Consunipta in ventos.”
Bacon fixed his eye on a mark which was placed on the earth, and within
bow-shot, and hit it in the white. The philosophy of Plato began in
words and ended in words, noble words indeed, words such as were to
be expected from the finest of human intellects exercising boundless
dominion over the finest of human languages. The philosophy of Bacon
began in observations and ended in arts.
The boast of the ancient philosophers was that their doctrine formed the
minds of men to a high degree of wisdom and virtue. This was indeed the
only practical good which the most celebrated of those teachers even
pretended to effect; and undoubtedly, if they had effected this, they
would have deserved far higher praise than if they had discovered the
most salutary medicines or constructed the most powerful machines. But
the truth is that, in those very matters in which alone they professed
to do any good to mankind, in those very matters for the sake of which
they neglected all the vulgar interests of mankind, they did nothing, or
worse than nothing. They promised what was impracticable; they despised
what was practicable; they {460}filled the world with long words and
long beards; and they left it as wicked and as ignorant as they found
it.
An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia. The
smallest actual good is better than the most magnificent promises
of impossibilities. The wise man of the Stoics would, no doubt, be a
grander object than a steam-engine. But there are steam-engines. And
the wise man of the Stoics is yet to be born. A philosophy which should
enable a man to feel perfectly happy while in agonies of pain would be
better than a philosophy which assuages pain. But we know that there
are remedies which will assuage pain and we know that the ancient sages
liked the toothache just as little as their neighbours. A philosophy
which should extinguish cupidity would be better than a philosophy which
should devise laws for the security of property. But it is possible to
make laws which shall, to a very great extent, secure property. And we
do not understand how any motives which the ancient philosophy furnished
could extinguish cupidity. Mre know indeed that the philosophers were no
better than other men. From the testimony of friends as well as of foes,
from the confessions of Epictetus and Seneca, as well as from the sneers
of Lucian and the fierce invectives of Juvenal, it is plain that these
teachers of virtue had all the vices of their neighbours, with the
additional vice of hypocrisy. Some people may think the object of the
Baconian philosophy a low object, but they cannot deny that, high or
low, it has been attained. They cannot deny that every year makes an
addition to what Bacon called “fruit.” They cannot deny that mankind
have made, and are making, great and constant progress in the road which
he pointed out to them. Was {461}there any such progressive movement
among the ancient philosophers? After they had been declaiming eight
hundred years, had they made the world better than when they began?
Our belief is that, among the philosophers themselves, instead of a
progressive improvement there was a progressive degeneracy. An abject
superstition which Democritus or Anaxagoras would have rejected with
scorn added the last disgrace to the long dotage of the Stoic and
Platonic schools. Those unsuccessful attempts to articulate which are
so delightful and interesting in a child shock and disgust us in an aged
paralytic; and in the same way, those wild mythological fictions which
charm us, when we hear them lisped by Greek poetry in its infancy,
excite a mixed sensation of pity and loathing, when mumbled by Greek
philosophy in its old age. We know that guns, cutlery, spy-glasses,
clocks, are better in our time than they were in the time of our
fathers, and were better in the time of our fathers than they were in
the time of our grandfathers. We might, therefore, be inclined to think
that, when a philosophy which boasted that its object was the elevation
and purification of the mind, and which for this object neglected the
sordid office of ministering to the comforts of the body, had flourished
in the highest honour during many hundreds of years, a vast moral
amelioration must have taken place. Was it so? Look at the schools of
this wisdom four centuries before the Christian era and four centuries
after that era. Compare the men whom those schools formed at those two
periods. Compare Plato and Libanius. Compare Pericles and Julian. This
philosophy confessed, nay boasted, that for every end but one it was
useless. Had it attained that one end? {462}Suppose that Justinian, when
he closed the schools of Athens, had called on the last few sages who
still haunted the Portico, and lingered round the ancient plane-trees,
to show their title to public veneration: suppose that he had said; “A
thousand years have elapsed since, in this famous city, Socrates posed
Protagoras and Hippias; during those thousand years a large proportion
of the ablest men of every generation has been employed in constant
efforts to bring to perfection the philosophy which you teach; that
philosophy has been munificently patronised by the powerful; its
professors have been held in the highest esteem by the public; it has
