Not long since the trite and frivolous question following was debated in
a very polite and learned company, viz., Who was the greatest man, Caesar,
Alexander, Tamerlane, Cromwell, &c.?
Somebody answered that Sir Isaac Newton excelled them all. The
gentleman's assertion was very just; for if true greatness consists in
having received from heaven a mighty genius, and in having employed it to
enlighten our own mind and that of others, a man like Sir Isaac Newton,
whose equal is hardly found in a thousand years, is the truly great man.
And those politicians and conquerors (and all ages produce some) were
generally so many illustrious wicked men. That man claims our respect
who commands over the minds of the rest of the world by the force of
truth, not those who enslave their fellow-creatures: he who is acquainted
with the universe, not they who deface it.
Since, therefore, you desire me to give you an account of the famous
personages whom England has given birth to, I shall begin with Lord
Bacon, Mr. Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, &c. Afterwards the warriors and
Ministers of State shall come in their order.
I must begin with the celebrated Viscount Verulam, known in Europe by the
name of Bacon, which was that of his family. His father had been Lord
Keeper, and himself was a great many years Lord Chancellor under King
James I. Nevertheless, amidst the intrigues of a Court, and the affairs
of his exalted employment, which alone were enough to engross his whole
time, he yet found so much leisure for study as to make himself a great
philosopher, a good historian, and an elegant writer; and a still more
surprising circumstance is that he lived in an age in which the art of
writing justly and elegantly was little known, much less true philosophy.
Lord Bacon, as is the fate of man, was more esteemed after his death than
in his lifetime. His enemies were in the British Court, and his admirers
were foreigners.
When the Marquis d'Effiat attended in England upon the Princess Henrietta
Maria, daughter to Henry IV., whom King Charles I. had married, that
Minister went and visited the Lord Bacon, who, being at that time sick in
his bed, received him with the curtains shut close. "You resemble the
angels," says the Marquis to him; "we hear those beings spoken of
perpetually, and we believe them superior to men, but are never allowed
the consolation to see them."
You know that this great man was accused of a crime very unbecoming a
philosopher: I mean bribery and extortion. You know that he was
sentenced by the House of Lords to pay a fine of about four hundred
thousand French livres, to lose his peerage and his dignity of
Chancellor; but in the present age the English revere his memory to such
a degree, that they will scarce allow him to have been guilty. In case
you should ask what are my thoughts on this head, I shall answer you in
the words which I heard the Lord Bolingbroke use on another occasion.
Several gentlemen were speaking, in his company, of the avarice with
which the late Duke of Marlborough had been charged, some examples
whereof being given, the Lord Bolingbroke was appealed to (who, having
been in the opposite party, might perhaps, without the imputation of
indecency, have been allowed to clear up that matter): "He was so great a
man," replied his lordship, "that I have forgot his vices."
I shall therefore confine myself to those things which so justly gained
Lord Bacon the esteem of all Europe.
The most singular and the best of all his pieces is that which, at this
time, is the most useless and the least read, I mean his _Novum
Scientiarum Organum_. This is the scaffold with which the new philosophy
was raised; and when the edifice was built, part of it at least, the
scaffold was no longer of service.
The Lord Bacon was not yet acquainted with Nature, but then he knew, and
pointed out, the several paths that lead to it. He had despised in his
younger years the thing called philosophy in the Universities, and did
all that lay in his power to prevent those societies of men instituted to
improve human reason from depraving it by their quiddities, their horrors
of the vacuum, their substantial forms, and all those impertinent terms
which not only ignorance had rendered venerable, but which had been made
sacred by their being ridiculously blended with religion.
