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 NICHOL # FRANCIS BACON HIS LIFE & 
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
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|1bi(osojjbicul (lllassics for ©ngltslj ^Icabcrs 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 AVILLTA:\r KXIGHT, T.L.D. 
 
 PROFESSOn OF MORAL PHlLOSOrnY, UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS 
 
 FRANCIS BACON 
 
CONTENTS OF THE SERIES. 
 
 1. DESCARTES, 
 
 2. BUTLER, . 
 
 3. BERKELEY, 
 
 4. FICHTE, . 
 
 5. KANT, 
 
 6. HAMILTON, 
 
 7. HEGEL, . 
 
 8. LEIBNIZ, . 
 
 9. VICO, 
 
 10. HOBBES, . 
 
 11. HUME, 
 
 12. SPINOZA, . 
 
 13. BACON. Part L, 
 
 14. BACON. Part II., 
 
 15. LOCKE, . 
 
 By Professor Mahaffy, Dublin. 
 By the Rev, W. Lucas Collins, M.A. 
 By Professor Campbell Eraser. 
 By Professor Adamson, Glasgow. 
 By Professor Wallace, Oxford. 
 By Professor Veitch. 
 . By the Master of Balliol. 
 By John Theodork Merz. 
 By Professor Flint, Edinburgh. 
 By Professor Croom Robertson. 
 By Professor Knight, St Andrews. 
 . By Principal Caird, Glasgow, 
 By Pi-ofessor NiCHOL. 
 By Professor NiCHOL. 
 By Professor Campbell Eraser, 
 
F BAN CIS BACON -.^^, 
 
 HIS LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 JOHN NICHOL 
 
 M.A. BALLIOL, OXON., LL.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW 
 
 PART II. 
 BACON'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 WITH A SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF PREVIOUS 
 SCIENCE AND METHOD 
 
 CHEAP EDITION 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 
 SAMMELS & TAYLOR 
 
 7 New Broad Street, London, E.C. 
 
 (And at 130 Fleet Street and 259 Oxford Street) 
 
 M c M I 
 
 All Rights reserved 
 

PREFATOnY NOTE. 
 
 Bacox, being the first after the close of tlie middle ages 
 to give a new direction as M'ell as a new aim to specu- 
 lative research, was as much a critic of old as a j^romoter 
 of new metliods ; and it seems not ina23propriate to 
 preface a survey of his system by a glance at the pre- 
 paratory work of his predecessors. In the first part of 
 the present volume, I am indebted equally for detail 
 and general suggestion to the comprehensive works of 
 Dr Whewell, the ' History of the Inductive Sciences ' 
 and the ' Philosophy of Induction.' I also acknowledge 
 my obligations to the Essays prefixed to Profcissor Jow- 
 ett's translations of Plato's Dialogues, especially that 
 wliich introduces the ' Timeeus.' ]My authorities for the 
 fragmentary references alonu here possible to the influ- 
 ence of the Arabians on European thought are, besides 
 Whewell, !M. Kenan's 'Averroes et rAverroisme,' and 
 the ' History of Philosophy,' by George H. Lewes. As 
 regards the ^Mystics and Alchemists, I have principally 
 
 i 
 
vi Prefatory Note. 
 
 relied on Yaughan's ' Hours with the INIystics,' the Essays 
 of the late Dr Samuel Brown, and the recondite pamphlets 
 of Professor John Ferguson. For a general view of the 
 relation of early Science, History, and Literature, ever}^ 
 writer will confess himself a grateful student of Hallam's 
 ' Middle Ages ' and ' Literature of Europe.' On cpiestions 
 of date and of spelling I have constantly consulted the 
 French * Biographic Generale,' and the ' Dictionnaire 
 des Sciences,' Hachette, 1844-1852.1 
 
 As an interpretation of Bacon's own Philosophy, I 
 have found the critical notes of Mr Eobert Ellis to 
 exceed all others in thoroughness and insight — an 
 opinion Mdiich, if we may argue from their following 
 in his trade, his successors in commentary seem to share. 
 I must also refer to the clear contrasts of old and new 
 methods in the work of Kuno Fischer ; to the brilliant 
 summary of jNL de Eemusat, for its estimate of the after 
 influences of the Baconian mode of thought ; and to Mr 
 Benn for a remarkable appreciation of the influence still 
 exerted over the mind of Bacon by that of Aristotle. 
 
 1 In the spelling of Arabian names I have followed these authori- 
 ties in giving them as they are best known to general readers, the 
 more confidently as there is often a confusing variance in the use of 
 these names by Arabic scholars — e.g., M. Renan in p. 55 of his book 
 refers to Algazel as Algazali, while in p. 73 and elsewhere the same 
 philosopher appears as Gazali. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I.— BACON'S RELATION TO THE PAST. 
 
 CUAP. PAGE 
 
 I. THE ' REDARGUTIO,' 1 
 
 II. METHOD AND SCIENCE OF ANTIQUITY, . . 12 
 
 III. THE DARK AGES, 33 
 
 IV. THE MIDDLE AGE, 51 
 
 V. THE RENAISSANCE, 67 
 
 II.— THE 'INSTAURATIO MAGNA.' 
 
 I. DESIGN, PLAN, AND PROGRESS, .... 97 
 II. ' ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING,' ' DE AUG- 
 
 MENTIS,' AND 'ESSAYS,' .... 123 
 
 III. THE ' NOVUM ORGANUM,' 150 
 
 IV. NATURAL HISTORIES, ' SYLVA SYLVARUM,' AND 
 
 'DE PRINCIPIIS,' 190 
 
 V. 'DE SAPIENTIA VETERUM,' SUMMARY, BACON's 
 
 INFLUENCE, 216 
 
Vlll 
 
 Contents. 
 
 TABLES. 
 
 I. GREEK MEN OF SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 REFERRED TO BY BACON, .... 
 
 II, bacon's MOST EMINENT PREDECESSORS AND 
 
 CONTEMPORARIES, 
 
 III. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF BACON'S CHIEF WORKS 
 
 — DATES OF COMPOSITION AND OF PUBLICA 
 TION, 
 
 IV. SCHEME OF THE ' INSTAURATIO MAGNA,' . 
 
 250 
 
 252 
 
 255 
 258 
 
FRANCIS BACON. 
 
 I.— BACON'S EELATION TO THE PAST. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE 'REDARGUTIO.' 
 
 The mass of criticism, English, German, and French, 
 accumulated about the Baconian Philosophy, still leaves 
 room for difference of opinion regarding its degree of 
 inaccuracy in detail and failure in result : there is no 
 room for difference as to its design, which was to ex- 
 plore the Universe, and, under reverence for the mys- 
 teries of Faith, to make men its masters. The popular 
 view of the subject is condensed in Lord Macaulay's 
 brilliant and shallow review, of which the followmg is 
 the gist : — 
 
 Bacon was neither a philosopher nor a logician, but 
 a practical reformer. Unlike his predecessors — who 
 M'asted their dialectic on labours like those spent on 
 
 p. — XIV. A 
 
2 Francis Bacon. 
 
 a treadmill — his desire was not to solve enigmas, but 
 to multijDly enjoyment and mitigate pain. Century 
 after century, during the evening of Greece, the me- 
 ridian of Eome, the darkness and the twilight before 
 the ncAV dawn of Italy, rival sects had been repeating 
 their idle cries, the Epicurean adding as little to the 
 quantity of pleasure as the Stoic to that of virtue, or 
 the Scholastic to that of knowledge. At last there 
 came a theoretical philanthropist who, caring nothing 
 about the grounds of moral obligation or the freedom 
 of the will, disdaining disputes as barren as the toils of 
 the damned m Tartarus, made Utility and Progress 
 his watchwords, and, leaving the windy war to those 
 who liked it, was content to contribute to the sum 
 of human happiness. Macaulay devotes ten pages to a 
 contrast of the treatment of the sciences — Arithmetic, 
 Geometry, Astronomy, Medicine, and Law — in ' The Ee- 
 public ' and the ' De Augmentis,' the one work regard- 
 ing them as steps to abstraction, the other as aids to 
 invention, and concludes : " The aim of Plato was to 
 exalt man into a god ; that of Bacon to provide him 
 with what he wants as a man. The one drew a good 
 bow, but shot at the stars ; the other fixed his eye on a 
 common targe, and hit it in the white." But, continues 
 the reviewer, the notion that Bacon found a new way 
 of arriving at truth rests on no better grounds than the 
 medieval belief in Yirgil as a conjuror. Induction has 
 been practised from morning till night by every human 
 being smce the world began. The man who infers 
 that mince-pies have disagreed Avith him because he 
 was ill when he ate them, well when he ate them 
 not, most ill when he ate most, and least ill when he 
 
Maccmlay^ Summary. 3 
 
 ate le.ast, lias employed, unconsciously but .sufficiently, 
 all the tables of the ' ]\'ovum Organuni.' The right 
 or wrong use of induction depends not on rules but 
 on brains. The objects of preceding speculators did 
 not require induction for their attainment : Bacon 
 stirred men up to pursue an object which could only 
 be attained ])y induction, and consequently it was 
 more carefully performed. This is the sum of the 
 benefit he conferred on society, and the total of his 
 so-called philosophy. 
 
 Three manifest defects combine to render this inade- 
 quate even as a popular presentation of the system it 
 professes to unfold : — 
 
 1. Its Historical incompleteness. The critic has 
 
 merely travestied the Greek schools of thought. 
 
 2. Stating so far correctly what Bacon has done, it 
 
 leaves us with hardly any conception of what he 
 meant to do. 
 
 3. It makes Bacon a mere Empiric. An observer and 
 
 experimentalist, he was also a philosopher ani- 
 mated by a spirit far less removed from that of 
 the ancient thinkers than Macaulay imagines 
 it to have been. 
 To understand the system we are called on to examine, 
 we must search more widely through its antecedents, 
 and examine more minutely into itself. 
 
 Bacon aimed at being both a critic and a creator : in 
 the former role he is often unjust, in the latter his 
 embrace was in some respects like that of Ixion ; but 
 in both he has left on thought, as on literature, an 
 indelible mark. No part of his design is more definite 
 than the determination, characteristic of his age, to 
 
4 Francis Bacon. 
 
 break witli tlie Past, although no part of it was more 
 incompletely fiilfUled. The most eloquent of his at- 
 tempts^ to brace himself to the impossible breach is 
 the harangue, supposed to be addressed to an audience 
 of seekers after truth at Paris by a mysterious stranger 
 who takes his seat among them as an equal, but comes 
 with an inspired message. 
 
