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Bacon has remarked1 that, in ages when philosophy was
stationary, the mechanical arts went on improving. Why was this? Evidently
because the mechanic was not content with so careless a mode of induction as
served the purpose of the philosopher. And why was the philosopher more easily
satisfied than the mechanic? Evidently because the object of the mechanic was to
mould things, whilst the object of the philosopher was only to mould words.
Careful induction is not at all necessary to the making of a good syllogism. But
it is indispensable to the making of a good shoe. Mechanics, therefore, have
always been, as far as the range of their humble but useful callings extended,
not anticipators but interpreters of nature. And when a philosophy arose, the
object of which was to do on a large scale what the mechanic does on a small
scale, to extend the power and to supply the wants of man, the truth of the
premises, which logically is a matter altogether unimportant, became a matter of
the highest importance; and the careless induction with which men of learning
had previously been satisfied gave place, of necessity, to an induction far more
accurate and satisfactory.
What Bacon did for inductive philosophy may, we think, be fairly stated thus.
The objects of preceding speculators were objects which could be attained
without careful induction. Those speculators, therefore, did not perform the
inductive process carefully. Bacon stirred up men to pursue an object which
could be attained only by induction, and by induction carefully performed; and
consequently induction was more carefully performed. We do not think that the
importance of what Bacon did for inductive philosophy has ever been overrated.
But we think that the nature of his services is often mistaken, and was not
fully understood even by himself. It was not by furnishing philosophers with
rules for performing the inductive process well, but by furnishing them with a
motive for performing it well, that he conferred so vast a benefit on society.
To give to the human mind a direction which it shall retain for ages is the rare
prerogative of a few imperial spirits. It cannot, therefore, be uninteresting to
inquire what was the moral and intellectual constitution which enabled Bacon to
exercise so vast an influence on the world.
In the temper of Bacon,--we speak of Bacon the philosopher, not of Bacon the
lawyer and politician,--there was a singular union of audacity and sobriety. The
promises which he made to mankind might, to a superficial reader, seem to
resemble the rants which a great dramatist has put into the mouth of ail
Oriental conqueror half-crazed by good fortune and by violent passions:
"He shall have chariots easier than air, Which I will have invented; and thyself
That art the messenger shall ride before him, On a horse cut out of an entire
diamond, That shall be made to go with golden wheels, I know not how yet."
But Bacon performed what he promised. In truth, Fletcher would not have dared to
make Arbaces promise, in his wildest fits of excitement, the tithe of what the
Baconian philosophy has performed.
The true philosophical temperament may, we think, be described in four words,
much hope, little faith; a disposition to believe that anything, however
extraordinary, may be done; an indisposition to believe that anything
extraordinary has been done. In these points the constitution of Bacon's mind
seems to us to have been absolutely perfect. He was at once the Mammon and the
Surly of his friend Ben. Sir Epicure did not indulge in visions more magnificent
and gigantic, Surly did not sift evidence with keener and more sagacious
incredulity.
Closely connected with this peculiarity of Bacon's temper was a striking
peculiarity of his understanding. With great minuteness of observation, he had
an amplitude of comprehension such as has never yet been vouchsafed to any other
human being. The small fine mind of Labruyere had not a more delicate tact than
the large intellect of Bacon. The Essays contain abundant proofs that no nice
feature of character, no peculiarity in the ordering of a house, a garden, or a
court-masque, would escape the notice of one whose mind was capable of taking in
the whole world of knowledge. His understanding resembled the tent which the
fairy Paribanou gave to Prince Ahmed. Fold it; and it seemed a toy for the hand
of a lady. Spread it; and the armies of powerful Sultans might repose beneath
its shade.
In keenness of observation he has been equaled, though perhaps never surpassed.
But the largeness of his mind was all his own. The glance with which he surveyed
the intellectual universe resembled that which the Archangel, from the golden
threshold of heaven, darted down into the new creation:
"Round he surveyed,--and well might, where he stood So high above the circling
canopy Of night's extended shade,--from eastern point Of Libra, to the fleecy
star which bears Andromeda far off Atlantic seas Beyond the horizon."
His knowledge differed from that of other men, as a terrestrial globe differs
from an Atlas which contains a different country on every leaf. The towns and
roads of England, France, and Germany are better laid down in the Atlas than on
the globe. But while we are looking at England we see nothing of France; and
while we are looking at France we see nothing of Germany. We may go to the Atlas
to learn the bearings and distances of York and Bristol, or of Dresden and
Prague. But it is useless if we want to know the bearings and distances of
France and Martinique, or of England and Canada. On the globe we shall not find
all the market towns in our own neighborhood; but we shall learn from it the
comparative extent and the relative position of all the kingdoms of the earth.
