The startling contrasts of splendor and humiliation which marked the
life of Bacon, and the seemingly incredible inconsistencies which hasty
observers find in his character, have been the themes of much rhetorical
declamation, and even of serious and learned debate. From Ben Jonson in
his own day, to James Spedding the friend of Tennyson, he has not lacked
eminent eulogists, who look up to him as not only the greatest and
wisest, but as among the noblest and most worthy of mankind: while the
famous epigram of Pope, expanded by Macaulay into a stately and eloquent
essay, has impressed on the popular mind the lowest estimate of his
moral nature; and even such careful scholars as Charles de Rémusat and
Dean Church, who have devoted careful and instructive volumes to the
survey of Bacon's career and works, insist that with all his
intellectual supremacy, he was a servile courtier, a false friend, and a
corrupt judge. Yet there are few important names in human history of men
who have left us so complete materials for a just judgment of their
conduct; and it is only a lover of paradox who can read these and still
regard Bacon's character as an unsolved problem.
Mr. Spedding has given a long life of intelligent labor to the
collection of every fact and document throwing light upon the motives,
aims, and thoughts of the great "Chancellor of Nature," from the cradle
to the grave. The results are before us in the seven volumes of 'The
Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon,' which form perhaps the most
complete biography ever written. It is a book of absolute candor as well
as infinite research, giving with equal distinctness all the evidence
which makes for its hero's dishonor and that which tends to justify the
writer's reverence for him. Another work by Mr. Spedding, 'Evenings with
a Reviewer,' in two volumes, is an elaborate refutation, from the
original and authentic records, of the most damning charges brought by
Lord Macaulay against Bacon's good fame. It is a complete and
overwhelming exposure of false coloring, of rhetorical artifices, and of
the abuse of evidence, in the famous essay. As one of the most
entertaining and instructive pieces of controversy in our literature, it
deserves to be widely read. The unbiased reader cannot accept the
special pleading by which, in his comments, Spedding makes every failing
of Bacon "lean to virtue's side"; but will form upon the unquestioned
facts presented a clear conception of him, will come to know him as no
other man of an age so remote is known, and will find in his many-sided
and magnificent nature a full explanation of the impressions which
partial views of it have made upon his worshipers and his detractors.
It is only in his maturity, indeed, that we are privileged to enter into
his mind and read his heart. But enough is known of the formative period
of his life to show us the sources of his weaknesses and of his
strength. The child whom high authorities have regarded as endowed with
the mightiest intellect of the human race was born at York House, on the
Strand, in the third year of Elizabeth's reign, January 22d, 1561. He
was the son of the Queen's Lord Keeper of the Seals, Sir Nicholas Bacon,
and his second wife Anne, daughter of Sir Anthony Cook, formerly tutor
of King Edward VI. Mildred, an elder daughter of the same scholar, was
the wife of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who for the first forty years
of her reign was Elizabeth's chief minister. As a child Bacon was a
favorite at court, and tradition represents him as something of a pet of
the Queen, who called him "my young Lord Keeper." His mother was among
the most learned women of an age when, among women of rank, great
learning was as common and as highly prized as great beauty; and her
influence was a potent intellectual stimulus to the boy, although he
revolted in early youth from the narrow creed which her fierce Puritan
zeal strove to impose on her household. Outside of the nursery, the
atmosphere of his world was that of craft, all directed to one end; for
the Queen was the source of honor, power, and wealth, and advancement in
life meant only a share in the grace distributed through her ministers
and favorites. Apart from the harsh and forbidding religious teachings
of his mother, young Francis had before him neither precept nor example
of an ambition more worthy than that of courting the smiles of power.
[Illustration: SIR FRANCIS BACON.]
