BACON.

In the age of Elizabeth, the English mind took its first bent; a

new-born impulse in the nation everywhere was working out its religion,

its legislation, and its literature. In every class of genius there

existed nothing to copy; everything that was to be great was to find a

beginning. Those maritime adventurers in this reign who sailed to

discover new regions, and those heroes whose chivalric spirit was errant

in the marshes of Holland, were not more enterprising than the creators

of our peaceful literature.

Among these first INVENTORS--our epical SPENSER, our dramatic

SHAKESPEARE and JONSON, our HOOKER, who sounded the depths of the origin

of law, and our RAWLEIGH, who first opened the history of mankind--at

length appeared the philosopher who proclaimed a new philosophy,

emancipating the human mind by breaking the chains of scholastic

antiquity. He was a singular being who is recognised without his name.

Aristotle, in taking possession of all the regions of knowledge, from

the first had assumed a universal monarchy, more real than that of his

regal pupil, for he had subjugated the minds of generation after

generation. Through a long succession of ages, and amid both extinct and

new religions, the writings of the mighty Stagyrite, however long known

by mutilated and unfaithful versions, were equally studied by the

Mahometan Arabian and the Rabbinical Hebrew, and, during the scholastic

ages, were even placed by the side, and sometimes above, the Gospel; and

the ten categories, which pretended to classify every object of human

apprehension, were held as another revelation. Centuries succeeded to

centuries, and the learned went on translating, commenting, and

interpreting, the sacred obscurity of the autocratical edict of a genius

whose lofty omniscience seemed to partake in some degree of divinity

itself.

But from this passive obedience to a single encyclopaedic mind, a fatal

consequence ensued for mankind. The schoolmen had formed, as Lord Bacon

has nobly expressed himself, "an unhallowed conjunction of divine with

human matters;" theology itself was turned into a system, drawn out of

the artificial arrangements of Aristotle; they made their orthodoxy

dependent on "the scholastic gibberish;"[1] and to doubt any doctrine of

"the philosopher," as Aristotle was paramountly called, might be to sin

by a syllogism--heretical, if not atheistical. In reality it was to

contend, without any possibility of escape, with the ecclesiastical

establishment, whose integrity was based on the immoveable conformity of

all human opinions. Every university in Europe, whose honours and

emoluments arose from their Aristotelian chairs, stood as the sentinels

of each intellectual fortress. Speculative philosophy could therefore no

further advance; it could not pass that inviolable circle which had

circumscribed the universal knowledge of the human race. No one dared to

think his own thoughts, to observe his own observations, lest by some

fortuitous discovery, in differing from the Aristotelian dialectic, he

might lapse from his Christianity. The scholastical sects were still

agitating the same topics; for the same barbarous terms supplied, on all

occasions, verbal disputations, which even bloody frays could never

terminate.

If we imagine that this awful fabric of the Aristotelian or scholastic

philosophy was first shaken by the Verulamian, we should be conferring

on a single individual a sudden influence which was far more

progressive. In a great revolution, whence we date a new era, we are apt

to lose sight of those devious paths and those marking incidents which

in all human affairs are the prognostics and the preparations; the

history of the human mind would be imperfectly revealed, should we not

trace the great inventors in their precursors.

Early in the sixteenth century appeared simultaneously a number of

extraordinary geniuses. An age of philosophical inventors seemed to

arise; a new generation, who, each in his own way, were emancipating

themselves from the dogmas of the ancient dictator. This revolt against

the old scholastics broke forth in Italy, in Spain, in France, in

Germany, and even reached our shores. These philosophers were the

contemporaries of Luther: they had not engaged in his theological

reformation, but it is more than probable that they had caught the

inspiration of his hardy spirit. We are indeed told that the famous

Cornelius Agrippa, though he could not desert the Rome of his patrons,

yet saw with satisfaction its great pontiff attacked by Luther; as

Erasmus and others equally delighted to satirize all the scholastic

monkery.[2] Luther, too, made common cause with them, in the demolition

of that ancient edifice of scholastic superstition which, under the

supremacy of Aristotle, barred out every free inquiry.

