doctrines may have been, ought, it should seem, to have merited an
exception from the general censure which Bacon has pronounced on the
ancient schools of wisdom. The Epicurean, who referred all happiness to
bodily pleasure, and all evil to bodily pain, might have been expected
to exert himself for the purpose of bettering his own physical condition
and that of his neighbours. But the thought seems never to have occurred
to any member of that school. Indeed their notion, as reported by their
great poet, was, that no more improvements were to be expected in the
arts which conduce to the comfort of life.=
````“Ad victum quae flagitat usus
```Omnia jam ferme mortalibus esse parata.”=
This contented despondency, this disposition to admire what has
been done, and to expect that nothing more will be done, is strongly
characteristic of all the schools which preceded the school of Fruit and
Progress. Widely as the Epicurean and the Stoic differed on most points,
they seem to have quite agreed in their contempt for pursuits so vulgar
as to be useful. The philosophy of both was a garrulous, declaiming,
canting, wrangling philosophy. Century after century they continued to
repeat their hostile war-cries, Virtue and Pleasure; and in the end
it appeared that the Epicurean had added as little to the quantity of
pleasure as the Stoic to the quantity of virtue.
It is on the pedestal of Bacon, not on that of Epicurus, that those
noble lines ought to be inscribed,=
```“O tenebris tantis tam clarum extollere lumen
```Qui primus potuisti, illustrans commoda vitae.”=
In the fifth century Christianity had conquered Paganism, and Paganism
had infected Christianity. The Church was now victorious and corrupt.
The rites of the Pantheon had passed into her worship, the subtilties of
the Academy into her creed. In an evil day, though with great pomp
and solemnity,--we quote the language of Bacon,--was the ill-starred
alliance stricken between the old philosophy and the new faith.
[Cogitata et visa.] Questions widely different from those which had
employed the ingenuity of Pyrrho and Carneades, but just as subtle, just
as interminable, and just as unprofitable, exercised the minds of the
lively and voluble Greeks. When learning began to revive in the West,
similar trifles occupied the sharp and vigorous intellects of the
Schoolmen. There was another sowing of the wind, and another reaping of
the whirlwind. The great work of improving the condition of the human
race was still considered as unworthy of a man of learning. Those
who undertook that task, if what they effected could be readily
comprehended, were despised as mechanics; if not, they were in danger of
being burned as conjurers.
There cannot be a stronger proof of the degree in which the human mind
had been misdirected than the history of the two greatest events
which took place during the middle ages. We speak of the invention
of Gunpowder and of the invention of Printing. The dates of both are
unknown. The authors of both are unknown. Nor was this because men were
too rude and ignorant to value intellectual superiority. The inventor of
gunpowder appears to have been contemporary with Petrarch and Boccaccio.
The inventor of printing was certainly contemporary with Nicholas
the Fifth, with Cosmo de’ Medici, and with a crowd of distinguished
scholars. But the human mind still retained that fatal bent which it had
received two thousand years earlier. George of Trebisond and Marsilio
Ficino would not easily have been brought to believe that the inventor
of the printing-press had done more for mankind than themselves, or than
those ancient writers of whom they were the enthusiastic votaries.
At length the time arrived when the barren philosophy which had, during
so many ages, employed the faculties of the ablest of men, was destined
to fall. It had worn many shapes. It had mingled itself with many
creeds. It had survived revolutions in which empires, religions,
languages, races, had perished. Driven from its ancient haunts, it had
taken sanctuary in that Church which it had persecuted, and had, like
the daring fiends of the poet, placed its seat=
`````“next the seat of God, ```And with its darkness dared affront his
light.”=
Words, and more words, and nothing but words, had been all the fruit of
all the toil of all the most renowned sages of sixty generations. But
the days of this sterile exuberance were numbered.
Many causes predisposed the public mind to a change. The study of
a great variety of ancient writers, though it did not give a right
direction to philosophical research, did much towards destroying that
blind reverence for authority which had prevailed when Aristotle ruled
alone. The rise of the Florentine sect of Platonists, a sect to which
belonged some of the finest minds of the fifteenth century, was not
an unimportant event. The mere substitution of the Academic for the
Peripatetic philosophy would indeed have done little good. But anything
was better than the old habit of unreasoning servility. It was something
to have a choice of tyrants. “A spark of freedom,” as Gibbon has justly
remarked, “was produced by this collision of adverse servitude.”
Other causes might be mentioned. But it is chiefly to the great
reformation of religion that we owe the great reformation of philosophy.