At the age of twelve he entered Trinity College, Cambridge (April,
1573), and left it before he was fifteen (Christmas, 1575); the
institution meanwhile having been broken up for more than half a year
(August, 1574, to March, 1575) by the plague, so that his intermittent
university career summed up less than fourteen months. There is no
record of his studies, and the names of his teachers are unknown; for
though Bacon in later years called himself a pupil of Whitgift, and his
biographers assumed that the relation was direct and personal, yet that
great master of Trinity had certainly ended his teaching days before
Bacon went to Cambridge, and had entered as Dean of Lincoln on his
splendid ecclesiastical career. University life was very different from
that of our times. The statutes of Cambridge forbade a student, under
penalties, to use in conversation with another any language but
Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, unless in his private apartments and in hours
of leisure. It was a regular custom at Trinity to bring before the
assembled undergraduates every Thursday evening at seven o'clock such
junior students as had been detected in breaches of the rules during the
week, and to flog them. It would be interesting to know in what
languages young Bacon conversed, and what experiences of discipline
befell him; but his subsequent achievements at least suggest that
Cambridge in the sixteenth century may have afforded more efficient
educational influences than our knowledge of its resources and methods
can explain. For it is certain that, at an age when our most promising
youths are beginning serious study, Bacon's mind was already formed, his
habits and modes of research were fixed, the universe of knowledge was
an open field before him. Thenceforth he was no man's pupil, but in
intellectual independence and solitude he rapidly matured into the
supreme scholar of his age.
After registering as a student of law at Gray's Inn, apparently for the
purpose of a nominal connection with a profession which might aid his
patrons in promoting him at court, Bacon was sent in June, 1576, to
France in the train of the British Ambassador, Sir Amyas Paulet; and for
nearly three years followed the roving embassy around the great cities
of that kingdom. The massacre of St. Bartholomew had taken place four
years before, and the boy's recorded observations on the troubled
society of France and of Europe show remarkable insight into the
character of princes and the sources of political movements. Sir
Nicholas had hitherto directed his son's education and associations with
the purpose of making him an ornament of the court, and had set aside a
fund to provide Francis at the proper time with a handsome estate. But
he died suddenly, February 20th, 1579, without giving legal effect to
this provision, and the sum designed for the young student was divided
equally among the five children, while Francis was excluded from a share
in the rest of the family fortune; and was thus called home to England
to find himself a poor man.
He made himself a bachelor's home at Gray's Inn, and devoted his
energies to the law, with such success that he was soon recognized as
one of the most promising members of the profession. In 1584 he entered
Parliament for Melcombe Regis in Somersetshire, and two years later sat
for Liverpool. During these years the schism between his inner and his
outer life continued to widen. Drawing his first breath in the
atmosphere of the court, bred in the faith that honor and greatness come
from princes' favor, with a native taste for luxury and magnificence
which was fostered by delicate health, he steadily looked for
advancement through the influence of Burghley and the smiles of the
Queen. But Burghley had no sympathy with speculative thought, and
distrusted him for his confidences concerning his higher studies, while
he probably feared in Bacon a dangerous rival of his own son; so that
with expressions of kind interest, he refrained from giving his nephew
practical aid. Elizabeth, too, suspected that a young man who knew so
many things could not be trusted to know his own business well, and
preferred for important professional work others who were lawyers and
nothing besides. Thus Bacon appeared to the world as a disappointed and
uneasy courtier, struggling to keep up a certain splendor of appearance
and associations under a growing load of debt, and servile to a Queen on
whose caprice his prospects of a career must depend. His unquestioned
power at the bar was exercised only in minor causes; his eloquence and
political dexterity found slow recognition in Parliament, where they
represented only themselves; and the question whether he would ever be a
man of note in the kingdom seemed for twenty-five years to turn upon
what the Crown might do for its humble suitor.
Meanwhile this laborious advocate and indefatigable courtier, whose
labors at the bar and in attendance upon his great friends were enough
to fill the days of two ordinary men, led his real life in secret,
unknown to the world, and uncomprehended even by the few in whom he had
divined a capacity for great thought, and whom he had selected for his
confidants. From his childhood at the university, where he felt the
emptiness of the Aristotelian logic, the instrument for attaining truth
which traditional learning had consecrated, he had gradually formed the
conception of a more fruitful process. He had become convinced that the
learning of all past ages was but a poor result of the intellectual
capacities and labors which had been employed upon it; that the human
mind had never yet been properly used; that the methods hitherto adopted
in research were but treadmill work, returning upon itself, or at best
could produce but fragmentary and accidental additions to the sum of
knowledge. All nature is crammed with truth, he believed, which it
concerns man to discover; the intellect of man is constructed for its
discovery, and needs but to be purged of errors of every kind, and
directed in the most efficient employment of its faculties, to make sure
that all the secrets of nature will be revealed, and its powers made
tributary to the health, comfort, enjoyment, and progressive improvement
of mankind.