Of these eminent men, an elegant scholar, Ludovicus Vives, by birth a

Spaniard, had been invited to the English court by our Henry the Eighth,

to be the preceptor of the Princess Mary. Vives too was the friend of

Erasmus; but while that facetious sage only expended his raillery on the

scholastic madness, Vives formally attacked the chief, whose final

authority he declared had hitherto solely rested on the indolence of the

human mind. Ramus, in France, advanced with more impetuous fury; he held

a public disputation against the paramount authority of the Stagyrite in

philosophy; and in his "Aristotelian Animadversions" he profanely

shivered into atoms of absurdity the syllogistic method, and substituted

for the logic of Aristotle one of his own, which was long received in

all the schools of the reformed, for Ramus was a Huguenot. This

innovator was denounced to the magistrate; for, by opposing Aristotle,

he had committed open hostility against religion and learning! The

erudite Abate Andres, probably an Aristotelian at heart, observes, in

noticing the continued persecutions of this bold spirit, that, "to tell

the truth, Ramus injured himself far more than the Aristotelian doctrine

which he had impugned"[3]--and true enough, if it were a rival

Aristotelian who cast Ramus out of the window, to be massacred by the

mob on St. Bartholomew's day. Two eminent scholars of Italy contested

more successfully the doctrines of Aristotle: Patricius collected

everything he could to degrade and depreciate that philosopher, and to

elevate the more seductive and imaginative Plato. He asserted that

Aristotle was the plagiarist of other writers, whose writings he

invariably affected to contemn; and he went so far as to suggest to the

Pope to prohibit the teaching of the Aristotelian doctrines in the

schools; for the doctrines of Plato more harmoniously accorded with the

Christian faith. Less learned, but more original than Patricius, the

Neapolitan Telesius struck out a new mode of philosophizing. The study

of mathematics had indicated to Telesius a severe process in his

investigations of nature, and had taught him to reject those conjectural

solutions of the phenomena of the material world--subtleties and

fictions which had led Aristotle into many errors, and whose universal

authority had swayed opinions through successive ages. "Telesius," says

Lord Bacon, "hath renewed the tenet of Parmenides, and is the best of

our novelists."[4] Lord Bacon considered the Telesian system worthy of

his development and his refutation. But, by his physical system,

Telesius had broken the spell, and sent forth the naturalist to

scrutinize more closely into nature; and possibly this Neapolitan sage

may have kindled the first spark in the experimental philosophy of

Bacon.

All these were eminent philosophers who had indignantly rejected the

eternal babble of the scholastics, and the vain dicta of the

peripatetics; and in the same cycle were others more erratic and

fantastic. These bold artificers of novel systems of philosophy had not

unsuccessfully attacked the dogmas of Aristotle, but to little purpose,

while they were substituting their own. The prevalent agitation of the

philosophical spirit, now impetuous and disturbed, shot forth mighty

impulses in imaginary directions, and created chimeras. Agrippa and

Paracelsus, Jordano Bruno, Cardan and Campanella, played their

"fantastic tricks," till the patient genius of the new philosophy arose

simultaneously in the Italian Galileo and the founder of the Verulamian

method.

Amid the ruins of these systems of philosophies, it was not with their

fallen columns that Lord Bacon designed to construct a new philosophy of

his own--a system in opposition to other systems. He would hold no

controversies: for refutations were useless if the method he invented

was a right one. He would not even be the founder of a sect, for he

presumed not to establish a philosophy, but to show how we should

philosophize. The father of experimental philosophy delivered no

"opinions," but "a work;" patient observation, practical results, or new

and enlarged sciences, "not to be found in the space of a single age,

but through a succession of generations." D'Alembert observed, "The

Baconian philosophy was too wise to astonish." His early sagacity had

detected the fatal error of all system-makers; each, to give coherence

to his hypothesis, had recourse to some occult operation, and sometimes

had ventured to give it a name which was nothing more than an abstract

notion, and not a reality ascertained to exist in nature. The Platonist

had buried his lofty head amid the clouds of theology, beyond the

aspirations of man: the Aristotelian, by the syllogistic method of

reasoning, had invented a mere instrument of perpetual disputation,

without the acquisition of knowledge; and in the law which governed the

material world, when Democritus had conceived his atom, and endowed it

with a desire or appetency to move with other atoms, or Telesius

imagined with cold and heat to find the first beginnings of motion--what

had they but contracted nature within the bars of their systems, while

she was perpetually escaping from them? The greater philosopher sought

to follow nature through her paths, to be "her servant and interpreter;"