drawn to itself almost all the sap and vigour of the human intellect:
and what has it effected? What profitable truth has it taught us which
we should not equally have known without it? What has it enabled us to
do which we should not have been equally able to do without it?” Such
questions, we suspect, would have puzzled Simplicius and Isidore. Ask a
follower of Bacon what the new philosophy, as it was called in the
time of Charles the Second, has effected for mankind, and his answer
is ready; “It has lengthened life; it has mitigated pain; it has
extinguished diseases; it has increased the fertility of the soil; it
has given new securities to the mariner; it has furnished new arms to
the warrior; it has spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of
form unknown to our fathers; it has guided the thunderbolt innocuously
from heaven to earth; it has lighted up the night with the splendour
of the day; it has extended the range of the human vision; it has
multiplied the power of the human muscles; it has accelerated motion;
it has annihilated distance; it has facilitated intercourse,
correspondence, all friendly offices, all despatch of business; it has
{463}enabled man to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the
air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to
traverse the land in cars which whirl along without horses, and the
ocean in ships which run ten knots an hour against the wind. These
are but a part of its fruits, and of its first fruits. For it is a
philosophy which never rests, which has never attained, which is never
perfect. Its law is progress. A point which yesterday was invisible is
its goal to-day, and will be its starting-post to-morrow.”
Great and various as the powers of Bacon were, he owes his wide and
durable fame chiefly to this, that all those powers received their
direction from common sense. His love of the vulgar useful, his strong
sympathy with the popular notions of good and evil, and the openness
with which he avowed that sympathy, are the secret of his influence.
There was in his system no cant, no illusion. He had no anointing for
broken hones, no fine theories _de finibus_, no arguments to persuade
men out of their senses. He knew that men, and philosophers as well as
other men, do actually love life, health, comfort, honour, security,
the society of friends, and do actually dislike death, sickness, pain,
poverty, disgrace, danger, separation from those to whom they are
attached. He knew that religion, though it often regulates and moderates
these feelings, seldom eradicates them; nor did he think it desirable
for mankind that they should be eradicated. The plan of eradicating
them by conceits like those of Seneca, or syllogisms like those of
Chrysippus, was too preposterous to be for a moment entertained by
a mind like his. He did not understand what wisdom there could be in
changing names where it was impossible to change things; in denying that
blindness, hunger, the gout, {464}the rack, were evils, and calling them
[Greek], in refusing to acknowledge that health, safety, plenty, were
good things, and dubbing them by the name of [Greek]. In his opinions
on all these subjects, he was not a Stoic, nor an Epicurean, nor an
Academic, but what would have been called by Stoics, Epicureans, and
Academics a mere a mere common man. And it was precisely because he was
so that his name makes so great an era in the history of the world. It
was because he dug deep that he was able to pile high. It was because,
in order to lay his foundations, he went down into those parts of human
nature which lie low, but which are not liable to change, that the
fabric which he reared has risen to so stately an elevation, and stands
with such immovable strength.
We have sometimes thought that an amusing fiction might be written,
in which a disciple of Epictetus and a disciple of Bacon should be
introduced as fellow-travellers. They come to a village where the
small-pox has just begun to rage, and find houses shut up, intercourse
suspended, the sick abandoned, mothers weeping in terror over their
children. The Stoic assures the dismayed population that there
is nothing bad in the small-pox, and that to a wise man, disease,
deformity, death, the loss of friends, are not evils. The Baconian takes
ont a lancet and begins to vaccinate. They find a body of miners in
great dismay. An explosion of noisome vapours has just killed many of
those who were at work; and the survivors are afraid to venture into the
cavern. The Stoic assures them that such an accident is nothing but a
mere [Greek]. The Baconian, who has no such fine word at his command,
contents himself with devising a safety-lamp. They find a shipwrecked
merchant wringing his hands on the shore. {465}His vessel with an
inestimable cargo has just gone down, and lie is reduced in a moment
from opulence to beggary. The Stoic exhorts him not to seek happiness
in things which lie without himself, and repeats the whole chapter of
Epictetus [Greek]. The Baconian constructs a diving-bell, goes down in
it, and returns with the most precious effects from the wreck. It
would be easy to multiply illustrations of the difference between the
philosophy of thorns and the philosophy of fruit, the philosophy of
words and the philosophy of works.