This stupendous conception, of a revolution which should transform the
world, seems to have taken definite form in Bacon's mind as early as his
twenty-fifth year, when he embodied the outline of it in a Latin
treatise; which he destroyed in later life, unpublished, as immature,
and partly no doubt because he came to recognize in it an unbecoming
arrogance of tone, for its title was 'Temporis Partus Maximus' (The
Greatest Birth of Time.) But six years later he defines these "vast
contemplative ends" in his famous letter to Burghley, asking for
preferment which will enable him to prosecute his grand scheme and to
employ other minds in aid of it. "For I have taken all knowledge to be
my province," he says, "and if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers,
whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and
verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular traditions
and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in
industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable
inventions and discoveries: the best state of that province. This,
whether it be curiosity or vain glory, or nature, or (if one take it
favorably) _philanthropia_ is so fixed in my mind as it cannot
be removed."
This letter reveals the secret of Bacon's life, and all that we know of
him, read in the light of it, forms a consistent and harmonious whole.
He was possessed by his vast scheme, for a reformation of the
intellectual world, and through it, of the world of human experience, as
fully as was ever apostle by his faith. Implicitly believing in his own
ability to accomplish it, at least in its grand outlines, and to leave
at his death the community of mind at work, by the method and for the
purposes which he had defined, with the perfection of all science in
full view, he subordinated every other ambition to this; and in seeking
and enjoying place, power, and wealth, still regarded them mainly as
aids in prosecuting his master purpose, and in introducing it to the
world. With this clearly in mind, it is easy to understand his
subsequent career. Its external details may be read in any of the score
of biographies which writers of all grades of merit and demerit have
devoted to him, and there is no space for them here. For our purpose it
is necessary to refer only to the principal crises in his public life.
Until the death of Elizabeth, Bacon had no place in the royal service
worthy of his abilities as a lawyer. Many who, even in the narrowest
professional sense, were far inferior to him, were preferred before him.
Yet he obtained a position recognized by all, and second only in legal
learning to his lifelong rival and constant adversary, Sir Edward Coke.
To-day, it is probable that if the two greatest names in the history of
the common law were to be selected by the suffrages of the profession,
the great majority would be cast for Coke and Bacon. As a master of the
intricacies of precedent and an authority upon the detailed formulas of
"the perfection of reason," the former is unrivaled still; but in the
comprehensive grasp of the law as a system for the maintenance of social
order and the protection of individual rights, Bacon rose far above him.
The cherished aim of his professional career was to survey the whole
body of the laws of England, to produce a digest of them which should
result in a harmonious code, to do away with all that was found obsolete
or inconsistent with the principles of the system, and thus to adapt the
living, progressive body of the law to the wants of the growing nation.
This magnificent plan was beyond the power of any one man, had his life
no other task, but he suggested the method and the aim; and while for
six generations after these legal giants passed away, the minute,
accurate, and profound learning of Coke remained the acknowledged chief
storehouse of British traditional jurisprudence, the seventh generation
took up the work of revision and reform, and from the time of Bentham
and Austin the progress of legal science has been toward codification.
The contest between the aggregation of empirical rules and formulated
customs which Coke taught as the common law, and the broad, harmonious
application of scientific reason to the definition and enforcement of
rights, still goes on; but with constant gains on the side of the
reformers, all of whom with one consent confess that no general and
complete reconstruction of legal doctrine as a science is possible,
except upon the lines laid down by Bacon.
The most memorable case in which Bacon was employed to represent the
Crown during Elizabeth's life was the prosecution of the Earl of Essex
for treason. Essex had been Bacon's friend, patron, and benefactor; and
as long as the earl remained faithful to the Queen and retained her
favor, Bacon served him with ready zeal and splendid efficiency, and
showed himself the wisest and most sincere of counselors. When Essex
rejected his advice, forfeited the Queen's confidence by the follies
from which Bacon had earnestly striven to deter him, and finally plunged
into wanton and reckless rebellion, Bacon, with whom loyalty to his
sovereign had always been the supreme duty, accepted a retainer from the
Crown, and assisted Coke in the prosecution. The crime of Essex was the
greatest of which a subject was capable; it lacked no circumstance of
aggravation; if the most astounding instance of ingratitude and
disloyalty to friendship ever known is to be sought in that age, it will
be found in the conduct of Essex to Bacon's royal mistress. Yet writers
of eloquence have exhausted their rhetorical powers in denouncing
Bacon's faithlessness to his friend. But no impartial reader of the full
story in the documents of the time can doubt that throughout these
events Bacon did his duty and no more, and that in doing it he not
merely made a voluntary sacrifice of his popularity, but a far more
painful sacrifice of his personal feelings.
