since my end of putting it into Latin was to have it read everywhere, it had been an absurd contradiction to free it in the language and to pen it up in the matter.' Bacon's Essays evince his pregnancy of thought and power of surprise; his Novum Organum all the logical faculties of wit, memory, judgement, and elocution imputed to him in his Life by his chaplain, Dr. Rawley; his Advancement and De Augmentis what his biographer calls his deep and universal apprehension. As Macaulay remarks, 'The knowledge in which Bacon excelled all men was a knowledge of the mutual relations of all the departments of knowledge.' He had, in short, the very qualities required for a book on all learning; wherein, though a critic of antiquity, he nevertheless appreciates the past, while he expects more from the future; wherein he finds a place for the display of all man's faculties, historical, poetical, and scientific; and wherein he enlarges the scope of science to the triple knowledge of God, nature, and man as the three main constituents of the universe; while before all, like Aristotle, he places the science of all things, and warns us that 'men have abandoned universality, or philosophia prima: which cannot but cease and stop all progression In dealing with God, he recognizes both natural and revealed theology2. In dealing with Nature, he embraces all kinds of causes, adds to the concrete sciences of bodies the abstract sciences of their attributes, such as motion, sound, heat, &c., which have proved so successful since his times, and shows his wide comprehension of physical science by devoting it to the whole fabric of nature and to its least elements, as well as to the various bodies of which it is composed3. In dealing with Man, he at once grasps human nature as a whole; man both as an individual and as a social being; body and soul 2 Post, pp. 96 seq., 221 seq. 3 Post, pp. 98 seq. 1 Post, pp. 37, 93 seq. 19 in their connexion; the soul too as a whole, its nature as well as its faculties, and all its faculties both logical and moral; and lastly, man's future state as a whole, and not as a mere immortality of soul, nor as a mere resurrection of body, since not only the understanding but the affections purified, not only the spirit but the body changed, shall be advanced to immortality '1. This admirable comprehensiveness is the answer to Bacon's detractors, who charge him variously with all sorts of narrowness in philosophy, such as materialism, relativism, and empiricism. Bacon was never narrow. He was no materialist; though he thought more about nature, he believed in the supernatural, recognized not only natural but also 'intellectual forms, and regarded man as both material body and inspired soul. He was no relativist he said indeed that sense and intellect are relative to man and not to the universe, but he added that the former faculty aided by systematic experience, and the latter by systematic induction and the new method, would make the mind the image of the very essence of things 3. He was no empiricist: for, although he exhorted men to reject as idols all preconceived notions and lay themselves alongside of nature by observation and experiment, so as gradually to ascend from facts to their laws, nevertheless he was far from regarding sensory experience as the whole origin of knowledge, and in truth had a double theory, that, while sense and experience are the sources of our knowledge of the natural world, faith and inspiration are the sources of our knowledge of the supernatural, of God, and of the rational soul. 3 The same answer must be given to his detractors on the practical side, who have accused him of 1 Post, pp. 66, 114 seq. Post, pp. 41, 118, 127, 221-34. Post, pp. 8, 102; cf. Novum Organum, passim. Machiavellianism, or the view which, like Jesuitry in religion, holds that in politics the end justifies the means, and that the prince for the good of the State should use both good and evil arts according to circumstances. But the English Machiavellian is Hobbes, not Bacon. The expansive genius of Bacon He fitted him to hold the balance between the merits and the defects of Machiavel; and it is curious to trace in the Advancement how he alternately praises and condemns him with calm impartiality. quotes his clever remark that the poverty of friars had excused the superfluities of prelates1; but criticizes him for saying that a prince ought to play the part of the lion in violence and the fox in guile as of the man in virtue and justice '2. He agrees with him that the way to preserve a government is to reduce it to its principles, but dissents from his comparison of Caesar with Catiline. It is under the head of Civil Knowledge that the English comes closest to the Italian politician, whom he approves for 'discourse upon histories or examples' as drawing knowledge out of particulars, and for history of times as the best ground for discourse of government. Under the same head, Bacon follows Machiavel in the importance attached by him to fortune in human affairs, and pays special attention to the 'Architecture of Fortune'; but he severs himself at once from the demoralization of his predecessor's views by subordinating fortune to virtue. Though he thinks it for the most part true, according to the Italian proverb, that there is commonly less money, less wisdom, and less good faith than men do account upon's, he does not draw the Machiavellian conclusion, bad faith is to be repaid by bad faith, and still less does he approve of Machiavel's model, Caesar Borgia, Duke Valentine. If there is a Machia vellian sound in the advice that nothing is more politic than to make the wheels of our minds concentric and voluble with the wheels of fortune'', there is an anti-Machiavellian ring in the counsel that the continual habit of dissimulation is but a weak and sluggish cunning, and not greatly politic '2. The fact is that Bacon grasped Machiavel's wisdom in isolated maxims, such as that the sinews of war are the sinews of men's arms, but set himself against the Machiavellian system of 'evil arts' with all the weight of his most impressive eloquence. The reason is that Bacon's ethics are founded on the distinction between private and public good, and the subordination of the former to the latter, so that 'the conservation of duty to the public ought to be much more precious than the conservation of life and being'"; his politics are based not only on good arms, but still more on good laws; and his religion is grounded on the conviction that a man cannot search too far in the book of God's word or in the book of God's works, and that the further he studies Nature the nearer he comes to God". In short, his whole philosophy, speculative and practical, springs from comprehensiveness guided by philanthropy; and in his survey of all learning he stands by the side of Plato and Aristotle as a universal philosopher. Naturally, then, has Bacon become the prophet of modern science. He owed his far-seeing power of prevision to no accident, but to many causes in himself, of which the first is that quality noticed in him by Rawley, and exhibited throughout the Advancement-his deep and universal apprehension; or what Dr. Johnson calls in another reference, 'that comprehension and expanse of thought, which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second 1 Post, p. 209. 7 Post, p. 215. Post, pp. 10-11 2 Post, p. 211. $ Post, p. 212. Post, pp. 218-9. rational admiration". Bacon is like a great architect, conceiving a vast plan, distributing it into its proportionate parts, and so giving each man his appropriate chamber, in which to direct his mind to the right object in its real relations to the whole of things. Hence, in projecting the Encyclopédie, D'Alembert called Bacon the greatest, the most universal, the most eloquent of philosophers, and joined Diderot in adopting as their basis the Baconian classification of sciences as the most exact enumeration possible. Secondly, in the Advancement Bacon showed his deliberate foresight by distinguishing between what had been done for learning and what remained to be done, so as to strike the balance between merits and defects. Hence too, at the end of the De Augmentis, he drew out of these defects a list of Desiderata. The consequence is an extraordinary suggestiveness of problems to the thinking mind. At the very moment when we tend to lose ourselves in the antique technicality of his intricate divisions and subdivisions, we are constantly surprised by some new proof of his modernity. The stress on the facts of natural history as opposed to theories, and the demand for a history of literature and philosophy 2; the requirement, in the De Augmentis, of a living astronomy which should dissect, as it were, the viscera, the physical causes, of the substance, of the motion, and of the influence of the stars; the conception of comparative anatomy, vivisection, and relief of pain as a physician's business*; the grasp of human nature as a whole and in its parts; the perception of a philosophic grammar, and the definition of rhetoric as the application of reason to imagination for the better moving of the will; the preference of duty to interest and of action to contemplation, together with the recognition that more 1 Johnson, Lives of the Poets: Cowley. Post, pp. 76 seq., 113. Post, pp. 122-3. • Post, pp. 146-9, 156. 3 Lib. III, c. 4. Post, pp. 166–7. |