Bacon has been accused of overrating the importance of those sciences
which minister to the physical well-being of man, and of underrating the
importance of moral philosophy; and it cannot be denied that persons who
read the _Novum Organam_ and the _De Augmentis_, without adverting to
the circumstances under which those works were written, will find much
that may seem to countenance the accusation. It is certain, however,
that though in practice he often went very wrong, and though, as his
historical work and his essays prove, he did not hold, even in theory,
very strict opinions on points of political morality, he was far too
wise a man not to know how much our wellbeing depends on the regulation
of our minds. The world for which he wished was not, as some people
seem to imagine, a world of water-wheels, power-looms, steam-carriages,
sensualists, and knaves. He would have been as ready as Zeno himself to
maintain that no bodily comforts which could be devised by the skill and
labour of a hundred generations would give happiness to a man whose mind
was under the tyranny of licentious appetite, of envy, of hatred, or
of fear. If he sometimes appeared to ascribe importance {466}too
exclusively to the arts which increase the outward comforts of
our species, the reason is plain. Those arts had been most unduly
depreciated. They had been represented as unworthy the attention of a
man of liberal education. “Cogitavit,” says Bacon of himself, “cam
esse opinionem sire æstilnationem humidam et dainnosam, minni nempe
majestatem mentis luminanæ, si in experimentis et rebus particularibus,
sensui subjectis, et in materia terminatis, din ac multum versetur:
præsertim cum hujusmodi res ad inquirendum laborioue ad meditandum
ignobiles, ad discendum asperre, ad practicam illiberales, numéro
infinitæ, et subtilitate pusillæ videri soleant, et ob hujusmodi
conditiones, glorio artium minus sint accommodate.” (1) This opinion
seemed to him “omnia in familia humana turbasse.” It had undoubtedly
caused many arts which were of the greatest utility, and which
were susceptible of the greatest improvements, to be neglected by
speculators, and abandoned to joiners, masons, smiths, weavers,
apothecaries. It was necessary to assert the dignity of those arts, to
bring them prominently forward, to proclaim that, as they have a
most serious effect on human happiness, they are not unworthy of
the attention of the highest human intellects. Again, it was by
illustrations drawn from these arts that Bacon could most easily
illustrate his principles. It was by improvements effected in these
arts that the soundness of his principles could be most speedily
and decisively brought to the test, and made manifest to common
understandings. He acted like a wise commander who thins every other
(1) _Cogitata_. The expression _opinio humida_ may surprise
a reader not accustomed to Bacon’s style. The allusion is to
the maxim of Heraclitus the obscure: “Dry light is the
best.” By dry light, Bacon understood the light of the
intellect, not obscured by the mists of passion, interest,
or prejudice
{467}part of his line to strengthen a point where the enemy is attacking
with peculiar fury, and on the fate of which the event of the battle
seems likely to depend. In the _Novum Organum_, however, he distinctly
and most truly declares that his philosophy is no less a Moral than
a Natural Philosophy, that, though his illustrations are drawn from
physical science, the principles which those illustrations are intended
to explain are just as applicable to ethical and political inquiries as
to inquiries into the nature of heat and vegetation. (1)
He frequently treated of moral subjects; and he brought to those
subjects that spirit which was the essence of his whole system. He has
left us many admirable practicable observations on what he somewhat
quaintly called the Georgies of the mind, on the mental culture which
tends to produce good dispositions. Some persons, he said, might accuse
him of spending labour on a matter so simple that his predecessors had
passed it by with contempt. He desired such persons to remember that
he had from the first announced the objects of his search to be not
the splendid and the surprising, but the useful and the true, not the
deluding dreams which go forth through the shining portal of ivory, but
the humbler realities of the gate of horn. (2)
True to this principle, he indulged in no rants about the fitness of
things, the all-sufficiency of virtue, and the dignity of human nature.