He is the father of experimental philosophy. It must, indeed, be
confessed that very surprising secrets had been found out before his
time--the sea-compass, printing, engraving on copper plates,
oil-painting, looking-glasses; the art of restoring, in some measure, old
men to their sight by spectacles; gunpowder, &c., had been discovered. A
new world had been fought for, found, and conquered. Would not one
suppose that these sublime discoveries had been made by the greatest
philosophers, and in ages much more enlightened than the present? But it
was far otherwise; all these great changes happened in the most stupid
and barbarous times. Chance only gave birth to most of those inventions;
and it is very probable that what is called chance contributed very much
to the discovery of America; at least, it has been always thought that
Christopher Columbus undertook his voyage merely on the relation of a
captain of a ship which a storm had driven as far westward as the
Caribbean Islands. Be this as it will, men had sailed round the world,
and could destroy cities by an artificial thunder more dreadful than the
real one; but, then, they were not acquainted with the circulation of the
blood, the weight of the air, the laws of motion, light, the number of
our planets, &c. And a man who maintained a thesis on Aristotle's
"Categories," on the universals _a parte rei_, or such-like nonsense, was
looked upon as a prodigy.
The most astonishing, the most useful inventions, are not those which
reflect the greatest honour on the human mind. It is to a mechanical
instinct, which is found in many men, and not to true philosophy, that
most arts owe their origin.
The discovery of fire, the art of making bread, of melting and preparing
metals, of building houses, and the invention of the shuttle, are
infinitely more beneficial to mankind than printing or the sea-compass:
and yet these arts were invented by uncultivated, savage men.
What a prodigious use the Greeks and Romans made afterwards of mechanics!
Nevertheless, they believed that there were crystal heavens, that the
stars were small lamps which sometimes fell into the sea, and one of
their greatest philosophers, after long researches, found that the stars
were so many flints which had been detached from the earth.
In a word, no one before the Lord Bacon was acquainted with experimental
philosophy, nor with the several physical experiments which have been
made since his time. Scarce one of them but is hinted at in his work,
and he himself had made several. He made a kind of pneumatic engine, by
which he guessed the elasticity of the air. He approached, on all sides
as it were, to the discovery of its weight, and had very near attained
it, but some time after Torricelli seized upon this truth. In a little
time experimental philosophy began to be cultivated on a sudden in most
parts of Europe. It was a hidden treasure which the Lord Bacon had some
notion of, and which all the philosophers, encouraged by his promises,
endeavoured to dig up.
But that which surprised me most was to read in his work, in express
terms, the new attraction, the invention of which is ascribed to Sir
Isaac Newton.
We must search, says Lord Bacon, whether there may not be a kind of
magnetic power which operates between the earth and heavy bodies, between
the moon and the ocean, between the planets, &c. In another place he
says either heavy bodies must be carried towards the centre of the earth,
or must be reciprocally attracted by it; and in the latter case it is
evident that the nearer bodies, in their falling, draw towards the earth,
the stronger they will attract one another. We must, says he, make an
experiment to see whether the same clock will go faster on the top of a
mountain or at the bottom of a mine; whether the strength of the weights
decreases on the mountain and increases in the mine. It is probable that
the earth has a true attractive power.
This forerunner in philosophy was also an elegant writer, an historian,
and a wit.
His moral essays are greatly esteemed, but they were drawn up in the view
of instructing rather than of pleasing; and, as they are not a satire
upon mankind, like Rochefoucauld's "Maxims," nor written upon a sceptical
plan, like Montaigne's "Essays," they are not so much read as those two
ingenious authors.
His History of Henry VII. was looked upon as a masterpiece, but how is it
possible that some persons can presume to compare so little a work with
the history of our illustrious Thuanus?
Speaking about the famous impostor Perkin, son to a converted Jew, who
assumed boldly the name and title of Richard IV., King of England, at the
instigation of the Duchess of Burgundy, and who disputed the crown with
Henry VII., the Lord Bacon writes as follows:--
"At this time the King began again to be haunted with sprites, by the
magic and curious arts of the Lady Margaret, who raised up the ghost of
Richard, Duke of York, second son to King Edward IV., to walk and vex the
King.
"After such time as she (Margaret of Burgundy) thought he (Perkin
Warbeck) was perfect in his lesson, she began to cast with herself from
what coast this blazing star should first appear, and at what time it
must be upon the horizon of Ireland; for there had the like meteor strong
influence before."
Methinks our sagacious Thuanus does not give in to such fustian, which
formerly was looked upon as sublime, but in this age is justly called
nonsense.