In 1603 James I. came to the throne, and in spite of the efforts of his
most trusted ministers to keep Bacon in obscurity, soon discovered in
him a man whom he needed. In 1607 he was made Solicitor-General; in
1613 Attorney-General; in March 1617, on the death of Lord Ellesmere, he
received the seals as Lord Keeper; and in January following was made
Lord Chancellor of England. In July 1618 he was raised to the permanent
peerage as Baron Verulam, and in January 1621 received the title of
Viscount St. Albans. During these three years he was the first subject
in the kingdom in dignity, and ought to have been the first in
influence. His advice to the King, and to the Duke of Buckingham who was
the King's king, was always judicious. In certain cardinal points of
policy, it was of the highest statesmanship; and had it been followed,
the history of the Stuart dynasty would have been different, and the
Crown and the Parliament would have wrought together for the good and
the honor of the nation, at least through a generation to come. But the
upstart Buckingham was supreme. He had studied Bacon's strength and
weakness, had laid him under great obligations, had at the same time
attached him by the strongest tie of friendship to his person, and
impressed upon his consciousness the fact that the fate of Bacon was at
all times in his hands. The new Chancellor had entered on his great
office with a fixed purpose to reform its abuses, to speed and cheapen
justice, to free its administration from every influence of wealth and
power. In the first three months of service he brought up the large
arrears of business, tried every cause, heard every petition, and
acquired a splendid reputation as an upright and diligent judge. But
Buckingham was his evil angel. He was without sense of the sanctity of
the judicial character; and regarded the bench, like every other public
office, as an instrument of his own interests and will. On the other
hand, to Bacon the voice of Buckingham was the voice of the King, and he
had been taught from infancy as the beginning of his political creed
that the king can do no wrong. Buckingham began at once to solicit from
Bacon favors for his friends and dependants, and the Chancellor was weak
enough to listen and to answer him. There is no evidence that in any one
instance the favorite asked for the violation of law or the perversion
of justice; much less that Bacon would or did accede to such a request.
But the Duke demanded for one suitor a speedy hearing, for another a
consideration of facts which might not be in evidence, for a third all
the favor consistent with law; and Bacon reported to him the result, and
how far he had been able to oblige him. This persistent tampering with
the source of justice was a disturbing influence in the Chancellor's
court, and unquestionably lowered the dignity of his attitude and
weakened his judicial conscience.
Notwithstanding this, when the Lord Chancellor opened the Parliament in
January, 1621, with a speech in praise of his King and in honor of the
nation, he seemed to be at the summit of earthly prosperity. No voice
had been lifted to question his purity and worth. He was the friend of
the King, one of the chief supports of the throne, a champion indeed of
high prerogative, but an orator of power, a writer of fame, whose
advancement to the highest dignities had been welcomed by public
opinion. Four months later he was a convicted criminal, sentenced for
judicial corruption to imprisonment at the King's pleasure, to a fine of
£40,000, and to perpetual incapacity for any public employment.
Vicissitudes of fortune are commonplaces of history. Many a man once
seemingly pinnacled on the top of greatness has "shot from the zenith
like a falling star," and become a proverb of the fickleness of fate.
Some are torn down by the very traits of mind, passion, or temper, which
have raised them: ambition which overleaps itself, rashness which
hazards all on chances it cannot control, vast abilities not great
enough to achieve the impossible. The plunge of Icarus into the sea, the
murder of Caesar, the imprisonment of Coeur de Lion, the abdication of
Napoleon, the apprehension as a criminal of Jefferson Davis, each was a
startling and impressive contrast to the glory which it followed, yet
each was the natural result of causes which lay in the character and
life of the sufferer, and made his story a consistent whole. But the
pathos of Bacon's fall is the sudden moral ruin of a life which had been
built up in honor for sixty years. An intellect of the first rank, which
from boyhood to old age had been steadfast in the pursuit of truth and
in the noblest services to mankind, which in a feeble body had been
sustained in vigor by all the virtues of prudence and self-reverence; a
genial nature, winning the affection and admiration of associates,
hardly paralleled in the industry with which its energies were devoted
to useful work, a soul exceptional among its contemporaries for piety
and philanthropy--this man is represented to us by popular writers as
having habitually sold justice for money, and as having become in office
"the meanest of mankind."