The alliance between the Schools and the Vatican had for ages been so
close that those who threw off the dominion of the Vatican could not
continue to recognise the authority of the Schools. Most of the chiefs
of the schism treated the Peripatetic philosophy with contempt, and
spoke of Aristotle as if Aristotle had been answerable for all the
dogmas of Thomas Aquinas. “Nullo apud Lutheranos philosophiam esse in
pretio,” was a reproach which the defenders of the Church of Rome loudly
repeated, and which many of the Protestant leaders considered as a
compliment. Scarcely any text was more frequently cited by the reformers
than that in which St. Paul cautions the Colossians not to let any man
spoil them by philosophy. Luther, almost at the outset of his career,
went so far as to declare that no man could be at once a proficient in
the school of Aristotle and in that of Christ. Zwingle, Bucer,
Peter Martyr, Calvin, held similar language. In some of the Scotch
universities, the Aristotelian system was discarded for that of Ramus.
Thus, before the birth of Bacon, the empire of the scholastic philosophy
had been shaken to its foundations. There was in the intellectual world
an anarchy resembling that which in the political world often follows
the overthrow of an old and deeply rooted Government. Antiquity,
prescription, the sound of great names, have ceased to awe mankind. The
dynasty which had reigned for ages was at an end; and the vacant throne
was left to be struggled for by pretenders.
The first effect of this great revolution was, as Bacon most justly
observed, [De Augmentis, Lib. i.] to give for a time an undue importance
to the mere graces of style. The new breed of scholars, the Aschams and
Buchanans, nourished with the finest compositions of the Augustan
age, regarded with loathing the dry, crabbed, and barbarous diction of
respondents and opponents. They were far less studious about the matter
of their writing than about the manner. They succeeded in reforming
Latinity; but they never even aspired to effect a reform in Philosophy.
At this time Bacon appeared. It is altogether incorrect to say, as
has often been said, that he was the first man who rose up against the
Aristotelian philosophy when in the height of his power. The authority
of that philosophy had, as we have shown, received a fatal blow long
before he was born. Several speculators, among whom Ramus is the best
known, had recently attempted to form new sects. Bacon’s own expressions
about the state of public opinion in the time of Luther are clear
and strong: “Accedebat,” says he, “odium et contemptus, illis ipsis
temporibus ortus erga Scholasticos.” And again, “Scholasticorum doctrina
despectui prorsus haberi coepit tanquam aspera et barbara.” [Both these
passages are in the first book of the De Augmentis.] The part which
Bacon played in this great change was the part, not of Robespierre,
but of Bonaparte. The ancient order of things had been subverted. Some
bigots still cherished with devoted loyalty the remembrance of the
fallen monarchy, and exerted themselves to effect a restoration. But the
majority had no such feeling. Freed, yet not knowing how to use their
freedom, they pursued no determinate course, and had found no leader
capable of conducting them.
That leader at length arose. The philosophy which he taught was
essentially new. It differed from that of the celebrated ancient
teachers, not merely in method, but also in object. Its object was the
good of mankind, in the sense in which the mass of mankind always have
understood and always will understand the word good. “Meditor,” said
Bacon, “instaurationem philosophiae ejusmodi quae nihil inanis aut
abstracti habeat, quaeque vitae humanae conditiones in melius provehat.”
[Redargutio Philosophiarum.]
The difference between the philosophy of Bacon and that of his
predecessors cannot, we think, be better illustrated than by comparing
his views on some important subjects with those of Plato. We select
Plato, because we conceive that he did more than any other person
towards giving to the minds of speculative men that bent which they
retained till they received from Bacon a new impulse in a diametrically
opposite direction.
It is curious to observe how differently these great men estimated the
value of every kind of knowledge. Take Arithmetic for example. Plato,
after speaking slightly of the convenience of being able to reckon
and compute in the ordinary transactions of life, passes to what he
considers as a far more important advantage. The study of the properties
of numbers, he tells us, habituates the mind to the contemplation of
pure truth, and raises us above the material universe. He would have his
disciples apply themselves to this study, not that they may be able to
buy or sell, not that they may qualify themselves to be shopkeepers or
travelling merchants, but that they may learn to withdraw their minds
from the ever-shifting spectacle of this visible and tangible world, and
to fix them on the immutable essences of things. [Plato’s Republic, Book
vii.]
Bacon, on the other hand, valued this branch of knowledge, only on
account of its uses with reference to that visible and tangible world
which Plato so much despised. He speaks with scorn of the mystical
arithmetic of the later Platonists, and laments the propensity of
mankind to employ, on mere matters of curiosity, powers the whole
exertion of which is required for purposes of solid advantage. He
advises arithmeticians to leave these trifles, and to employ themselves
in framing convenient expressions, which may be of use in physical
researches. [De Augmentis, Lib. iii. Cap. 6.]
The same reasons which led Plato to recommend the study of arithmetic
led him to recommend also the study of mathematics. The vulgar crowd
of geometricians, he says, will not understand him. They have practice
always in view. They do not know that the real use of the science is
to lead men to the knowledge of abstract, essential, eternal truth.