or, as he has also expressed it, "to subdue nature by yielding to her."

Lord Bacon was conscious of the slow progress of truth; he has himself

appealed to distant ages. So progressive is human reason, that a novel

system, at its first announcement, has been resisted as the most

dangerous innovation, or rejected as utterly false; yet at a subsequent

period the first promulgator who had struck into the right road is

censured, not for his temerity, but for his timidity, in not having

advanced to its termination, and laying the burden on posterity to

demonstrate that which he had only surmised or assumed. It is left to

another generation to shoot their arrow forth a truer aim, far more

distantly. Some of the most important results in philosophical inquiries

by men who have advanced beyond their own age, have been subjected to

this inconvenience; and we now are familiarized to axioms and

principles, requiring no further demonstration, which in their original

discovery were condemned as dangerous and erroneous; for the most novel

principles must be disputed before they can be demonstrated, till time

in silence seals its decree with authority.

Some discoveries have required almost a century to be received, while

some truths remain still problematical, and, like the ether of Newton,

but a mere hypothesis. What is the wisdom of the wise but a state of

progression? and the inventor has to encounter even the hostility of his

brothers in science; even Lord Bacon himself was the victim of his own

idols of the den--those fallacies that originate from the peculiar

character of the man; for by undervaluing the science of mathematics, he

refused his assent to the Copernican system.

The celebrity of Lord Bacon was often distinct from the Baconian

philosophy at home--a circumstance which concerns the history of our

vernacular literature. The lofty pretensions of a new way to "The

Advancement of Learning," and the "Novum Organum" of an art of

invention, to invent arts, were long a veiled mystery to the English

public, who were deterred from its study by the most offuscating

translations of the Latin originals. English readers recognised in Lord

Bacon, not the interpreter of Nature through all her works, but the

interpreter of man to man, of their motives and their actions, in his

"Sermones Fideles," those "Essaies" which "come home to our business and

to our bosoms." Such readers were left to wonder how the historian of

"The Winds," and of "Life and Death"--the gatherer of medical receipts

and of masses of natural history, amid all such minute processes of

experiments and inductions, groping in tangible matter, as it seemed to

ordinary eyes, could in the mere naturalist be the creator of a new

philosophy of intellectual energy. The ethical sage who had unfolded the

volume of the heart they delightfully comprehended, but how the mind

itself stood connected with the outward phenomena of nature remained

long an enigma for the men of the world. Lord Bacon, in his dread to

trust the mutability of our language placed by the side of the universal

language of the learned which fifteen centuries had fixed sacred from

innovation, had concluded that the modern languages will "at one time or

another play the bankrupt with books." The sage who, in his sanguine

confidence in futurity, had predicted that "third period of time which

will far surpass that of the Grecian and Roman learning," had not,

however, contemplated on a national idiom; nor in that noble prospect of

time had he anticipated a race of the European learned whose vernacular

prose would create words beyond the reach of the languages of antiquity.

No work in our native idiom had yet taken a station. The volume of

Hooker we know not how he read; but the copiousness of the diction

little accorded with the English of the learned Lord Chancellor, who had

pressed the compactness of his aphoristic sentences into the brevity of

Seneca, but with a weight of thought no Roman, if we except Tacitus, has

attained. Rawleigh and Jonson were but contemporaries, unsanctioned by

time; nor could he have looked even on them as modellers for him whose

own genius was still more prodigally opulent, though not always with the

most difficult taste.