 The date of this piece, entitled 'Eedargutio Phil- 
 OSOPHIARUM,' is nearly determined by an allusion, 
 " Meditor Instaurationem Philosophise," which shows it 
 to be meant as an introduction to the author's alread}^ 
 conceived scheme, and written after he had begun to miss 
 co-operation in his work. " Quos socios habes 1 Ego 
 certe in summa solitudine versor." It is the "oratio 
 ad filios," mixed with elegancy, novelty, and supersti- 
 tion, suggested in the ' Commentarius,' and ]\I. Bouil- 
 let has reasonably conjectured that it is the MS. re- 
 
 1 Not, however, the first. In a letter to Father Fulgentius (1625), 
 Bacon refers to the constancy of his mind, which has "not gro^vn ohl 
 or cooled in this pursuit since, forty years ago, he, with a magnificent 
 title, named his first efi"ort 'The greatest birth of Time.'" The 
 ' Temporis Partus Maximus ' is lost. If it was identical, or nearly 
 so, with the ' Temporis Partus Masculus,' the censure of the scholar 
 Henry Cufi'e— " a fool could not have WTitten it, and a wise man would 
 not " — is just. If the latter be a juvenile production, it betrays an 
 arrogance rare even at the age of 25 ; if, as Mr Spedding conjec- 
 tures, it was ^vritten in 1608, on the lines of the hint in the ' Com- 
 mentarius Solutus,' "to discourse scornfully of the philosophy of the 
 Grecians," it displays a dramatic dishonesty in depreciation. In this 
 fragment as elsewhere, respect is paid to the thinkers who are to 
 philosophy as the heroes before Agamemnon. Their successors are 
 arraigned with a violence comparable only to the censures passed on 
 each other by rival politicians, commentators, or theologians. Aris- 
 totle is " pessimus sophista " ; Plato, "ca\illator urbanus"; Ramiis, 
 "literarum tinea"; Galen, "canicula et pestis"; Cornelius Agrippa, 
 ''trivialis scurra"; Paracelsus, "asinorum adoptiva " ; and the Co- 
 pernicans, "term? aurigfe." 
 
' TemiJoris Parties Mascidus.' 5 
 
 fciTod to ill the letter of October 10, 1609, to Toby 
 Matthews : — 
 
 " I send you the only part which hath any harshness ; . . . 
 this other speech of preparation ... is written out of the 
 same necessity. Nay, it doth more fully lay open that the 
 question between me and the ancients is not of the virtue 
 of the race but of the rightness of the way. And to speak 
 truth, it is to the other but as palma to pugnus, part of the 
 same thing more large." 
 
 In comparing the ' Eedargutio ' with the ' Partus Mas- 
 culus,' we find the view more comprehensive, the judg 
 ments more tempered, the style indefinitely raised. It 
 is like passing from INIilton's railing at Salmasius to the 
 stately Latin of the Address to the nations of Europe in 
 the ' Defensio Secunda.' AVe have less of the fist in 
 fight, more of the helping hand. For contempt we have 
 conciliation ; for the " de alto despiciens," the con- 
 stantly repeated reference to the French who came to 
 Italy with chalk to mark rather than A\'ith arms to storm 
 their lodgings. Bacon now respects his predecessors, 
 while demurring to their conclusions : of his former 
 " verborum ludibrium " and "theologus mente captus," 
 he now admits "ingenia certe illorum capacia, acuta 
 et sublimia." He, however, still regards them as 
 usurpers of a throne — a superior kind of sopliists blind- 
 ing the minds of men. Aristotle is the Ottoman who 
 kills his brothers to reign alone, constructing the world 
 out of categories, juggling with nature, coming in his 
 own name, dropping a curtain over the earlier age, 
 the tyrant whom it is the first duty of the leaders of an 
 inevitable rebellion to depose. 
 
6 Francis Bacon. 
 
 The oration^ itself, the main part of the essay in 
 which these criticisms are set, opens with an appeal to 
 the audience as heirs of a high inheritance, — '' men not 
 animals erect, hut mortal gods," "Deus mundi conditor 
 et vestrum, animas vobis donavit mundi ipsius capaces ; 
 nee tamen eo ipso satiandas." This noble estimate of 
 man's prerogative in the mental, in contrast with the 
 author's mean view of men in the political world, is fol- 
 lowed by a reference to our forlorn state in being doomed 
 to live so long on one food variously dressed — ?.e., on a 
 small part even of the old philosopiiy, on the writings 
 of six autocrats — Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, 
 Euclid, Ptolemy. Xor is much of value gained if we 
 add the labours of the alchemists, save that, like hus- 
 bandmen digging in vain for gold, they broke the soil ; 
 or the crude guesses and haphazard experiments of later 
 physicists. Our wealth is small because we have 
 misused our capital — i.e., the faculties designed by the 
 Creator for the best choral hymn to His praise, the 
 study of the heavens and eartli. Keep, says the speaker, 
 your inherited learning to adorn discourse, and win 
 esteem. For that the new philoso^Dliy will be of small 
 avail ; it is not on the surface, nor can be snatched in 
 passing, "nor in broad rumour lies"; it can only appeal 
 to the multitude when its results are manifest. Con- 
 cede to the old fashions, but as shows, not fetters. 
 Have Lais, be not her slave. Reserve yourselves for 
 better things. See that your minds be sound, then use 
 
 1 A summary of the whole of this comprehensive oration, which 
 presents in more artistic form all that is important in the "Pars De- 
 struens" of the 'Novum Organum,' having been given by Dr Abbot, 
 I restrict myself to referring, and that not always in their actual 
 order, to the most salient passages. 
 
Lost Philosophies. 7 
 
 tliciii : l)cforc building prepare the ground, cumbered 
 now with traditions of the Greeks, — " children ever," 
 as said the Egyptian seer, reared in an age of fable, 
 scant of history, with no more knowledge of the earth 
 than from tales and journeys which, compared with 
 ours, were suburban, or of their neighbours, than to 
 call all those to the west Celts, to the north Scythians. 
 In this barrenness their minds fell a prey to those 
 who went from city to city, making and selling rhet- 
 oric ; or to those who, with more haughty dogmatism, 
 opened schools and instituted sects, — that of Aristotle 
 in chief, who corrupted the study of nature by dia- 
 lectic ; as Plato did by theology, diverted from follow- 
 ing the true path by his superficial knowledge and 
 soaring abstractions. As for the yet older philosophers 
 who, far from strife and pomp, disdaining to sport, like 
 Galatea, in the waves of disputation, rather half asleep 
 like Endymion on a hill, gave themselves up to thought 
 and research ; these merit a higher place, as having 
 penetrated often more deeply into the secrets of nature, 
 and been closer observers of her ways. Eut their 
 hearers were a few select disciples, and their works, 
 more known under the Caesars (tede Juvenal, x. 
 48), must have been destroyed by Attila and Gen- 
 seric and the Goths, for they remain to ns only in 
 fragments, often hard to reconcile. Lastly, as far as 
 we can judge, even their dogmas and speculations were 
 like stage arguments, where much that is true is mixed 
 with the fancies of fable. Their discoveries, many of 
 them genuine, were made by wit and industry, but 
 without any consistency of method. The ship of 
 Greek i^hilosophy is one, the wanderings various, the 
 
8 Francis Bacon. 
 
 causes of wandering the same — i.e., the want of a com- 
 pass. That this is not the popular judgment is in our 
 favour. " Pessimum certe omnium augurium est de 
 consensu in rebus intellectualibus." ^ That Greek was 
 wise who asked, "What have I said amiss that the mob 
 applaud me 1 " Let honour remain with the ancients, 
 but no longer blind belief; and treat us as the rest. 
 We claim credit only for our method and our aim ; and 
 a lame man in the right way will beat the swiftest 
 racer in the wrong. We are finger-posts, not judges, 
 in saying that were all the wits of all ages rolled in one, 
 in the present mode no great progress could be made ; 
 nay, the more capacity there is in the man who leaves the 
 light of nature — i.e., its liistory and facts — the further 
 he will lead us astray. Wh^t spiders' webs, wonderful, 
 subtle, and useless, have the schoolmen, made fierce by 
 the darkness in which they have been reared, woven 
 around us ! Our confidence is no boast, for the new 
 method will make all men equal ; 'tis not by steadiness 
 of hand or eye, but by the compass and the square, that 
 we propose to draw our lines and circles. We rather 
 dread than hail the quickness of untrained powers, and 
 would give them weights, not wmgs. For up till now 
 men have never known how straight is the way of 
 truth. 
 
 To fortune rather than merit let us attribute that we 
 are no longer abandoned to the waves of chance, but 
 may now hope to find the middle way between mere 
 experience and ojoinion ; nor wonder that we have had 
 
 1 Bacon adds here, " exceptis divinis, cum Veritas descendit coeli- 
 tus;" and in 'Novum Organum/ i. § 77, "et politicis, ubi suffragi- 
 orum jus est." 
 
The Old and New 'Atlantis' 9 
 
 to wait, for it is a mixture of diffidence and scorn wliicli 
 has so long retarded the discoveries which, once made, 
 seem inevitable. Whether they were known before is 
 doubtful. There is a veil hanging over the remote an- 
 tiquity before the dawn of philosophy. One might well 
 believe that there had been something there jDrophetic of 
 the future, had the old records not been corrupted by 
 those who have wished to claim authority for their own 
 views. It matters little to inquire whether America be 
 really the new world or the old Atlantis rediscovered, 
 for our task is to discover from the light of I^ature, 
 and not to recover from the darkness of Eld. 
 
 The imaginary speaker returning to the Alchemists, 
 censures them for adopting the theory of the four ele- 
 ments of Aristotle and Empedocles, and draAving from 
 them preconceived analogies, as four complexions, four 
 humours, four conjunctions of primary qualities, and for 
 their superstitious use of natural magic. Bacon then 
 proceeds to talk of deluding prepossessions, and contends 
 that every Philosophy must be judged by its fruits, com- 
 paring that of the Greeks to Charybdis or Scylla, fair 
 above, with barking monsters famous for great ship- 
 wrecks below. He next animadverts on the habit of 
 looking merely at isolated facts, without considering the 
 unity of nature — as if one should carry a small candle 
 about the comers of a room radiant with a central light ; 
 and again condemns the challenges and disputes of the 
 schools, preferring M'ith Cato that Cartilage should be 
 destroyed, rather than with Scipio Xasica that it should 
 l)e preserved as an exercise-ground. Passing to auguries 
 from the progress of the arts, he contends that they 
 should be brought into relations with philosophy by 
 
10 Francis Bacon. 
 
 being referred to their sources and systematised. Where 
 they are defective, it is no fault of nature, within which 
 lie boundless possibilities, to doubt which is to condemn 
 mankind, as the sceptics of the Academy did, to eternal 
 darkness. 
 
 But, says Bacon's mask in this opening scene of his 
 great play, time flies while we are wandering smitten 
 with love of the theme, and longing for the initiation 
 which is to melt the frosts like April. Let us ask 
 how it is to be accomplished, and answer by using all 
 the aids within our grasp. He were a madman who 
 should try to shift an obelisk by mere force of hand, 
 however strong : _ so were he who would have men 
 apply unaided intellects to solve the problems of the 
 universe, and discard the means of guiding and combin- 
 ing their efforts. We have more to do than collect facts, 
 and then spend an age in revolving theories ; as if we 
 were looking from a tower, till the world seems to our 
 eyes like a cloud in which difference and shade are lost. 
 Similarly the ancients, from a few experiments made 
 captive to a foregone conclusion, rose at once to the most 
 general axioms, and remained with them as at the poles 
 of controversy. We must leave those heights and come 
 into the plain, there mingling with our fellows and 
 enlarging their estate. From these new nuptials of the 
 Mind with Nature shall spring a race of heroes, of later 
 birth but higher destiny, to sulijugate monsters, to re- 
 lieve the wants of men, and chase the shadows of the 
 night. 
 