[Plato’s Republic, Book vii.] Indeed, if we are to believe Plutarch,
Plato carried this feeling so far that he considered geometry as
degraded by being applied to any purpose of vulgar utility. Archytas,
it seems, had framed machines of extraordinary power on mathematical
principles. [Plutarch, Sympos. viii. and Life of Marcellus. The machines
of Archytas are also mentioned by Aulus Gellius and Diogenes Laertius.]
Plato remonstrated with his friend, and declared that this was to
degrade a noble intellectual exercise into a low craft, fit only for
carpenters and wheelwrights. The office of geometry, he said, was to
discipline the mind, not to minister to the base wants of the body. His
interference was successful; and from that time, according to Plutarch,
the science of mechanics was considered as unworthy of the attention of
a philosopher.
Archimedes in a later age imitated and surpassed Archytas. But even
Archimedes was not free from the prevailing notion that geometry was
degraded by being employed to produce anything useful. It was with
difficulty that he was induced to stoop from speculation to practice.
He was half ashamed of those inventions which were the wonder of hostile
nations, and always spoke of them slightingly as mere amusements, as
trifles in which a mathematician might be suffered to relax his mind
after intense application to the higher parts of his science.
The opinion of Bacon on this subject was diametrically opposed to that
of the ancient philosophers. He valued geometry chiefly, if not solely,
on account of those uses, which to Plato appeared so base. And it is
remarkable that the longer Bacon lived the stronger this feeling became.
When in 1605 he wrote the two books on the Advancement of Learning, he
dwelt on the advantages which mankind derived from mixed mathematics;
but he at the same time admitted that the beneficial effect produced by
mathematical study on the intellect, though a collateral advantage, was
“no less worthy than that which was principal and intended.” But it
is evident that his views underwent a change. When, near twenty years
later, he published the De Augmentis, which is the Treatise on the
Advancement of Learning, greatly expanded and carefully corrected, he
made important alterations in the part which related to mathematics.
He condemned with severity the high, pretensions of the mathematicians,
“delicias et fastum mathematicorum.” Assuming the well-being of the
human race to be the end of knowledge, [Usui et commodis hominum
consulimus.] he pronounced that mathematical science could claim no
higher rank than that of an appendage or auxiliary to other sciences.
Mathematical science, he says, is the handmaid of natural philosophy;
she ought to demean herself as such; and he declares that he cannot
conceive by what ill chance it has happened that she presumes to claim
precedence over her mistress. He predicts--a prediction which would
have made Plato shudder--that as more and more discoveries are made in
physics, there will be more and more branches of mixed mathematics. Of
that collateral advantage the value of which, twenty years before, he
rated so highly, he says not one word. This omission cannot have been
the effect of mere inadvertence. His own treatise was before him. From
that treatise he deliberately expunged whatever was favourable to the
study of pure mathematics, and inserted several keen reflections on the
ardent votaries of that study. This fact, in our opinion, admits of only
one explanation. Bacon’s love of those pursuits which directly tend
to improve the condition of mankind, and his jealousy of all pursuits
merely curious, had grown upon him, and had, it may be, become
immoderate. He was afraid of using any expression which might have the
effect of inducing any man of talents to employ in speculations,
useful only to the mind of the speculator, a single hour which might
be employed in extending the empire of man over matter. [Compare the
passage relating to mathematics in the Second Book of the Advancement of
Learning with the De Augmentis Lib. iii. Cap. 6.] If Bacon erred here,
we must acknowledge that we greatly prefer his error to the opposite
error of Plato. We have no patience with a philosophy which, like those
Roman matrons who swallowed abortives in order to preserve their shapes,
takes pains to be barren for fear of being homely.
Let us pass to astronomy. This was one of the sciences which Plato
exhorted his disciples to learn, but for reasons far removed from common
habits of thinking. “Shall we set down astronomy,” says Socrates, “among
the subjects of study?” [Plato’s Republic, Book vii.] “I think so,”
answers his young friend Glaucon: “to know something about the seasons,
the months, and the years is of use for military purposes, as well as
for agriculture and navigation.” “It amuses me,” says Socrates, “to see
how afraid you are, lest the common herd of people should accuse you
of recommending useless studies.” He then proceeds, in that pure and
magnificent diction which, as Cicero said, Jupiter would use if Jupiter
spoke Greek, to explain, that the use of astronomy is not to add to
the vulgar comforts of life, but to assist in raising the mind to the
contemplation of things which are to be perceived by the pure intellect
alone. The knowledge of the actual motions of the heavenly bodies
Socrates considers as of little value. The appearances which make
the sky beautiful at night are, he tells us, like the figures which
a geometrician draws on the sand, mere examples, mere helps to feeble
minds. We must get beyond them; we must neglect them; we must attain to
an astronomy which is as independent of the actual stars as geometrical
truth is independent of the lines of an ill-drawn diagram. This is, we
imagine, very nearly if not exactly, the astronomy which Bacon compared
to the ox of Prometheus, [De Augmentis, Lib. iii. Cap. 4] a sleek,
well-shaped hide, stuffed with rubbish, goodly to look at, but
containing nothing to eat. He complained that astronomy had, to its
great injury, been separated from natural philosophy, of which it was
one of the noblest provinces, and annexed to the domain of mathematics.
