adherence to the symbolical books, some voices from time to time were
heard for a more spiritual and effective religion. Arndt’s Treatise of
True Christianity, in 1605, written on ascetic and devotional
principles, and with some deviation from the tenets of the very
orthodox Lutherans may be reckoned one of the first protests against
their barren forms of Faith[133]; and the mystical theologians, if
they had not run into such extravagances as did dishonour to their
names would have been accessions to the same side. The principal
mystics or theosophists have generally been counted among
philosophers, and will therefore find their place in the next chapter.
The German nation is constitutionally disposed to receive those forms
of religion which address themselves to the imagination and the heart.
Much therefore of this character has always been written, and become
popular, in that language. Few English writings of the practical
class, except those already mentioned, can be said to retain much
notoriety. Those of George Herbert are best known; his Country Parson,
which seems properly to fall within this description, is on the whole
a pleasing little book; but the precepts are sometimes so
overstrained, as to give an air of affectation.
[133] Eichhorn, v. part i., p. 355. Biogr. Univ. Chalmers.
|Infidelity of some writers. Charron.|
75. The disbelief in revelation, of which several symptoms had
appeared before the end of the sixteenth century, became more
remarkable afterwards both in France and England, involving several
names not obscure in literary history. The first of these, in point of
date, is Charron. The religious scepticism of this writer has not been
generally acknowledged, and indeed it seems repugnant to the fact of
his having written an elaborate defence of Christianity; yet we can
deduce no other conclusion from one chapter in his most celebrated
book, the Treatise on Wisdom. Charron is so often little else than a
transcriber, that we might suspect him in this instance also to have
drawn from other sources; which however would leave the same inference
as to his own tenets, and I think this chapter has an air of
originality.
|Vanini.|
76. The name of Charron, however, has not been generally associated
with the charge of irreligion. A more audacious, and consequently more
unfortunate writer was Lucilio Vanini, a native of Italy, whose book
De Admirandis Naturæ Reginæ Deæque Mortalium Arcanis, printed at Paris
in 1616, caused him to be burned at the stake by a decree of the
parliament of Toulouse in 1619. This treatise, as well as one that
preceded it, Amphitheatrum Æternæ Providentiæ, Lyons, 1615, is of
considerable rarity, so that there has been a question concerning the
atheism of Vanini, which some have undertaken to deny.[134] In the
Amphitheatrum I do not perceive anything which leads to such an
imputation, though I will not pretend to have read the whole
of a book full of the unintelligible metaphysics of the later
Aristotelians. It professes at least to be a vindication of the being
and providence of the Deity. But the later work, which is dedicated to
Bassompierre, and published with a royal privilege of exclusive sale
for six years, is of a very different complexion. It is in sixty
dialogues, the interlocutors being styled Alexander and Julius Cæsar,
the latter representing Vanini himself. The far greater part of these
dialogues relate to physical, but a few to theological subjects. In
the fiftieth, on the religion of the heathens, he avows his disbelief
of all religion, except such as nature, which is God, being the
principle of motion, has planted in the hearts of man; every other
being the figment of kings to keep their subjects in obedience, and of
priests for their own lucre and honour;[135] observing plainly of his
own Amphitheatrum, which is a vindication of providence, that he had
said many things in it which he did not believe.[136] Vanini was
infatuated with presumption, and, if he resembled Jordano Bruno in
this respect, fell very short of his acuteness and apparent integrity.
His cruel death, and perhaps the scarcity of his works, has given more
celebrity to his name in literary history than it would otherwise have
obtained.
[134] Brucker, v. 678.
[135] In quanam religione verè et piè Deum coli vetusti
philosophi existimârunt? In unica Naturæ lege, quam ipsa Natura,
quæ Deus est (est enim principium motûs), in omnium gentium
animis inscripsit; cæteras vero leges non nisi figmenta et
illusiones esse asserebant, non a cacodæmone aliquo inductas,
fabulosum namque illorum genus dicitur a philosophis, sed a
principibus ad subditorum pædagogiam excogitatas, et a
sacrificulis ob honoris et auri aucupium confirmatas, non
miraculis, sed scriptura, cujus nec originale ullibi adinvenitur,
quæ miracula facta recitet, et bonarum ac malarum actionum
repromissiones polliceatur, in futura tamen vita, ne fraus detegi
possit, p. 366.
[136] Multa in eo libro scripta sunt, quibus a me nulla præstatur
fides. Così va il mondo.--ALEX. Non miror, nam ego crebris
vernaculis hoc usurpo sermonibus: Questo mondo è una gabbia de’
matti. Reges excipio et Pontifices. Nam de illis scriptum est:
Cor Regis in manu Domini, &c. Dial. LVI., p. 428.
The concluding pages are enough to show with what justice Buhle
and Tennemann have gravely recorded Vanini among philosophers.
Quæso, mi Juli, tuam de animæ immortalitate sententiam
explices.--J. C. Excusatum me habeas rogo.--AL. Cur ita?--J. C.
Vovi Deo meo quæstionem hanc me non pertractaturum, antequam
senex dives et germanus evasero.--AL. Dii tibi Nestoreos pro
literariæ reipublicæ emolumento dies impertiant: vix trigesimum
nunc attigisti annum et tot præclaræ eruditionis monumenta
admirabili cum laude edidisti.--J. C. Quid hæc mihi prosunt?--AL.
Celebrem tibi laudem comparârunt.--J. C. Omnes famæ rumusculos
cum uno amasiæ basiolo commutandos plerique philosophi
suadent.--AL. At alter ea perfrui potest.--J. C. Quid inde
adimit?...--AL. Uberrimos voluptaris fructus percepisti in Naturæ
arcanis investigandis.--J. C. Corpus mihi est studiis enervatum
exhaustumque; neque in hac humana caligine perfectam rerum
cognitionem assequi possumus; cum ipsummet Aristotelem
philosophorum Deum infinitis propemodum locis hallucinatum fuisse
adverto, cumque medicam facultatem præ reliquis certissimam adhuc
incertam et fallacem experior, subscribere cuperem Agrippæ
libello quem de scientiarum vanitate conscripsit.--AL. Laborum
tuorum præmium jam consecutus es; æternitati nomen jam
consecrâsti. Quid jucundius in extremo tuæ ætatis curriculo
accipere potes, quam hoc canticum? Et superest sine te nomen in
orbe tuum.--J. C. Si animus meus una cum corpore, ut Athei
fingunt, evanescat, quas ille ex fama post obitum delicias
nanscisci poterit? Forsitan gloriolæ voculis, et fidiculis ad
cadaveris domicilium pertrahatur? Si animus, ut credimus libenter
et speramus, interitui non est obnoxius, et ad superos evolabit,
tot ibi perfruetur cupediis et voluptatibus, ut illustres ac
splendidas mundi pompas et laudationes nec pili faciat. Si ad
purgatorias flammas descendet, gratior erit illi illius
orationis, Dies iræ, dies illa, mulierculis gratissima recitatio,
quam omnes Tulliani glossuli, dicendique lepores, quam
subtilissimæ et pene divinæ Aristotelis ratiocinationes: si
Tartareo, quod Deus avertat, perpetuo carceri emancipatur, nullum
ibi solatium, nullam redemptionam inveniet.--AL. O utinam in
adolescentiæ limine has rationas excepissem!--J. C. Prætorita
mala ne cogites, futura ne cures, præsentia fugias.--AL. Ah!--J.
C. Liberaliter inspiras.--AL. Illius versiculi recordor. Perduto
è tutto il tempo, che in amor non si spende.--J. C. Eja quoniam
inclinato jam die ad vesperam perducta est disputatio (cujus
singula verba divino Romanæ ecclesiæ oraculo, infallibilis cujus
interpres a Spiritu sancto modo constitutus est Paulus V.,
serenissimæ Burghesiæ familiæ soboles, subjecta esse volumus, ita
ut pro non dictis habeantur, si quæ forsitan sunt, quod vic
crediderim, quæ illius placitis ad amussim non consentiant),
laxemus paulisper animos, et a severitate ad hilaritatem risumque
traducamus. Heus pueri! lusorias tabulas huc adferte. The
wretched man, it seems, had not much reason to think himself a
gainer by his speculations; yet he knew not that the worst was
still behind.
|Lord Herbert of Cherbury.|
77. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, in his Treatise de Veritate, and still
more in that De Religione Gentilium, has been justly deemed inimical
to every positive religion. He admits indeed the possibility of
immediate revelation from heaven, but denies that any tradition from
others can have sufficient certainty. Five fundamental truths of
natural religion he holds to be such as all mankind are bound
to acknowledge, and damns those heathens who do not receive them as
summarily as any theologian.[137]
[137] These five articles are--1. Esse Deum summum.--2. Coli
debere.--3. Virtutem pietatemque esse præcipuas partes cultûs
divini.--4. Dolendum esse ob peccata, ab iisque resipiscendum.--
5. Dari ex bonitate justitiaque divina præmium vel pœnam tum in
hac vita, tum post hanc vitam.... Hisce quippe ubi superstitiones
figmentaque commiscuerint, vel animas suas criminibus quæ nulla
satis eluat pœnitentia, commaculaverint, a seipsis perditio
propria, Deo vero summo in æternum sit gloria. De Religione
Gentilium, cap. 1.
|Grotius de Veritate.|
78. The progress of infidelity in France did not fail to attract
notice. It was popular in the court of Louis XIII., and, in a certain
degree, in that of Charles I. But this does not belong to the history
of literature. Among the writers who may have given some proofs of it
we may reckon La Mothe le Vayer, Naudé, and Guy Patin.[138] The
writings of Hobbes will be treated at length hereafter. It is probable
that this sceptical spirit of the age gave rise to those vindications
of revealed religion which were published in the present period. Among
these the first place is due to the well-known and extensively
circulated treatise of Grotius. This was originally sketched in Dutch
verse, and intended for the lower classes of his countrymen. It was
published in Latin in 1627.[139] Few, if any, books of the kind have
been so frequently reprinted; but some parts being not quite so close
and critical as the modern state of letters exacts, and the arguments
against Jews and Mahometans seeming to occupy too much space, it is
less read than formerly.
[138] La Mothe le Vayer has frequently been reckoned among those
who carried their general scepticism into religion. And this
seems a fair inference, unless the contrary can be shown; for
those who doubt of what is most evident, will naturally doubt of
what is less so. In La Mothe’s fourth dialogue, under the name of
Oratius Tubero, he pretends to speak of faith as a gift of God,
and not founded on evidence; which was probably but the usual
subterfuge. The Naudæana are full of broad intimations that the
author was, as he expresses it, _bien déniaisé_; and Guy Patin’s
letters, except those near the end of his life, lead to a similar
conclusion. One of them has certainly the appearance of
implicating Gassendi, and has been quoted as such by Sir James
Mackintosh, in his Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy. Patin
tells us, that Naudé, Gassendi, and he were to sup together the
following Sunday. Ce sera une débauche, mais philosophique, et
peut-être quelque chose d’avantage, pour être tous trois guéris
du loup-garou, et être délivrés du mal des scrupules qui est le
tyran des consciences, nous irons peut-être jusque fort près du
sanctuaire. Je fis l’an passé ce voyage de Gentilly avec M.
Naudé, moy seul avec luy, tête-à-tête; il n’y avoit point de
témoins, aussi n’y en falloit-il point; nous y parlâmes fort
librement de tout, sans que personne en ait été scandalizé, p.
32. I should not, nevertheless, lay much stress on this letter in
opposition to the many assertions of belief in religion which the
writings of Gassendi contain. One of them, indeed, quoted by
Dugald Stewart, in note Q. to his first Dissertation, is rather
suspicious, as going too far into a mystical strain for his
extremely cold temperament.
[139] Niceron, vol. xix. Biogr. Univ.
|English translation of the Bible.|
79. This is not a period in which many editions or versions of the
Scriptures were published. The English translation of the Bible had
been several times revised, or re-made, since the first edition by
Tyndal and Coverdale. It finally assumed its present form under the
authority of James I. Forty-seven persons, in six companies, meeting
at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge, distributed the labour among
them; twenty-five being assigned to the Old Testament, fifteen to the
New, seven to the Apocrypha. The rules imposed for their guidance by
the king were designed, as far as possible, to secure the text against
any novel interpretation; the translation, called the Bishop’s Bible,
being established as the basis, as those still older had been in that;
and the work of each person or company being subjected to the review
of the rest. The translation, which was commenced in 1607, was
published in 1611.[140]
[140] Fuller’s Church History.
|Its style.|
80. The style of this translation is in general so enthusiastically
praised, that no one is permitted either to qualify or even explain
the grounds of his approbation. It is held to be the perfection of our
English language. I shall not dispute this proposition; but one remark
as to a matter of fact cannot reasonably be censured, that, in
consequence of the principle of adherence to the original versions
which had been kept up ever since the time of Henry VIII., it is not
the language of the reign of James I. It may, in the eyes of many, be
a better English, but it is not the English of Daniel, or Raleigh, or
Bacon, as any one may easily perceive. It abounds, in fact, especially
in the Old Testament, with obsolete phraseology, and with single words
long since abandoned, or retained only in provincial use. On the more
important question, whether this translation is entirely, or
with very trifling exceptions, conformable to the original text, it
seems unfit to enter. It is one which is seldom discussed with all the
temper and freedom from oblique views which the subject demands, and
upon which, for this reason, it is not safe for those who have not had
leisure or means to examine it for themselves, to take upon trust the
testimony of the learned. A translation of the Old Testament was
published at Douay in 1609, for the use of the English Catholics.