But this picture, as so often drawn, and as seemingly fixed in the
popular mind, is not only impossible, but is demonstrably false. To
review all the facts which correct it in detail would lead us far beyond
our limits. It must suffice to refer to the great work of Spedding, in
which the entire records of the case are found, and which would long ago
have made the world just to Bacon's fame, but that the author's comment
on his own complete and fair record is itself partial and extravagant.
But the materials for a final judgment are accessible to all in
Spedding's volumes, and a candid reading of them solves the enigma.
Bacon was condemned without a trial, on his own confession, and this
confession was consistent with the tenor of his life. Its substance was
that he had failed to put a stop effectually to the immemorial custom
in his court of receiving presents from suitors, but that he had never
deviated from justice in his decrees. There was no instance in which he
was accused of yielding to the influence of gifts, or passing judgment
for a bribe. No act of his as Chancellor was impeached as illegal, or
reversed as corrupt. Suitors complained that they had sent sums of money
or valuable presents to his court, and had been disappointed in the
result; but no one complained of injustice in a decision. Bacon was a
conspicuous member of the royal party; and when the storm of popular
fury broke in Parliament upon the court, the King and the ministry
abandoned him. He had stood all his life upon the royal favor as the
basis of his strength and hope; and when it was gone from under him, he
sank helplessly, and refused to attempt a defense. But he still in his
humiliation found comfort in the reflection that his ruin would put an
end to "anything that is in the likeness of corruption" among the
judges. And he wrote, in the hour of his deepest distress, that he had
been "the justest Chancellor that hath been in the five changes that
have been since Sir Nicholas Bacon's time." Nor did any man of his time
venture to contradict him, when in later years he summed up his case in
the words, "I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty
years. But it was the justest censure in Parliament that was these two
hundred years."
No revolution of modern times has been more complete than that which the
last two centuries have silently wrought in the customary morality of
British public life, and in the standards by which it is judged. Under
James I. every office of state was held as the private property of its
occupant. The highest places in the government were conferred only on
condition of large payments to the King. He openly sold the honors and
dignities of which he was the source. "The making of a baron," that is,
the right to sell to some rich plebeian a patent of nobility, was a
common grant to favorites, and was actually bestowed on Bacon, to aid
him in maintaining the state of his office. We have the testimony of
James himself that all the lawyers, of whom the judges of the realm were
made, were "so bred and nursed in corruption that they cannot leave it."
But the line between what the King called corruption and that which he
and all his ministers practiced openly and habitually, as part of the
regular work of government, is dim and hard to define. The mind of the
community had not yet firmly grasped the conception of public office as
a trust for the public good, and the general opinion which stimulates
and sustains the official conscience in holding this trust sacred was
still unformed. The courts of justice were the first branch of the
government to feel the pressure of public opinion, and to respond to
the demand for impersonal and impartial right. But this process had only
begun when Bacon, who had never before served as judge, was called to
preside in Chancery. The Chancellor's office was a gradual development:
originally political and administrative rather than judicial, and with
no salary or reward for hearing causes, save the voluntary presents of
suitors who asked its interference with the ordinary courts, it step by
step became the highest tribunal of the equity which limits and corrects
the routine of law, and still the custom of gifts was unchecked. A
careful study of Bacon's career shows that in this, as every other
branch of thought, his theoretic convictions were in advance of his age;
and in his advice to the King and in his inaugural promises as
Chancellor, he foreshadows all the principles on which the wisest
reformers of the public service now insist. But he failed to apply them
with that heroic self-sacrifice which alone would have availed him, and
the forces of custom and example continually encroached upon his views
of duty. Having through a long life sought advancement and wealth for
the purpose of using leisure and independence to carry out his
beneficent plans on the largest scale, he eagerly accepted the
traditional emoluments of his new position, in the conviction that they
would become in his hands the means of vast good to mankind. It was only
the public exposure which fully awakened him to a sense of the
inconsistency and wrong of his conduct; and then he was himself his
severest judge, and made every reparation in his power, by the most
unreserved confession, by pointing out the danger to society of such
weakness as his own in language to whose effectiveness nothing could be
added, and by devoting the remainder of his life to the noblest work
for humanity.