 Bacon then passes, by a somewhat sudden jerk, to the 
 division of the Faculties into Empirical and liational, 
 which, he says, should work together. Apart, the former 
 
'Plus Ultra: 11 
 
 merely gather like the ants ; tlie latter weave webs like 
 the spiders, between is the fashion of the bee, that, 
 drawing material from grove and garden, transmutes it. 
 So true philosophy passes the matter of observation and 
 experiment through the mind, and brings forth " liujus- 
 modi mellis celestia dona." The oration concludes with 
 an exhortation to be of good heart, and dread no lion in 
 the way ; nothing will give such cheer as the daring of 
 the age, " facinora ajtatis nostras " : replace non ultra by 
 jyliLS ultra, and you will find that Jove's bolts can be 
 forged on earth. Go forth with the sentence of Alex- 
 ander, " Xil aliud quam bene ausus est vana contemnere." 
 This review is an epitome of all the writer has said in 
 so many forms of the ancient philosophy in the numerous 
 and varied introductions to his own. To appreciate its 
 accuracy on one side, its inadequacy on another, it is 
 necessary to survey his antecedents, so far, at least, as to 
 understand where the previous thinkers, by most of whom 
 he was influenced, though frequently by antagonism, 
 came legitimately Avithin the scope of his criticism. 
 
12 
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 METHOD AND SCIENCE OF ANTIQUITY. 
 
 Bacon, it lias been liastily said, was a Logician, not a 
 Philosopher. He had, it is true, formed no consistent 
 scheme of the universe ; but his method was determined 
 by his view of the matter with which he had to deal. 
 Logic, far from being an end in itself, was to him em- 
 phatically a means, and the defects of his system are 
 directly traceable to the imperfection of his Science. 
 The larger half of his work being a criticism of the 
 Past, we must, in order to estimate its value, endeavour, 
 at least proximately, to realise the amount and nature 
 of his intellectual inheritance. 
 
 As the ' Eepublic ' and ' Tim reus ' of Plato sum up 
 and concentrate nearly all the previous speculations of 
 Greece, so in the * Instauratio Magna ' we find reflected, 
 though often distorted, two thousand previous years of 
 thought. Bacon's whole attitude is that of hostility to 
 tli£ medieval mode of reasoning which had grown out of 
 the decadence of the Greek philosophy. The first re- 
 corded speculations of Europe are attempts to generalise 
 on the data of a few phenomena. The Ionic theorists aim 
 at discovering a physical unity in referring the changes of 
 
Frc-Socratic Philosophy. 13 
 
 nature to a single element, but without any conception 
 of a true physical method. They are followed by more 
 abstract thinkers, who, denying the reliability of sense- 
 impressions, endeavour to bring everything under the 
 control of a mental idea. The inadequacy of Bacon's 
 criticism is nowhere more conspicuous than in his mis- 
 taking their random physical conjectures for the essen- 
 tial points of tlieir systems. Neglecting the central 
 conception of Heraclitus, who regarded the world as 
 a series of dissolving views, he dwells only on the 
 fire, which was an emblem of tlie perpetual flux, and, 
 similarly, he comprehends the mere phenomenal fringe 
 of the Eleatic Idealism. His notes on the Atomists 
 are more appreciative ; but in referring to Anaxa- 
 goras — in whom the modern historian recognises the 
 first Greek who had a glimmer of the distinction be- 
 tween the laws of mind and those of matter — he con- 
 fines his attention to the ' Homoiomereia.^ The pre- 
 Socratic philosophers were only scientific by accident. 
 There is hardly any result of modern science which they 
 do not seem dimly to foreshadow ; but the vagueness 
 so obscured the suggestiveness of their conclusions, that 
 when they met and clashed, towards the close of the 
 fifth century B.C., at Athens, tlie Sophists found a 
 ready audience for their negative thesis : " Ilai/Ta pet is 
 as true within as without, we know not anything ; but 
 there remains the art of life. " Socrates seems to have been 
 as sceptical as Protagoras in his view that the universe 
 was past finding out : he abandoned speculations -rrcpi 
 Trj<s oXt^s <f>vcre(i)<:, and maintained " the proper study of 
 mankind is man." It is true that he so far succeeded 
 in reconstructing Etliics, by appeals to a finer analysis of 
 
14 Francis Bacon. 
 
 the mind, substituted for savoir faire firmer bases of 
 practical belief, and gave to Western thought a moral dye 
 that has never been wholly worn out ; but from Bacon's 
 point of view his position was distinctly retrograde. In 
 elevating the Socratic " definitions " into " Ideas," in 
 substituting a more elaborate dialectic for the Socratic 
 "elenchus," Plato restored the translunary metaphysic 
 his teacher had discarded. In the Dialogues, which have 
 been ajDtly termed his "plays," the previous w^orld of 
 thought converges, as in a reservoir from which the 
 rivers of the after-world flow; but the physics of the 
 ' Timseus' are a mere rechauffe of Pythagorean and other 
 phantasies, where imperceptible triangles are made to do 
 duty for the atoms of Democritus, and the crudest phy- 
 siological assumptions take the place of the anatomical 
 or biological facts reserved for the labour of centuries to 
 ascertain. Aristotle, the first great analyst among philo- 
 sophers, marked the lines of demarcation between Pol- 
 itics, Ethics^ and Theology, and tried to exhibit the rela- 
 tion between Psychology and ISIetaphysics proper. With 
 him formal Logic all but begins ; with him it all but 
 ends. He replaced the Ideal Paradigms of Plato by his 
 own theory of "Forms" — i.e., the qualities essential to 
 things being considered to be, and being (for in his 
 system the conception and the reality are merged^), what 
 they are, — qualities which he sought by observation, 
 investigation, and, though more rarely and roughly, by 
 experiment, to discriminate from accidents. 
 
 In the works of these masters most mental problems 
 are so defined that, in many directions, later ages have 
 only filled in details ; and Aristotle, in his wide accumu- 
 1 They are so in equal degree in the philosophy of Bacon. 
 
Acatcdepsia! 15 
 
 lation of facts, showed himself a student of natural his- 
 tory ; but in extending the kingdom of man over nature, 
 they were little in advance of their predecessors. Their 
 near successors, in formulating their doctrines as tenets 
 of rival schools, only contracted their scope, and more 
 unreservedly abandoned the lines of real physical re- 
 search. Epicurus and Zeno enlarged the ethical views 
 of Aristippus and Antisthenes ; but the cosmological 
 theories of Democritus and of Pleraclitus, Avith which 
 they became respectively associated, remained in their 
 hands mere abstract speculations. The great work of 
 Lucretius displays a poetical interpretation of nature 
 often only surpassed in subtilty by AVordsAvorth ; nor 
 are there Avanting in its pages occasional references 
 to crude experiment, and a few anticipations of correct 
 theories of the world such as we find somewhat later 
 in Ovid's ' Fasti ' ; but these are interwoven Avith vicAA's 
 fundamentally false. The services rendered by the Stoics 
 and Epicureans to mankind consist in their criticisms of 
 life. These naturally impressed themselves on the prac- 
 tical genius of Eome, at a time AAdien the Empire Avas 
 being established, and men Avere divided betAveen those 
 ready to let the Avorld slide and those Avho Avere vain- 
 ly endeavoiu:ing to revive the old life of the Eepublic. 
 Side by side Avith these tAvo schools Ave have the modi- 
 fied negations of the ]!^eAV Academy. Cato Avould have 
 expelled Carneades for undermining morality ; Bacon 
 regards his doubt, " acatalepsia," as a bar to science, pro- 
 foundly observing that " he Avho has once despaired of 
 arriving at truth, finds his interest in all things less." 
 Greek philosophy had Avrought out, in the only Avays 
 open to the existing state of knowledge, the chief ques- 
 
16 Francis Bacon. 
 
 tions it had started. Coming into contact with another 
 era of civilisation, it was cramped by legality and formal- 
 ism before having to succumb to the dominance of the 
 new religion. Diuing the centuries of its wane we 
 meet with various substitutes for genuine research, repre- 
 sented by the following types of confused or superficial 
 thought : the Dogmatist — the Baconian spider — who 
 lays down opinions in a final way without caring to give 
 reasons for them ; the Empiric^ who, on the ground of a 
 few facts or coincidences, compiled as the ant gathers 
 rubbish, forms and acts on narrow views ; the Eclectic, 
 who pieces together often discordant parts of several 
 systems, with the idea that somewhere among them the 
 truth must be found ; the Scej^tic, who, weary of the 
 search, impatiently denies ; and the Mystic, who trusts 
 in a new imaginary faculty — resolving itself for the most 
 part into a diseased fancy or vague emotion — to supply 
 those truths which he holds to be above reason. 
 
 The Academicians and the Peripatetics are distin- 
 guished from the masters of their respective schools 
 by their mixture of scepticism and dogmatism : Avhat- 
 ever in the teaching of Plato and Aristotle would not 
 readily submit itself to dogmatic treatment, of that 
 they were sceptical. The Eomans generally were eclec- 
 tics, — an attitude variously represented by Cicero, 
 Plutarch, and Pliny. The later Epicureans inclined 
 to empiricism ; and their Hedonism, after being de- 
 graded in Petronius Arbiter, was relegated to practical 
 life till it was revived in the Renaissance. The asceti- 
 cism of Zeno and Cleanthes gave way to, not without 
 influencing, Christianity. The mysticism of Alexandria, 
 gathering together the abstractions and myths of the 
 
Nco-riatomsm. 17 
 
 East and "West in a strange farrago, afFected, though 
 in disputed degree, some of the Fathers, before it 
 passed with Prockis, after having had its king in Ju- 
 lian and its martyr in llypatia. It is hardly true to 
 say that Bacon understood Greek philosophy only as 
 distorted by those mists, for there is evidence of his 
 having read, even if he did not carefully study, some of 
 tlie original authors ; but he insufficiently disentangled 
 their teaching from that of the commentators, and in- 
 volved them in the same condemnation. The modern 
 student sees a chain of thought in the ancient schools ; 
 but their true relation is often difficult to detect, for it is 
 generally unconscious. Each successive thinker seemed 
 to himself to have found the secret of the world, and 
 proclaimed it with a religious ardour. We see that 
 each introduced some idea that has not been wholly lost ; 
 that for many of our conceptions we are indebted to what 
 has descended to us through so many channels ; that we 
 are what we are, in some degree, because of speculations 
 to question the utility of which is to question the utility 
 of mental science ; that to gauge them by practical re- 
 sults is like asking the use of a poem or the shape of a 
 colour. But this view, to which we have been educated, 
 is that of a critical age. It might have been possible 
 to Lord Macaulay in the 19th century ; it could hardly 
 have been entertamed by Lord Bacon in the 16th, — 
 a century not of criticism but of self-confident asser- 
 tions. WHiat Bacon could see was the undoubted fact 
 that the ancients had done almost nothing to promote 
 our power over external nature. His verdict was one- 
 sided ; but from one side it was correct. The Greeks 
 speculated about everything ; Init the positive results — 
 r, — XIV. B 
 
18 Francis Bacon. 
 
 such results as were the mam object of his pursuit — 
 which they arrived at iu physical science, may be re- 
 corded in a few pages. 
 