CHAPTER XX.
HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY FROM 1600 TO 1650.
SECT. I.
_Aristotelian Logic--Campanella--Theosophists--Lord Herbert of
Cherbury--Gassendi’s Remarks upon him._
|Subjects of this chapter.|
1. In the two preceding volumes, we have had occasion to excuse the
heterogeneous character of the chapters that bear this title. The
present is fully as much open to verbal criticism; and perhaps it is
rather by excluding both moral and mathematical philosophy, that we
give it some sort of unity, than from any close connexion in all the
books that will come under our notice in the ensuing pages. But any
tabular arrangement of literature, such as has often been attempted
with no very satisfactory result, would be absolutely inappropriate to
such a work as the present, which has already to labour with the
inconvenience of more subdivisions than can be pleasing to the reader,
and would interfere too continually with that general regard to
chronology, without which the name of history seems incongruous. Hence
the metaphysical inquiries that are conversant with the human mind, or
with natural theology, the general principles of investigating truth,
the comprehensive speculations of theoretical physics, subjects very
distinct and not easily confounded by the most thoughtless, must fall,
with no more special distribution, within the contents of this
chapter. But since during the period which it embraces, men arose, who
have laid the foundations of a new philosophy, and thus have rendered
it a great epoch in the intellectual history of mankind, we shall not
very strictly, though without much deviation, follow a chronological
order, and after reviewing some of the less important labourers in
speculative philosophy, come to the names of three who have most
influenced posterity--Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes.
|Aristotelians and Ramists.|
2. We have seen in a former chapter how little progress had been made
in this kind of philosophy during the sixteenth century. At its close
the schools of logic were divided, though by no means in equal
proportion, between the Aristotelians and the Ramists; the one
sustained by ancient renown, by civil, or at least academical power,
and by the common prejudice against innovation; the other deriving
some strength from the love of novelty, and the prejudice against
established authority, which the first age of the reformation had
generated, and which continued, perhaps, to preserve a certain
influence in the second. But neither from one nor the other had
philosophy, whether in material or intellectual physics, much to hope;
the disputations of the schools might be technically correct; but so
little regard was paid to objective truth, or at least so little pains
taken to ascertain it, that no advance in real knowledge signalised
either of these parties of dialecticians. According, indeed, to a
writer of this age, strongly attached to the Aristotelian party, Ramus
had turned all physical science into the domain of logic, and argued
from words to things still more than his opponents.[141] Lord Bacon,
in the bitterest language, casts on him a similar reproach.[142] It
seems that he caused this branch of philosophy to retrograde
rather than advance.
[141] Keckermann, Præcognita Logica, p. 129. This writer charges
Ramus with plagiarism from Ludovicus Vives, placing the passages
in apposition, so as to prove his case. Ramus, he says, never
alludes to Vives. He praises the former, however, for having
attacked the scholastic party, being himself a genuine
Aristotelian.
[142] Ne vero, fili, cum hanc contra Aristotelem sententiam fero,
me cum rebelli ejus quodam neoterico Petro Ramo conspirasse
augurare. Nullum mihi commercium cum hoc ignorantiæ latibulo,
perniciosissima literarum tinea, compendiorum patre, qui cum
methodi suæ et compendii vinclis res torqueat et premat, res
quidem, si qua fuit, elabitur protinus et exsilit; ipse vero
aridas et desertissimas nugas stringit. Atque Aquinas quindam cum
Scoto et sociis etiam in non rebus rerum varietatem effinxit, hic
vero etiam in rebus non rerum solitudinem æquavit. Atque hoc
hominis cum sit, humanos tamen usus in ore habet impudens, ut
mihi etiam pro [præ?] sophistis prævaricari videatur Bacon de
Interpretatione Naturæ.
|No improvement till near the end of the century.|
3. It was obvious at all events, that from the universities, or from
the church, in any country, no improvement in philosophy was to be
expected; yet those who had strayed from the beaten track, a
Paracelsus, a Jordan Bruno, even a Telesio, had but lost themselves in
irregular mysticism, or laid down theories of their own, as arbitrary
and destitute of proof as those they endeavoured to supersede. The
ancient philosophers, and especially Aristotle, were, with all their
errors and defects, far more genuine high-priests of nature than any
moderns of the sixteenth century. But there was a better prospect at
its close, in separate though very important branches of physical
science. Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, were laying the basis of a true
philosophy; and they, who do not properly belong to this chapter,
laboured very effectually to put an end to all antiquated errors, and
to check the reception of novel paradoxes.
|Methods of the Universities.|
4. We may cast a glance, meantime, on those universities which still
were so wise in their own conceit, and maintained a kind of reputation
by the multitude of their disciples. Whatever has been said of the
scholastic metaphysicians of the sixteenth century, may be understood
as being applicable to their successors during the present period.
That method was by no means extinct, though the books which contain it
are forgotten. In all that part of Europe which acknowledged the
authority of Rome, and in all the universities which were swayed by
the orders of Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits, the metaphysics of
the thirteenth century, the dialectics of the Peripatetic school, were
still taught. If new books were written, as was frequently the case,
they were written upon old systems. Brucker, who sometimes transcribes
Morhof word for word, but frequently expands with so much more
copiousness, that he may be presumed to have had a direct acquaintance
with many of the books he mentions, has gone most elaborately into
this subject.[143] The chairs of philosophy in Protestant German
universities, except where the Ramists had got possession of them,
which was not very common, especially after the first years of this
period, were occupied by avowed Aristotelians; so that if one should
enumerate the professors of physics, metaphysics, logic, and ethics,
down to the close of the century, he would be almost giving a list of
strenuous adherents to that system.[144] One cause of this was the
“Philippic method,” or course of instruction in the philosophical
books of Melanchthon, more clear and elegant, and better arranged than
that of Aristotle himself or his commentators. But this, which long
continued to prevail, was deemed by some too superficial, and tending
to set aside the original authority. Brucker however admits, what
seems at least to limit some of his expressions as to the prevalence
of Peripateticism, that many reverted to the scholastic metaphysics,
which raised its head about the beginning of the seventeenth century,
even in the protestant regions of Germany. The universities of Altdorf
and Helmstadt were the chief nurseries of the genuine Peripateticism.[145]
[143] Morhof, vol. iii., l. 1. c. 13, 14. Brucker, iv.,
cap. 2, 3.
[144] Brucker, iv. 243.
[145] Id. pp. 248-253.
|Scholastic Writers.|
5. Of the metaphysical writers whom the older philosophy brought forth
we must speak with much ignorance. Suarez of Granada is justly
celebrated for some of his other works; but of his Metaphysical
Disputations, published at Mentz, in 1614, in two folio volumes, and
several times afterwards, I find no distinct character in Morhof or
Brucker. They both, especially the former, have praised Lalemandet, a
Franciscan, whose Decisiones Philosophicæ, on logic, physics, and
metaphysics, appeared at Munich, in 1644 and 1645. Lalemandet, says
Morhof, has well stated the questions between the Nominalist and
Realist parties; observing that the difference between them is like
that of a man who casts up a sum of money by figures, and one who
counts the coins themselves.[146] This, however, seems no very happy
illustration of the essential points of controversy. Vasquez, Tellez,
and several more names, without going for the present below the middle
of the century, may be found in the two writers quoted. Spain was
peculiarly the nurse of these obsolete and unprofitable metaphysics.
[146] Morhof, vol. ii., lib. i., cap. 14., sect. 15.
Brucker, iv. 129.
6. The Aristotelian philosophy, unadulterated by the figments of the
schoolmen, had eminent upholders in the Italian universities,
especially in that of Padua. Cæsar Cremonini taught in that famous
city till his death in 1630. Fortunio Liceto, his successor, was as
staunch a disciple of the Peripatetic sect. We have a more full
account of these men from Gabriel Naudé, both in his recorded
conversation, the Naudæana, and in a volume of letters, than from any
other quarter. His twelfth letter, especially, enters into some detail
as to the state of the university of Padua, to which, for the purpose
of hearing Cremonini, he had repaired in 1625. He does not much extol
its condition; only Cremonini and one more were deemed by him safe
teachers: the rest were mostly of a common class; the lectures were
too few, and the vacations too long. He observes, as one might at this
day, the scanty population of the city compared with its size, the
grass growing and the birds singing in the streets, and, what we
should not find now to be the case, the “general custom of Italy,
which keeps women perpetually locked up in their chambers, like birds
in cages.”[147] Naudé in many of these letters speaks in the most
panegyrical terms of Cremonini,[148] and particularly for his standing
up almost alone in defence of the Aristotelian philosophy, when
Telesio, Patrizi, Bruno, and others had been propounding theories of
their own. Licetus, the successor of Cremonini, maintained, he
afterwards informs us, with little support the Peripatetic verity. It
is probable that, by this time, Galileo, a more powerful adversary
than Patrizi and Telesio, had drawn away the students of physical
philosophy from Aristotle; nor did Naudé himself long continue in the
faith he had imbibed from Cremonini. He became the intimate friend of
Gassendi, and embraced a better system without repugnance, though he
still kept up his correspondence with Licetus.
[147] Naudæi Epistolæ, p. 52 (edit. 1667.)
[148] P. 27, et alibi sæpius.
|Treatises on logic.|
7. Logic had never been more studied, according to a writer who has
given a sort of history of the science about the beginning of this
period, than in the preceding age; and in fact he enumerates above
fifty treatises on the subject, between the time of Ramus and his
own.[149] The Ramists, though of little importance in Italy, in Spain,
and even in France, had much influence in Germany, England, and
Scotland.[150] None however of the logical works of the sixteenth
century obtained such reputation as those by Smiglecius,
Burgersdicius, and our countryman Crakanthorp, all of whom flourished,
if we may use such a word for those who bore no flowers, in the
earlier part of the next age. As these men were famous in their
generation, we may presume that they at least wrote better than their
predecessors. But it is time to leave so jejune a subject, though we
may not yet be able to produce what is much more valuable.
[149] Keckermann, Præcognita Logica, p. 110 (edit 1606.)
[150] Id. p. 147.
|Campanella.|
8. The first name, in an opposite class, that we find in descending
from the sixteenth century, is that of Thomas Campanella, whose
earliest writings belong to it. His philosophy being wholly
dogmatical, must be classed with that of the paradoxical innovators
whom he followed and eclipsed. Campanella, a Dominican friar, and like
his master Telesio, a native of Cosenza, having been accused, it is
uncertain how far with truth, of a conspiracy against the Spanish
government of his country, underwent an imprisonment of twenty-seven
years; during which almost all his philosophical treatises were
composed and given to the world. Ardent and rapid in his mind, and, as
has just been seen, not destitute of leisure, he wrote on logic,
physics, metaphysics, morals, politics, and grammar. Upon all these
subjects his aim seems to have been to recede as far as possible from
Aristotle. He had early begun to distrust this guide, and had formed a
noble resolution to study all schemes of philosophy, comparing them
with their archetype, the world itself, that he might distinguish how
much exactness was to be found in those several copies, as they ought
to be, from one autograph of nature.[151]
[151] Cypriani Vita Campanellæ, p. 7.
|His theory taken from Telesio.|
9. Campanella borrowed his primary theorems from Telesio, but enlarged
that Parmenidean philosophy by the invention of his own fertile and
imaginative genius. He lays down the fundamental principle, that the
perfectly wise and good Being has created certain signs and types
(statuas atque imagines) of himself, all of which, severally as well
as collectively, represent power, wisdom, and love, and the objects of
these namely, existence, truth, and excellence, with more or less
evidence. God first created space, the basis of existence, the primal
substance, an immovable and incorporeal capacity of receiving body.