"I have taken," said Bacon, in a letter written when he was only thirty-one, to
his uncle Lord Burleigh, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province." In any
other young man, indeed in any other man, this would have been a ridiculous
flight of presumption. There have been thousands of better mathematicians,
astronomers, chemists, physicians, botanists, mineralogists, than Bacon. No man
would go to Bacon's works to learn any particular science or art, any more than
he would go to a twelve-inch globe in order to find his way from Kennington
turnpike to Clapham Common. The art which Bacon taught was the art of inventing
arts. The knowledge in which Bacon excelled all men was a knowledge of the
mutual relations of all departments of knowledge.
The mode in which he communicated his thoughts was peculiar to him. He had no
touch of that disputatious temper which he often censured in his predecessors.
He effected a vast intellectual revolution in opposition to a vast mass of
prejudices; yet he never engaged in any controversy, nay, we cannot at present
recollect, in all his philosophical works, a single passage of a controversial
character. All those works might with propriety have been put into the form
which he adopted in the work entitled Cogitata et visa: "Franciscus Baconus sic
cogitavit." These are thoughts which have occurred to me: weigh them well: and
take them or leave them.
Borgia said of the famous expedition of Charles the Eighth, that the French had
conquered Italy, not with steel, but with chalk for that the only exploit which
they had found necessary for the purpose of taking military occupation of any
place had been to mark the doors of the houses where they meant to quarter.
Bacon often quoted this saying, and loved to apply it to the victories of his
own intellect.2 His philosophy,
he said, came as a guest, not as an enemy. She found no difficulty in gaining
admittance, without a contest, into every understanding fitted, by its structure
and by its capacity, to receive her. In all this we think that he acted most
judiciously; first, because, as he has himself remarked, the difference between
his school and other schools was a difference so fundamental that there was
hardly any common ground on which a controversial battle could be fought; and,
secondly, because his mind, eminently observant, preeminently discursive and
capacious, was, we conceive, neither formed by nature nor disciplined by habit
for dialectical combat.
Though Bacon did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic, he adorned
her profusely with all the decorations of rhetoric. His eloquence, though not
untainted with the vicious taste of his age, would alone have entitled him to a
high rank in literature. He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close,
and rendering it portable. In wit, if by wit be meant the power of perceiving
analogies between things which appear to have nothing in common, he never had an
equal, not even Cowley, not even the author of Hudibras. Indeed, he possessed
this faculty, or rather this faculty possessed him, to a morbid degree. When he
abandoned himself to it without reserve, as he did in the Sapientia Veterum, and
at the end of the second book of the De Augmentis, the feats which he performed
were not merely admirable, but portentous, and almost shocking. On those
occasions we marvel at him as clowns on a fair-day marvel at a juggler, and can
hardly help thinking that the devil must be in him.
These, however, were freaks in which his ingenuity now and then wantoned, with
scarcely any other object than to astonish and amuse. But it occasionally
happened that, when he was engaged in grave and profound investigations, his wit
obtained the mastery over all his other faculties, and led him into absurdities
into which no dull man could possibly have fallen. We will give the most
striking instance which at present occurs to us. In the third book of the De
Augmentis he tells us that there are some principles which are not peculiar to
one science, but are common to several. That part of philosophy which concerns
itself with these principles is, in his nomenclature, designated as philosophia
prima. He then proceeds to mention some of the principles with which this
philosophia prima is conversant. One of them is this. An infectious disease is
more likely to be communicated while it is in progress than when it has reached
its height. This, says he, is true in medicine. It is also true in morals; for
we see that the example of very abandoned men injures public morality less than
the example of men in whom vice has not yet extinguished all good qualities.
Again, he tells us that in music a discord ending in a concord is agreeable, and
that the same thing may be noted in the affections. Once more, he tells us, that
in physics the energy with which a principle acts is often increased by the
antiperistasis of its opposite; and that it is the same in the contests of
factions. If the making of ingenious and sparkling similitudes like these be
indeed the philosophia prima, we are quite sure that the greatest philosophical
work of the nineteenth century is Mr. Moore's Lalla Rookh. The similitudes which
we have cited are very happy similitudes. But that a man like Bacon should have
taken them for more, that he should have thought the discovery of such
resemblances as these an important part of philosophy, has always appeared to us
one of the most singular facts in the history of letters.