 The laws of number and form taught by Pythagoras, 
 and soon expanded into a system that is still the basis of 
 Geometry, do not properly belong to physics. Astron- 
 omy is the most ancient of the sciences, because it 
 relies so much on calculations that call for no experi- 
 ment. Its mathematics had made great progress almost 
 before the question of its physics — i.e., the consideration 
 of the forces that regulate the movements of the heavenly 
 bodies — had been started. It began with the first concep- 
 tion of times and seasons. The alternation of light and 
 darkness marked the day, a slight exercise of memory 
 the year, the phases of the moon the month. The course 
 of the sun through the zodiac seems to have been fixed 
 by the Egyptians about 2500 B.C., and eclipses arrested 
 attention from remote antiquity. Early observation dis- 
 tinguished the revolution of the constellations from the 
 dance of the " seven wanderers." Pythagoras identified 
 Lucifer and Hesperus ; he himself or Philolaus, or an- 
 other of his followers, asserted the motion of the earth 
 round a central fire. The most poetic representation of 
 the Pythagorean universe is found near the close of the 
 * Republic ' : but the astronomical part of tlie ' Tim?eus ' 
 is a retrogression ; for while Plato's view of the diurnal 
 revolution of the earth is uncertain, he makes it the 
 centre round which the fixed stars, as well as the 
 planets, revolve — those within our orbit in one direc- 
 tion, those without in another. He, however, dis^ 
 tinctlx_ asserts the spherical form of our globe, and in 
 one passage remarkably anticipates the medieval ob- 
 
Ancient Astronomy. 19 
 
 jectioii to the antipodes ; ^ though he runs off from the 
 tiutli to a series of phantasies regarding " kindred ele- 
 ments," eVrc. Aiistotk^, with all his more definite research, 
 made in this direction no further progress. Meanwhile, 
 as contributions to geographical knowledge, Anaximander. 
 had constructed the first maj), Anaximenes the first dial ; 
 [ and the zones, still retained in our nomenclature, had 
 i been marked. Later, the irregularities of the planets 
 eluding the simple hypothesis of opposite directions, the 
 fiction of epicycles was introduced to reconcile them 
 with the postulate of circular motion, which kept fast 
 its hold on astronomy till the time of Kepler ; Eudoxus 
 and Calippus multiplied those imaginary spheres. Hip- 
 parclms_(fl. J[6p_B.c.) added the conception of an eccen- 
 tric — or cii'cle revolving round a body displaced from 
 the centre — -discovered the precession of the equinoxes, 
 constructed lunar __and solar tables, catalogued the stars, 
 and supplemented the geometry of Euclid by treatises 
 on trigonometry. }£is conclusions were extended, and 
 apparently verified, by the calculations of Ptolemy 
 (fl. 150 A.D.), whose 'MrJytcTTT; o-wra^cs,' the Arabic 
 "Almagest," became the canon of the Ptolemaic, or 
 more properly Hipparchian system, which remained prac- 
 tically unshaken for 1500 years. Ptolemy has the credit 
 of admitting that the circles, which in the popular fancy 
 had come to be regarded as substantial sources of the 
 " sphery chime," were mere geometrical expressions, on 
 tlie basis of which a theory could be constructed to 
 
 1 " Sucli being the nature of the worhl, when a person says that any- 
 thing is above or below, may he not be justly charged with using an 
 iniproper expression ? for the centre of the world cannot be rightly 
 called either above or below, Init is the centre and nothing else." 
 
20 Francis Bacon. 
 
 resolve into uniformity all the previously observed 
 phenomena of the heavens. 
 
 The story told of Pythagoras and the liammers and 
 weights indicates an acquaintance with the tone of 
 musical notes, as depending on the length of the chords, 
 which established Harmonics on something like a 
 scientific basis. This application of the same ratios to 
 the planetary distances, and of abstract mathematical 
 theories to botli, reappears, with hardly less freedom from 
 half-mythical and wholly fantastic conceptions, after an 
 interval of 2000 years, in the first cosmological theories 
 of Kepler. Further than this, the Acoustics, as the 
 Optics of the Greeks, rest on the assumption of emis- 
 sions and transmitting media, or species sensibiles appro- 
 priate to the ear or the eye, — an assumption founded on 
 the maxim that all change implies contact, conspicuous 
 alike in the speculations of the Stoics and Epicureans, 
 accepted equally by Bacon and the Cartesians, and 
 Imgering in Newton himself. Aristotle was aware of 
 the fact that light proceeds in straight lines ; but his 
 investigations were arrested by premature theories of 
 its cause. Euclid discovered the equality of the angles 
 of incidence and reflection, and Ptolemy recognised, and 
 attempted to measure, the law of refraction. Greek 
 Mechanics and Hydrostatics almost begin and end 
 with Archi medes (290-212 B.C.) Previous to his time 
 their progress liad been stopped by false views as to 
 the nature of force, pressure, and motion. He was 
 the first to form a clear conception of a centre of 
 gravity, and from it deduced the correct theory of 
 the steelyard, and came near the solution of tlie 
 problem of tlie lever. Realising the conditions of a 
 
Greek Physics. 21 
 
 Ixtily ill Avliich pressure is transferred from one to 
 all its parts, lie made use of the calculation of specific 
 gravity in his celebrated analysis of the Crown ; and 
 enunciated the law hy which a narrow column of fluid 
 balances abroad column of the same weight, — afterwards 
 so long forgotten, that, on its revival, it was called " the 
 hydrostatical paradox." Neither Statics nor Dynamics 
 made any further advance till the time of Leonardo da 
 Vinci, and no continuous progress till that of Galileo. 
 Bacon himself, in his practical knowledge of them, fell 
 behind Archimedes. The definite attainments of the 
 Greeks in the more complex sciences of Meteorology, 
 Biology, Chemistry, Szo,., are confined to the observation 
 of a few elementary facts, and the hazarding of a few 
 often higlily suggestive conjectures. In these have been 
 found the germs of the Nebular and Darwinian and 
 Copernican theories, of the doctrine of chemical affinities ; 
 of the discovery of sex m plants^ as well as animals ; of 
 the belief in the indestructibility of either matter or 
 force ; of the transmutation and correlation of forces, 
 and the resolution of qualitative into quantitative dif- 
 ferences. But if discoveries deserve the name only 
 when they have been proved, the best of these guesses 
 nuist be regarded as finger-posts to future investigation. 
 In one department, a true physical principle seems to 
 have been laid down with practical results. The 
 initial aphorism of the ^ Novum Organum ' is curiously 
 anticipated in the assertion of Hippocrates (whose re- 
 
 ' For an extension of tliis list, and a general criticism of Greek 
 Physics, I refer to Dr Whewell's 'History of the Inductive Sciences,' 
 and to Professor Jowett's Introduction to the 'Timwus/ vide 'Dia- 
 logues of Plato,' vol. iii. pp. 577-595. 
 
22 Francis Bacon. 
 
 puted date makes liim the junior of Socrates and senior 
 of Plato) that the physician must be vir-qpir-q^ ^vtrcw?. 
 Galen, 600 years later, quotes this expression Avith 
 approval as the key-note of the system of the " divine 
 old man," who refused to attribute diseases to the 
 wrath of tlie gods, and largely relied for their cure on 
 the "vis medicatrix naturae." The same disciple adds 
 that Hippocrates was a more faithful student of nature 
 than Aristotle, and that his method had been infringed 
 by later empirics. But however fruitful may have been 
 the maxim of the father of medicine, the subsequent 
 assertions of the 'Timasus' regarding the composition 
 and action of the human frame exliibit the most 
 primitive and crude physiology. 
 
 How little has Greece bequeathed to us in the way of 
 physical discovery ! How little has been added to the 
 pure speculation of the Greeks ! There is no more re- 
 markable contrast of sterility and luxuriance. To explain 
 it is to repeat in yet more modern form much of Bacon's 
 criticism of the ancient thinkers. If we ask why, during 
 those active centuries, there were no thinkers alile to 
 apprehend and willing to apply the principles on which 
 a fruitful investigation of Xature depends, we may answer 
 that there are eras which seem to admit of the exercise 
 of thought only in one direction. AVe may associate 
 the dawn of philosophy with the ardour of a child 
 putting questions the answers to which he cannot 
 understand, — inventing toys and dreaming dreams ; 
 we may draw an analogy between its full developments 
 in Greece and the metaphysics of youth, and compare 
 the growth of practical science to the entrance of man- 
 hood into life. But some more definite reasons for 
 
Theory and Practice. 23 
 
 the contrast, of Avliich the following are the chief, may 
 l)e assigned : — 
 
 1. In our minds. Theory and Practice suggest each 
 other. Science is in advance of Art : the head waits 
 for the hands. Consequently, it seems strange that 
 the ancient artists and inventors so rarely realised the 
 simplest of the principles of which they so success- 
 fully availed themselves. There is, how^ever, no need, 
 as Bacon sometimes inclines to do, to imagine a lost 
 science in order to account for this ; for the empirical 
 knowledge which is enough for Art — the use of dials, 
 levers, pulleys, the wine-press, and the still — often pre- 
 cedes Science by centuries. All the resources of the 
 inclined plane must have been employed on the Ppa- 
 mids ; its principle, unknown to Bacon, was first demon- 
 strated by Stevinus (fl. 1620). The class of those who 
 discover is still somewhat distinct from that of those 
 who apply their discoveries. In the days wdien specu- 
 lation did not feel honoured by being put into practice, 
 the classes were quite distinct. Lord Macaulay inclines 
 to exaggerate the claims of immediate utility. Plato, 
 oppositely, censures those who think of mensuration, 
 navigation, or agriculture in their pursuit of astron- 
 omy, the object of wdiicli should be "not to note the 
 stars, but to understand the revolutions of the celestial 
 spheres." Every step in the ladder of knowledge should, 
 he maintains, be an approach, not to axioms that are to 
 redescend in fruits, but to the conversation of the mind 
 with itself, the end of which is the vision of truth. 
 In this spirit he is rumoured to have reproached 
 Archytas for his machines, as Seneca long after defended 
 Democritus from the charge of inventing the arch. 
 
24 Francis Bacon. 
 
 and Archimedes, inspired by wliat Bacon calls '' deliciae 
 et fastus matheniaticomm," is said to have been half 
 ashamed of his own inventions. There is a point of 
 vieAv from which Plato's arguments have force, but it is 
 not that of physical science ; and while his views pre- 
 vailed, theory and practice naturally remained apart. 
 