Next he created matter without form or figure. In this corporeal mass
God called to being two workmen, incorporeal themselves, but
incapable of subsisting apart from body, the organs of no physical
forms, but of their maker alone. These are heat and cold, the active
principles diffused through all things. They were enemies from the
beginning, each striving to occupy all material substances itself;
each, therefore, always contending with the other, while God foresaw
the great good that their discord would produce.[152] The heavens, he
says in another passage, were formed by heat out of attenuated matter,
the earth by cold out of condensed matter; the sun, being a body of
heat, as he rolls round the earth, attacks the colder substance, and
converts part of it into air and vapour.[153] This last part of his
theory Campanella must have afterwards changed in words, when he
embraced the Copernican system.
[152] In hac corporea mole tantæ materia statuæ, dixit Deus, ut
nascerentur fabri duo incorporei, sed non potentes nisi a corpore
subsistere, nullarum physicarum formarum organa, sed formatoris
tantummodo. Id circo nati calor et frigus, principia activa
principalia, ideoque suæ virtutis diffusiva. Statim inimici
fuerunt mutuo, dum uterque cupit totam substantiam materialem
occupare. Hinc contra se invicem pugnare cœperunt providente Deo
ex hujusmodi discordia ingens bonum. Philosophia Realis
Epilogistica (Frankfort, 1623), sect. 4.
[153] This is in the Compendium de Rerum Natura pro Philosophia
humana, published by Adami in 1617. In his Apology for Galileo,
in 1632, Campanella defends the Copernican system, and says that
the modern astronomers think they cannot construct good
ephemerides without it.
|Notion of universal sensibility.|
10. He united to this physical theory another not wholly original, but
enforced in all his writings with singular confidence and pertinacity,
the sensibility of all created beings. All things, he says, feel; else
would the world be a chaos. For neither would fire tend upwards, nor
stones downwards, nor waters to the sea; but everything would remain
where it was, were it not conscious that destruction awaits it by
remaining amidst that which is contrary to itself, and that it can
only be preserved by seeking that which is of a similar nature.
Contrariety is necessary for the decay and reproduction of nature; but
all things strive against their contraries, which they could not do,
if they did not perceive what is their contrary.[154] God, who is
primal power, wisdom, and love, has bestowed on all things the power
of existence, and so much wisdom and love as is necessary for their
conversation during that time only for which his providence has
determined that they shall be. Heat, therefore, has power, and sense,
and desire of its own being; so have all other things seeking to be
eternal like God, and in God they are eternal, for nothing dies before
him, but is only changed.[155] Even to the world, as a sentient being,
the death of its parts is no evil, since the death of one is the birth
of many. Bread that is swallowed dies to revive as blood, and blood
dies, that it may live again in our flesh and bones; and thus as the
life of man is compounded out of the deaths and lives of all his
parts, so is it with the whole universe.[156] God said, Let all things
feel, some more, some less, as they have more or less necessity to
imitate my being. And let them desire to live in that which they
understand to be good for them, lest my creation should come to
nought.[157]
[154] Omnia ergo sentiunt; alias mundus esset chaos. Ignis enim
non sursum tenderet, nec aquæ in mare, nec lapides deorsum; sed
res omnis ubi primo reperiretur, permaneret, cum non sentiret sui
destructionem inter contraria nec sui conservationem inter
similia. Non esset in mundo generatio et corruptio nisi esset
contrarietas, sicut omnes physiologi affirmant. At si alteram
contrarium non sentiret alterum sibi esse contrarium, contra
ipsum non pugnaret. Sentiunt ergo singula. De Sensu Rerum, l. i.
c. 4.
[155] Igitur ipse Deus, qui est prima potentia, prima sapientia,
primus amor, largitus est rebus omnibus potentiam vivendi, et
sapientiam et amorem quantum sufficit conservationi ipsarum in
tanto tempore necessariæ, quantum determinavit ejus mens pro
rerum regimine in ipso ente, nec præteriri potest. Calor ergo
potest, sentit, amat esse; ita et res omnis cupitque æternari
sicut Deus, et Deo res nulla moritur, sed solummodo mutatur, &c.
l. ii., c. 26.
[156] Non est malus ignis in suo esse; terræ autem mams videtur,
non autem mundo; nec vipera mala est, licet homini sit mala. Ita
de omnibus idem prædico. Mors quoque rei unius si nativitas est
multarum rerum, mala non est. Moritur panis manducatus, ut fiat
sanguis, et sanguis moritur, ut in carnem nervos et ossa vertatur
ac vivat; neque tamen hoc universo displicit animali, quamvis
partibus mors ipsa, hoc est, transmutatio dolorifica sit,
displiceatque. Ita utilis est mundo transmutatio eorum
particularium noxia displicensque illis. Totus homo compositus
est ex morte ac vita partialibus, quæ integrant vitam humanam.
Sic mundus totus ex morticus ac vitibus compositus est, quæ
totius vitam efficiunt. Philosop. Realis, c. 10.
[157] Sentiant alia magis, alia minus, prout magis minusque opus
habent, et me imitentur in essendo. Ibidem ament, omnia vivere in
proprio esse præcognito ut bono, ne corruat factura mea. Id.
c. 10.
|His imagination and eloquence.|
11. The strength of Campanella’s genius lay in his imagination, which
raises him sometimes to flights of impressive eloquence on
this favourite theme. The sky and stars are endowed with the keenest
sensibility; nor is it unreasonable to suppose that they signify their
mutual thoughts to each other by the transference of light, and that
their sensibility is full of pleasure. The blessed spirits that inform
such living and bright mansions behold all things in nature and in the
divine ideas; they have also a more glorious light than their own,
through which they are elevated to a supernatural beatific
vision.[158] We can hardly read this, without recollecting the most
sublime passage, perhaps, in Shakspeare:--
“Sit, Jessica; look how the vault of heaven
Is thick inlayed with patins of bright gold.
There’s not the smallest orb, that thou behold’st,
But in its motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim;
Such harmony is in immortal souls.
But while this muddy vesture of decay
Does grossly close us in, we cannot hear it.”[159]
[158] Animæ beatæ habitantes sic vivas lucidasque mansiones, res
naturales vident omnes divinasque ideas, habent quoque lumen
gloriosius quo elevantur ad visionem supernaturalem beatificam,
et veluti apud nos luces plurimæ sese mutuo tangunt, intersecant,
decussant, sentiuntque ita in cœlo luces distinguuntur, uniuntur,
sentiunt. De Sensu Rerum, l. iii. c. 4.
[159] Merchant of Venice, Act V.
12. The world is full of living spirits, he proceeds; and when the
soul shall be delivered from this dark cavern, we shall behold their
subtle essences. But now we cannot discern the forms of the air, and
the winds as they rush by us; much less the angels and dæmons who
people them. Miserable as we are, we recognise no other sensation than
that which we observe in animals and plants, slow and half
extinguished, and buried under a weight that oppresses it. We will not
understand that all our actions and appetites and motions and powers
flow from heaven. Look at the manner in which light is diffused over
the earth, penetrating every part of it with endless variety of
operation, which we must believe that it does not perform without
exquisite pleasure.[160] And hence there is no vacuum in nature,
except by violent means; since all bodies delight in mutual contact,
and the world no more desires to be rent in its parts than an animal.
[160] Prætervolant in conspectu nostro venti et aer, at nihil eos
videmus, multo minus videmus Angelos Dæmonasque, quorum plenus
est mundus.
Infelices qui sensum alium nullum agnoscimus, nisi obtusum
animalium plantarumque, tardum, demortuum aggravatum; sepultum:
nec quidem intelligere volumus omnem actionem nostram et
appetitum et sensum et motum et vim a cœlo manare. Ecce lux
quanto acutissimo expanditur sensu super terram, quo
multiplicatur, generatur, amplificatur, idque non sine magna
efficere voluptate existimanda est, l. iii. c. 5.
Campanella used to hear, as he tells us, whenever any evil was
impending, a voice calling him by his name, sometimes with other
words; he doubted whether this were his proper Dæmon, or the air
itself speaking. It is not wonderful that his imagination was
affected by length of confinement.
13. It is almost a descent in Campanella from these visions of the
separate sensibility of nature in each particle, when he seizes hold
of some physical fact or analogy to establish a subordinate and less
paradoxical part of his theory. He was much pleased with Gilbert’s
treatise on the magnet, and thought it of course a proof of the
animation of the earth. The world is an animal, he says, sentient as a
whole, and enjoying life in all its parts.[161] It is not surprising
that he ascribes intelligence to plants; but he here remarks that we
find the male and female sexes in them, and that the latter cannot
fructify without the former. This is manifest in siliquose plants and
in palms (which on this account he calls in another place the wiser
plants, plantæ sapientiores), in which the two kinds incline towards
each other for the purpose of fructification.[162]
[161] Mundum esse animal, totum sentiens, omnesque portiones ejus
communi gaudere vita, l. i. c. 9.
[162] Inveniemus in plantis sexum masculinum et fœmininum, ut in
animalibus, et fœminam non fructificare sine masculi congressu.
Hoc patet in siliquis et in palmis, quarum mas fœminaque
inclinantur mutuo alter in alterum et sese osculantur, et fœmina
impregnatur, nec fructificat sine mare; immo conspicitur dolens,
squalida mortuaque, et pulvere illius et odore reviviscit.
|His works published by Adami.|
14. Campanella, when he uttered from his Neapolitan prison these
dulcet sounds of fantasy, had the advantage of finding a pious
disciple who spread them over other parts of Europe. This was Tobias
Adami, initiated, as he tells us, in the same mysteries as himself
(nostræ philosophiæ symmysta), who dedicated to the philosophers of
Germany his own Prodromus Philosophiæ Instauratio, prefixed to his
edition of Campanella’s Compendium de Rerum Natura, published at
Frankfort in 1617. Most of the other writings of the master seem to
have preceded this edition; for Adami enumerates them in his
Prodromus. Campanella did not fully obtain his liberty till 1629, and
died some years afterwards in France, where he had experienced
the kindness of Peiresc, and the patronage of Richelieu. His
philosophy made no very deep impression; it was too fanciful, too
arbitrary, too much tinctured with marks of an imagination rendered
morbid by solitude, to gain many proselytes in an age that was
advancing in severe science. Gassendi, whose good nature led him to
receive Campanella, oppressed by poverty and ill usage, with every
courteous attention, was of all men the last to be seduced by his
theories. No one, probably, since Campanella, aspiring to be reckoned
among philosophers, has ventured to assert so much on matters of high
speculative importance and to prove so little. Yet he seems worthy of
the notice we have taken of him, if it were only as the last of the
mere dogmatists in philosophy. He is doubtless much superior to
Jordano Bruno, and I should presume, except in mathematics, to
Cardan.[163]
[163] Brucker (vol. v., p. 106-144) has given a laborious
analysis of the philosophy of Campanella.
|Basson.|
15. A less important adversary of the established theory in physics
was Sebastian Basson, in his “Philosophiæ Naturalis adversus
Aristotelem libri XII., in quibus abstrusa veterum physiologia
restauratur, et Aristotelis errores solidis rationibus refelluntur.
Genevæ, 1621.” This book shows great animosity against Aristotle, to
whom, as Lord Bacon has himself insinuated, he allows only the credit
of having preserved fragments of the older philosophers, like pearls
in mud. It is difficult to give an account of this long work. In some
places we perceive signs of a just philosophy; but in general his
explanations of physical phænomena seem as bad as those of his
opponents, and he displays no acquaintance with the writings and the
discoveries of his great contemporaries. We find also some geometrical
paradoxes; and in treating of astronomy he writes as if he had never
heard of the Copernican system.
|Berigard.|
16. Claude Berigard, born at Moulins, became professor of natural
philosophy at Pisa and Padua. In his Circuli Pisani, published in
1643, he attempted to revive, as it is commonly said, the Ionic or
corpuscular philosophy of Anaxagoras, in opposition to the
Aristotelian. The book is rare; but Brucker, who had seen it, seems to
have satisfactorily repelled the charge of atheism, brought by some
against Berigard.[164]
[164] Brucker, iv. 460. Niceron, xxxi., where he is inserted by
the name of Beauregard, which is probably more correct, but
against usage.
|Magnen.|
Another Frenchman domiciled in Italy, Magnen, trod nearly the same
path as Berigard, professing, however, to follow the modification of
the corpuscular theory introduced by Democritus.[165] It seems to be
observable as to these writers, Basson and the others, that, coming
with no sufficient knowledge of what had recently been discovered in
mathematical and experimental science, and following the bad methods
of the universities, even when they deviated from their usual
doctrines, dogmatizing and asserting when they should have proved,
arguing synthetically from axioms, and never ascending from particular
facts, they could do little good to philosophy, except by
contributing, so far as they might be said to have had any influence,
to shake the authority of Aristotle.