He dealt not at all in resounding nothings, such as those with which
Boling-broke pretended to comfort himself in exile, and in which Cicero
vainly sought consolation after the loss of Tullia. The casuistical
subtilties which occupied the
(1) _Novum Organum_, Lib. 1. Aph. 127.
(2) _De Augmentis_, Lib. 7. Cap. 3.
{468}attention of the keenest spirits of his age had, it should seem, no
attractions for him. The doctors whom Escobar afterwards compared to
the four beasts and the four-and-twenty elders in the Apocalypse Bacon
dismissed with most contemptuous brevity. “Inanes plerumque evadunt
et futiles.” (1) Nor did he ever meddle with those enigmas which have
puzzled hundreds of generations, and will puzzle hundreds more. He said
nothing about the grounds of moral obligation, or the freedom of
the human will. He had no inclination to employ himself in labours
resembling those of the damned in the Grecian Tartarus, to spin for ever
on the same wheel round the same pivot, to gape for ever after the
same deluding clusters, to pour water for ever into the same bottomless
buckets, to pace for ever to and fro on the same wearisome path after
the same recoiling stone. He exhorted his disciples to prosecute
researches of a very different description, to consider moral science
as a practical science, a science of which the object was to cure the
diseases and perturbations of the mind, and which could be improved only
by a method analogous to that which has improved medicine and surgery.
Moral philosophers ought, he said, to set themselves vigorously to work
for the purpose of discovering what are the actual effects produced on
the human character by particular modes of education, by the indulgence
of particular habits, by the study of particular books, by society, by
emulation, by imitation. Then we might hope to find out what mode of
training was most likely to preserve and restore moral health. (2)
What he was as a natural philosopher and a moral philosopher, that he
was also as a theologian. He was,
(1) _Ib_., Lib. 7. Cap. 2.
(2) _De Augmentis_, Lib. 7. Cap. 3.
{469}we are convinced, a sincere believer in the divine authority of the
Christian revelation. Nothing can be found in his writings, or in any
other writings, more eloquent and pathetic than some passages which were
apparently written under the influence of strong devotional feeling.
He loved to dwell on the power of the Christian religion to effect much
that the ancient philosophers could only promise. He loved to consider
that religion as the bond of charity, the curb of evil passions, the
consolation of the wretched, the support of the timid, the hope of the
dying. But controversies on speculative points of theology seem to
have engaged scarcely any portion of his attention. In what he wrote
on Church Government he showed, as far as he dared, a tolerant and
charitable spirit. He troubled himself not at all about Homoousians and
Homoionsians, Monothelites and Nestorians. He lived in an age in which
disputes on the most subtle points of divinity excited an intense
interest throughout Europe, and nowhere more than in England. He was
placed in the very thick of the conflict. He was in power at the time
of the Synod of Dort, and must for months have been daily deafened with
talk about election, reprobation, and final perseverance. Yet we do not
remember a line in his works from which it can be inferred that he was
either a Calvinist or an Arminian. While the world was resounding with
the noise of a disputatious philosophy and a disputatious theology,
the Baconian school, like Alworthy seated between Square and Thwackum,
preserved a calm neutrality, half scornful, half benevolent, and,
content with adding to the sum of practical good, left the war of words
to those who liked it.
We have dwelt long on the end of the Baconian {470}philosophy, because
from this peculiarity all the other peculiarities of that philosophy
necessarily arose. Indeed, scarcely any person who proposed to himself
the same end with Bacon could fail to hit upon the same means.