The world stood in need, he said, of a very different astronomy, of a
living astronomy, [Astronomia viva.] of an astronomy which should set
forth the nature, the motion, and the influences of the heavenly bodies,
as they really are. [“Quae substantiam et motum et influxum ecelestium,
prout re vera sunt proponat.” Compare this language with Plato’s “ta
d’en to ourano easomen.”]
On the greatest and most useful of all human inventions, the invention
of alphabetical writing, Plato did not look with much complacency. He
seems to have thought that the use of letters had operated on the human
mind as the use of the go-cart in learning to walk, or of corks in
learning to swim, is said to operate on the human body. It was a support
which, in his opinion, soon became indispensable to those who used it,
which made vigorous exertion first unnecessary and then impossible.
The powers of the intellect would, he conceived, have been more fully
developed without this delusive aid. Men would have been compelled to
exercise the understanding and the memory, and, by deep and assiduous
meditation, to make truth thoroughly their own. Now, on the contrary,
much knowledge is traced on paper, but little is engraved in the soul. A
man is certain that he can find information at a moment’s notice when
he wants it. He therefore suffers it to fade from his mind. Such a man
cannot in strictness be said to know anything. He has the show without
the reality of wisdom. These opinions Plato has put into the mouth of
an ancient king of Egypt. [Plato’s Phaedrus.] But it is evident from
the context that they were his own; and so they were understood to be
by Quinctilian. [Quinctilian, xi.] Indeed they are in perfect accordance
with the whole Platonic system.
Bacon’s views, as may easily be supposed, were widely different. [De
Augmentis, Lib. v. Cap. 5.] The powers of the memory, he observes,
without the help of writing, can do little towards the advancement of
any useful science. He acknowledges that the memory may be disciplined
to such a point as to be able to perform very extraordinary feats. But
on such feats he sets little value. The habits of his mind, he tells
us, are such that he is not disposed to rate highly any accomplishment,
however rare, which is of no practical use to mankind. As to these
prodigious achievements of the memory, he ranks them with the
exhibitions of rope-dancers and tumblers. “These two performances,” he
says, “are much of the same sort. The one is an abuse of the powers
of the body; the other is an abuse of the powers of the mind. Both may
perhaps excite our wonder; but neither is entitled to our respect.”
To Plato, the science of medicine appeared to be of very disputable
advantages. [Plato’s Republic, Book iii.] He did not indeed object to
quick cures for acute disorders, or for injuries produced by accidents.
But the art which resists the slow sap of a chronic disease, which
repairs frames enervated by lust, swollen by gluttony, or inflamed by
wine, which encourages sensuality by mitigating the natural punishment
of the sensualist, and prolongs existence when the intellect has
ceased to retain its entire energy, had no share of his esteem. A
life protracted by medical skill he pronounced to be a long death. The
exercise of the art of medicine ought, he said, to be tolerated, so far
as that art may serve to cure the occasional distempers of men whose
constitutions are good. As to those who have bad constitutions, let
them die; and the sooner the better. Such men are unfit for war, for
magistracy, for the management of their domestic affairs, for severe
study and speculation. If they engage in any vigorous mental exercise,
they are troubled with giddiness and fulness of the head, all which they
lay to the account of philosophy. The best thing that can happen to such
wretches is to have done with life at once. He quotes mythical authority
in support of this doctrine; and reminds his disciples that the practice
of the sons of Aeculapius, as described by Homer, extended only to the
cure of external injuries.
Far different was the philosophy of Bacon. Of all the sciences, that
which he seems to have regarded with the greatest interest was
the science which, in Plato’s opinion, would not be tolerated in a
well-regulated community. To make men perfect was no part of Bacon’s
plan. His humble aim was to make imperfect men comfortable. The
beneficence of his philosophy resembled the beneficence of the common
Father, whose sun rises on the evil and the good, whose rain descends
for the just and the unjust. In Plato’s opinion man was made for
philosophy; in Bacon’s opinion philosophy was made for man; it was
a means to an end; and that end was to increase the pleasures and to
mitigate the pains of millions who are not and cannot be philosophers.