[165] Brucker (p. 504) thinks that Magnen misunderstood
the atomic theory of Democritus, and substituted one quite
different in his Democritus reviviscens, published in 1646.
|Paracelsists.|
17. This authority, which at least required but the deference of
modest reason to one of the greatest of mankind, was ill exchanged, in
any part of science, for the unintelligible dreams of the school of
Paracelsus, which had many disciples in Germany, and a very few in
England. Germany indeed has been the native soil of mysticism in
Europe. The tendency to reflex observation of the mind, characteristic
of that people, has exempted them from much gross error, and given
them insight into many depths of truth, but at the expense of some
confusion, some liability to self-deceit, and to some want of
strictness in metaphysical reasoning. It was accompanied by a profound
sense of the presence of Deity; yet one which, acting on their
thoughtful spirits, became rather an impression than an intellectual
act, and settled into a mysterious indefinite theopathy, when it did
not even evaporate in pantheism.
|And Theosophists.|
18. The founder, perhaps, of this sect was Tauler of Strasburg, in the
fourteenth century, whose sermons in the native language, which,
however, are supposed to have been translated from Latin, are full of
what many have called by the vague word mysticism, an intense
aspiration for the union of the soul with God. An anonymous work
generally entitled The German Theology, written in the fifteenth
century, pursues the same track of devotional thought. It was
a favourite book with Luther, and was translated into Latin by
Castalio.[166] These indeed are to be considered chiefly as
theological; but the study of them led readily to a state of mental
emotion, wherein a dogmatic pseudo-philosophy, like that of
Paracelsus, abounding with assertions that imposed on the imagination,
and appealing frequently both to scriptural authority and the evidence
of inward light, was sure to be favourably received. The mystics,
therefore, and the theosophists belonged to the same class, and it is
not uncommon to use the names indifferently.
[166] Episcopius places the author of the Theologia Germanica,
with Henry Nicolas and David George, among mere enthusiasts.
|Fludd.|
19. It may appear not here required to dwell on a subject scarcely
falling under any province of literary history, but two writers within
this period have been sufficiently distinguished to deserve mention.
One of these was Robert Fludd, an English physician, who died in 1637;
a man of indefatigable diligence in collecting the dreams and follies
of past ages, blending them in a portentous combination with new
fancies of his own. The Rabbinical and Cabbalistic authors, as well as
the Paracelsists, the writers on magic, and whatever was most worthy
to be rejected and forgotten, form the basis of his creed. Among his
numerous works the most known was his “Mosaic Philosophy,” in which,
like many before his time as well as since, he endeavoured to build a
scheme of physical philosophy on the first chapters in Genesis. I do
not know whether he found there his two grand principles or forces of
nature: a northern force of condensation, and a southern force of
dilatation. These seem to be the Parmenidean cold and heat, expressed
in a jargon affected in order to make dupes. In peopling the universe
with dæmons, and in ascribing all phænomena to their invisible agency,
he pursued the steps of Agrippa and Paracelsus, or rather of the whole
school of fanatics and impostors called magical. He took also from
older writers the doctrine of a constant analogy between universal
nature, or the macrocosm, and that of man, or the microcosm; so that
what was known in one might lead us to what was unknown in the
other.[167] Fludd possessed, however, some acquaintance with science,
especially in chemistry and mechanics; and his rhapsodies were so far
from being universally contemned in his own age, that Gassendi thought
it not unworthy of him to enter into a prolix confutation of the
Fluddian philosophy.[168]
[167] This was a favourite doctrine of Paracelsus. Campanella was
much too fanciful not to embrace it. Mundus, he says, habet
spiritum qui est cœlum, crassum corpus quod est terra, sanguinem
qui est mare. Homo igitur compendium epilogusque mundi est. De
Sensu Rerum, l. ii. c. 32.
[168] Brucker, iv. 691. Buhle, iii. 157.
|Jacob Behmen.|
20. Jacob Behmen, or rather Boehm, a shoemaker of Gorlitz, is far more
generally familiar to our ears than his contemporary Fludd. He was,
however, much inferior to him in reading, and in fact seems to have
read little but the Bible and the writings of Paracelsus. He recounts
the visions and ecstasies during which a supernatural illumination had
been conveyed to him. It came indeed without the gift of transferring
the light to others; for scarce any have been able to pierce the
clouds in which his meaning has been charitably presumed to lie hid.
The chief work of Behmen is his Aurora, written about 1612, and
containing a record of the visions wherein the mysteries of nature
were revealed to him. It was not published till 1641. He is said to
have been a man of great goodness of heart, which his writings
display; but, in literature, this cannot give a sanction to the
incoherencies of madness. His language, as far as I have seen any
extracts from his works, is coloured with the phraseology of the
alchemists and astrologers; as for his philosophy, so to style it, we
find according to Brucker, who has taken some pains with the subject,
manifest traces of the system of emanation, so ancient and so
attractive; and from this and several other reasons, he is inclined to
think the unlearned shoemaker of Gorlitz must have had assistance from
men of more education in developing his visions.[169] But the
emanative theory is one into which a mind absorbed in contemplation
may very naturally fall. Behmen had his disciples, which such
enthusiasts rarely want; and his name is sufficiently known to justify
the mention of it even in philosophical history.
[169] Brucker, iv. 698.
|Lord Herbert De Veritate.|
21. We come now to an English writer of a different class, little
known as such at present, but who, without doing much for the
advancement of metaphysical philosophy, had at least the merit of
devoting to it with a sincere and independent spirit the leisure of
high rank, and of a life not obscure in the world--Lord
Herbert of Cherbury. The principal work of this remarkable man is his
Latin treatise, published in 1624, “On truth as it is distinguished
from Revelation, from Probability, from Possibility, and from
Falsehood.” Its object is to inquire what are the sure means of
discerning and discovering truth. This, as, like other authors, he
sets out by proclaiming, had been hitherto done by no one, and he
treats both ancient and modern philosophers rather haughtily, as being
men tied to particular opinions, from which they dare not depart. “It
is not from an hypocritical or mercenary writer, that we are to look
for perfect truth. Their interest is not to lay aside their mask, or
think for themselves. A liberal and independent author alone will do
this.” [170] So general an invective, after Lord Bacon, and indeed
after others, like Campanella, who could not be charged with following
any conceits rather than their own, bespeaks either ignorance of
philosophical literature, or a supercilious neglect of it.
[170] Non est igitur a larvatoaliquo vel stipendioso scriptore ut
verum consummatum opperiaris: Illorum apprime interest ne
personam deponant, vel aliter quidem sentiant. Ingenuus et sui
arbitrii ista solummodo præstabit auctor. Epist. ad Lectorem.
|His axioms.|
22. Lord Herbert lays down seven primary axioms. 1. Truth exists: 2.
It is coeval with the things to which it relates: 3. It exists
everywhere: 4. It is self-evident:[171] 5. There are as many truths,
as there are differences in things: 6. These differences are made
known to us by our natural faculties: 7. There is a truth belonging to
these truths; “Est veritas quædam harum veritatum.” This axiom he
explains as obscurely, as it is strangely expressed. All truth he then
distinguishes into the truth of the thing or object, the truth of the
appearance, the truth of the perception, and the truth of the
understanding. The truth of the object is the inherent conformity of
the object with itself, or that which makes everything what it
is.[172] The truth of appearance is the conditional conformity of the
appearance with the object. The truth of perception is the conditional
conformity of our senses (facultates nostras prodromas) with the
appearances of things. The truth of understanding is the due
conformity between the aforesaid conformities. All truth, therefore,
is conformity, all conformity relation. Three things are to be
observed in every inquiry after truth; the thing or object, the sense
or faculty, and the laws or conditions by which its conformity or
relation is determined. Lord Herbert is so obscure, partly by not
thoroughly grasping his subject, partly by writing in Latin, partly
perhaps by the “sphalmata et errata in typographo, quædam fortasse in
seipso,” of which he complains at the end, that it has been necessary
to omit several sentences as unintelligible, though what I have just
given is far enough from being too clear.
[171] Hæc veritas est in se manifesta. He observes that what are
called false appearances, are true as such, though not true
according to the reality of the object: sua veritas apparentiæ
falsæ inest, verè enim ita apparebit, vera tamen ex veritate rei
non erit.
[172] Inhærens illa conformitas rei cum seipsa, sive illa ratio,
ex qua res unaquæque sibi constant.
|Conditions of truth.|
23. Truth, he goes on to say, exists as to the object, or outward
thing itself, when our faculties are capable of determining everything
concerning it; but though this definition is exact, it is doubtful
whether any such truth exists in nature. The first condition of
discerning truth in things, is that they should have a relation to
ourselves; (ut intra nostram stet analogiam) since multitudes of
things may exist which the senses cannot discover. The three chief
conditions of this condition seem to be: 1. That it should be of a
proper size, neither immense, nor too small; 2. That it should have
its determining difference, or principle of individuation, to
distinguish it from other things; 3. That it should be accommodated to
some sense or perceptive faculty. These are the universally necessary
conditions of truth (that is of knowledge) as it regards the object.
The truth of appearance depends on others, which are more particular;
as that the object should be perceived for a sufficient time, through
a proper medium, at a due distance, in a proper situation.[173] Truth
of perception is conditional also, and its conditions are, that the
sense should be sound, and the attention directed towards it. Truth of
understanding depends on the κοιναι εννοιαι [koinai ennoiai], the
common notions possessed by every man of sane mind, and implanted by
nature. The understanding teaches us by means of these, that infinity
and eternity exist, though our senses cannot perceive them.
The understanding deals also with universals, and truth is known as to
universals, when the particulars are rightly apprehended.
[173] Lord Herbert defines appearance, icetypum, seu forma
vicaria rei, quæ sub conditionibus istis cum prototypo suo
conformata, cum conceptu denuo sub conditionibus etiam suis,
conformari et modo quodam spirituali, tanquam ab objecto decisa,
etiam in objecti absentia conservari potest.
|Instinctive truths.|
24. Our faculties are as numerous as the differences of things; and
thus it is, that the world corresponds by perfect analogy to the human
soul, degrees of perception being as much distinct from one another as
different modes of it. All our powers may however be reduced to four
heads; natural instinct, internal perception, external sensation, and
reason. What is not known by one of these four means cannot be known
at all. Instinctive truths are proved by universal consent. Here he
comes to his general basis of religion, maintaining the existence of
κοιναι εννοιαι [koinai ennoiai] or common notions of mankind, on that
subject, principles against which no one can dispute, without
violating the laws of his nature.[174] Natural instinct he defines to
be an act of those faculties existing in every man of sane mind, by
which the common notions as to the relations of things not perceived
by the senses, (rerum internarum) and especially such as tend to the
conversation of the individual, of the species, and of the whole, are
formed without any process of reasoning. These common notions, though
excited in us by the objects of sense, are not conveyed to us by them;
they are implanted in us by nature, so that God seems to have imparted
to us not only a part of his image, but of his wisdom.[175] And
whatever is understood and perceived by all men alike deserves to be
accounted one of these notions. Some of them are instinctive, others
are deduced from such as are. The former are distinguishable by six
marks; priority, independence, universality, certainty; so that no man
can doubt them without putting off as it were his nature, necessity,
that is, usefulness for the preservation of man; lastly, intuitive
apprehension, for these common notions do not require to be
inferred.[176]
[174] Principia illa sacrosancta, contra quæ disputare nefas.
p. 44. I have translated this in the best sense I could give it;
but to use _fas_ or _nefas_, before we have defined their
meaning, or proved their existence, is but indifferent logic.
[175] P. 48.
[176] P. 60.
|Internal perceptions.|
25. Internal perceptions denote the conformity of objects with those
faculties existing in every man of sane mind, which, being developed
by his natural instinct, are conversant with the internal relations of
things, in a secondary and particular manner, and by means of natural
instinct.[177] By this ill-worded definition he probably intends to
distinguish the general power, or instinctive knowledge, from its
exercise and application in any instance. But I have found it very
difficult to follow Lord Herbert. It is by means, he says, of these
internal senses that we discern the nature of things in their
intrinsic relations, or hidden types of being.[178] And it is
necessary well to distinguish the conforming faculty in the mind or
internal perception, from the bodily sense. The cloudiness of his
expression increases as we proceed, and in many pages I cannot venture
to translate or abridge it. The injudicious use of a language in which
he did not write with facility, and which is not very well adapted, at
the best, to metaphysical disquisition, has doubtless increased the
perplexity into which he has thrown his readers.