The truth is that his mind was wonderfully quick in perceiving analogies of all
sorts. But, like several eminent men whom we could name, both living and dead,
he sometimes appeared strangely deficient in the power of distinguishing
rational from fanciful analogies, analogies which are arguments from analogies
which are mere illustrations, analogies like that which Bishop Butler so ably
pointed out, between natural and revealed religion, from analogies like that
which Addison discovered, between the series of Grecian gods carved by Phidias
and the series of English kings painted by Kneller. This want of discrimination
has led to many strange political speculations. Sir William Temple deduced a
theory of government from the properties of the pyramid. Mr. Southey's whole
system of finance is grounded on the phenomena of evaporation and rain. In
theology, this perverted ingenuity has made still wilder work. From the time of
Irenaeus and Origen down to the present day, there has not been a single
generation in which great divines have not been led into the most absurd
expositions of Scripture, by mere incapacity to distinguish analogies proper, to
use the scholastic phrase, from analogies metaphorical.3
It is curious that Bacon has himself mentioned this very kind of delusion among
the idola specus; and has mentioned it in language which, we are inclined to
think, shows that he knew himself to be subject to it. It is the vice, he tells
us, of subtle minds to attach too much importance to slight distinctions; it is
the vice, on the other hand, of high and discursive intellects to attach too
much importance to slight resemblances; and he adds that, when this last
propensity is indulged to excess, it leads men to catch at shadows instead of
substances.4
Yet we cannot wish that Bacon's wit had been less luxuriant. For, to say nothing
of the pleasure which it affords, it was in the vast majority of cases employed
for the purpose of making obscure truth plain, of making repulsive truth
attractive, of fixing in the mind for ever truth which might otherwise have left
but a transient impression.
The poetical faculty was powerful in Bacon's mind, but not, like his wit, so
powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his reason, and to tyrannize over
the whole man. No imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly
subjugated. It never stirred but at a signal from good sense. It stopped at the
first check from good sense. Yet, though disciplined to such obedience, it gave
noble proofs of its vigor. In truth, much of Bacon's life was passed in a
visionary world, amidst things as strange as any that are described in the
Arabian Tales, or in those romances on which the curate and barber of Don
Quixote's village performed so cruel an auto-de-fe, amidst buildings more
sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin, fountains more wonderful than the golden
water of Parizade, conveyances more rapid than the hippogryph of Ruggiero, arms
more formidable than the lance of Astolfo, remedies more efficacious than the
balsam of Fierabras. Yet in his magnificent daydreams there was nothing wild,
nothing but what sober reason sanctioned. He knew that all the secrets feigned
by poets to have been written in the books of enchanters are worthless when
compared with the mighty secrets which are really written in the book of nature,
and which, with time and patience, will be read there. He knew that all the
wonders wrought by all the talismans in fable were trifles when compared to the
wonders which might reasonably be expected from the philosophy of fruit, and
that, if his words sank deep into the minds of men, they would produce effects
such as superstition had never ascribed to the incantations of Merlin and
Michael Scott. It was here that he loved to let his imagination loose. He loved
to picture to himself the world as it would be when his philosophy should, in
his own noble phrase, "have enlarged the bounds of human empire."5 We might refer to many instances. But we will content ourselves with
the strongest, the description of the House of Solomon in the New Atlantis. By
most of Bacon's contemporaries, and by some people of our time, this remarkable
passage would, we doubt not, be considered as an ingenious rodomontade, a
counterpart to the adventures of Sinbad or Baron Munchausen. The truth is, that
there is not to be found in any human composition a passage more eminently
distinguished by profound and serene wisdom. The boldness and originality of the
fiction is far less wonderful than the nice discernment which carefully excluded
from that long list of prodigies everything that can be pronounced impossible,
everything that can be proved to lie beyond the mighty magic of induction and
time. Already some parts, and not the least startling parts, of this glorious
prophecy have been accomplished, even according to the letter; and the whole,
construed according to the spirit, is daily accomplishing all around us.