During the years of Bacon's splendor as a member of the government and
as spokesman for the throne, his real life as a thinker, inspired by the
loftiest ambition which ever entered the mind of man, that of creating a
new and better civilization, was not interrupted. It was probably in
1603 that he wrote his fragmentary 'Prooemium de Interpretatione
Naturae,' or 'Preface to a Treatise on Interpreting Nature,' which is
the only piece of autobiography he has left us. It was found among his
papers after his death; and its candor, dignity, and enthusiasm of tone
are in harmony with the imaginative grasp and magnificent suggestiveness
of its thought. Commending the original Latin to all who can appreciate
its eloquence, we cite the first sentences of it in English:--
"Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and
regarding the care of the Commonwealth as a kind of common
property which, like the air and water, belongs to everybody,
I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best
served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature
to perform.
"Now, among all the benefits that could be conferred upon
mankind, I found none so great as the discovery of new arts
for the bettering of human life. For I saw that among the
rude people of early times, inventors and discoverers were
reckoned as gods. It was seen that the works of founders of
States, law-givers, tyrant-destroyers, and heroes cover but
narrow spaces and endure but for a time; while the work of
the inventor, though of less pomp, is felt everywhere and
lasts forever. But above all, if a man could, I do not say
devise some invention, however useful, but kindle a light in
nature--a light which, even in rising, should touch and
illuminate the borders of existing knowledge, and spreading
further on should bring to light all that is most
secret--that man, in my view, would be indeed the benefactor
of mankind, the extender of man's empire over nature, the
champion of freedom, the conqueror of fate.
"For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as
for the study of Truth: as having a mind nimble and versatile
enough to discern resemblances in things (the main point),
and yet steady enough to distinguish the subtle differences
in them; as being endowed with zeal to seek, patience to
doubt, love of meditation, slowness of assertion, readiness
to reconsider, carefulness to arrange and set in order; and
as being a man that affects not the new nor admires the old,
but hates all imposture. So I thought my nature had a certain
familiarity and kindred with Truth."
During the next two years he applied himself to the composition of the
treatise on the 'Advancement of Learning,' the greatest of his English
writings, and one which contains the seed-thoughts and outline
principles of all his philosophy. From the time of its publication in
1605 to his fall in 1621, he continued to frame the plan of his 'Great
Instauration' of human knowledge, and to write out chapters, books,
passages, sketches, designed to take their places in it as essential
parts. It was to include six great divisions: first, a general survey of
existing knowledge; second, a guide to the use of the intellect in
research, purging it of sources of error, and furnishing it with the new
instrument of inductive logic by which all the laws of nature might be
ascertained; third, a structure of the phenomena of nature, included in
one hundred and thirty particular branches of natural history, as the
materials for the new logic; fourth, a series of types and models of the
entire mental process of discovering truth, "selecting various and
remarkable instances"; fifth, specimens of the new philosophy, or
anticipations of its results, in fragmentary contributions to the sixth
and crowning division, which was to set forth the new philosophy in its
completeness, comprehending the truths to be discovered by a perfected
instrument of reasoning, in interpreting all the phenomena of the world.
Well aware that the scheme, especially in its concluding part, was far
beyond the power and time of any one man, he yet hoped to be the
architect of the final edifice of science, by drawing its plans and
making them intelligible, leaving their perfect execution to an
intellectual world which could not fail to be moved to its supreme
effort by a comprehension of the work before it. The 'Novum Organum,'
itself but a fragment of the second division of the 'Instauration,' the
key to the use of the intellect in the discovery of truth, was published
in Latin at the height of his splendor as Lord Chancellor, in 1620, and
is his most memorable achievement in philosophy. It contains a multitude
of suggestive thoughts on the whole field of science, but is mainly the
exposition of the fallacies by which the intellect is deceived and
misled, and from which it must be purged in order to attain final truth,
and of the new doctrine of "prerogative instances," or crucial
observations and experiments in the work of discovery.
In short, Bacon's entire achievement in science is a plan for an
impossible universe of knowledge. As far as he attempted to advance
particular sciences by applying his method to their detailed phenomena,
he wrought with imperfect knowledge of what had been done, and with
cumbrous and usually misdirected efforts to fill the gaps he recognized.