[177] Sensus interni sunt actus conformitatum objectorum cum
facultatibus illis in omni homine sano et integro existentibus,
quæ ab instinctu naturali expositæ, circa analogiam rerum
internam, particulariter, secondario, et ratione instinctûs
naturalis versantur. p. 66.
[178] Circa analogiam rerum internam, sive signaturas et
characteras rerum penitiores versantur. p. 68.
|Five natural notions of natural religion.|
26. In the conclusion of this treatise, Herbert lays down the five
common notions of natural religion, implanted, as he conceives, in the
breasts of all mankind. 1. That there is a God; 2. That he ought to be
worshipped; 3. That virtue and piety are the chief parts of worship;
4. That we are to repent and turn from our sins; 5. That they are
rewards and punishments in another life.[179] Nothing can be admitted
in religion which contradicts these primary notions; but if any one
has a revelation from heaven in addition to these, which may happen to
him sleeping or waking, he should keep it to himself, since nothing
can be of importance to the human race, which is not established by
the evidence of their common faculties. Nor can anything be known to
be revealed, which is not revealed to ourselves; all else being
tradition and historic testimony, which does not amount to knowledge.
The specific difference of man from other animals he makes not reason,
but the capacity of religion. It is a curious coincidence, that John
Wesley has said something of the same kind.[180] It is also
remarkable that we find in another work of Lord Herbert, De Religione
Gentilium, which dwells again on his five articles of natural
religion, essential, as he expressly lays it down, to salvation, the
same illustration of the being of a Deity from the analogy of a watch
or clock, which Paley has since employed. I believe that it occurs in
an intermediate writer.[181]
[179] P. 222.
[180] I have somewhere read a profound remark of Wesley, that,
considering the sagacity which many animals display, we cannot
fix upon reason as the distinction between them and man; the true
difference is, that we are formed to know God, and they are not.
[181] Et quidem si horologium per diem et noctem integram horas
signanter indicans, viderit quispiam non mente captus, id
consilio arteque summa factum judicaverit. Ecquis non planè
demens, qui hanc mundi machinam non per viginti quatuor horas
tantum, sed per tot sæcula circuitus suos obeuntem
animadverterit, non id omne sapientissimo utique potentissimoque
alicui autori tribuat? De Relig. Gentil., cap. xiii.
|Remarks of Gassendi on Herbert.|
27. Lord Herbert sent a copy of his treatise De Veritate several years
after its publication to Gassendi. We have a letter to the noble
author in the third volume of the works of that philosopher, showing,
in the candid and sincere spirit natural to him, the objections that
struck his mind in reading the book.[182] Gassendi observes that the
distinctions of four kinds of truth are not new; the veritas rei of
Lord Herbert being what is usually called substance, his veritas
apparentiæ no more than accident, and the other two being only sense
and reason. Gassendi seems not wholly to approve, but gives us the
best, a definition of truth little differing from Herbert’s, the
agreement of the cognizant intellect with the thing known:
“Intellectûs cognoscentis cum re cognita congruentia.” The obscurity
of the treatise De Veritate could ill suit an understanding like that
of Gassendi, always tending to acquire clear conceptions; and though
he writes with great civility, it is not without smartly opposing what
he does not approve. The aim of Lord Herbert’s work, he says, is that
the intellect may pierce into the nature of things, knowing them as
they are in themselves without the fallacies of appearance and sense.
But for himself he confesses that such knowledge he has always found
above him, and that he is in darkness when he attempts to investigate
the real nature of the least thing; making many of the observations on
this which we read also in Locke. And he well says that we have enough
for our use in the accidents or appearances of things without knowing
their substances, in reply to Herbert, who had declared that we should
be miserably deficient, if, while nature has given us senses to
discern sounds and colours and such fleeting qualities of things, we
had no sure road to eternal, and necessary truths.[183] The
universality of those innate principles, especially moral and
religious, on which his correspondent had built so much, is doubted by
Gassendi on the usual grounds, that many have denied, or been ignorant
of them. The letter is imperfect, some sheets of the autograph having
been lost.
[182] Gassendi Opera, iii. 411.
[183] Misere nobiscum actum esset, si ad percipiendos colores,
sonos et qualitates cæteras caducas atque momentaneas subessent
media, nulla autem ad veritates illas internas, æternas,
necessarias sine errore superesset via.
28. Too much space may seem to have been bestowed on a writer who
cannot be ranked high among metaphysicians. But Lord Herbert was not
only a distinguished name, but may claim the precedence among those
philosophers in England. If his treatise De Veritate is not as an
entire work very successful, or founded always upon principles which
have stood the test of severe reflection, it is still a monument of an
original, independent thinker, without rhapsodies of imagination,
without pedantic technicalities, and above all, bearing witness to a
sincere love of the truth he sought to apprehend. The ambitious
expectation that the real essences of things might be discovered, if
it were truly his, as Gassendi seems to suppose, could not be
warranted by anything, at least within the knowledge of that age. But
from some expressions of Herbert I should infer that he did not think
our faculties competent to solve the whole problem of _quiddity_,
as the logicians called it, or the real nature of anything, at least,
objectively without us.[184] He is indeed so obscure, that I will not
vouch for his entire consistency. It has been an additional motive to
say as much as I have done concerning Lord Herbert, that I know not
where any account of his treatise De Veritate will be found. Brucker
is strangely silent about this writer, and Buhle has merely adverted
to the letter of Gassendi. Descartes has spoken of Lord Herbert’s book
with much respect, though several of their leading principles
were far from the same. It was translated into French in 1639, and
this translation he found less difficult than the original.[185]
[184] Cum facultates nostræ ad analogiam propriam terminatæ
quidditates rerum intimas non penetrent: ideo quid res naturalis
in seipsa sit, tali ex analogia ad nos ut _sit_ constituta,
perfecte sciri non potest, p. 165. Instead of _sit_, it might be
better to read _est_. In another place he says, it is doubtful
whether anything exists in nature, concerning which we have a
complete knowledge. The eternal and necessary truths which
Herbert contends for our knowing, seem to have been his communes
notitiæ, subjectively understood, rather than such as relate to
external objects.
[185] Descartes, vol. viii., p. 138 and 168. J’y trouve plusieurs
choses fort bonnes, _sed non publici saporis_; car il y a peu de
personnes qui soient capables d’entendre la métaphysique. Et,
pour le général du livre, il tient un chemin fort différent de
celui que j’ai suivi.... Enfin, par conclusion, encore que je ne
puisse m’accorder en tout aux sentimens de cet auteur, je ne
laisse pas de l’estimer beaucoup au-dessus des esprits
ordinaires.
|Gassendi’s defence of Epicurus.|
29. Gassendi himself ought, perhaps, to be counted wholly among the
philosophers of this period, since many of his writings were
published, and all may have been completed within it. They are
contained in six large folio volumes, rather closely printed. The
Exercitationes Paradoxicæ, published in 1624, are the earliest. These
contain an attack on the logic of Aristotle, the fortress that so many
bold spirits were eager to assail. But in more advanced life Gassendi
withdrew in great measure from this warfare, and his Logic, in the
Syntagma Philosophicum, the record of his latest opinions, is chiefly
modelled on the Aristotelian, with sufficient commendation of its
author. In the study of ancient philosophy, however, Gassendi was
impressed with an admiration of Epicurus. His physical theory, founded
on corpuscles and a vacuum, his ethics, in their principle and
precepts, his rules of logic and guidance of the intellect, seemed to
the cool and independent mind of the French philosopher more worthy of
regard than the opposite schemes prevailing in the schools, and not to
be rejected on account of any discredit attached to the name.
Combining with the Epicurean physics and ethics the religious element
which had been unnecessarily discarded from the philosophy of the
Garden, Gassendi displayed both in a form no longer obnoxious. The
Syntagma Philosophiæ Epicuri, published in 1649, is an elaborate
vindication of this system, which he had previously expounded in a
commentary on the tenth book of Diogenes Laertius. He had already
effaced the prejudices against Epicurus himself, whom he seems to have
regarded with the affection of a disciple, in a biographical treatise
on his life and moral character.
|His chief works after 1650.|
30. Gassendi died in 1656; the Syntagma Philosophicum, his greatest as
well as last work, in which it is natural to seek the whole scheme of
his philosophy, was published by his friend Sorbière in 1658. We may,
therefore, properly defer the consideration of his metaphysical
writings to the next period: but the controversy in which he was
involved with Descartes will render it necessary to bring his name
forward again before the close of this chapter.
SECT. II.
_On the Philosophy of Lord Bacon._
|Preparation for the philosophy of.|
31. It may be judged from what has been said in a former volume, as
well as in our last pages, that at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, the higher philosophy which is concerned with general truth,
and the means of knowing it, had been little benefitted by the labours
of any modern inquirer. It was become indeed no strange thing, at
least out of the air of a college, to question the authority of
Aristotle; but his disciples pointed with scorn at the endeavours
which had as yet been made to supplant it, and asked whether the
wisdom so long reverenced was to be set aside for the fanatical
reveries of Paracelsus, the unintelligible chimæras of Bruno, or the
more plausible, but arbitrary, hypotheses of Telesio.
|Lord Bacon.|
32. Francis Bacon was born in 1561.[186] He came to years of manhood
at the time when England was rapidly emerging from ignorance and
obsolete methods of study, in an age of powerful minds, full himself
of ambition, confidence and energy. If we think on the public history
of Bacon, even during the least public portion of it, philosophy must
appear to have been but his amusement; it was by his hours of leisure,
by time hardly missed from the laborious study and practice of the law
and from the assiduities of a courtier’s life, that he became the
father of modern science. This union of an active with a reflecting
life had been the boast of some ancients, of Cicero and Antonine; but
what comparison, in depth and originality, between their philosophy
and that of Bacon?
[186] Those who place Lord Bacon’s birth in 1560, as Mr. Montagu
has done, must be understood to follow the old style, which
creates some confusion. He was born the 22nd of January, and died
the 9th of April, 1626, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, as we
are told in his life by Rawley, the best authority we have.
|His plan of philosophy.|
33. This wonderful man, in sweeping round the champaign of universal
science with his powerful genius, found as little to praise in
the recent, as in the ancient methods of investigating truth. He liked
as little the empirical presumption of drawing conclusions from a
partial experience as the sophistical dogmatism which relied on
unwarranted axioms and verbal chicane. All, he thought, was to be
constructed anew; the investigation of facts, their arrangement for
the purposes of inquiry, the process of eliciting from them the
required truth. And for this he saw, that, above all, a thorough
purgation of the mind itself would be necessary, by pointing out its
familiar errors, their sources, and their remedies.
|Time of its conception.|
34. It is not exactly known at what age Bacon first conceived the
scheme of a comprehensive philosophy, but it was, by his own account,
very early in life.[187] Such noble ideas are most congenial to the
sanguine spirit of youth, and to its ignorance of the extent of labour
it undertakes. In the dedication of the Novum Organum to James in
1620, he says that he had been about some such work near thirty years,
“so as I made no haste.” “And the reason,” he adds, “why I have
published it now, specially being imperfect, is, to speak plainly,
because I number my days, and would have it saved. There is another
reason of my so doing, which is to try whether I can get help in one
intended part of this work, namely, the compiling of a natural and
experimental history, which must be the main foundation of a true and
active philosophy.” He may be presumed at least to have made a very
considerable progress in his undertaking, before the close of the
sixteenth century. But it was first promulgated to the world by the
publication of his Treatise on the Advancement of Learning in 1605. In
this, indeed, the whole of the Baconian philosophy may be said to be
implicitly contained, except perhaps the second book of the Novum
Organum. In 1623, he published his more celebrated Latin translation
of this work, if it is not rather to be deemed a new one, entitled, De
Augmentis Scientiarum. I find, upon comparison, that more than two
thirds of this treatise are a version, with slight interpolation or
omission, from the Advancement of Learning, the remainder being new
matter.
[187] In a letter to Father Fulgentio, which bears no date in
print, but must have been written about 1624, he refers to a
juvenile work about forty years before, which he had confidently
entitled The Greatest Birth of Time. Bacon says: Equidem memini
me quadraginta abhinc annis juvenile opusculum circa has res
confecisse, quod magna prorsus fiducia et magnifico titulo,
“Temporis partum maximum” inscripsi. The apparent vain-glory of
this title is somewhat extenuated by the sense he gave to the
phrase Birth of Time. He meant that the lapse of time and long
experience were the natural sources of a better philosophy, as he
says in his dedication of the Instauratio Magna: Ipse certè, ut
ingenue fateor, soleo, æstimare hoc opus magis pro partu temporis
quam ingenii. Illud enim in eo solummodo mirabile est, initia rei
et tantas de iis quæ invaluerunt suspiciones, alicui in mentem
venire potuisse. Cætera non illibenter sequuntur.