That a valetudinarian who took great pleasure in being wheeled along his
terrace, who relished his boiled chicken, and his weak wine and water,
and who enjoyed a hearty laugh over the Queen of Navarre’s tales, should
be treated as a caput lupinum because he could not read the Timaeus
without a headache, was a notion which the humane spirit of the English
school of wisdom altogether rejected. Bacon would not have thought it
beneath the dignity of a philosopher to contrive an improved garden
chair for such a valetudinarian, to devise some way of rendering his
medicines more palatable, to invent repasts which he might enjoy, and
pillows on which he might sleep soundly; and this though there might not
be the smallest hope that the mind of the poor invalid would ever rise
to the contemplation of the ideal beautiful and the ideal good. As Plato
had cited the religious legends of Greece to justify his contempt for
the more recondite parts of the heart of healing, Bacon vindicated the
dignity of that art by appealing to the example of Christ, and reminded
men that the great physician of the soul did not disdain to be also the
physician of the body. [De Augmentis, Lib, iv. Cap.2]
When we pass from the science of medicine to that of legislation, we
find the same difference between the systems of these two great men.
Plato, at the commencement of the Dialogue on Laws, lays it down as
a fundamental principle that the end of legislation is to make men
virtuous. It is unnecessary to point out the extravagant conclusions to
which such a proposition leads. Bacon well knew to how great an extent
the happiness of every society must depend on the virtue of its members;
and he also knew what legislators can and what they cannot do for the
purpose of promoting virtue. The view which he has given of the end of
legislation, and of the principal means for the attainment of that
end, has always seemed to us eminently happy, even among the many happy
passages of the same kind with which his works abound. “Finis et scopus
quem leges intueri atque ad quem jussiones et sanctiones suas dirigere
debent, non alius est quam ut cives feliciter degant. Id fiet si pietate
et religione recte instituti, moribus honesti, armis adversus hostes
externos tuti, legum auxilio adversus seditiones et privatas injurias
muniti, imperio et magistratibus obsequentes, copiis et opibus
locupletes et florentes fuerint.” [De Augmentis, Lib. viii. Cap. 3, Aph.
5.] The end is the well-being of the people. The means are the imparting
of moral and religious education; the providing of everything necessary
for defence against foreign enemies; the maintaining of internal order;
the establishing of a judicial, financial, and commercial system, under
which wealth may be rapidly accumulated and securely enjoyed.
Even with respect to the form in which laws ought to be drawn, there is
a remarkable difference of opinion between the Greek and the Englishman.
Plato thought a preamble essential; Bacon thought it mischievous. Each
was consistent with himself. Plato, considering the moral improvement of
the people as the end of legislation, justly inferred that a law which
commanded and threatened, but which neither convinced the reason, nor
touched the heart, must be a most imperfect law. He was not content with
deterring from theft a man who still continued to be a thief at heart,
with restraining a son who hated his mother from beating his mother.
The only obedience on which he set much value was the obedience which
an enlightened understanding yields to reason, and which a virtuous
disposition yields to precepts of virtue. He really seems to have
believed that, by prefixing to every law an eloquent and pathetic
exhortation, he should, to a great extent, render penal enactments
superfluous. Bacon entertained no such romantic hopes; and he well knew
the practical inconveniences of the course which Plato recommended.
“Neque nobis,” says he, “prologi legum qui inepti olim habiti sunt, et
leges introducunt disputantes non jubentes, utique placerent, si priscos
mores ferre possemus. . . . Quantum fieri potest prologi evitentur, et
lex incipiat a jussione.” [Ibid., Lib. viii. Cap. 3, Aph. 69.]
Each of the great men whom we have compared intended to illustrate his
system by a philosophical romance; and each left his romance imperfect.
Had Plato lived to finish the Critias, a comparison between that noble
fiction and the new Atlantis would probably have furnished us with still
more striking instances than any which we have given. It is amusing
to think with what horror he would have seen such an institution as
Solomon’s House rising in his republic: with what vehemence he would
have ordered the brew-houses, the perfume-houses, and the dispensatories
to be pulled down--and with what inexorable rigour he would have driven
beyond the frontier all the Fellows of the College, Merchants of Light
and Depredators, Lamps and Pioneers.
To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic
philosophy was to exalt man into a god. The aim of the Baconian
philosophy was to provide man with what he requires while he continues
to be man. The aim of the Platonic philosophy was to raise us far above
vulgar wants. The aim of the Baconian philosophy was to supply our
vulgar wants. The former aim was noble; but the latter was attainable.
Plato drew a good bow; but, like Acestes in Virgil, he aimed at the
stars; and therefore, though there was no want of strength or skill,
the shot was thrown away. His arrow was indeed followed by a track of
dazzling radiance, but it struck nothing.=
```“Volans liquidis in nubibus arsit arundo
```Signavitque viam flammis, tenuisque recessit
```Consumta 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 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. We 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 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 in an aged paralytic; and in
the same way, those wild and 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?