The vulgar notion about Bacon we take to be this, that he invented a new
method of arriving at truth, which method is called Induction, and that
he detected some fallacy in the syllogistic reasoning which had been in
vogue before his time. This notion is about as well founded as that of
the people who, in the middle ages, imagined that Virgil was a great
conjurer. Many who are far too well informed to talk such extravagant
nonsense entertain what we think incorrect notions as to what Bacon
really effected in this matter.
The inductive method has been practised ever since the beginning of
the world by every human being. It is constantly practised by the most
ignorant clown, by the most thoughtless schoolboy, by the very child
at the breast. That method leads the clown to the conclusion that if he
sows barley he shall not reap wheat. By that method the schoolboy learns
that a cloudy day is the best for catching trout. The very infant, we
imagine, is led by induction to expect milk from his mother or nurse,
and none from his father.
Not only is it not true that Bacon invented the inductive method; but
it is not true that he was the first person who correctly analysed that
method and explained its uses. Aristotle had long before pointed out the
absurdity of supposing that syllogistic reasoning could ever conduct men
to the discovery of any new principle, had shown that such discoveries
must be made by induction, and by induction alone, and had given the
history of the inductive process, concisely indeed, but with great
perspicuity and precision. {471}Again, we are not inclined to ascribe
much practical value to that analysis of the inductive method which
Bacon has given in the second book of the _Novum Organum_. It is indeed
an elaborate and correct analysis. But it is an analysis of that which
we are all doing from morning to night, and which we continue to do
even in our dreams. A plain man finds his stomach out of order. He never
heard Lord Bacon’s name. But he proceeds in the strictest conformity
with the rules laid down in the second book of the Novum Organum, and
satisfies himself that minced pies have done the mischief. “I ate minced
pies on Monday and Wednesday, and I was kept awake by indigestion
all night.” This is the comparentia ad intellectual instantiarum
convenientium. “I did not eat any on Tuesday and Friday, and I was quite
well.” This is the comparentia instantiarum in proximo qua natura
data privantur. “I ate very sparingly of them on Sunday, and was very
slightly indisposed in the evening. But on Christmas-day I almost
dined on them, and was so ill that I was in great danger.” This is the
_comparentia instantiarum secundum magis et minus_. “It cannot have been
the brandy which I took with them. For I have drunk brandy daily for
years without being the worse for it.” This is the _rejectio naturarum_.
Our invalid then proceeds to what is termed by Bacon the _Vindemiatio_,
and pronounces that minced pies do not agree with him.
We repeat that we dispute neither the ingenuity nor the accuracy of the
theory contained in the second book of the _Novum Organum_; but we think
that Bacon greatly overrated its utility. We conceive that the inductive
process, like many other processes, is not likely to be better performed
merely because men know {472}how they perform it. William Tell would not
have been one whit more likely to cleave the apple if he had known
that his arrow would describe a parabola under the influence of the
attraction of the earth. Captain Barclay would not have been more likely
to walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours, if he had known the place
and name of every muscle in his legs. Monsieur Jourdain probably did not
pronounce D and F more correctly after he had been apprised that D is
pronounced by touching the teeth with the end of the tongue, and F by
putting the upper teeth on the lower lip. We cannot perceive that the
study of Grammar makes the smallest difference in the speech of people
who have always lived in good society. Not one Londoner in ten thousand
can lay down the rules for the proper use of will and shall. Yet not
one Londoner in a million ever misplaces his will and shall. Doctor
Robertson could, undoubtedly, have written a luminous dissertation on
the use of’ those words. Yet, even in his latest work, he sometimes
misplaced them ludicrously. No man uses figures of speech with more
propriety because he knows that one figure is called a metonymy and
another a synecdoche. A drayman in a passion calls out, “You are a
pretty fellow,” without suspecting that he is uttering irony, and that
irony is one of the four primary tropes. The old systems of rhetoric
were never regarded by the most experienced and discerning judges as of
any use for the purpose of forming an orator-“Ego liane vim intelligo,”
said Cicero, “esse in præceptis omnibus, non ut ea secuti oratores
eloquentiæ landem sint adepti, sed quæ sua sponte homines éloquentes
facerent, ea quosdam observasse, atque id egisse; sic esse non
eloquentiam ex artificio, sed artificium ex eloqnentia natum.” We must
own that we {473}entertain the same opinion concerning the study of
Logic which Cicero entertained concerning the study of Rhetoric. A
man of sense syllogizes in _celarent_ and sesare all day long without
suspecting it; and, though he may not know what an _ignoratio clenchi_
is, has no difficulty in exposing it whenever he falls in with it; which
is likely to be as often as he falls in with a Reverend Master of Arts
nourished on mode and figure in the cloisters of Oxford. Considered
merely as an intellectual feat, the _Organum_ of Aristotle can
scarcely be admired too highly. But the more we compare individual with
individual, school with school, nation with nation, generation with
generation, the more do we lean to the opinion that the knowledge of the
theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.