No treatise with this precise title appears. But we find prefixed
to some of the short pieces a general title, Temporis Partus
Masculus, sive Instauratio Magna Imperii Universi in Humanum.
These treatises, however, though earlier than his great works,
cannot be referred to so juvenile a period as his letter to
Fulgentio intimates, and I should rather incline to suspect that
the _opusculum_ to which he there refers, has not been
preserved. Mr. Montagu is of a different opinion. See his Note I.
to the life of Bacon in vol. xvi. of his edition. The Latin tract
De Interpretatione Naturæ Mr. M. supposes to be the germ of the
Instauratio, as the Cogitata et Visa are of the Novum Organum. I
do not dissent from this; but the former bears marks of having
been written after Bacon had been immersed in active life. The
most probable conjecture appears to be that he very early
perceived the meagreness and imperfection of the academical
course of philosophy, and of all others which fell in his way,
and formed the scheme of affording something better from his own
resources: but that he did not commit _much_ to paper, nor
had planned his own method till after he was turned thirty, which
his letter to the King intimates.
In a recent and very brilliant sketch of the Baconian philosophy
(Edinb. Review, July, 1837), the two leading principles that
distinguish it throughout all its parts, are justly denominated
_utility_ and _progress_. To do good to mankind, and do
more and more good, are the ethics of its inductive method. We
may only regret that the ingenious author of this article has
been hurried sometimes into the low and contracted view of the
deceitful word _utility_, which regards rather the
enjoyments of physical convenience, than the general well-being
of the individual and the species. If Bacon looked more
frequently to the former, it was because so large a portion of
his writings relates to physical observation and experiment. But
it was far enough from his design to set up physics in any sort
of opposition to ethics, much less in a superior light. I dissent
also from some of the observations in this article, lively as
they are, which tend to depreciate the originality and importance
of the Baconian methods. The reader may turn to a note on this
subject by Dugald Stewart, at the end of the present section.
|Instauratio Magna.|
35. The Instauratio Magna had been already published in 1620, while
Lord Bacon was still chancellor. Fifteen years had elapsed
since he gave to the world his Advancement of Learning, the first
fruits of such astonishing vigour of philosophical genius, that,
inconceivable as the completion of the scheme he had even then laid
down in prospect for his new philosophy by any single effort must
appear, we may be disappointed at the great deficiencies which this
latter work exhibits, and which he was not destined to fill up. But he
had passed the interval in active life, and in dangerous paths,
deserting, as in truth he had all along been prone enough to do, the
“shady spaces of philosophy,” as Milton calls them, for the court of a
sovereign, who with some real learning, was totally incapable of
sounding the depths of Lord Bacon’s mind, or even of estimating his
genius.
|First Part: Partitiones Scientiarum.|
36. The Instauratio Magna, dedicated to James, is divided, according
to the magnificent groundplot of its author, into six parts. The first
of these he entitles Partitiones Scientiarum, comprehending a general
summary of that knowledge which mankind already possess; yet not
merely treating this affirmatively, but taking special notice of
whatever should seem deficient or imperfect; sometimes even supplying,
by illustration or precept, these vacant spaces of science. This first
part he declares to be wanting in the Instauratio. It has been chiefly
supplied by the treatise De Augmentis Scientiarum; yet perhaps even
that does not fully come up to the amplitude of his design.
|Second part: Novum Organum.|
37. The second part of the Instauratio was to be, as he expresses it
“the science of a better and more perfect use of reason in the
investigation of things, and of the true aids of the understanding,”
the new logic, or inductive method, in which what is eminently styled
the Baconian philosophy consists. This, as far as he completed it, is
known to all by the name of the Novum Organum. But he seems to have
designed a fuller treatise in place of this; the aphorisms into which
he has digested it being rather the heads or theses of chapters, at
least in many places, that would have been further expanded.[188] And
it is still more important to observe, that he did not achieve the
whole of this summary that he had promised; but out of nine divisions
of his method we only possess the first, which he denominates
prærogative instantiarum. Eight others, of exceeding importance in
logic, he has not touched at all, except to describe them by name and
to promise more. “We will speak,” he says, “in the first place, of
prerogative instances; secondly, of the aids of induction; thirdly, of
the rectification of induction; fourthly, of varying the investigation
according to the nature of the subject; fifthly, of prerogative
natures (or objects), as to investigation, or the choice of what shall
be first inquired into; sixthly, of the boundaries of inquiry, or the
synoptical view of all natures in the world; seventhly, on the
application of inquiry to practice, and what relates to man; eighthly,
on the preparations (parascevis) for inquiry; lastly, on the ascending
and descending scale of axioms.”[189] All these, after the first, are
wanting, with the exception of some slightly handled in separate parts
of Bacon’s writings; and the deficiency, which is so important, seems
to have been sometimes overlooked by those who have written about the
Novum Organum.
[188] It is entitled by himself, Partis secundæ Summa, digesta in
aphorismos.
[189] Dicemus itaque primo loco de prærogativis instantiarum;
secundo, de adminiculis inductiones; tertio, de rectificatione
inductionis; quarto, de variatione inquisitionis pro natura
subjecti; quinto, de prærogativis naturarum quatenus ad
inquisitionem, sive de eo quod inquirendum est prius et
posterius; sexto, de terminis inquisitionis, sive de synopsi
omnium naturarum in universo; septimo, de deductione ad praxin,
sive de eo quod est in ordine ad hominem; octavo, de parascevis
ad inquisitionem; postremo autem, de scala ascensoria et
descensoria axiomatum, lib. ii. 22.
|Third part: Natural History.|
38. The third part of the Instauratio Magna was to comprise an entire
natural history, diligently and scrupulously collected from experience
of every kind; including under that name of natural history everything
wherein the art of man has been employed on natural substances either
for practice or experiment; no method of reasoning being sufficient to
guide us to truth as to natural things, if they are not themselves
clearly and exactly apprehended. It is unnecessary to observe that
very little of this immense chart of nature could be traced by the
hand of Bacon, or in his time. His Centuries of Natural History,
containing about one thousand observed facts and experiments, are a
very slender contribution towards such a description of universal
nature as he contemplated; these form no part of the Instauratio
Magna, and had been compiled before. But he enumerates one hundred and
thirty particular histories which ought to be drawn up for his great
work. A few of these he has given in a sort of skeleton, as
samples rather of the method of collecting facts, than of the facts
themselves; namely, the History of Winds, of Life and Death, of
Density and Rarity, of Sound and Hearing.
|Fourth part: Scala Intellectûs.|
39. The fourth part, called Scala Intellectûs, is also wanting with
the exception of a very few introductory pages. “By these tables,”
says Bacon, “we mean not such examples as we subjoin to the several
rules of our method, but types and models, which place before our eyes
the entire process of the mind in the discovery of truth, selecting
various and remarkable instances.”[190] These he compares to the
diagrams of geometry, by attending to which the steps of the
demonstration become perspicuous. Though the great brevity of his
language in this place renders it rather difficult to see clearly what
he understood by these models, some light appears to be thrown on this
passage by one in the treatise De Augmentis, where he enumerates among
the desiderata of logic what he calls traditio lampadis, or a delivery
of any science or particular truth according to the order wherein it
was discovered.[191] “The methods of geometers,” he there says, “have
some resemblance to this art;” which is not, however, the case as to
the synthetical geometry with which we are generally conversant. It is
the history of analytical investigation, and many beautiful
illustrations of it have been given since the days of Bacon in all
subjects to which that method of inquiry has been applied.
[190] Neque de iis exemplis loquimur, quæ singulis præceptis ac
regulis illustrandi gratia adjiciuntur, hoc enim in secunda
operis parte abunde præstitimus, sed plane typos intelligimus ac
plasmata, quæ universum mentis processum atque inveniendi
continuatam fabricam et ordinem in certis subjectis, iisque
variis et insignibus tanquam sub oculos ponant. Etenim nobis
venit in mentem in mathematicis, astente machina, sequi
demonstrationem facilem et perspicuam; contra absque hac
commoditate omnia videri involuta et quam revera sunt subtiliora.
[191] Lib. vi. cap. 2. Scientia quæ aliis tanquam tela pertexendo
traditur, eadem methodo, si fieri possit, animo alterius est
insinuanda, qua primitus inventa est. Atque hoc ipsum fieri sane
potest in scientia per inductionem acquisita: sed in anticipata
ista et præmatura scientia, qua utimur, non facile dicat quis quo
itinere ad eam quam nactus est scientiam pervenerit. Attamen sane
secundum majus et minus possit quis scientiam propriam revisere,
et vestigia suæ cognitionis simul et consensûs remetiri; atque
hoc facto scientiam sic transplantare in animum alienum, sicut
crevit in suo.... Cujus quidem generis traditionis, methodus
mathematicorum in eo subjecto similitudinem quandam habet. I do
not well understand the words, in eo subjecto; he may possibly
have referred to analytical processes.
|Fifth part: Anticipationes Philosophiæ.|
|Sixth part: Philosophia Secunda.|
40. In the fifth part of the Instauratio Magna, Bacon had designed to
give a specimen of the new philosophy which he hoped to raise after a
due use of his natural history and inductive method, by way of
anticipation or sample of the whole. He calls it Prodromi, sive
Anticipationes Philosophiæ Secundæ. And some fragments of this part
are published by the names Cogitata et Visa, Cogitationes de Natura
Rerum, Filum Labyrinthi, and a few more, being as much, in all
probability, as he had reduced to writing. In his own metaphor, it was
to be like the payment of interest, till the principal could be
raised; tanquam fœnus reddatur, donec sors haberi possit. For he
despaired of ever completing the work by a sixth and last portion,
which was to display a perfect system of philosophy, deduced and
confirmed by a legitimate, sober, and exact inquiry according to the
method which he had invented and laid down. “To perfect this last part
is above our powers and beyond our hopes. We may, as we trust, make no
despicable beginnings, the destinies of the human race must complete
it; in such a manner, perhaps, as men, looking only at the present,
would not readily conceive. For upon this will depend not only a
speculative good, but all the fortunes of mankind, and all their
power.” And with an eloquent prayer that his exertions may be rendered
effectual to the attainment of truth and happiness, this introductory
chapter of the Instauratio, which announces the distribution of its
portions, concludes. Such was the temple, of which Bacon saw in vision
before him the stately front and decorated pediments, in all their
breadth of light and harmony of proportion, while long vistas of
receding columns and glimpses of internal splendour revealed a glory
that it was not permitted him to comprehend. In the treatise De
Augmentis Scientiarum, and in the Novum Organum, we have less, no
doubt, than Lord Bacon, under different conditions of life, might have
achieved; he might have been more emphatically the high-priest of
nature, if he had not been the chancellor of James I.; but no one man
could have filled up the vast outline which he alone, in that stage of
the world, could have so boldly sketched.
|Course of studying Lord Bacon.|
41. The best order of studying the Baconian philosophy would be to
read attentively the Advancement of Learning; next, to take the
treatise De Augmentis, comparing it all along with the former, and
afterwards to proceed to the Novum Organum. A less degree of regard
has usually been paid to the Centuries of Natural History, which are
the least important of his writings, or even to the other
philosophical fragments, some of which contain very excellent
passages; yet such, in great measure, as will be found substantially
in other parts of his works. The most remarkable are the Cogitata et
Visa. It must be said, that one who thoroughly venerates Lord Bacon
will not disdain his repetitions, which sometimes, by variations of
phrase, throw light upon each other. It is generally supposed that the
Latin works were translated by several assistants, among whom Herbert
and Hobbes have been named, under the author’s superintendence.[192]
The Latin style of these writings is singularly concise, energetic and
impressive, but frequently crabbed, uncouth and obscure; so that we
read with more admiration of the sense than delight in the manner of
delivering it. But Rawley, in his Life of Bacon, informs us that he
had seen about twelve autographs of the Novum Organum, wrought up and
improved year by year, till it reached the shape in which it was
published, and he does not intimate that these were in English, unless
the praise he immediately afterwards bestows on his English style may
be thought to warrant that supposition.[193] I do not know that we
have evidence as to any of the Latin works being translations from
English, except the treatise De Augmentis.
[192] The translation was made, as Archbishop Tenison informs us,
“by Mr. Herbert and some others, who were esteemed masters in the
Roman eloquence.”