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 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 bones, 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, the rack, were evils, and calling them
apoproegmena in refusing to acknowledge that health, safety, plenty,
were good things, and dubbing them by the name of adiaphora. 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 idiotes, 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
smallpox 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 smallpox, and that to a wise man disease, deformity,
death, the loss of friends, are not evils. The Baconian takes out 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 apoproegmenon. 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. His vessel with an
inestimable cargo has just gone down, and he 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 pros tous ten aporian dediokotas. 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 Organum 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 well-being 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 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 of the attention of a man of liberal
education. “Cogitavit,” says Bacon of himself, “eam esse opinionem
sive aestimationem humidam et damnosam, minui nempe majestatem mentis
humanae, si in experimentis et rebus particularibus, sensui subjectis,
et in materia terminatis, diu ac multum versetur: praesertim cum
hujusmodi res ad inquirendum laboriosae, ad meditandum ignobiles,
ad discendum asperae, ad practicam illiberales, numero infinitae,
et subtilitate pusillae videri soleant, et ob hujusmodi conditiones,
gloriae artium minus sint accommodatae.” [Cogitata et visa. 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.] 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
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. [Novum Organum, Lib,
I. Aph 127.]
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 Georgics 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. [De Augmentis, Lib. vii. Cap.
3.]
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
Bolingbroke pretended to comfort himself in exile, and in which Cicero
vainly sought consolation after the loss of Tullia. The casuistical
subtilties which occupied the 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.” [Ibid. Lib. vii. Cap. 2.] 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. [Ibid.: Lib. vii. Cap. 3.]
What he was as a natural philosopher and a moral philosopher, that he
was also as a theologian. He was, 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 Homoiousians, 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
Allworthy 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 philosophy, because
from this peculiarity all the other peculiarities of that philosophy
necessary 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.
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 intellectum instantiarum convenientium. “I did not
eat any on Tuesday and Friday, and I was quite well.” This is the
comparentia instantiarum in proximo quae 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 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. Dr. 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 hanc vim intelligo,” said Cicero, “esse in
praeceptis omnibus, non ut ea secuti oratores eloquentiae laudem sint
adepti, sed quae sua sponte homines eloquentes facerent, ea quosdam
observasse, atque id egisse; sic esse non eloquentiam ex artificio, sed
artificium ex eloquentia natum.” We must own that we entertain the
same opinion concerning the study of Logic which Cicero entertained
concerning the study of Rhetoric. A man of sense syllogises in celarent
and cesare all day long without suspecting it; and, though he may not
know what an ignoratio elenchi 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 comparentiae and
rejectiones of which we have given examples will be found in the most
unsound inductions. We have heard that an eminent judge of 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 absentiae 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 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 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 draftsmen can produce without such aid. [Novum
Organum, Praef. and Lib. I Aph. 122.] 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, 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 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 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,” [Novum Organum, Lib. i. Aph. 29.] 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 [De Augmentis, Lib. i.] 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 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 great dramatist has put into
the mouth of all Oriental conqueror half-crazed by good fortune and by
violent passions:=
```“He shall have chariots easier than air,
```Which I will have invented; and thyself
```That art the messenger shall ride before him,
```On a horse cut out of an entire diamond,
```That shall be made to go with golden wheels,
```I know not how yet.”=
But Bacon performed what he promised. In truth, Fletcher would not have
dared to make Arbaces promise, in his wildest fits of excitement, the
tithe of what the Baconian philosophy has performed.
The true philosophical temperament may, we think, be described in four
words, much hope, little faith; a disposition to believe that anything,
however extraordinary, may be done; an indisposition to believe that
anything extraordinary has been done. In these points the constitution
of Bacon’s mind seems to us to have been absolutely perfect. He was at
once the Mammon and the Surly of his friend Ben. Sir Epicure did not
indulge in visions more magnificent and gigantic, Surly did not sift
evidence with keener and more sagacious incredulity.
Closely connected with this peculiarity of Bacon’s temper was a striking
peculiarity of his understanding. With great minuteness of observation,
he had an amplitude of comprehension such as has never yet been
vouchsafed to any other human being. The small fine mind of Labruyere
had not a more delicate tact than the large intellect of Bacon. The
Essays contain abundant proofs that no nice feature of character, no
peculiarity in the ordering of a house, a garden, or a court-masque,
would escape the notice of one whose mind was capable of taking in the
whole world of knowledge. His understanding resembled the tent which the
fairy Paribanou gave to Prince Ahmed. Fold it; and it seemed a toy for
the hand of a lady. Spread it; and the armies of powerful Sultans might
repose beneath its shade.
In keenness of observation he has been equalled, though perhaps never
surpassed. But the largeness of his mind was all his own. The glance
with which he surveyed the intellectual universe resembled that which
the Archangel, from the golden threshold of heaven, darted down into the
new creation:=
```“Round he surveyed,--and well might, where he stood
```So high above the circling canopy
```Of night’s extended shade,--from eastern point
```Of Libra, to the fleecy star which bears
```Andromeda far off Atlantic seas
```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 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: “Franciscus 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 to the victories of his own intellect. [Novum Organum,
Lib. i. Aph. 35 and elsewhere.] 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 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 those 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.