 2. ^Yliile the Greeks thus lacked the spur of one of the 
 most powerful motives to the attainment of physical truth, 
 they were led astray by a misconception of its nature. 
 They looked upon law as an idea rather than as an exter- 
 nal uniformity or sequence : hence they imposed their 
 reflections on the world, and concluded " potius ex 
 natura hominis quam universi." They thought that all 
 the oppositions of the mind had a real existence, and 
 in their search for correspondences often wandered in 
 the air. The pioneers of generalisation — to whom Bacon 
 has hastily conceded an instinct for research — had not 
 reached the stage of scepticism. Like the poets, from 
 whose myths their speculations sprung, they hardly took 
 time even to observe nature, but placed figments behind 
 her shows, and thought they exjDlained them. AYater, 
 Air, and Fire are with them mere watchwords of a wish 
 to force unity on variety. Their attempt to solve all 
 the secrets of the universe was a bar to real discovery, 
 as it was to Bacon, who stretches out hands to them over 
 the abstractions of 2000 intervening years. Thales 
 noticed the powers of the magnet, but was content 
 with the assertion that it had "a living soul." He had 
 a notion of the expansion of water, as Anaximenes had 
 of the rarefaction of air, but neither touched on the 
 properties of steam or the gases. The theories of Lord 
 Monboddo and the ' Vestiges of Creation ' were super- 
 
A-priori JIdhods. 25 
 
 ticial precursors of l^arwiu's, based on iiiadeciiuile facts 
 acquired Ly rumour. The cosmogonies of Anaximander 
 and Empedocles were similar theories, based on no facts 
 at all. lleraclitus spoke of avaOvfXLaa-iq with no more 
 stud}' of the laws of evaporation than guided Herodotus 
 when he spoke of the sun draicinfj the waters of the 
 Xile. The Atomic philosophy is said to have been 
 suggested to Leucippus, not by any analysis, but by 
 a contemplation of the ^lilky AVay. 
 
 3. Eacon is never done descanting on the futility 
 of the method of the Greeks. In the so-called "pure 
 sciences," dependent on more or less obvious deductions, 
 they excelled ; but they failed wherever more complex 
 phenomena required to be selected, tested, and sifted by 
 a legitimate process of induction. That all men, in all 
 ages, have practised induction, is a truism; but Macaulay, 
 by a notorious ignoratio eleneJu, confounds induction 
 as an art of life, and the Inductive Method as a scien- 
 tific process. Of the latter the ancients had no well- 
 defined perception. They accumulated often consider- 
 able stores of facts, but without any clearly conceived 
 design. Herodotus, Democritus, and Aristotle were all, 
 in a sense, great observers ; and it has been duly 
 acknowledged that the latter, at least, bestowed great 
 pains on arranging the results of his observation : 
 according to Dr \Yhewell, his ' N^atural Histories,' have 
 seldom been surpassed in comprehensiveness of classi- 
 fication ; but, as the same critic has shoAvn, he failed 
 equally with his predecessors in applying to facts the 
 appropriate ideas required to weld them together, and 
 suggest or elucidate a law. Socrates taught the neces- 
 sity of search for the true connecting link in Ethics : 
 
26 Francis Bacon. 
 
 Plato applied tlie same principle to Metapliysics, 
 Aristotle to Politics ; but it never descended to Physics, 
 which remained under the control of notions "temere 
 a rebus abstractce," and incapable of definition. The 
 early philosophers would not wait for knowledge to be 
 unfolded by degrees. In the speculations of the Ionics, 
 mythical cosmogonies are mixed with misinterpretations 
 of mechanical, dynamical, and chemical facts. Hence 
 they were content to derive organisation and life from 
 fluids and solids of which they did not know the 
 primary properties, and form theories of universal force 
 Avithout realising the facts of either motion or inertia. 
 They made one step in analysis, and stopped ; e.g.^ no 
 sooner had the notion of the four ^ elements been 
 started than they were accepted as dogmas, hold- 
 ing somewhat the same position in physical as the 
 four causes do in metaphysical speculations. Pythag- 
 oras having seized on the idea of number, mapped out 
 the universe according to a pre-established theory of 
 ratios, and made geometry the dictator rather than the 
 servant of the sciences. Similarly, Plato refers truth to 
 inspiration rather than to discovery. It is, he says in 
 the ' Philebus,' " a gift of the gods to man sent by some 
 Prometheus in a blaze of light ; and the ancients, more 
 clear-sighted than we, handed doAvn this doctrine that 
 Avhatever is said to be, comes of the one and the many. 
 We must therefore endeavour to seize the one idea as 
 
 1 Aristotle cliaracteristically deduces them from tlie qualities of 
 touch ; hot, cold, wet, and dry. Setting aside the impossible com- 
 bination of hot and cold, he asserts that the union of hot and wet is 
 =air^ as in steam; of hot and dry=^re; of cold and wet=wrtto'y 
 of cold and i\.xy=earth; and assigns to each " its own place " in the 
 order of ascension — earthy water, air, and fire. 
 
A/yumait versus Experiment. 27 
 
 tlie cliief point." AVo may compare this with Aristotle's 
 dictum in the introduction to liis 'Physics': "AVe should 
 proceed from what is known to Avhat is unknown — i.e., 
 from tlie universal to the particular," and contrast these 
 canons with the first aphorism of the ' Novum Or- 
 ganum,' or with Galileo's scorn of the paper philosojihers, 
 who studied nature like the Iliad and Odyssey through 
 a collation of texts, or with his famous sentence, '' Phil- 
 osophy is written in that great book — I mean the uni- 
 verse, constantly open before our eyes ; but it cannot be 
 understood except we first know the language and learn 
 the characters in which it is written." For want of 
 this initiatory study or a sense of its iiecessity, the 
 Greeks were satisfied to rest in ideas indistinct and 
 ambiguous, and their research was lost in generalisa- 
 tion before they had learned to spell in the book of 
 the universe. 
 
 4. *' There are," says Roger Bacon, " two methods of 
 knowing — by argument and by experiment." In argu- 
 ment the Greeks remain unsurpassed, but the uses of 
 experiment were to them almost unknown, and hence 
 their ignorance of the sciences that rely for their initial 
 steps on analysis. The assertion in the ' Timaeus,' — " God 
 only is able to compound and resolve substances ; such 
 experiments are impossible to man," — was a bar to Chem- 
 istry more rigid than the later interdict of " Dominican 
 or Franciscan licensers" on the progress of Astronomy 
 or Geologj'. Where reflection and calculation sufficed, 
 as in merely formal Astronomy, the ancients made con- 
 siderable way ; where experiment was required, they 
 stood stiU, They had hardly any instruments to work 
 with but language and logical forms, and to the fallacies 
 
28 Francis Bacon, 
 
 which these are apt to engender they became a ready 
 prey. Many of Plato's arguments and more of Aristotle's 
 criticisms seem to ns to turn on words. Both agi'ee in 
 thinking there is something gained in the mere tautology 
 of referring heat, cold, and motion to a primum calidum, 
 prwium frigidum, and xwimum mobile: both are cap- 
 tives to the mental dichotomy that, ranging all " things in 
 heaven and earth" into such pairs as Knowledge and 
 Ignorance, One and oMany, Odd and Even, ]\Iotion and 
 Rest, Being and I^ot Being, Atoms and Vacancy, ]\Iind 
 and Chaos, Matter and Form, Power and Act, in reality 
 dropped a curtain over the real arena : both — the one 
 "contingens cuncta lepore," the other with the glitter 
 of his formulae — lead us often through the same wood, 
 and, after more wanderings than those of Spenser's 
 Knight, back to the same entrance. It is owing to 
 a recurring confusion between facts of consciousness 
 and facts of sense that so much of Plato's reasoning 
 seems to us to move in a circle; and to his being 
 hampered by the tyranny of a x*riori ideas crowned 
 and fenced that Aristotle could often be satisfied with 
 such flimsy solutions as these : — 
 
 " There is no void ; for there is no difference of up and 
 down in nothing, and there must always be up and down." 
 " The continuous is best, the best must always be." " ICotion 
 along the earth, being violent, ceases ; motion down, being 
 natural, increases." " The earth is composed of the noblest 
 matter which has three dimensions, for three is the most 
 perfect number : of it we say first, beginning, middle, end." 
 " A man bends when he rises because a right angle is con- 
 nected with equality and rest." " The powers of the circle 
 are wonderful ; but it is nothing absurd if something won- 
 derful is derived from the wonderful. The combination of 
 
Cause and Effect. 29 
 
 (ipposites is womlerful. The circle is composed of a station- 
 ary point and a moving line, of a convex and a concave, 
 — these are opposites and wonderful." "The simple ele- 
 ments have simple motions : the circular ^ motion of the 
 heavens cannot be unnatural ; it must come from a fifth 
 element, the quintessence." 
 
 These are random examples of the manner in which 
 technical terms, galvanised into a show of life, intruded 
 themselves into physics with preconceptions of proper and 
 improper, strange and common, natural and unnatural, 
 up and down, — conceptions alien to their sphere and 
 fatal to their progress. One of these errors so rooted as 
 to claim special note Avas the belief that all things to 
 which the same name^ was given must be essentially 
 alike. Another arose directly from the metaphysical 
 view of the relation of cause and effect maintained by 
 the Greeks. They imagined that an effect in nature 
 gave the law or force in kind ; that the cause was of the 
 same form as the effect ; whereas the effect, as far as 
 we see in Physics, gives no indication whatever of the 
 kind or species of its law. Causes, as mental forces, 
 are early objects of consciousness in self - reflection ; 
 but effects alone are objects of consciousness, or 
 rather of observation, in the study of external nature. 
 For the first traces of this presumption of resem- 
 blance we have again to revert to the Ionic School, 
 where we find prominent the idea of likeness betweeii 
 
 ^ Eighteen hundred years after we find Copernicus liimself still 
 partially possessed Ijy the same idea. "We must," he says, '-con- 
 fess that the celestial motions are circular or compounded of several 
 circles, since their inequalities observe a fixed law and recur in value 
 at certain intervals, which could not be unless they were circular, 
 for a circle alone can make that which has been recur again." 
 
 - An error iuto which Bacon has fallen in his discussious on Heat. 
 
30 Francis Bacon. 
 
 an element and a compound that prevailed all through 
 the middle ages. It lies at the root of the Homoio- 
 mereia of Anaxagoras, and the Xoyoi cnrepiiaTLKOL of the 
 Stoics, and lingers in the cosmology of the Atomists. 
 Aristotle's explanation of the round form of a luminous 
 spot thrown by the sun, and his misinterpretation of 
 the lever power, on the ground that the circle with the 
 widest radius had more force, are instances of the fal- 
 lacy. On the same principle, all fiery appearances in 
 the sky Avere classed together as meteors ; and the 
 scheme of the revolution of the spheres was devised. 
 It reappears in Galen's assertion that man's body must be 
 of various elements, else he would never fall sick. It 
 was revived in the chemical theories of Phlogiston, and 
 though refuted by known facts of chemical,^ magnetic, 
 and electrical affinity, till lately lingered in the popular 
 notion of Caloric. 
 
