “that the
first shoemaker was a philosopher.” For our own part, if we are forced
to make our choice between the first shoemaker, and the author of the
three books On Anger, we pronounce for the shoemaker. It may be worse
to be angry than to be wet. But shoes have kept millions from being wet;
and we doubt whether Seneca ever kept any body from being angry. {438}It
is very reluctantly that Seneca can be brought to confess that any
philosopher had ever paid the smallest attention to any thing that could
possibly promote what vulgar people would consider as the well-being of
mankind. He labors to clear Democritus from the disgraceful imputation
of having made the first arch, and Anacharsis from the charge of having
contrived the potter’s wheel. He is forced to own that such a thing
might happen; and it may also happen, he tells us, that a philosopher
may be swift of foot. But it is not in his character of philosopher
that he either wins a race or invents a machine. Iso, to be sure. The
business of a philosopher was to declaim in praise of poverty, with two
millions sterling out at usury, to meditate epigrammatic conceits about
the evils of luxury, in gardens which moved the envy of sovereigns, to
rant about liberty, while fawning on the insolent and pampered freedmen
of a tyrant, to celebrate the divine beauty of virtue with the same pen
which had just before written a defence of the murder of a mother by a
son.
From the cant of this philosophy, a philosophy meanly proud of its own
unprofitableness, it is delightful to turn to the lessons of the great
English teacher. We can almost forgive all the faults of Bacon’s life
when we read that singularly graceful and dignified passage: “Ego certe,
ut de me ipso, quod res est, loquar, et in iis que nunc edo, et in iis
quæ in posterum meditor, dignitatem ingenii et nominis mei, si qua sit,
sæpius sciens et volens projicio, dum commodis humanis inserviam; quique
arehitectus fortasse in phi-losophia et scientiis esse debeam, etiam
operarius, et bajulus, et quidvis demum fio, cum baud pauca pue
omnino fieri necesse sit, alii an tern ob innatam superbiam {439}
{439}subterfugiant, ipse sustineam et exsequar.” (1) This _philanthropia_,
which, as he said in one of the most remarkable of his early letters,
“was so fixed in his mind, as it could not be removed,” this majestic
humility, this persuasion that nothing can be too insignificant for the
attention of the wisest, which is not too insignificant to give pleasure
or pain to the meanest, is the great characteristic distinction, the
essential spirit of the Baconian philosophy. We trace it in all that
Bacon has written on Physics, on Laws, on Morals. And we conceive that
from this peculiarity all the other peculiarities of his system directly
and almost necessarily sprang.
The spirit which appears in the passage of Seneca to which we have
referred, tainted the whole body of the ancient philosophy from the time
of Socrates downwards, and took possession of intellects with which that
of Seneca cannot for a moment be compared. It pervades the dialogues
of Plato. It may be distinctly traced in many parts of the works of
Aristotle. Bacon has dropped hints, from which it may be inferred that,
in his opinion, the prevalence of this feeling was in a great measure
to be attributed to the influence of Socrates. Our great countryman
evidently did not consider the revolution which Socrates effected in
philosophy as a happy event, and constantly maintained that the earlier
Greek speculators, Democritus in particular, were, on the whole,
superior to their more celebrated successors. (2)