Lord Bacon, therefore, decided to compose his "Instauratio Magna" in

Latin. Dedicating the Latin version of the "Advancement of Learning" to

the Prince, he observed--"It is a work I think will live, and be a

_citizen of the world, as English books are not_." Lord Bacon saw

"bankruptcy in our language," and houseless wanderers in our books. The

commonwealth of letters had yet no existence. Haunted by this desolating

notion that there was no perpetuity in English writings, he rested not

till his own were translated by himself and his friends, Jonson, and

Hobbes, and Herbert; and often enlarging these Latin versions, some of

his English compositions remain, in some respect, imperfect, when

compared with those subsequent revisions in the Latin translations.

By trusting his genius to a foreign tongue, Lord Bacon has dimmed its

lustre; the vitality of his thoughts in their original force, the

spontaneity of his mind in all its raciness, all those fortuitous

strokes which are the felicities of genius, were lost to him who had

condemned himself to the Roman yoke. Professor Playfair always preferred

quoting the original English of those passages of the treatise "De

Augmentis Scientiarum," which had first appeared in "The Advancement of

Learning." The felicity of many of those fine or forcible conceptions is

emasculated in a foreign and artificial idiom; and the invention of

novel terms in an ancient language left it often in a clouded obscurity.

The hand of Lord Bacon had already moulded the language at pleasure, and

he might have preceded his friend Hobbes in the lucidity of a

philosophical style. The style of Lord Bacon is stamped with the

originality of the age, and is as peculiar to him as was that of

Shakspeare to the poet. He is not only the wittiest of writers in his

remote allusions, but poetical in his fanciful conceptions. His style

long served for a model to many succeeding writers. One of the most

striking imitations is that curious folio of secret history, and

brilliant sententiousness, and witty pedantry, the Life of Archbishop

Williams by Bishop HACKET. It was with declining spirit Lord Bacon

composed his "History of Henry the Seventh;" it was an oblation to

majesty; the king himself was his critic; and the Solomon, as he terms

Henry the Seventh, was that image of peaceful sovereignty which James

affected.

He who thought that the language would have failed him, has himself

failed to the language, and we have lost an English classic. Since the

experimental philosophy arose out of practical discoveries, it should

not have been limited to recluse students, but open to the practitioners

not yet philosophers, now condemned to study it by translations of a

translation. It required two centuries before the writings of Bacon

reached the many. Now, a single volume, in the most popular form, places

them in the hands of artisans and artists, who are to learn from them to

think, to observe, and to invent.

The first modern edition of the collected writings of Lord Bacon was

that by Blackbourne, in 1730. It probably awoke the public attention;

but English readers eager to possess themselves of the Baconian

philosophy were still doomed to their old ignorance, for no one was yet

to be found bold enough to risk versions, which in the mere translation

often require to be elucidated. This first edition, however, hastened

the arduous task of "methodising" the philosophy of Bacon in English, by

Dr. PETER SHAW, in 1733, who then suggested that the noble Baconian

scheme had not been "sufficiently understood and regarded." This Dr.

SHAW was one of the court physicians, attached to scientific pursuits,

which he usefully displayed by popular lectures and writings, on

subjects with which the public were then not familiar. Imbued with the

genius of Bacon, this diligent student unfortunately had a genius of his

own; he fancied that he could reconstruct the works of our great

philosopher, by a more perfect arrangement. He separated, or he joined;

he classed, and he new-named; and not the least curious of his

singularities is that of assigning right principles for his wrong

doings. He did not abridge his author; for justly he observes, great

works admit of no abridgment; but to shorten their extent, he took the

liberty of what he terms "dropping,"--that is, "leaving out." Of his

translations of the Latin originals, of which he experienced all the

difficulty, he observes, that "a direct translation would have left the

works more obscure than they are," and therefore he adopted what he

terms "an open version." A precise notion of this mode of free

translation, it might be difficult to fix on; it would be too open if it

admitted what was not in the original, or if it suffered what was

essential to escape. His irremissible sin was that of "modernizing the

English" of Lord Bacon. The most racy and picturesque expressions of our

elder writers were then to be weakened down to a vapid colloquial style.