 The history of any one of the sciences demonstrates 
 how hard it is to shake off inajDpropriate ideas once 
 attached to them. It would have required a strong 
 impulse, in a direction toward which they never turned, 
 to dismiss the fallacies of method and aim so firmly 
 grafted on the whole j^hysical speculation of the 
 Greeks. The Eomans, the Latin poets, Cicero, and, 
 in the main, the Stoics of the empire, echo the errors 
 of their masters; but they added a greater confidence 
 in progress, some faith in the future. The later 
 Stoics have been accused of inclining to materialis- 
 tic views ; they may be credited with a partial return 
 to Mature, and an attempt to reconcile theory and 
 
 1 In modern science the Heraclitean TrdAejaos narrip vavTai' seems to 
 have decidedly prevailed over the rival rubric bfiolov o/xotw. 
 
Seneca s rredictions. 31 
 
 practice in their interpretation of ^rjv Kara (fiva-iv. 
 Seneca is eonspicuous hy his profession of a r(;verence 
 for Physics. T^nliko Socrates in this respect, and follow- 
 ing Aristotle's (lictnni tliat there are many things in the 
 universe greater than man, he exalted natural above 
 human studies, on account of their suhlimity. His 
 ideal of ethics was the calm standard of " that great 
 republic of gods and men, in which Ave measure our 
 city by the course of the sun." A Lucretian with a 
 Stoic mask, his maxim was, " I live according to Xa- 
 ture if I am her admirer and worshipper." Nowhere 
 in antiquity is the forward - stretching glance of the 
 panegyrist of James more nearly anticipated than in 
 these sentences of the servile tutor of Nero : — 
 
 " It is not yet 1500 years since Greeks reckoned the stars 
 and gave them names. There are still many nations who 
 are ac(|uainted with the heavens by sight only, who do not 
 know why the moon disappears. The day shall come when 
 the labour of a maturer age shall bring to light what is yet 
 concealed. We have just begun to know how the shows of 
 morning and evening arise. Some one will hereafter de- 
 monstrate in what region the comets wander. Let us not 
 wonder that what lies so deep is brought out so slowly. 
 Many things are reserved for a time when our memory shall 
 have passed away. The world would be a small thing if it 
 did not contain matter of im^uiry for all the world. Eleusis 
 reserves something for the second visit of her worshipper. 
 Nature does not at once disclose all her mysteries. We 
 think ourselves initiated ; we are but in the vestibule." i 
 
 Science had to wait another 1500 years before the 
 promise was fulfilled. Yet, amid the intervening Avars 
 of Avord and creed, some of the conceptions \Adiich have, 
 ' Dr Whewell quotes this from 8eu., 'Questioues Nat.', vii. 25. 
 
32 Francis Bacon. 
 
 during the last three centuries, borne hixuriant fruit, 
 were silently growing up — 
 
 " Crescit occulto velut arbor sevo ; " 
 
 and there were thrown forth, in the shape of vague con- 
 jectures, ideas which the latest developments of science 
 seem tending to confirm. Great truths often dawn 
 upon the mind long before they can be fully under- 
 stood ; or they come like a mirage in shadowy form. 
 Some of the earliest thinkers seem to have attained, 
 as it were through inspiration, the last truths of phy- 
 sics, but it was by the wrong road — the road of meta- 
 physics. They reached the point at which the two 
 meet, but by a premature anticipation of the goal 
 from the start, and they did nothing to fertilise the 
 long track between. 
 
33 
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 THE DARK AGES. 
 
 The same causes which retarded progress on one side 
 during tlie ages of antiquity had the same benumbing 
 effect on those immediately succeeding, and there were 
 added new bonds. It is a mistake to suppose that 
 authority has no control over thought ; for to impose 
 limits on its expression is to cbive it to solitude, in- 
 ertia, decay, and this was for more than a thousand 
 years the ban placed on the human mind. 
 
 Towards the close of the second century of our era we 
 have summed up, in Galen, Ptolemy, and Marcus Aure- 
 lius the last records of original speculation on the ancient 
 lines ; but the twilight, after the setting of the sun, 
 lingers for three hundred years longer in the mystic 
 eclecticism of Alexandria and the Christianised Stoi- 
 cism, which heard its swan -song in Boethius. The 
 Xeo-Platonists supplied a link between the old and 
 new Astronomy (a tradition prevails associating Hypatia 
 with the first European observatory) ; but their theories 
 were made valueless by a constant confusion of thought 
 with learning, of knowledge with tradition, of inspiration 
 with sentiment. Boethius studied the sciences in the 
 
 p. XIV. c 
 
34 Francis Bacon. 
 
 spirit of Plato : he dwells with special emphasis on the 
 music of the spheres, and urges the smallness of the 
 earth, as compared Avith the heavens, as an argument 
 against vainglory ; but his method was that of a strict 
 Aristotelian, commenting reverentially on the ' Organon ' 
 and Pori^hyry's Predicables, accepting as an axiom the 
 distinction of form and matter, and strenuously assert- 
 ing the authority of formal logic. In this blending 
 of two systems, and his distinctly expressed belief in 
 genera and species as entities, he is the forerunner 
 of the Realism of the middle ages. 
 
 The period from 250-550 A.D. is that of the most 
 famous of the Fathers, of the early Saints, of the Arian 
 and Athanasian wars, and of the first of the great 
 Councils of Christendom, — all hostile to the growth of 
 independent inquiry, and concurring to stifle the pro- 
 gress of mental as of physical research. " It is," says 
 Eusebius, " through contempt of science that we turn 
 our souls to better things." Tertullian is even more 
 resolutely opposed to the secular learning which Lac- 
 tantius openly denounces as false and shallow ; and even 
 St Augustine ^ imagines himself to refute the belief in 
 the existence of the antipodes by the fact that no such 
 race is mentioned in Scripture. 
 
 The Emperors of the age allied themselves with the 
 same obscurantism. Constantine, fresh from his politic 
 
 1 Augustine, however, alone among the Church authorities, seems 
 to have had a glimmer of the future conflict, and shows his desire to 
 avert it in the caution : "A Christian should beware how he speaks 
 on questions of natural philosophy, as if they were doctrines of Holy 
 Scripture, The opinions of philosophers should never be proposed 
 as doctrines of faith, or rejected as contrary to faith, Avhen it is not 
 certain that they are so." 
 
Inflitencc of the Church. 35 
 
 conversion, closed the schools, dispersed the libraries, 
 and allowed science to be branded as magic ; while 
 Julian, whose love of nature was merely artistic, as re- 
 actionary on the other side, wished to interdict the 
 Cliristians from the pursuit of studies that might 
 be perverted to support their heresies. It has been 
 said that Justinian, in banishing the later seven 
 sages from Constantinople to the Court of Chosroes, 
 "dug the grave of Greek philosophy." Charlemagne, 
 Alfred, and our Norman knigs, were patrons of the 
 scant culture of their respective reigns ; and Frederick 
 II. of Germany established a new centre of polite 
 learnmg in his Sicilian Court : but the Caliphs were the 
 sole throned promoters of science down to the time of 
 Alphonso of Castile. The history of thought during 
 the dark ages is mainly the history of the Church. In 
 the sixth century her struggle for existence was succeeded 
 by imperious claims to supremacy, only held in check by 
 the secular and national resistance of the Plantagenets, 
 Capets, and Hohenstauffens. Hildebrand established a 
 universal court of appeal, and dispensed to monarchs 
 their right to rule. The candle that had been carried 
 warily through the catacombs was now exalted on the 
 shrine. 
 
 It is admitted that civilisation owes to the medieval 
 Church a debt difficult to overstate. Her Popes fostered 
 the early arts, her monasteries were the repositories of 
 books, and the use of the Latin language, preserved in 
 her ceremonials and her controversies, helped to bridge 
 the gulf between two worlds. But these influences were 
 injuriously exclusive ; they gave a single bent to ener- 
 gies that might have otherwise expanded with the variety 
 
36 Francis Bacon. 
 
 of life, and gagged the free development of thought. 
 The price mankind had to pay for a partial enlighten- 
 ment Avas the sacrifice of its birthright to look beyond a 
 fixed horizon. Under this paternal government all study 
 had a preordained result — not truth, but orthodoxy ; and 
 the faithful had to enter the kingdom of St Peter's " as 
 a little child." Dogmatism grew more and more intol- 
 erant of philosophy and afraid of science. The licensers 
 of the intellect discouraged familiarity with the classics, 
 and encouraged the superstitions that had the effect of 
 threats on a fenced and guarded ignorance. The old 
 manly Periclean virtues, di/Spcta, oroicjipoa-vvr}, o-o^ta, and 
 SiKatoa-vvrj, were rej^laced by the spectres, chastity, 
 humility, and obedience, which the monks and friars 
 were supposed to represent, and the knightly orders 
 were theoretically enlisted to enforce. The duration 
 of this period of tutelage has been roughly marked 
 by Hallam in speaking of Nicholas V. " How strik- 
 ing the contrast between this Pope and his prede- 
 cessor, Gregory I. ! These eminent men, like Michael 
 Angelo's figures of Night and Morning, seem to stand at 
 the two gates of the middle ages, emblems and heralds 
 of the mind's long sleep, and of its awakening." This 
 somewhat sweeping generalisation ignores the rehearsal 
 of the Eenaissance under Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer, 
 in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries — a period 
 almost as fertile in invention as in fancy; but it 
 indicates the limits on either hand of ecclesiastical 
 absolutism. 
 
 We must not, however, fail to note that, even in the 
 soundest sleep of the dark ages, there were premonitory 
 dreams. Gregory's missionary zeal was an incentive 
 
Aufjlo-Saxoii Cidturc. 37 
 
 to the cultivation of literature in the provinces. The 
 early luminaries of the Anglo-Saxon Church, not con- 
 tent to be mere commentators, ventured with some free- 
 dom to record their views of the universe. Among these, 
 Aldhelni is said to have been skilled in the liberal 
 sciences ; and that Alcuinjs entitled to the same j)raisc 
 is shown by his account of the teaching he received in 
 the school of Bishop Egbert at York. At a later period 
 of his life, as the preceptor of Charlemagne, he taught 
 (782 A.D.) at the^chool of St ^lartin at Paris on the 
 following rule : "To some I administer the honey of 
 the Sacred Writings; others I try to inebriate with 
 the wine of the ancient classics. I begin the nourish- 
 ment of some with the apples of grammatical subtilty. 
 I strive to illuminate many by the arrangement of the 
 stars, as from the painted roof of a lofty palace." This 
 may seem a somewhat bombastic flourish of the rudi- 
 ments of the trivlum and qmidrivimn, — 
 
 " Lingua, tropus, ratio ; numerus, tonus, angului^, astra," — 
 
 which it was in the power of Alcuin to impart or in that 
 of his disciples to receive ; but it shows that, even under 
 the lengthening shadow, the ancient traditions of culture 
 had not died out, and that the desire to explore the 
 secrets of nature still survived among the early scholars 
 of our Ultima Thule. Similarly, Joannes Scotus Eri- 
 gena, in his Christianised Platonic dialogue, speaks of 
 primordial causes, types, or forms in language nearly 
 applicable to physical laws, and discourses on the heav- 
 enly bodies with some knowledge of Astronomy. His 
 guesses in psychology and physiology recall those of 
 Anaximander and the ' Timseus,' and his whole specu- 
 
38 Francis Bacon. 
 
 lation is pervaded hj the idea of man — with his four- 
 fold life, corporeal, vital, sensitive, and rational — as a 
 microcosm of the macrocosm, which, frequently recur- 
 ring in after-ages, is so conspicuous in Bacon. 
 