One of the most remarkable circumstances in the history of Bacon's mind is the
order in which its powers expanded themselves. With him the fruit came first and
remained till the last; the blossoms did not appear till late. In general, the
development of the fancy is to the development of the judgment what the growth
of a girl is to the growth of a boy. The fancy attains at an earlier period to
the perfection of its beauty, its power, and its fruitfulness; and, as it is
first to ripen, it is also first to fade. It has generally lost something of its
bloom and freshness before the sterner faculties have reached maturity; and is
commonly withered and barren while those faculties still retain all their
energy. It rarely happens that the fancy and the judgment grow together. It
happens still more rarely that the judgment grows faster than the fancy. This
seems, however, to have been the case with Bacon. His boyhood and youth appear
to have been singularly sedate. His gigantic scheme of philosophical reform is
said by some writers to have been planned before he was fifteen, and was
undoubtedly planned while he was still young. He observed as vigilantly,
meditated as deeply, and judged as temperately when he gave his first work to
the world as at the close of his long career. But in eloquence, in sweetness and
variety of expression, and in richness of illustration, his later writings are
far superior to those of his youth. In this respect the history of his mind
bears some resemblance to the history of the mind of Burke. The treatise on the
Sublime and Beautiful, though written on a subject which the coldest
metaphysician could hardly treat without being occasionally betrayed into florid
writing, is the most unadorned of all Burke's works. It appeared when he was
twenty-five or twenty-six. When, at forty, he wrote the Thoughts on the Causes
of the existing Discontents, his reason and his judgment had reached their full
maturity; but his eloquence was still in its splendid dawn. At fifty, his
rhetoric was quite as rich as good taste would permit; and when he died, at
almost seventy, it had become ungracefully gorgeous. In his youth he wrote on
the emotions produced by mountains and cascades, by the master-pieces of
painting and sculpture, by the faces and necks of beautiful women, in the style
of a Parliamentary report. In his old age he discussed treaties and tariffs in
the most fervid and brilliant language of romance. It is strange that the Essay
on the Sublime and Beautiful, and the Letter to a Noble Lord, should be the
productions of one man. But it is far more strange that the Essay should have
been a production of his youth, and the Letter of his old age.
We will give very short specimens of Bacon's two styles. In 1597, he wrote thus:
"Crafty men contemn studies; simple men admire them; and wise men use them; for
they teach not their own use: that is a wisdom without them, and won by
observation. Read not to contradict, nor to believe, but to weigh and consider.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed
and digested. Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an
exact man. And therefore if a man write little, he had need have a great memory;
if he confer little, have a present wit; and if he read little, have much
cunning to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise, poets witty,
the mathematics subtle, natural philosophy deep, morals grave, logic and
rhetoric able to contend." It will hardly be disputed that this is a passage to
be "chewed and digested." We do not believe that Thucydides himself has anywhere
compressed so much thought into so small a space.
In the additions which Bacon afterwards made to the Essays, there is nothing
superior in truth or weight to what we have quoted. But his style was constantly
becoming richer and softer. The following passage, first published in 1625, will
show the extent of the change: "Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament;
adversity is the blessing of the New, which carrieth the greater benediction and
the clearer evidence of God's favor. Yet, even in the Old Testament, if you
listen to David's harp you shall hear as many hearse-like airs as carols; and
the pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of
Job than the felicities of Solomon. Prosperity is not without many fears and
distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes. We see in
needleworks and embroideries it is more pleasing to have a lively work upon a
sad and solemn ground, than to have a dark and melancholy work upon a lightsome
ground. Judge therefore of the pleasure of the heart by the pleasure of the eye.
Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed or
crushed; for prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best
discover virtue."
It is by the Essays that Bacon is best known to the multitude. The Novum Organum
and the De Augmentis are much talked of, but little read. They have produced
indeed a vast effect on the opinions of mankind; but they have produced it
through the operation of intermediate agents. They have moved the intellects
which have moved the world. It is in the Essays alone that the mind of Bacon is
brought into immediate contact with the minds of ordinary readers. There he
opens an exoteric school, and talks to plain men, in language which everybody
understands, about things in which everybody is interested. He has thus enabled
those who must otherwise have taken his merits on trust to judge for themselves;
and the great body of readers have, during several generations, acknowledged
that the man who has treated with such consummate ability questions with which
they are familiar may well be supposed to deserve all the praise bestowed on him
by those who have sat in his inner-school.
Without any disparagement to the admirable treatise De Augmentis, we must say
that, in our judgment, Bacon's greatest performance is the first book of the
Novum Organum. All the peculiarities of his extraordinary mind are found there
in the highest perfection. Many of the aphorisms, but particularly those in
which he gives examples of the influence of the idola, show a nicety of
observation that has never been surpassed. Every part of the book blazes with
wit, but with wit which is employed only to illustrate and decorate truth. No
book ever made so great a revolution in the mode of thinking, overthrew so many
prejudices, introduced so many new opinions. Yet no book was ever written in a
less contentious spirit. It truly conquers with chalk and not with steel.
