Beyond the horizon.”
His knowledge differed from that of other men, as a terrestrial globe
differs from an Atlas which contains a different country on every leaf.
The towns and roads of England, France, and Germany are better laid down
in the Atlas than on the globe. But while we are looking at England we
see nothing of France; and while we are looking at France we see nothing
of Germany. We may go to the Atlas to learn the bearings and distances
of York and Bristol, or of Dresden and Prague. But it is useless if we
want to know the bearings and distances of France and Martinique, or of
England and Canada. On the globe we shall not find all the market towns
in our own neighbourhood; but we shall learn from it the comparative
extent and the relative position of all the kingdoms of the earth.
“I have taken,” said Bacon, in a letter {483}written when he was only
thirty-one, to his uncle Lord Burleigh, “I have taken all knowledge to
be my province.” In any other young man, indeed in any other man, this
would have been a ridiculous flight of presumption. There have been
thousands of better mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, physicians,
botanists, mineralogists, than Bacon. No man would go to Bacon’s works
to learn any particular science or art, any more than he would go to a
twelve-inch globe in order to find his way from Kennington turnpike to
Clapham Common. The art which Bacon taught was the art of inventing
arts. The knowledge in which Bacon excelled all men was a knowledge of
the mutual relations of all departments of knowledge.
The mode in which he communicated his thoughts was peculiar to him. He
had no touch of that disputatious temper which he often censured in his
predecessors. He effected a vast intellectual revolution in opposition
to a vast mass of prejudices; yet he never engaged in any controversy:
nay, we cannot at present recollect, in all his philosophical works, a
single passage of a controversial character. All those works might
with propriety have been put into the form which he adopted in the work
entitled _Cogitata et visa_: “Francisons Baconus sic cogitavit.” These
are thoughts which have occurred to me: weigh them well: and take them
or leave them.
Borgia said of the famous expedition of Charles the Eighth, that the
French had conquered Italy, not with steel, but with chalk; for that the
only exploit which they had found necessary for the purpose of taking
military occupation of any place had been to mark the doors of the
houses where they meant to quarter. Bacon often quoted this saying, and
loved to apply it {484}to the victories of his own intellect. (1) His
philosophy, he said, came as a guest, not as an enemy. She found
no difficulty in gaining admittance, without a contest, into every
understanding fitted, by its structure and by its capacity, to receive
her. In all this we think that he acted most judiciously; first,
because, as he has himself remarked, the difference between his school
and other schools was a difference so fundamental that there was hardly
any common ground on which a controversial battle could be fought; and,
secondly, because his mind, eminently observant, preeminently
discursive and capacious, was, we conceive, neither formed by nature nor
disciplined by habit for dialectical combat.
Though Bacon did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic, he
adorned her profusely with all the richest decorations of rhetoric. His
eloquence, though not untainted with the vicious taste of his age, would
alone have entitled him to a high rank in literature. He had a wonderful
talent for packing thought close, and rendering it portable. In wit, if
by wit be meant the power of perceiving analogies between things which
appear to have nothing in common, he never had an equal, not even
Cowley, not even the author of Hudibras. Indeed, he possessed this
faculty, or rather this faculty possessed him, to a morbid degree. When
he abandoned himself to it without reserve, as he did in the _Sapientia
Veterum_, and at the end of the second book of the _De Augmentis_, the
feats which he performed were not merely admirable, but portentous,
and almost shocking. On these occasions we marvel at him as clowns on
a fair-day marvel at a juggler, and can hardly help thinking that the
devil must be in him.
(1) _Novum Organum_, Lib. 1. Aph. 35. and elsewhere.
{485}These, however, were freaks in which his ingenuity now and then
wantoned, with scarcely any other object than to astonish and amuse. But
it occasionally happened that, when he was engaged in grave and
profound investigations, his wit obtained the mastery over all his other
faculties, and led him into absurdities into which no dull man could
possibly have fallen. We will give the most striking instance which at
present occurs to us. In the third book of the _De Augmentis_ he tells
us that there are some principles which are not peculiar to one science,
but are common to several. That part of philosophy which concerns
itself with these principles is, in his nomenclature, designated as
_philosophia prima_. He then proceeds to mention some of the principles
with which this _philosophia prima_ is conversant. One of them is this.
An infectious disease is more likely to be communicated while it is in
progress than when it has reached its height. This, says he, is true in
medicine. It is also true in morals; for we see that the example of very
abandoned men injures public morality less than the example of men in
whom vice has not yet extinguished all good qualities. Again, he tells
us that in music a discord ending in a concord is agreeable, and that
the same thing may be noted in the affections. Once more, he tells
us, that in physics the energy with which a principle acts is often
increased by the antiperistasis of its opposite; and that it is
the same in the contests of factions. If the making of ingenious and
sparkling similitudes like these be indeed the _philosophia prima_, we
are quite sure that the greatest philosophical work of the nineteenth
century is Mr. Moore’s Lalla Rookh. The similitudes which we have cited
are very happy similitudes. But that a man like Bacon should have taken
them for more, that he should have thought the {486}discovery of such
resemblances as these an important part of philosophy, has always
appeared to us one of the most singular facts in the history of letters.