What Aristotle did for the syllogistic process Bacon has, in the second
book of the _Novum Organum_, done for the inductive process; that is to
say, he has analysed it well. His rules are quite proper; but we do not
need them, because they are drawn from our own constant practice.
But, though everybody is constantly performing the process described
in the second book of the _Novum Organum_, some men perform it well and
some perform it ill. Some are led by it to truth, and some to error. It
led Franklin to discover the nature of lightning. It led thousands, who
had less brains than Franklin, to believe in animal magnetism. But this
was not because Franklin went through the process described by Bacon,
and the dupes of Mesmer through a different process. The _comparentiæ_
and _rejectiones_ of which we have given examples will be found in the
most unsound inductions. We have heard that an eminent judge of {474}the
last generation was in the habit of jocosely propounding after dinner a
theory, that the cause of the prevalence of Jacobinism was the practice
of bearing three names. He quoted on the one side Charles James Fox,
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, John Horne Tooke, John Philpot Curran,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Theobald Wolfe Tone. These were _instantiae
convenientes_. He then proceeded to cite instances _absentio in
proximo_, William Pitt, John Scott, William Windham, Samuel Horsley,
Henry Dundas, Edmund Burke. He might have gone on to instances _secundum
magis et minus_. The practice of giving children three names has been
for some time a growing practice, and Jacobinism has also been growing.
The practice of giving children three names is more common in America
than in England. In England we still have a King and a House of Lords;
but the Americans are republicans. The rejectiones are obvious. Burke
and Theobald Wolfe Tone are both Irishmen; therefore the being an
Irishman is not the cause of Jacobinism. Horsley and Horne Tooke are
both clergymen; therefore the being a clergyman is not the cause of
Jacobinism. Fox and Windham were both educated at Oxford; therefore the
being educated at Oxford is not the cause of Jacobinism. Pitt and Horne
Tooke were both educated at Cambridge; therefore the being educated at
Cambridge is not the cause of Jacobinism. In this way, our inductive
philosopher arrives at what Bacon calls the Vintage, and pronounces that
the having three names is the cause of Jacobinism.
Here is an induction corresponding with Bacon’s analysis and ending in
a monstrous absurdity. In what then does this induction differ from the
induction which leads us to the conclusion that the presence {475}of
the sun is the cause of our having more light by day than by night? The
difference evidently is not in the kind of instances, but in the number
of instances; that is to say, the difference is not in that part of the
process for which Bacon has given precise rules, but in a circumstance
for which no precise rule can possibly be given. If the learned author
of the theory about Jacobinism had enlarged either of his tables a
little, his system would have been destroyed. The names of Tom Paine and
William Wyndham Grenville would have been sufficient to do the work.