Proposition after proposition enters into the mind, is received not as an
invader, but as a welcome friend, and, though previously unknown, becomes at
once domesticated. But what we most admire is the vast capacity of that
intellect which, without effort, takes in at once all the domains of science,
all the past, the present, and the future, all the errors of two thousand years,
all the encouraging signs of the passing times, all the bright hopes of the
coming age. Cowley, who was among the most ardent, and not among the least
discerning followers of the new philosophy, has, in one of his finest poems,
compared Bacon to Moses standing on Mount Pisgah. It is to Bacon, we think, as
he appears in the first book of the Novum Organum, that the comparison applies
with peculiar felicity. There we see the great Lawgiver looking round from his
lonely elevation on an infinite expanse; behind him a wilderness of dreary sands
and bitter waters in which successive generations have sojourned, always moving,
yet never advancing, reaping no harvest, and building no abiding city; before
him a goodly land, a land of promise, a land flowing with milk and honey. While
the multitude below saw only the flat sterile desert in which they had so long
wandered, bounded on every side by a near horizon, or diversified only by some
deceitful mirage, he was gazing from a far higher stand on a far lovelier
country, following with his eye the long course of fertilizing rivers, through
ample pastures, and under the bridges of great capitals, measuring the distances
of marts and havens, and portioning out all those wealthy regions from Dan to
Beersheba.
It is painful to turn back from contemplating Bacon's philosophy to contemplate
his life. Yet without so turning back it is impossible fairly to estimate his
powers. He left the University at an earlier age than that at which most people
repair thither. While yet a boy he was plunged into the midst of diplomatic
business. Thence he passed to the study of a vast technical system of law, and
worked his way up through a succession of laborious offices to the highest post
in his profession. In the meantime he took an active part in every Parliament;
he was an adviser of the Crown: he paid court with the greatest assiduity and
address to all whose favor was likely to be of use to him; he lived much in
society; he noted the slightest peculiarities of character and the slightest
changes of fashion. Scarcely any man has led a more stirring life than that
which Bacon led from sixteen to sixty. Scarcely any man has been better entitled
to be called a thorough man of the world. The founding of a new philosophy, the
imparting of a new direction to the minds of speculators, this was the amusement
of his leisure, the work of hours occasionally stolen from the Woolsack and the
Council Board. This consideration, while it increases the admiration with which
we regard his intellect, increases also our regret that such an intellect should
so often have been unworthily employed. He well knew the better course and had,
at one time, resolved to pursue it. "I confess," said he in a letter written
when he was still young, "that I have as vast contemplative ends as I have
moderate civil ends." Had his civil ends continued to be moderate, he would have
been, not only the Moses, but the Joshua of philosophy. He would have fulfilled
a large part of his own magnificent predictions. He would have led his
followers, not only to the verge, but into the heart of the promised land. He
would not merely have pointed out, but would have divided the spoil. Above all,
he would have left, not only a great, but a spotless name. Mankind would then
have been able to esteem their illustrious benefactor. We should not then be
compelled to regard his character with mingled contempt and admiration, with
mingled aversion and gratitude. We should not then regret that there should be
so many proofs of the narrowness and selfishness of a heart, the benevolence of
which was large enough to take in all races and all ages. We should not then
have to blush for the disingenuousness of the most devoted worshipper of
speculative truth, for the servility of the boldest champion of intellectual
freedom. We should not then have seen the same man at one time far in the van,
and at another time far in the rear of his generation. We should not then be
forced to own that he who first treated legislation as a science was among the
last Englishmen who used the rack, that he who first summoned philosophers to
the great work of interpreting nature was among the last Englishmen who sold
justice. And we should conclude our survey of a life placidly, honorably,
beneficently passed, "in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and
profitable inventions and discoveries,"6 with feelings very different from those with which we now turn away
from the checkered spectacle of so much glory and so much shame.
1 De Augmentis, Lib. i.
2 Novum Organum, Lib. i. Aph. 35 and elsewhere.
3 See some interesting remarks on this subject in Bishop
Berkeley's Minute Philosopher, Dialogue iv.
4 Novum Organum, Lib. i. Aph. 55.
5 New Atlantis.
6 From a Letter of Bacon to Lord Burleigh.
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