 The period that followed down to the middle of the 
 thirteenth century is generally regarded as the lowest 
 ebb time of European thought ; but the darkness was 
 never complete, and during this era the intellectual 
 activities of the West received a new stimulus from an 
 unexpected source. It was the golden age of Saracenic 
 literature, — of Haroun-al-Raschid, Jaafir al Mansur, and 
 Al Mamun ; of the Abassides at Bagdad, the Fatimites 
 in Egypt, and the Ommiades in Spain, who, in their re- 
 spective capitals, collected libraries, instituted schools, 
 constructed observatories, and, preserving many import- 
 ant monuments of Greek literature that, during the de- 
 cline of the Roman Empire, threatened to be forgotten, 
 gave them a new though somewhat mutilated life. In 
 the tenth century, students from all parts frequented the 
 schools of Cordova and Seville, and brought back and 
 diffused over France and Italy a knowledge of Algebra 
 (of which science Gerbert, Pope Sylvester II., M^as con- 
 spicuously a master), of rudimentary Chemistry, and of 
 the philosophy of Aristotle, whose works had been trans- 
 lated from Greek or Syriac into Arabic, and from 
 Arabic into Latin. The influence of this learning is 
 visible in our literature down to the close of the six- 
 teenth century. 
 
 The amount contributed by the Arabians to the pro- 
 gress of science has been variously estimated, but it may 
 be admitted that, in the interval from the date of Ptol- 
 emy to that of Leonardo da Vinci, they did more than 
 
Arabic Science. 39 
 
 any others to keep alive sometliing like a scientific spirit. 
 In Astronomy, though generally adherents of the Hip- 
 parchian system, they deduced from its data some new 
 conclusions, as — the mensuration of the earth by the ris- 
 ings and settings of the stars ; the discovery of the disc 
 and apogee of the sun, and the enlargement of the Ptole- 
 maic tables by Albategni (850-929) ; the discovery by 
 Aboul Wefa, 975 a.d., of the variation or 3d inequality 
 of the moon ; "while Alpetragi, in his ' Planetarum 
 Theorica ' (a book translated by Michael the Scot, and 
 referred to by Eoger Bacon), proposes to supersede the 
 Ptolemaic system by a theory of spirals, in some respects 
 comparable to that of the "Thema Coeli." Alhazen 
 seems to have made considerable progress in Optics, 
 and Omar El Aalem to have been the first to devote 
 a distinct treatise to the sea. On a freer field the 
 Arabs made a more decided advance, which they turned 
 to an important practical purpose in their schools of 
 medicine. As early as the middle of the eighth cen- 
 tury, Geber, who may be regarded as the father of chem- 
 istry, laid do^vn the principle adopted by Bacon as the 
 key to man's work as the minister of nature. The fol- 
 lowing sentence is one of the most striking, though per- 
 haps the most neglected, of the anticipations in the his- 
 tory of thought : " Similiter et metalla non mutamus ; 
 sed natura, cui secundum artificium materiam prsepara- 
 mus : quoniam ipsa per se agit, non nos, nos vero ad- 
 ministratores illius sumus." But Geber probably failed 
 to follow his maxim to its consequences ; and his true 
 titles were soon obscured by the cloudy fame of super- 
 natural power. After two dead centuries, chemistry 
 was revived l)y Avicenna (978-1037), and associated 
 
40 Francis Bacon. 
 
 with the system by the exposition of which he, availing 
 himself of their results, superseded Hippocrates and 
 Galen. To this remarkable man, whose genius has been 
 referred to as the most comprehensive of his nation, is 
 in great measure due the canonisation of those Aris- 
 totelian studies initiated by Alfarabi of Bagdad, and 
 the imposition of a new authority on the mind of ages 
 ready to accept it. The reproach, as far as it is so, of 
 living in an " age of Faith," of substituting quotation 
 for thought, obedience for inquiry, applies to the Arabs 
 equally with their foes on the field of arms and contro- 
 versy : they had none of the modern progressive spirit, 
 or the audacity of the Eenaissance. On the side of 
 religion, they were bound as strictly by the Koran as 
 their Christian contemporaries by the creed of the 
 Fathers. On the side of logic, they in a like spirit 
 accepted Aristotle. There seems to have been in early 
 Islam little trace even of the veiled protest that occa- 
 sionally appears in the early ages of the Church. If 
 there was any tendency in the East to the assertion of 
 more real freedom for thought, it was, in the later 
 years of the eleventh century, arrested by Algazel of 
 Bagdad, who, after searching through the schools in 
 vain for certitude, and finding reason as deceptive as 
 the senses, fell back in despair on a view like that of 
 Lactantius that philosophy was " the patriarch of all 
 the heresies," wrote a treatise entitled ' Destructio Philo- 
 sophorum,' and sought refuge in the sentimental inspira- 
 tion and ascetic life of the Soufis. This reactionary 
 influence was, in the next age, only partially counteracted 
 by AvERROES (1120-1190) the most noted of the Spanish 
 Arabians, a physicist as well as a metaphysician, whose 
 
Mysticism. 41 
 
 cflbrts to defend and restore the Aristotelian methods — 
 in his liands soniewliat incongruously associated with 
 Neo-Platonic emanations — appear to have met with a 
 more favourable reception from Jews and Christians 
 than from his own fellow-religionists. 
 
 The growth of Arabian ^ and of all medieval science 
 was retarded by timidity, and by the Mysticism that 
 tends to recur in every age. Eooted in impatience of the 
 slow methods of genuine research, the desire to find short 
 cuts to great results, and the wish to enliven hard facts 
 Avitli a glow of feeling, it is most natural in the child- 
 hood of nations and of men, but it lingers in the man- 
 hood of both. Francis Bacon, in the midst of his con- 
 stant protests against it, constantly lets us see its influence 
 over a mind at every turn constrained to accept from the 
 past a repudiated inheritance {vide infra). His OAvn 
 image of the early seekers after the philosopher's stone, 
 the universal solvent, and the elixir vitae, conveys a 
 true criticism ; in digging for gold they ploughed the 
 land. But for centuries their work was marred, and 
 its useful results retarded, by two causes. Ignorant of 
 distinctions, they, in their premature desire for universal 
 knowledge, confounded together even the shadows of 
 science they were pursuing, mixed up fact and fable, 
 mythology and meteorology, associated moral with physi- 
 cal qualities, sought for perfection among the metals, 
 and a millennium in the discovery of their " magisteries." 
 They found a mystic relation between gold and Apollo, 
 silver and Diana, quicksilver and jMercury, iron and jNIars, 
 
 1 For a further account of the Arabian philosophy, vide Renan, 
 'Averroes et 1' Averroisme ; ' also Lewes, 'History of Philosophy,' 
 vol. ii. pp. 38-62. 
 
42 Francis Bacon. 
 
 lead and Saturn, tin and the Devil, and, so, often merely 
 sowed and reaped the air. 
 
 The other cause lay in the prejudice which the often 
 pretentious claims of these erratic pioneers naturally 
 excited in an ignorant age. The unripe fruit which 
 they plucked from the tree of knowledge was regarded 
 as forbidden, and hardly one among them escaped the 
 charge,^ sometimes followed by severe practical conse- 
 quences, of unhallowed dealing in the black arts. It 
 has been observed that in dark periods and among 
 rude peoples superior powers are apt to be the butts 
 of hatred and fear. On the minds of those assailed 
 this had a twofold result ; it led to the practice among 
 the more cautious thinkers of expressing themselves in 
 occult phrases, of conveying the secrets ^ of which they 
 fancied themselves possessed, in enigmas intelligible only 
 to an initiated few, thus restricting the range of their in- 
 fluence : it misled the more rash or daring into them- 
 selves believing or asserting the truth of the allegations 
 against them. The same perverted pride which, in much 
 later times, often brought reputed witches to the stake, 
 
 1 Among the conspicuous reputed magicians of the dark and middle 
 ages were Geber, Gerbert or Sylvester II., Grostete, Albertus Mag- 
 nus, Arnold of Villanova, Raymond Lully, Roger Bacon, and Picus of 
 Mirandola. Similarly Virgil is represented in the ' Gesta Romanoruni' 
 as a conjuror, and Thomas the Rhymer was accepted as a wizard. 
 
 - The interval between the tAvelfth and sixteenth centuries is 
 studded with books of secrets — e.g., Vincent deBeauvais's ' Speculum 
 Quadruplex,' c. 1250, belonging to the next century, though even the 
 'Speculum Majns' was not published till 1473 ; Bartholomew Glan- 
 vill's ' Properties of Things ' ; Levinus Lemnius's ' De Miraculis 
 Naturce,' published c. 1600 ; the ' Biljliotheca Universalis ' of Con- 
 rad Gesner, 11. 1516-1565 ; the works of Don Alessio Ruscelli and 
 Polydore Vergil, fl. 1520 ; the ' Secreti Diversi ' of G. Falloppio, c. 
 1550 ; and the ' Magia Naturalis ' of Giambatista Porta, 1538-1615. 
 
The Schoolmen. 43 
 
 tempted men like jSTichael the Scot and Paracelsus to 
 confess to the superhuman knowledge of "which they 
 were accused. When the accusation remained a mere 
 popular cry, it might be despised; but when it was 
 countenanced by authority, it became formidalile. 
 
 ^leanwhile the Church had made good its claim to be 
 regarded as a patron of learning, though in bonds, by its 
 part in the foundation ql the universities, of which, in 
 the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, those of Bologna, 
 Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and Padua were the chief, 
 and by its countenance of the Scholastic Philosophy. 
 Sir "William Hamilton and German commentators have 
 done something to realise the wish of Leibnitz for the 
 extraction of the scattered particles of gold in abandoned 
 mmes ; and ]\Ir Maurice has warned us against contempt 
 of those who, under fetters, yet ruled the serious thought 
 of their time. But when due deference has been paid 
 to the men on whose shoulders we are sometimes raised, 
 we may still assert with Bacon that the schoolmen mis- 
 took subtilty for wisdom, and divided their ingenuity 
 between questions impossible to answer, and others not 
 worth raising. 
 
 IMuch that seems to us barbarous in their language, 
 and futile in their distinctions, may have been due to a 
 confused terminology not inconsistent with logical acute- 
 ness ; but their fundamental error lay in an idea of 
 Science more false than that of the ancients. The 
 schoolmen were not a body held together by any com- 
 munity of sect : on the few open questions they were 
 often ranged on different sides, but they were at one in 
 worship of an authority which, having accepted, they 
 Avere resolved to impose. In their age, it has been said, 
 
4:4: Francis Bacon. 
 