[193] Ipse reperi in archivis dominationis suæ, autographa plus
minus duodecim Organi Novi de anno in annum elaborati, et ad
incudem revocati, et singulis annis, ulteriore lima subinde
politi et castigati, donec in illud tandem corpus adoleverat, quo
in lucem editum fuit; sicut multa ex animalibus fœtus lambere
consuescunt usque quo ad membrorum firmitudinem eos perducant. In
libris suis componendis verborum vigorem et perspicuitatem
præcipuè sectabatur, non elegantiam aut concinnitatem sermonis,
et inter scribendum aut dictandum sæpe interrogavit, num sensus
ejus clare admodum et perspicuè redditus esset? Quippe qui sciret
æquum esse ut verba famularentur rebus, non res verbis. Et si in
stylum forsitan politiorem incidisset, siquidem apud nostrates
eloquii Anglicani artifex habitus est, id evenit, quia evitare
arduum ei erat.
42. The leading principles of the Baconian philosophy are contained in
the Advancement of Learning. These are amplified, corrected,
illustrated, and developed in the treatise De Augmentis Scientiarum,
from the fifth book of which, with some help from other parts, is
taken the first book of the Novum Organum, and even a part of the
second. I use this phrase, because, though earlier in publication, I
conceive that the Novum Organum was later in composition. All the very
important part of this fifth book which relates to Experientia
Litterata, or Venatio Panis, as he calls it, and contains excellent
rules for conducting experiments in natural philosophy, is new, and
does not appear in the Advancement of Learning, except by way of
promise of what should be done in it. Nor is this, at least so fully
and clearly, to be found in the Novum Organum. The second book of this
latter treatise he professes not to anticipate. De Novo Organo
silemus, he says, neque de eo quicquam prælibamus. This can only apply
to the second book, which he considered as the real exposition of his
method, after clearing away the fallacies which form the chief subject
of the first. Yet what is said of Topica particularis, in this fifth
book De Augmentis (illustrated by “articles of inquiry concerning
gravity and levity”), goes entirely on the principles of the second
book of the Novum Organum.
|Nature of the Baconian Induction.|
43. Let us now see what Lord Bacon’s method really was. He has given
it the name of induction, but carefully distinguishes it from what
bore that name in the old logic, that is, an inference from a perfect
enumeration of particulars to a general law of the whole. For such an
enumeration, though of course conclusive, is rarely practicable in
nature, where the particulars exceed our powers of numbering.[194] Nor
again is the Baconian method to be confounded with the less
complete form of the inductive process, namely, inferences from
partial experience in similar circumstances; though this may be a very
sufficient ground for practical, which is probable knowledge. His own
method rests on the same general principle, namely, the uniformity of
the laws of nature, so that in certain conditions of phænomena the
same effects or the same causes may be assumed; but it endeavours to
establish these laws on a more exact and finer process of reasoning
than partial experience can effect. For the recurrence of antecedents,
and consequents does not prove a necessary connection between them,
unless we can exclude the presence of all other conditions which may
determine the event. Long and continued experience of such a
recurrence, indeed, raises a high probability of a necessary
connexion; but the aim of Bacon was to supersede experience in this
sense, and to find a shorter road to the result; and for this his
methods of exclusion are devised. As complete and accurate a
collection of facts, connected with the subject of inquiry, as
possible is to be made out by means of that copious natural history
which he contemplated, or from any other good sources. These are to be
selected, compared, and scrutinized, according to the rules of natural
interpretation delivered in the second book of the Novum Organum, or
such others as he designed to add to them; and if experiments are
admissible, these are to be conducted according to the same rules.
Experience and observation are the guides through the Baconian
philosophy, which is the handmaid and interpreter of nature. When Lord
Bacon seems to decry experience, which in certain passages he might be
thought to do, it is the particular and empirical observation of
individuals, from which many rash generalisations had been drawn, as
opposed to that founded on an accurate natural history. Such hasty
inferences he reckoned still more pernicious to true knowledge
than the sophistical methods of the current philosophy; and, in a
remarkable passage, after censuring this precipitancy of empirical
conclusions in the chemists, and in Gilbert’s Treatise on the Magnet,
utters a prediction that if ever mankind, excited by his counsels,
should seriously betake themselves to seek the guidance of experience
instead of relying on the dogmatic schools of the sophists, the
proneness of the human mind to snatch at general axioms would expose
them to much risk of error from the theories of this superficial class
of philosophers.[195]
[194] Inductio quæ procedit per enumerationem simplicem, res
puerilis est, et precario concludit, et periculo exponitur ab
instantia contradictoria, et plerumque secundum pauciora quam par
est, et ex his tantummodo quæ præsto sunt, pronuntiat. At
inductio quæ ad inventionem et demonstrationem scientiarum et
artium erit utilis, naturam separare debet, per rejectiones et
exclusiones debitas; ac deinde post negativas tot quot
sufficiunt, super affirmativas concludere; quod adhuc factum non
est, nec tentatum certe, nisi tantummodo a Platone, qui ad
excutiendas definitiones et ideas, hac certe forma inductionis
aliquatenus utitur. Nov. Org. i. 105. In this passage Bacon seems
to imply that the enumeration of particulars in any induction is
or may be imperfect. This is certainly the case in the plurality
of physical inductions; but it doss not appear that the logical
writers looked upon this as the primary and legitimate sense.
Induction was distinguished into the complete and incomplete.
“The word,” says a very moderate writer, “is perhaps unhappy, as
indeed it is taken in several vague senses; but to abolish it is
impossible. It is the Latin translation of επαγωγη [epagôgê],
which word is used by Aristotle as a counterpart to συλλογισμος
[sullogismos]. He seems to consider it in a perfect, or
dialectic, and in an imperfect or rhetorical sense. Thus, if a
genus (G.) contained four species (A. B. C. D.), syllogism would
argue, that what is true of G. is true of any one of the four;
but perfect induction would reason, that what we can prove true
of A. B. C. D. separately, we may properly state as true of G.,
the whole genus. This is evidently a formal argument, as
demonstrative as syllogism. But the imperfect or rhetorical
induction will perhaps enumerate three only of the species, and
then draw the conclusion concerning G., which virtually includes
the fourth, or what is the same thing, will argue, that what is
true of the three is to be believed true likewise of the fourth.”
Newman’s Lectures on Logic, p. 73 (1837). The same distinction
between perfect and imperfect induction is made in the
Encyclopédie Françoise, art. Induction, and apparently on the
authority of the ancients.
It may be observed, that this imperfect induction may be put in a
regular logical form, and is only vicious in syllogistic
reasoning when the conclusion asserts a higher probability than
the premises. If, for example, we reason thus: Some serpents are
venomous--This unknown animal is a serpent-Therefore, this is
venomous; we are guilty of an obvious paralogism. If we infer
only, This may be venomous, our reasoning is perfectly valid in
itself, at least in the common apprehension of all mankind,
except dialecticians, but not regular in form. The only means
that I perceive of making it so, is to put it in some such phrase
as the following: All unknown serpents are affected by a certain
probability of being venomous: This animal, &c. It is not
necessary, of course, that the probability should be capable of
being estimated, provided we mentally conceive it to be no other
in the conclusion than in the major term. In the best treatises
on the strict or syllogistic method, as far as I have seen, there
seems a deficiency in respect to _probable_ conclusions,
which may have arisen from the practice of taking instances from
universal or necessary, rather than contingent truths, as well as
from the contracted views of reasoning which the Aristotelian
school have always inculcated. No sophisms are so frequent in
practice as the concluding generally from a partial induction, or
assuming (most commonly tacitly) by what Archbishop Whateley
calls “a kind of logical fiction,” that a few individuals are
“adequate samples or representations of the class they belong
to.” These sophisms cannot, in the present state of things, be
practised largely in physical science or natural history; but in
reasonings on matter of fact they are of incessant occurrence.
The “logical fiction” may indeed frequently be employed, even on
subjects unconnected with the physical laws of nature; but to
know when this may be, and to what extent, is just that which,
far more than any other skill, distinguishes what is called a
good reasoner from a bad one. This note will not, by an attentive
reader, be thought inapposite to the text, or to some passages
that will follow in the present chapter.
[195] Nov. Organ. lib. i. 64. It may be doubted whether Bacon did
full justice to Gilbert.
|His dislike of Aristotle.|
44. The indignation, however, of Lord Bacon is more frequently
directed against the predominant philosophy of his age, that of
Aristotle and the schoolmen. Though he does justice to the great
abilities of the former, and acknowledges the exact attention to facts
displayed in his History of Animals, he deems him one of the most
eminent adversaries to the only method that can guide us to the real
laws of nature. The old Greek philosophers, Empedocles, Leucippus,
Anaxagoras, and others of their age, who had been in the right track
of investigation, stood much higher in his esteem than their
successors, Plato, Zeno, Aristotle, by whose lustre they had been so
much superseded, that both their works have perished and their tenets
are with difficulty collected. These more distinguished leaders of the
Grecian schools were in his eyes little else than disputatious
professors (it must be remembered that Bacon had in general only
physical science in his view) who seemed to have it in common with
children, “ut ad garriendum prompti sint, generare non possint;” so
wordy and barren was their miscalled wisdom.
|His method much required.|
45. Those who object to the importance of Lord Bacon’s precepts in
philosophy that mankind have practised, many of them immemorially, are
rather confirming their utility than taking off much from their
originality in any fair sense of that term. Every logical method is
built on the common faculties of human nature, which have been
exercised since the creation in discerning, better or worse, truth
from falsehood, and inferring the unknown from the known. That men
might have done this more correctly, is manifest from the quantity of
error into which, from want of reasoning well on what came before
them, they have habitually fallen. In experimental philosophy, to
which the more special rules of Lord Bacon are generally referred,
there was a notorious want of that very process of reasoning which he
has supplied. It is probable, indeed, that the great physical
philosophers of the seventeenth century would have been led to employ
some of his rules, had he never promulgated them; but I believe they
had been little regarded in the earlier period of science.[196] It is
also a very defective view of the Baconian method to look only at the
experimental rules given in the Novum Organum. The preparatory steps
of completely exhausting the natural history of the subject of inquiry
by a patient and sagacious consideration of it in every light, are at
least of equal importance, and equally prominent in the inductive
philosophy.
[196] It has been remarked, that the famous experiment of Pascal
on the barometer, by carrying it to a considerable elevation, was
“a _crucial instance_, one of the first, if not the very first on
record in physics.” Herschel, p. 229.
|Its objects.|
46. The first object of Lord Bacon’s philosophical writings is to
prove their own necessity, by giving an unfavourable impression as to
the actual state of most sciences, in consequence of the prejudices of
the human mind, and of the mistaken methods pursued in their
cultivation. The second was to point out a better prospect for the
future. One of these occupies the treatise De Augmentis, and the first
book of the Novum Organum. The other, besides many anticipations in
these, is partially detailed in the second book, and would have been
more thoroughly developed in those remaining portions which the author
did not complete. We shall now give a very short sketch of these two
famous works, which comprise the greater part of the Baconian
philosophy.
|Sketch of the treatise De Augmentis.|
|History.|
|Poetry.|
47. The Advancement of Learning is divided into two books only; the
treatise De Augmentis into nine. The first of these, in the latter, is
introductory, and designed to remove prejudices against the search for
truth, by indicating the causes which had hitherto obstructed it. In
the second book, he lays down his celebrated partition of human
learning into history, poetry, and philosophy, according to the
faculties of the mind respectively concerned in them, the memory,
imagination and reason. History is natural or civil, under the latter
of which ecclesiastical and literary histories are comprised.
These again fall into regular subdivisions; all of which he treats in
summary manner, and points out the deficiencies which ought to be
supplied in many departments of history. Poetry succeeds in the last
chapter of the same book, but by confining that name to fictitious
narrative, except as to the ornaments of style, which he refers to a
different part of his subject, he much limited his views of that
literature; even if it were true, as it certainly is not, that the
imagination alone, in any ordinary use of the word, is the medium of
poetical emotion. The word emotion indeed is sufficient to show that
Bacon should either have excluded poetry altogether from his
enumeration of sciences and learning, or taken into consideration
other faculties of the soul than those which are merely intellectual.
|Fine passage on poetry.|
48. Stewart has praised with justice a short but beautiful paragraph
concerning poetry (under which title may be comprehended all the
various creations of the faculty of imagination) wherein Bacon “has
exhausted everything that philosophy and good sense have yet had to
offer on the subject of what has since been called the _beau
idéal_.” The same eminent writer and ardent admirer of Bacon
observes that D’Alembert improved on the Baconian arrangement by
classing the fine arts with poetry. Injustice had been done to
painting and music, especially the former, when, in the fourth book De
Augmentis, they were counted as mere “artes voluptariæ,” subordinate
to a sort of Epicurean gratification of the senses, and only somewhat
more liberal than cookery or cosmetics.
|Natural Theology and Metaphysics.|
|Form of bodies.|
49. In the third book, science having been divided into theological
and philosophical, and the former, or what regards revealed religion,
being postponed for the present, he lays it down that all philosophy
relates to God, to nature, or to man. Under natural theology, as a
sort of appendix, he reckons the doctrine of angels and superhuman
spirits; a more favourite theme, especially as treated independently
of revelation, in the ages that preceded Lord Bacon, than it has been
since. Natural philosophy is speculative or practical; the former
divided into physics, in a particular sense, and metaphysics; “one of
which enquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; the
other handleth the formal and final causes.” Hence, physics dealing
with particular instances, and regarding only the effects produced, is
precarious in its conclusions, and does not reach the stable
principles of causation.