Willymot had translated Lord Bacon's "Essays" from the Latin, and thus

substituted his own loose incondite sentences, which he deemed "more

fashionable language," for the brilliancy or the energy of Lord Bacon's

native vein. Dr. Shaw's three goodly quartos, however, long conveyed in

some shape to the English public the Baconian philosophy. There is

something still seductive in these fair volumes, with their copious

index, and a glossary of the philosophical terms invented by Bacon; I

loved them in the early days of my studies; and they have been deemed

worthy to be revived in a late edition.

In my youth, the illustrious name of Lord Bacon was more familiar to

readers than his works, and they were more frequently reminded of the

Lord Chancellor by the immortal verse of Pope, than by that Life of

Bacon by Mallet, which may be read without discovering that the subject

was the father of modern philosophy, excepting that in the last page, as

if accidentally, there occurs a slight mention of the Great Instauration

itself! The very choice of Mallet, in 1740, for an editor of Lord Bacon,

is a striking evidence how imperfectly the genius of the Instaurator of

sciences was comprehended.

The psychological history of Lord Bacon has all that oneness which is

the perfection of mind. We see him in his boyhood, studious of the

phenomena of nature, meditating on the multiplication of echoes at the

brick-conduit, near his father's house; there he sought to discover the

laws of sound; as in his latest days, when on the snowy road an

experiment suddenly occurred, "touching the conservation and the

induration of bodies," whether snow could not preserve flesh equally

with salt. Alighting from his carriage, with his own hands he assisted

the experiment, and was struck by that chilliness which, a few days

after, closed in death; yet the dying naturalist, too weak to write the

last letter he dictated, expressed his satisfaction that the experiment

"answered excellently well."

But he who, by the cruelty of fortune and mortal infirmity, lived many

lives in the span of one short life, ever wrestling with Nature to

subdue her, could never subdue himself by himself. He idolized state and

magnificence in his own person; the brilliancy of his robes and the

blaze of his equipage his imagination seemed to feed on; he loved to be

gazed on in the streets, and to be wondered at in the cabinet; but with

this feminine weakness, this philosopher was still so philosophic as to

scorn the least prudential care of his fortune. So that, while he was

enamoured of wealth, he could not bring himself down to the love of

money. Participating in the corruptions of the age, he was himself

incorruptible; the Lord Chancellor never gave a partial or unjust

sentence, and Rushworth has told us, that not one of his decrees was

ever reversed. Such a man was not made to crouch and to fawn, to breathe

the infection of a corrupted court, to make himself the scape-goat in

the mysterious darkness of court-intrigues; but he was this man of

wretchedness! Truly he exclaimed one day, in grasping a volume, For this

only am I fitted. The intellectual architect who had modelled his house

of Solomon, and should have been for ever the ideal inhabitant of that

palace of the mind, was the tenant of an abode of disorder, where every

one was master but its owner, a maculated man seeking to shelter himself

in dejection and in shade. Whisperers, surmisers, evil eyes and evil

tongues, the domestic asp, whose bite sends poison into the veins of him

on whom it hangs--those were his familiars, while his abstracted mind

was dictating to his chaplain the laws and economy of nature.

Yet there were some better spirits in the mansion of Gorhambury, and

even in the obscurity of Gray's Inn, who have left testimonies of their

devotion to the great man long after his death. In the psychological

history of Lord Bacon, we must not pass by the psychological monument

which the affectionate Sir Thomas Meautys, who, by his desire, lies

buried at his feet, raised to his master. The design is as original as

it is grand, and is said to have been the invention of Sir Henry Wotton,

who, in his long residence abroad, had formed a refined taste for the

arts which were yet strangers in England. The simplicity of our

ancestors had placed their sculptured figures recumbent on their tombs;

the taste of Wotton raised the marble figure to imitate life itself, and

to give the mind of the original to its image. The monument of Bacon

exhibits the great philosopher seated in profound contemplation in his

habitual attitude, for the inscription records for posterity, _Sic

sedebat_.[5]