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 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 phaenomena of evaporation and rain.
In theology, this perverted ingenuity has made still wilder work. From
the time of Irenaeus 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. [See some interesting remarks on this subject in
Bishop Berkeley’s Minute Philosopher, Dialogue iv.] It is curious that
Bacon has himself mentioned this very kind of delusion among the idola
specus; and has mentioned it 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
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. [Novum Organum, Lib. i. Aph.
55.]
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 for ever 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 tyrannise 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
daydreams 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 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 Scott. 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.” [New Atlantis.] 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
everything that can be pronounced impossible, everything that can be
proved to lie beyond the mighty magic of induction and 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.
One of the most remarkable circumstances in the history of Bacon’s mind
is the order in which its powers expanded themselves. With him the fruit
came first and remained till the last; the blossoms did not appear till
late. In general, the development of the fancy is to the development of
the judgment what the growth of a girl is to the growth of a boy. The
fancy attains at an earlier period to the perfection of its beauty, its
power, and its fruitfulness; and, as it is first to ripen, it is
also first to fade. It has generally lost something of its bloom and
freshness before the sterner faculties have reached maturity; and is
commonly withered and barren while those faculties still retain all
their energy. It rarely happens that the fancy and the judgment grow
together. It happens still more rarely that the judgment grows faster
than the fancy. This seems, however, to have been the case with Bacon.
His boyhood and youth appear to have been singularly sedate. His
gigantic scheme of philosophical reform is said by some writers to have
been planned before he was fifteen, and was undoubtedly planned while
he was still young. He observed as vigilantly, meditated as deeply, and
judged as temperately when he gave his first work to the world as at the
close of his long career. But in eloquence, in sweetness and variety of
expression, and in richness of illustration, his later writings are far
superior to those of his youth. In this respect the history of his mind
bears some resemblance to the history of the mind of Burke. The treatise
on the Sublime and Beautiful, though written on a subject which the
coldest metaphysician could hardly treat without being occasionally
betrayed into florid writing, is the most unadorned of all Burke’s
works. It appeared when he was twenty-five or twenty-six. When, at
forty, he wrote the Thoughts on the Causes of the existing Discontents,
his reason and his judgment had reached their full maturity; but his
eloquence was still in its splendid dawn. At fifty, his rhetoric was
quite as rich as good taste would permit; and when he died, at almost
seventy, it had become ungracefully gorgeous. In his youth he wrote on
the emotions produced by mountains and cascades, by the master-pieces
of painting and sculpture, by the faces and necks of beautiful women,
in the style of a Parliamentary report. In his old age he discussed
treaties and tariffs in the most fervid and brilliant language of
romance. It is strange that the Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, and
the Letter to a Noble Lord, should be the productions of one man. But it
is far more strange that the Essay should have been a production of his
youth, and the Letter of his old age.
We will give very short specimens of Bacon’s two styles. In 1597, he
wrote thus: “Crafty men contemn studies; simple men admire them; and
wise men use them; for they teach not their own use: that is a wisdom
without them, and won by observation. Read not to contradict, nor to
believe, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others
to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. Reading maketh
a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. And
therefore if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if
he confer little, have a present wit; and if he read little, have much
cunning to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise, poets
witty, the mathematics subtle, natural philosophy deep, morals grave,
logic and rhetoric able to contend.” It will hardly be disputed that
this is a passage to be “chewed and digested.” We do not believe that
Thucydides himself has anywhere compressed so much thought into so small
a space.
In the additions which Bacon afterwards made to the Essays, there is
nothing superior in truth or weight to what we have quoted. But his
style was constantly becoming richer and softer. The following passage,
first published in 1625, will show the extent of the change: “Prosperity
is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the
New, which carrieth the greater benediction and the clearer evidence of
God’s favour. Yet, even in the Old Testament, if you listen to David’s
harp you shall hear as many hearse-like airs as carols; and the pencil
of the Holy Ghost hath laboured more in describing the afflictions of
Job than the felicities of Solomon. Prosperity is not without many fears
and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes. We see
in needleworks and embroideries it is more pleasing to have a lively
work upon a sad and solemn ground, than to have a dark and melancholy
work upon a lightsome ground. Judge therefore of the pleasure of the
heart by the pleasure of the eye. Certainly virtue is like precious
odours, most fragrant when they are incensed or crushed; for prosperity
doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.”
It is by the Essays that Bacon is best known to the multitude. The Novum
Organum and the De Augmentis are much talked of, but little read. They
have produced indeed a vast effect on the opinions of mankind; but they
have produced it through the operation of intermediate agents. They have
moved the intellects which have moved the world. It is in the Essays
alone that the mind of Bacon is brought into immediate contact with the
minds of ordinary readers. There he opens an exoteric school, and talks
to plain men, in language which everybody understands, about things
in which everybody is interested. He has thus enabled those who must
otherwise have taken his merits on trust to judge for themselves; and
the great body of readers have, during several generations, acknowledged
that the man who has treated with such consummate ability questions with
which they are familiar may well be supposed to deserve all the praise
bestowed on him by those who have sat in his inner-school.