It appears to us, then, that the difference between a sound and unsound
induction does not lie in this, that the author of the sound induction
goes through the process analysed in the second book of the _Novum
Organum_, and the author of the unsound induction through a different
process. They both perform the same process. But one performs it
foolishly or carelessly; the other performs it with patience, attention,
sagacity, and judgment. Now precepts can do little towards making men
patient and attentive, and still less towards making them sagacious
and judicious. It is very well to tell men to be on their guard against
prejudices, not to believe facts on slight evidence, not to be content
with a scanty collection of facts, to put out of their minds the _idola_
which Bacon has so finely described. But these rules are too general to
be of much practical use. The question is, What is a prejudice? How long
does the incredulity with which I hear a new theory propounded continue
to be a wise and salutary incredulity? When does it become an _idolum
specus_, the unreasonable pertinacity of a too sceptical mind? What is
slight evidence? What collection of facts is scanty? Will ten instances
do, or fifty, or a hundred? In how many {476}months would the first
human beings who settled on the shores of the ocean have been justified
in believing that the moon had an influence on the tides? After how many
experiments would Jenner have been justified in believing that he had
discovered a safeguard against the small-pox? These are questions to
which it would be most desirable to have a precise answer; but unhappily
they are questions to which no precise answer can be returned.
We think then that it is possible to lay down accurate rules, as Bacon
has done, for the performing of that part of the inductive process which
all men perform alike; but that these rules, though accurate, are not
wanted, because in truth they only tell us to do what we are all doing.
We think that it is impossible to lay down any precise rule for
the performing of that part of the inductive process which a great
experimental philosopher performs in one way, and a superstitious old
woman in another.
On this subject, we think, Bacon was in an error. He certainly
attributed to his rules a value which did not belong to them. He went so
far as to say, that, if his method of making discoveries were adopted,
little would depend on the degree of force or acuteness of any
intellect; that all minds would be reduced to one level, that his
philosophy resembled a compass or a rule which equalises all hands, and
enables the most unpractised person to draw a more correct circle or
line than the best draughtsmen can produce without such aid. (1) This
really seems to us as extravagant as it would have been in Lindley
Murray to announce that everybody who should learn his Grammar would
write as good English as Dryden, or in that very able writer,
(1) _Novum Organum_, Præf. and Lib. 1. Aph. 122.
{477}the Archbishop of Dublin, to promise that all the readers of his
Logic would reason like Chillingworth, and that all the readers of his
Rhetoric would speak like Burke. That Bacon was altogether mistaken as
to this point will now hardly be disputed. His philosophy has flourished
during two hundred years, and has produced none of this levelling. The
interval between a man of talents and a dunce is as wide as ever; and is
never more clearly discernible than when they engage in researches which
require the constant use of induction.
It will be seen that we do not consider Bacon’s ingenious analysis of
the inductive method as a very useful performance. Bacon was not, as we
have already said, the inventor of the inductive method. He was not even
the person who first analysed the inductive method correctly, though he
undoubtedly analysed it more minutely than any who preceded him. He was
not the person who first showed that by the inductive method alone new
truth could be discovered. But he was the person who first turned the
minds of speculative men, long occupied in verbal disputes, to the
discovery of new and useful truth; and, by doing so, he at once gave to
the inductive method an importance and dignity which had never before
belonged to it. He was not the maker of that road; he was not the
discoverer of that road; he was not the person who first surveyed and
mapped that road. But he was the person who first called the public
attention to an inexhaustible mine of wealth, which had been utterly
neglected, and which was accessible by that road alone. By doing so, he
caused that road, which had previously been trodden only by peasants and
higglers, to be frequented by a higher class of travellers.
That which was eminently his own in his system {478}was the end which
he proposed to himself. The end being given, the means, as it appears to
us, could not well be mistaken. If others had aimed at the same object
with Bacon, we hold it to be certain that they would have employed the
same method with Bacon. It would have been hard to convince Seneca
that the inventing of a safety-lamp was an employment worthy of a
philosopher. It would have been hard to persuade Thomas Aquinas to
descend from the making of syllogisms to the making of gunpowder. But
Seneca would never have doubted for a moment that it was only by means
of a series of experiments that a safety-lamp could be invented. Thomas
Aquinas would never have thought that his _barbara_ and _baralipton_
would enable him to ascertain the proportion which charcoal ought to
bear to saltpetre in a pound of gunpowder. Neither common sense nor
Aristotle would have suffered him to fall into such an absurdity.