The truth is that his mind was wonderfully quick in perceiving analogies
of all sorts. But, like several eminent men whom we could name, both
living and dead, he sometimes appeared strangely deficient in the power
of distinguishing rational from fanciful analogies, analogies which are
arguments from analogies which are mere illustrations, analogies like
that which Bishop Butler so ably pointed out, between natural and
revealed religion, from analogies like that which Addison discovered,
between the series of Grecian gods carved by Phidias and the series of
English kings painted by Kneller. This want of discrimination has led to
many strange political speculations. Sir William Temple deduced a theory
of government from the properties of the pyramid. Mr. Southey’s whole
system of finance is grounded on the phænomena of evaporation and rain.
In theology, this perverted ingenuity has made still wilder work. From
the time of Iremeus and Origen down to the present day, there has not
been a single generation in which great divines have not been led
into the most absurd expositions of Scripture, by mere incapacity
to distinguish analogies proper, to use the scholastic phrase, from
analogies metaphorical. (1) It is curious that Bacon has himself
mentioned this very kind of delusion among the _idola specus_; and has
mentioned in language which, we are inclined to think, shows that he
knew himself to be subject to it. It is the vice, he tells us, of subtle
minds to attach too much importance to slight distinctions; it, is the
vice, on the other hand, of high and discursive
(1) See some interesting remark? on this subject in Bishop
Berkeley’s Minute Philosopher, Dialogue IV.
{487}intellects to attach too much importance to slight resemblances;
and he adds that, when this last propensity is indulged to excess, it
leads men to catch at shadows instead of substances. (1)
Yet we cannot wish that Bacon’s wit had been less luxuriant. For, to say
nothing of the pleasure which it affords, it was in the vast majority of
cases employed for the purpose of making obscure truth plain, of making
repulsive truth attractive, of fixing in the mind forever truth which
might otherwise have left but a transient impression.
The poetical faculty was powerful in Bacon’s mind, but not, like his
wit, so powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his reason, and
to tyrannize over the whole man. No imagination was ever at once so
strong and so thoroughly subjugated. It never stirred but at a signal
from good sense. It stopped at the first check from good sense. Yet,
though disciplined to such obedience, it gave noble proofs of its
vigour. In truth, much of Bacon’s life was passed in a visionary world,
amidst things as strange as any that are described in the Arabian Tales,
or in those romances on which the curate and barber of Don Quixote’s
village performed so cruel an auto-de-fe, amidst buildings more
sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin, fountains more wonderful than the
golden water of Parizade, conveyances more rapid than the hippogryph of
Ruggiero, arms more formidable than the lance of Astolfo, remedies
more efficacious than the balsam of Fierabras. Yet in his magnificent
day-dreams there was nothing wild, nothing but what sober reason
sanctioned. He knew that all the secrets feigned by poets to have been
written in the books of enchanters are worthless when compared
(1) _Novum Organum_, Lib. 1. Aph. 55.
{488}with the mighty secrets which are really written in the book of
nature, and which, with time and patience, will be read there. He knew
that all the wonders wrought by all the talismans in fable were trifles
when compared to the wonders which might reasonably be expected from the
philosophy of fruit, and that, if his words sank deep into the minds of
men, they would produce effects such as superstition had never ascribed
to the incantations of Merlin and Michael Scot. It was here that he
loved to let his imagination loose. He loved to picture to himself
the world as it would be when his philosophy should, in his own noble
phrase, “have enlarged the bounds of human empire.” (1) We might refer
to many instances. But we will content ourselves with the strongest,
the description of the House of Solomon in the New Atlantis. By most of
Bacon’s contemporaries, and by some people of our time, this remarkable
passage would, we doubt not, be considered as an ingenious rodomontade,
a counterpart to the adventures of Sinbad or Baron Munchausen. The truth
is, that there is not to be found in any human composition a passage
more eminently distinguished by profound and serene wisdom. The boldness
and originality of the fiction is far less wonderful than the nice
discernment which carefully excluded from that long list of prodigies
every thing that can be pronounced impossible, every thing that can be
proved to lie beyond the mighty magic of induction and of time. Already
some parts, and not the least startling parts, of this glorious prophecy
have been accomplished, even according to the letter; and the whole,
construed according to the spirit, is daily accomplishing all around us.