Without any disparagement to the admirable treatise De Augmentis, we
must say that, in our judgment, Bacon’s greatest performance is
the first book of the Novum Organum. All the peculiarities of his
extraordinary mind are found there in the highest perfection. Many of
the aphorisms, but particularly those in which he gives examples of the
influence of the idola, show a nicety of observation that has never been
surpassed. Every part of the book blazes with wit, but with wit which
is employed only to illustrate and decorate truth. No book ever made
so great a revolution in the mode of thinking, overthrew so many
prejudices, introduced so many new opinions. Yet no book was ever
written in a less contentious spirit. It truly conquers with chalk and
not with steel. Proposition after proposition enters into the mind,
is received not as an invader, but as a welcome friend, and, though
previously unknown, becomes at once domesticated. But what we most
admire is the vast capacity of that intellect which, without effort,
takes in at once all the domains of science, all the past, the
present, and the future, all the errors of two thousand years, all the
encouraging signs of the passing times, all the bright hopes of the
coming age. Cowley, who was among the most ardent, and not among the
least discerning followers of the new philosophy, has, in one of his
finest poems, compared Bacon to Moses standing on Mount Pisgah. It is to
Bacon, we think, as he appears in the first book of the Novum Organum,
that the comparison applies with peculiar felicity. There we see the
great Lawgiver looking round from his lonely elevation on an infinite
expanse; behind him a wilderness of dreary sands and bitter waters in
which successive generations have sojourned, always moving, yet never
advancing, reaping no harvest, and building no abiding city; before him
a goodly land, a land of promise, a land flowing with milk and honey.
While the multitude below saw only the flat sterile desert in which
they had so long wandered, bounded on every side by a near horizon,
or diversified only by some deceitful mirage, he was gazing from a far
higher stand on a far lovelier country, following with his eye the long
course of fertilising rivers, through ample pastures, and under the
bridges of great capitals, measuring the distances of marts and havens,
and portioning out all those wealthy regions from Dan to Beersheba.
It is painful to turn back from contemplating Bacon’s philosophy to
contemplate his life. Yet without so turning back it is impossible
fairly to estimate his powers. He left the University at an earlier age
than that at which most people repair thither. While yet a boy he was
plunged into the midst of diplomatic business. Thence he passed to the
study of a vast technical system of law, and worked his way up through
a succession of laborious offices to the highest post in his profession.
In the meantime he took an active part in every Parliament; he was an
adviser of the Crown: he paid court with the greatest assiduity and
address to all whose favour was likely to be of use to him; he lived
much in society; he noted the slightest peculiarities of character
and the slightest changes of fashion. Scarcely any man has led a more
stirring life than that which Bacon led from sixteen to sixty. Scarcely
any man has been better entitled to be called a thorough man of
the world. The founding of a new philosophy, the imparting of a new
direction to the minds of speculators, this was the amusement of his
leisure, the work of hours occasionally stolen from the Woolsack and
the Council Board. This consideration, while it increases the admiration
with which we regard his intellect, increases also our regret that such
an intellect should so often have been unworthily employed. He well
knew the better course and had, at one time, resolved to pursue it. “I
confess,” said he in a letter written when he was still young, “that I
have as vast contemplative ends as I have moderate civil ends.” Had his
civil ends continued to be moderate, he would have been, not only the
Moses, but the Joshua of philosophy. He would have fulfilled a
large part of his own magnificent predictions. He would have led his
followers, not only to the verge, but into the heart of the promised
land. He would not merely have pointed out, but would have divided the
spoil. Above all, he would have left, not only a great, but a spotless
name. Mankind would then have been able to esteem their illustrious
benefactor. We should not then be compelled to regard his character with
mingled contempt and admiration, with mingled aversion and gratitude.
We should not then regret that there should be so many proofs of the
narrowness and selfishness of a heart, the benevolence of which was
large enough to take in all races and all ages. We should not then have
to blush for the disingenuousness of the most devoted worshipper
of speculative truth, for the servility of the boldest champion of
intellectual freedom. We should not then have seen the same man at
one time far in the van, and at another time far in the rear of his
generation. We should not then be forced to own that he who first
treated legislation as a science was among the last Englishmen who used
the rack, that he who first summoned philosophers to the great work of
interpreting nature was among the last Englishmen who sold justice.
And we should conclude our survey of a life placidly, honourably,
beneficently passed, “in industrious observations, grounded conclusions,
and profitable inventions and discoveries,” [From a Letter of Bacon to
Lord Burleigh.] with feelings very different from those with which we
now turn away from the checkered spectacle of so much glory and so much
shame.