By stimulating men to the discovery of new truth, Bacon stimulated
them to employ the inductive method, the only method, even the ancient
philosophers and the schoolmen themselves being judges, by which new
truth can be discovered. By stimulating men to the discovery of useful
truth, he furnished them with a motive to perform the inductive process
well and carefully. His predecessors had been, in his phrase, not
interpreters, but anticipators of nature. They had been content with
the first principles at which they had arrived by the most scanty and
slovenly induction. And why was this? It was, we conceive, because their
philosophy proposed to itself no practical end, because it was merely an
exercise of the mind. A man who wants to contrive a new machine or a new
medicine has a strong motive to observe accurately and {479}patiently,
and to try experiment after experiment. But a man who merely wants a
theme for disputation or declamation has no such motive. He is therefore
content with premises grounded on assumption, or on the most scanty
and hasty induction. Thus, we conceive, the schoolmen acted. On their
foolish premises they often argued with great ability; and as their
object was “assensum subjugare, non res,” (1) to be victorious in
controversy, not to be victorious over nature, they were consistent. For
just as much logical skill could be shown in reasoning on false as on
true premises. But the followers of the new philosophy, proposing to
themselves the discovery of useful truth as their object, must have
altogether failed of attaining that object if they had been content to
build theories on superficial induction.
Bacon has remarked (2) that in ages when philosophy was stationary, the
mechanical arts went on improving. Why was this? Evidently because the
mechanic was not content with so careless a mode of induction as served
the purpose of the philosopher. And why was the philosopher more
easily satisfied than the mechanic? Evidently because the object of the
mechanic was to mould things, whilst the object of the philosopher was
only to mould words. Careful induction is not at all necessary to the
making of a good syllogism. But it is indispensable to the making of a
good shoe. Mechanics, therefore, have always been, as far as the range
of their humble but useful callings extended, not anticipators but
interpreters of nature. And when a philosophy arose, the object of which
was to do on a large scale what the mechanic does on a small scale, to
(1) _Novum Organum_, Lib. 1. Aph. 29.
(2) _De Augmentis_, Lib. 1.
{480}extend the power and to supply the wants of man, the truth of the
premises, which logically is a matter altogether unimportant, became a
matter of the highest importance; and the careless induction with which
men of learning had previously been satisfied gave place, of necessity,
to an induction far more accurate and satisfactory.
What Bacon did for inductive philosophy may, we think, be fairly stated
thus. The objects of preceding speculators were objects which could be
attained without careful induction. Those speculators, therefore, did
not perform the inductive process carefully. Bacon stirred up men to
pursue an object which could be attained only by induction, and by
induction carefully performed; and consequently induction was more
carefully performed. We do not think that the importance of what Bacon
did for inductive philosophy has ever been overrated. But we think
that the nature of his services is often mistaken, and was not fully
understood even by himself. It was not by furnishing philosophers with
rules for performing the inductive process well, but by furnishing
them with a motive for performing it well, that he conferred so vast a
benefit on society.
To give to the human mind a direction which it shall retain for ages is
the rare prerogative of a few imperial spirits. It cannot, therefore,
be uninteresting to inquire what was the moral and intellectual
constitution which enabled Bacon to exercise so vast an influence on the
world.
In the temper of Bacon,--we speak of Bacon the philosopher, not of Bacon
the lawyer and politician,--there was a singular union of audacity and
sobriety. The promises which he made to mankind might, to a superficial
reader, seem to resemble the rants which a {481}great dramatist has put
into the mouth of an Oriental conqueror half-crazed by good fortune and
by violent passions.
“He shall have chariots easier than air,