In a few instances, by what seems an almost superhuman instinct for
truth, rather than the laborious process of investigation which he
taught, he anticipated brilliant discoveries of later centuries. For
example, he clearly pointed out the necessity of regarding heat as a
form of motion in the molecules of matter, and thus foreshadowed,
without any conception of the means of proving it, that which, for
investigators of the nineteenth century, has proved the most direct way
to the secrets of nature. But the testimony of the great teachers of
science is unanimous, that Bacon was not a skilled observer of
phenomena, nor a discoverer of scientific inductions; that he
contributed no important new truth, in the sense of an established law,
to any department of knowledge; and that his method of research and
reasoning is not, in its essential features, that which is fruitfully
pursued by them in extending the boundaries of science, nor was his mind
wholly purged of those "idols of the cave," or forms of personal bias,
whose varying forms as hindrances to the "dry light" of sound reason he
was the first to expose. He never appreciated the mathematics as the
basis of physics, but valued their elements mainly as a mental
discipline. Astronomy meant little to him, since he failed to connect it
directly with human well-being and improvement; to the system of
Copernicus, the beginning of our insight into the heavens, he was
hostile, or at least indifferent; and the splendid discoveries
successively made by Tycho Brahe, Galileo, and Kepler, and brought to
his ears while the 'Great Instauration' filled his mind and heart, met
with but a feeble welcome with him, or none. Why is it, then, that
Bacon's is the foremost name in the history of English, and perhaps, as
many insist, of all modern thought? Why is it that "the Baconian
philosophy" is another phrase, in all the languages of Europe, for that
splendid development of the study and knowledge of the visible universe
which since his time has changed the life of mankind?
A candid answer to these questions will expose an error as wide in the
popular estimate of Bacon's intellectual greatness as that which has
prevailed so generally regarding his character. He is called the
inventor of inductive reasoning, the reformer of logic, the lawgiver of
the world of thought; but he was no one of these. His grasp of the
inductive method was defective; his logic was clumsy and impractical;
his plan for registering all phenomena and selecting and generalizing
from them, making the discovery of truth almost a mechanical process,
was worthless. In short, it is not as a philosopher nor as a man of
science that Bacon has carved his name in the high places of enduring
fame, but rather as a man of letters; as on the whole the greatest
writer of the modern world, outside of the province of imaginative art;
as the Shakespeare of English prose. Does this seem a paradox to the
reader who remembers that Bacon distrusted all modern languages, and
thought to make his 'Advancement of Learning' "live, and be a citizen of
the world," by giving it a Latin form? That his lifelong ambition was to
reconstruct methods of thought, and guide intellect in the way of work
serviceable to comfort and happiness? That the books in which his
English style appears in its perfection, the 'History of Henry VII.,'
the 'Essays,' and the papers on public affairs, were but incidents and
avocations of a life absorbed by a master purpose?
But what is literature? It is creative mind, addressing itself in worthy
expression to the common receptive mind of mankind. Its note is
universality, as distinguished from all that is technical, limited, and
narrow. Thought whose interest is as broad as humanity, suitably clothed
in the language of real life, and thus fitted for access to the general
intelligence, constitutes true literature, to the exclusion of that
which, by its nature or by its expression, appeals only to a special
class or school. The 'Opus Anglicanum' of Duns Scotus, Newton's
'Principia,' Lavoisier's treatise 'Sur la Combustion,' Kant's 'Kritik
der Reinen Vernunft' (Critique of Pure Reason), each made an epoch in
some vast domain of knowledge or belief; but none of them is literature.
Yet the thoughts they, through a limited and specially trained class of
students, introduced to the world, were gradually taken up into the
common stock of mankind, and found their broad, effective, complete
expression in the literature of after generations. If we apply this
test to Bacon's life work, we shall find sufficient justification for
honoring him above all special workers in narrower fields, as next to
Shakespeare the greatest name in the greatest period of English
literature.