Limus ut hic durescit, et hæc ut cera liquescit
Uno eodemque igni.
Metaphysics, to which word he gave a sense as remote from that which
it bore in the Aristotelian schools, as from that in which it is
commonly employed at present, had for its proper object the
investigation of forms. It was “a generally received and inveterate
opinion, that the inquisition of man is not competent to find out
essential forms or true differences.” Formæ inventio, he says in
another place, habetur pro desperata. The word _form_ itself,
being borrowed from the old philosophy, is not immediately
intelligible to every reader. “In the Baconian sense,” says Playfair,
“form differs only from cause in being permanent, whereas, we apply
cause to that which exists in order of time.” Form (_natura
naturans_, as it was barbarously called) is the general law, or
condition of existence, in any substance or quality (_natura
naturata_), which is wherever its form is.[197] The conditions of a
mathematical figure, prescribed in its definition, might in this sense
be called its form, if it did not seem to be Lord Bacon’s intention to
confine the word to the laws of particular sensible existences. In
modern philosophy, it might be defined to be that particular
combination of forces, which impresses a certain modification upon
matter subjected to their influence.
[197] Licet enim in natura nihil vere existat præter corpora
individua, edentia actus puros individuos ex lege, in doctrinis
tamen illa ipsa lex, ejusque inquisitio, et inventio atque
explicatio pro fundamento est tam ad sciendum quam operandum. Eam
autem legem ejusque paragraphos, Formarum nomine intelligimus;
præsertim cum hoc vocabulum invaluerit et familiariter occurrat.
Nov. Org. ii. 2.
|Might sometimes be inquired into.|
50. To a knowledge of such forms, or laws of essence and existence, at
least in a certain degree, it might be possible, in Bacon’s sanguine
estimation of his own logic, for man to attain. Not that we could hope
to understand the forms of complex beings, which are almost infinite
in variety, but the simple and primary natures, which are combined in
them. “To inquire the form of a lion, of an oak, of gold, nay of
water, of air, is a vain pursuit; but to inquire the forms of sense,
of voluntary motion, of vegetation, of colours, of gravity and
levity, of density and tenuity, of heat, of cold, and all other
natures and qualities, which, like an alphabet, are not many, and of
which the essences, upheld by matter, of all creatures do consist; to
inquire, I say, the true forms of these is that part of metaphysic
which we now define of.”[198] Thus, in the words he soon afterwards
uses, “of natural philosophy, the basis is natural history; the stage
next the basis is physic; the stage next the vertical point is
metaphysic. As for the vertical point, ‘Opus quod operatur Deos a
principio usque ad finem,’ the summary law of nature, we know not
whether man’s inquiry can attain unto it.”[199]
[198] In the Novum Organum he seems to have gone a little beyond
this, and to have hoped that the form itself of concrete things
might be known. Datæ autem naturæ formam, sive differentiam
veram, sive naturam naturantem, sive fontem emanationis (ista
enim vocabula habemus, quæ ad indicationem rei proxime accedunt),
invenire opus et intentio est Humanæ Scientiæ. Lib. ii. 1.
[199] Advancement of Learning, book ii. This sentence he has
scarcely altered in the Latin.
|Final causes too much slighted.|
51. The second object of metaphysics, according to Lord Bacon’s notion
of the word, was the investigation of final causes. It is well known
that he has spoken of this with unguarded disparagement.[200] “Like a
virgin consecrated to God, it bears nothing;” one of those witty
conceits that sparkle over his writings, but will not bear a severe
examination. It has been well remarked that almost at the moment he
published this, one of the most important discoveries of his age, the
circulation of the blood, had rewarded the acuteness of Harvey in
reasoning on the final cause of the valves in the veins.
[200] Causa finalis tantum abest ut prosit, ut etiam scientias
corrumpat, nisi in hominis actionibus. Nov. Org. ii. 2. It must
be remembered that Bacon had good reason to deprecate the
admixture of theological dogmas with philosophy, which had been,
and has often since been, the absolute perversion of all
legitimate reasoning in science. See what Stewart has said upon
Lord Bacon’s objection to reasoning from final causes in
_physics_. Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers, book iii.,
chap. 2, sect. 4.
|Man not included by him in physics.|
52. Nature, or physical philosophy, according to Lord Bacon’s
partition, did not comprehend the human species. Whether this be not
more consonant to popular language, adopted by preceding systems of
philosophy, than to a strict and perspicuous arrangement, may by some
be doubted; though a very respectable authority, that of Dugald
Stewart, is opposed to including man in the province of physics. For
it is surely strange to separate the physiology of the human body, as
quite a science of another class, from that of inferior animals; and
if we place this part of our being under the department of physical
philosophy, we shall soon be embarrassed by what Bacon has called the
“doctrina de fœdere,” the science of the connection between the soul
of man and his bodily frame, a vast and interesting field, even yet
very imperfectly explored.
|Man, in body and mind.|
|Logic.|
53. It has pleased, however, the author to follow his own arrangement.
The fourth book relates to the constitution, bodily and mental, of
mankind. In this book he has introduced several subdivisions which,
considered merely as such, do not always appear the most
philosophical; but the pregnancy and acuteness of his observations
under each head silences all criticism of this kind. This book has
nearly double the extent of the corresponding pages in the Advancement
of Learning. The doctrine as to the substance of the thinking
principle having been very slightly touched, or rather passed over,
with two curious disquisitions on divination and fascination, he
advances in four ensuing books to the intellectual and moral
faculties, and those sciences which immediately depend upon them.
Logic and Ethics are the grand divisions, co-relative to the reason
and the will of man. Logic, according to Lord Bacon, comprizes the
sciences of inventing, judging, retaining, and delivering the
conceptions of the mind. We invent, that is, discover new arts or new
arguments; we judge by induction or by syllogism; the memory is
capable of being aided by artificial methods. All these processes of
the mind are the subjects of several sciences, which it was the
peculiar aim of Bacon, by his own logic, to place on solid
foundations.
|Extent given it by Bacon.|
54. It is here to be remarked, that the sciences of logic and ethics,
according to the partitions of Lord Bacon, are far more extensive than
we are accustomed to consider them. Whatever concerned the human
intellect came under the first; whatever related to the will and
affections of the mind fell under the head of ethics. Logica de
intellectu et ratione, ethica de voluntate appetitu et affectibus
disserit; altera decreta, altera actiones progignit. But it
has been usual to confine logic to the methods of guiding the
understanding in the search for truth; and some, though, as it seems
to me, in a manner not warranted by the best usage of philosophers,[201]
have endeavoured to exclude everything but the syllogistic mode of
reasoning from the logical province. Whether again the nature and
operations of the human mind, in general, ought to be reckoned a part
of physics, has already been mentioned as a disputable question.
[201] In altera philosophiæ parte, quæ est _quærendi_ ac
disserendi, quæ λογικη [logikê] dicitur. Cic. de Fin. i. 14.
|Grammar and Rhetoric.|
55. The science of delivering our own thoughts to others, branching
into grammar and rhetoric, and including poetry, so far as its proper
vehicles, metre and diction, are concerned, occupies the sixth book.
In all this he finds more desiderata than from the great attention
paid to these subjects by the ancients could have been expected. Thus,
his ingenious collection of antitheta, or common places in rhetoric,
though mentioned by Cicero as to the judicial species of eloquence, is
first extended by Bacon himself to the deliberative or political
orations. I do not, however, think it probable that this branch of
topics could have been neglected by antiquity, though the writings
relating to it may not have descended to us; nor can we by any means
say there is nothing of the kind in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Whether the
utility of these common places, when collected in books, be very
great, is another question. And a similar doubt might be suggested
with respect to the elenchs, or refutations, of rhetorical sophisms,
“colores boni et mali,” which he reports as equally deficient, though
a commencement had been made by Aristotle.
|Ethics.|
|Politics.|
|Theology.|
56. In the seventh book we come to ethical science. This he deems to
have been insufficiently treated. He would have the different tempers
and characters of mankind first considered, then their passions and
affections (neither of which, as he justly observes, finds a place in
the Ethics of Aristotle, though they are sometimes treated, not so
appositely, in his Rhetoric); lastly, the methods of altering and
affecting the will and appetite, such as custom, education, imitation,
or society. “The main and primitive division of moral knowledge
seemeth to be into the exemplar or platform of good, and the regiment
or culture of the mind; the one describing the nature of good, the
other presenting rules how to subdue, apply and accommodate the will
of man thereunto.” This latter he also calls “the Georgics of the
mind.” He seems to place “the platform or essence of good” in seeking
the good of the whole, rather than that of the individual, applying
this to refute the ancient theories as to the summum bonum. But
perhaps Bacon had not thoroughly disentangled this question, and
confounds, as is not unusual, the _summum bonum_, or personal
felicity, with the object of moral action, or _commune bonum_. He
is right, however, in preferring, morally speaking, the active to the
contemplative life against Aristotle and other philosophers. This part
is translated in De Augmentis, with little variation, from the
Advancement of Learning; as is also what follows on the Georgics, or
culture, of the mind. The philosophy of civil life, as it relates both
to the conduct of men in their mutual intercourse, which is properly
termed prudence, and to that higher prudence, which is concerned with
the administration of communities, fills up the chart of the Baconian
ethics. In the eighth book, admirable reflections on the former of
these subjects occur at almost every sentence. Many, perhaps most of
these, will be found in the Advancement of Learning. But in this, he
had been, for a reason sufficiently obvious and almost avowed,
cautiously silent upon the art of government--the craft of his king.
The motives for silence were still so powerful, that he treats only in
the De Augmentis, of two heads in political science; the methods of
enlarging the boundaries of the state, which James I. could hardly
resent as an interference with his own monopoly, and one of far more
importance to the well-being of mankind, the principles of universal
jurisprudence, or rather of universal legislation, according to which
standard all laws ought to be framed. These he has sketched in
ninety-seven aphorisms, or short rules, which, from the great
experience of Bacon in the laws, as his peculiar vocation towards that
part of philosophy, deserve to be studied at this day. Upon such
topics, the progressive and innovating spirit of his genius was less
likely to be perceived; but he is, perhaps, equally free from what he
has happily called in one of his essays, the “froward retention of
custom,” the prejudice of mankind, like that of perverse children,
against what is advised to them for their real good, and what
they cannot deny to be conducive to it. This whole eighth book is
pregnant with profound and original thinking. The ninth and last,
which is short, glances only at some desiderata in theological
science, and is chiefly remarkable as it displays a more liberal and
catholic spirit than was often to be met with in a period signalized
by bigotry and ecclesiastical pride. But as the abjuration of human
authority is the first principle of Lord Bacon’s philosophy, and the
preparation for his logic, it was not expedient to say too much of its
usefulness in the theological pursuits.
|Desiderata enumerated by him.|
57. At the conclusion of the whole, we may find a summary catalogue of
the deficiencies which, in the course of this ample review, Lord Bacon
had found worthy of being supplied by patient and philosophical
inquiry. Of these desiderata, few, I fear, have since been filled up,
at least in a collective and systematic manner, according to his
suggestions. Great materials, useful intimations, and even partial
delineations, are certainly to be found, as so many of the rest, in
the writings of those who have done honour to the last two centuries.
But with all our pride in modern science, very much even of what, in
Bacon’s time, was perceived to be wanting, remains for the diligence
and sagacity of those who are yet to come.
|Novum Organum: first book.|
58. The first book of the Novum Organum, if it is not better known
than any other part of Bacon’s philosophical writings, has at least
furnished more of those striking passages which shine in quotation. It
is written in detached aphorisms; the sentences, even where these
aphorisms are longest, not flowing much into one another, so as to
create a suspicion, that he had formed adversaria, to which he
committed his thoughts as they arose. It is full of repetitions; and
indeed this is so usual with Lord Bacon, that whenever we find an
acute reflection or brilliant analogy, it is more than an even chance
that it will recur in some other place. I have already observed that
he has hinted the Novum Organum to be a digested summary of his
method, but not the entire system as he designed to develop it, even
in that small portion which he has handled at all.
|Fallacies. Idola.|