It was not as an experimenter, investigator, or technical teacher, but
as a thinker and a writer, that he rendered his great service to the
world. This consisted essentially in the contribution of two magnificent
ideas to the common stock of thought: the idea of the utility of
science, as able to subjugate the forces of nature to the use of man;
and the idea of continued and boundless progress in the comfort and
happiness of the individual life, and in the order and dignity of human
society. It has been shown how, from early manhood, he was inspired by
the conception of infinite resources in the material world, for the
discovery and employment of which the human mind is adapted. He never
wearied of pointing out the imperfection and fruitlessness of the
methods of inquiry and of invention hitherto in use, and the splendid
results which could be rapidly attained if a combined and systematic
effort were made to enlarge the boundaries of knowledge. This led him
directly to the conception of an improved and advancing civilization; to
the utterance, in a thousand varied, impressive, and fascinating forms,
of that idea of human progress which is the inspiration, the
characteristic, and the hope of the modern world. Bacon was the first of
men to grasp these ideas in all their comprehensiveness as feasible
purposes, as practical aims; to teach the development of them as the
supreme duty and ambition of his contemporaries, and to look forward
instead of behind him for the Golden Age. Enforcing and applying these
thoughts with a wealth of learning, a keenness of wit, a soundness of
judgment, and a suggestiveness of illustration unequaled by any writer
before him, he became the greatest literary power of modern times to
stimulate minds in every department of life to their noblest efforts and
their worthiest achievements.
Literature has a twofold aspect: its ideal is pure truth, which is the
noblest thought embodied in perfect beauty of form. It is the union of
science and art, the final wedding in which are merged the knowledge
worthy to be known and the highest imagination presenting it. There is a
school calling itself that of pure art, to which substance is nothing
and form is everything. Its measure of merit is applied to the manner
only; and the meanest of subjects, the most trivial and even the most
degraded of ideas or facts, is welcomed to its high places if clothed in
a satisfying garb. But this school, though arrogant in the other arts of
expression, has not yet been welcomed to the judgment-seat in
literature, where indeed it is passing even now to contempt and
oblivion. Bacon's instinct was for substance. His strongest passion was
for utility. The artistic side of his nature was receptive rather than
creative. Splendid passages in the 'Advancement' and 'De Augmentis' show
his profound appreciation of all the arts of expression, but show
likewise his inability to glorify them above that which they express. In
his mind, language is subordinate to thought, and the painting to the
picture, just as the frame is to the painting or the binding to the
book. He writes always in the grand style. He reminds us of "the large
utterance of the early gods." His sentences are weighted with thought,
as suggestive as Plato, as condensed as Thucydides. Full of wit, keen in
discerning analogies, rich in intellectual ornament, he is yet too
concentrated in his attention to the idea to care for the melody of
language. He decorates with fruits, not with flowers. For metrical
movement, for rhythmic harmony, he has no ear nor sense. Inconceivable
as it is that Shakespeare could have written one aphorism of the 'Novum
Organum,' it would be far more absurd to imagine Bacon writing a line of
the Sonnets. With the loftiest imagination, the liveliest fancy, the
keenest sense of precision and appropriateness in words, he lacks the
special gift of poetic form, the faculty divine which finds new
inspiration in the very limitations of measured language, and whose
natural expression is music alike to the ear and to the mind. His powers
were cramped by the fetters of metre, and his attempts to versify even
rich thought and deep feeling were puerile. But his prose is by far the
weightiest, the most lucid, effective, and pleasing of his day. The poet
Sprat justly says:--
"He was a man of strong, clear, and powerful imaginations;
his genius was searching and inimitable; and of this I need
give no other proof than his style itself, which as for the
most part it describes men's minds as well as pictures do
their bodies, so it did his above all men living."
And Ben Jonson, who knew him well, describes his eloquence in terms
which are confirmed by all we know of his Parliamentary career:--
"One, though he be excellent and the chief, is not to be
imitated alone; for no imitator ever grew up to his author:
likeness is always on this side truth. Yet there happened in
my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his
speaking. His language (when he could spare or pass by a
jest) was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly,
more rightly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness,
less idleness in what he uttered. No member of his speech but
consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough or
look aside from him without loss. He commanded when he spoke,
and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man
had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man
that heard him was lest he should make an end."
The speeches of Bacon are almost wholly lost, his philosophy is an
undeciphered heap of fragments, the ambitions of his life lay in ruins
about his dishonored old age; yet his intellect is one of the great
moving and still vital forces of the modern world, and he remains, for
all ages to come, in the literature which is the final storehouse of the
chief treasures of mankind, one of
"The dead yet sceptered sovereigns who still rule
Our spirits from their urns."