 " speculative men became tyrants without ceasing to be 
 slaves ; to the character of commentators they added 
 that of dogmatists ; " and they employed the exclusively 
 deductive method that has been noted as marking a 
 stationary period. Their psychology was crude, and in 
 all their writing that in any way relates to physics, 
 the human mind seems to be reacting its infancy. 
 M. Cousin has drawn special attention to the theologic 
 origin of their philosophy. Scholasticism, " the labour 
 of thought in the service of faith," emerging out of 
 mythology as Greek speculation emerged from myth- 
 ology, had its origin under Charlemagne, who estab- 
 lished in episcopal sees monasteries and convents, the 
 schools out of which the thought of the age devel- 
 oped. Of this preliminary period, characterised by 
 the influence of conceptions partially Platonic, Joamies 
 Scotus struck the note in his dictum : " There are not 
 two studies, one of philosophy the other of religion ; 
 true johilosophy is true religion, and true religion true 
 philosophy." But, as a recognised method, scholasticism 
 more properly dates from the later years of the eleventh 
 century, when William of Champeaux began to teach at 
 Paris, and thereafter manifested itself in three main stages. 
 I. 1070-1200, when philosophy was still a mere ad- 
 junct of theology, and the more rigid of the churchmen, 
 as St Bernard, opposed it. The considerable names of 
 this era are those of Roscelin and Anselm, who, in start- 
 ing the controversy of JN'ominalism and Realism, reopened 
 the ever-recurring debate as to the relation of sense and 
 ideas ; of Abelard, illustrious ^by his popular eloquence 
 and originality; and of Peter Lombard, who, in the 
 ' Book of Sentences,' in which he laboured to recon- 
 
Eras of Scholasticism. 45 
 
 cilo the apparent contradictions of tlic Fathers, was 
 regarded as the authoritative expositor of a distinct 
 scholastic tlieory. 
 
 II. 1200-1300. This era is that of the dominance of 
 Scholasticism, when philosophy and theology began to 
 meet on more eciual terms. It is marked by encyclo- 
 paedic systems as imposing as the cathedrals under the 
 shadow of which they grew, by the charters granted 
 to tlie imiversities, and by the missionary zeal of the 
 friars Avho, at its close, received their apotheosis in 
 Dante's Paradise. Two of these — Thomas Aquinas the 
 Dominican, and the Franciscan Duns Scotus — though 
 agreed as advocates of Eealism, were the protagonist 
 disputants of their age. At a slightly earlier date, 
 Albertus Magnus was among the first to vindicate the 
 imwieldy genius of Germany by forty-one folios of mul- 
 tifarious erudition, in wdiicli he expounded Aristotle and 
 Avicenna, and, in emulation of the former, tried to gather 
 all knowledge into an organic whole. Like his model, 
 he recognised Logic as a science of method distinct from 
 Physics and ^Metaphysics ; but while admitting that we 
 must start from Physics, he made their study wholly 
 subservient to the ontology which was to him, as to his 
 compeers, the absorbing pursuit. 
 
 III. 1300-1450. In this era we have the beginning 
 of a separation between dogmatism and inquiry, ending 
 in the birth of modern philosophy. It is introduced by 
 Occam, who, a pupil of Scotus, subsequently opposed 
 his master's views, supplanting them by the modified 
 form of Xominalism since generally accepted. He at- 
 tacked " the representative theory " of perception, still 
 held throughout the seventeenth centuiy, and applying 
 
46 Francis Bacon. 
 
 his " razor," — " entia non multiplicanda sunt praeter ne- 
 cessitatem," — logically cut the ground from the more fan- 
 tastic forms of Eealism. Though Scholasticism survived, 
 according to some critics, till the death of Thomas a 
 Kempis, it lingered only in decline after the invincible 
 doctor had won his victory for the heterodox party in 
 the Church. Occam was the last of the great school- 
 men notable among them for his championship of the 
 political against the ecclesiastic power, " Tu me defendas 
 gladio ego te defendam calamo," which made him, like 
 WyclifFe, his younger contemporary, in some degree a 
 precursor of the Eeformation. 
 
 During those periods of controversies so keen that 
 they inflamed persecutions, about matters so trivial that 
 they provoked the timid satirists of submissive times, 
 the authority of the Church was divided with that of 
 Aristotle : to men's prescribed relations to both might 
 have been applied the motto, " credo ut intelligam " ; 
 and the revolution of thought that shook the one over- 
 threw the other. This strange alliance between a form 
 of Clu'istianity which relied for the sanction of its de- 
 crees on the hopes and fears of another world, and a 
 philosopher who, to all practical intents denied their 
 validity, is a riddle that can only be resolved by 
 reference to the dominating love of system in both 
 of the contracting parties. For some time it met with 
 a strenuous though intermittent resistance. The lead- 
 ing churchmen were at first suspicious of arguments 
 which had, with equal emphasis, been employed in 
 defence of the Koran ; and their early attitude to- 
 wards the Arabian gift was " Tinieo Danaos " ; but, in 
 the thirteenth century, the Friars and their followers 
 
Early Protests. 47 
 
 agreed to baptise the reasoning tlicy were imable to 
 refute ; and succeeded in conducting it, through adverse 
 decrees of popes and councils, to an influence the latter 
 were constrained to conciliate.^ It is characteristic of the 
 reverential attitude towards the ancient teacher that the 
 earliest assailants of Scholasticism arraigned it, not on the 
 ground of slavish adherence to his methods, but of misus- 
 ing them. Thus John of Salisbury, though an admiring 
 pupil of Abelard, sarcastically protests against the time 
 wasted by his instructors on trivialities that " left him 
 no wiser," and upbraids them for neglect of the demon- 
 strative sciences — a neglect he attributes to the mis- 
 translation of those parts of Aristotle's works that re- 
 lated to physics. The real cause lay in their being alien 
 to the spirit of an age when it was possible for his con- 
 temporary, Peter of Blois, to define mathematicians as 
 " those who, from the position of the stars, the aspect 
 of the firmament, and the motions of the planets, dis- 
 cover things that are to come." Those early reclama- 
 tions are interesting as unconsciously prophetic. Scho- 
 lasticism bore somewhat the same relation to modern 
 metaphysics that Alchemy did to Chemistry. The one 
 opened the way for the other, and, amid many unprofit- 
 able disputes, started under the masks of grammar and 
 
 1 Vide Launoy on the "Various Fortunes of Aristotle in the Uni- 
 versity of Paris." In 1209 his works were prohibited on the ground 
 of heresy ; in 1215 his Logic was again publicly taught ; in 1231 his 
 Natural Philosophy and Metaphysics were proscribed by Gregory IX. 
 In 1250 Frederick II. had several of his treatises translated from Greek 
 and Arabic, and recommended to the University of Bologna. Alber- 
 tus and Aquinas almost canonised him, and throughout the four- 
 teenth and fifteenth centuries he remained sui)reme ; and, in the 
 sixteenth, Francis I. appointed judges to condemn Ramus for his 
 assaults on the authorised Logic. 
 
48 Francis Bacon. 
 
 logic those great problems that still divide the followers 
 of Descartes and of Locke. But this intellectual 
 giadiatorship did nothing to dispel popular ignorance. 
 The crowds that flocked to hang on the lips of Abelard, 
 or to draw the triumphal car of Duns Scotus into 
 Cologne, were, in practical matters, little instructed by 
 being told that morality is in the intention, not the deed, 
 or that an individual is Peter because his humanity is 
 combined with Petreity. They left " none the wiser " 
 for the weaving and unweaving of Penelope's web, the 
 Lilliputian disputes about hoeceity and quiddity, where 
 Physic of Metaphysic begged defence in vain. The 
 schoolmen were ambitious to construct a Cosmos, but 
 they could only follow in the steps of predecessors 
 as insensible as themselves to the need of experience 
 and the uses of experiment. As early as the twelfth 
 century, Eichard of St Victor had declared, almost 
 in the words of the 'Kew Organum,' that "Physical 
 Science ascends from effects to causes, and descends 
 from causes to effects ; " but his mere declaration 
 bore no fruit. Towards the close of the period Peter 
 Lombard is no further advanced than St Augustine 
 or Bede, The precession of ideas set forth by Aqui- 
 nas is that of Plato, probably through Averroes; his 
 six articles of corporeal action are a 2^^'^ori conclu- 
 sions ; the list of seven mechanical arts given by Bona- 
 ventura (1221-1274), though interesting, is emjDiric ; 
 the species of Scotus are transferred with little modi- 
 fication from the Peripatetics. The current opinions 
 of an age when few laymen could read or write, were 
 behind those of the contemporaries of Socrates. Most 
 men who thought on the matter at all believed the 
 
Foimlar Ignorance. 49 
 
 earth to bo flat/ that there could be no antipodes be- 
 cause they woukl fall away, and tliat the heavens were 
 sustained on a material floor. The elements of science 
 imported from the East by Gerbert, Adelhard of Bath 
 (the first European translator of Euclid), Kitello of 
 Poland, who adopted the principles of Optics from 
 Alhazen, and others, together with the numerous iso- 
 lated inventions of the thirteenth century (as clocks, 
 astrolabes, and the mariner's compass), but slightly 
 afl'ected the prevailing ignorance. Kor were the Arts 
 in which the age excelled of more avail; for, as in 
 Greece, they were divorced from theory, and perhaps 
 the noblest structures that have been reared in stone 
 were put together without a knowledge of the first 
 principles of mechanics. While the facades of Amiens 
 and Cologne "were bemg carved, and the minster towers 
 of Ely built, and the foundations of the Duomo at 
 Florence laid, the masters of the guild, whose work is 
 still the wonder of the world, were being instructed in 
 Aristotelian phrase that "gravity is a motive quality 
 arising from density and bulk, by which the elements 
 are canied down," and that " the moistness of water is 
 controlled by its coldness, so that it is less than the 
 moistness of air." 
 
 1 There are a few traces of more advanced views — e.g., Dr Whewell 
 instances a work of the reign of Edward 11. , the ' Ymage dii Monde,' 
 which, versifying the Ptolemaic system, represents the earth as a 
 round body from whose cii-cumference figures are dropping halls that 
 meet in the centre. He compares with this Dante's account of the 
 passage from the bottom of the abyss where Lucifer is seen with legs 
 reversed, and the explanation that follows : — 
 
 " Thou ditlst surpass 
 Tliat point from which to everj' point is dragged 
 All heavy substance." 
 
 r. — XIV. p 
 
50 Francis Bacon, 
 
 The few encyclopaedic ^^Titings of those ages in which 
 keen-eyed antiquarians find foreshadowings of physical 
 discovery, — notably the famous ' Speculum ' (naturale, 
 morale, doctrinale, et historicale) of Vincent de Beau- 
 vais, a heterogeneous mass of learning and super- 
 stition, remained for long either unpublished or 
 practically inaccessible ; while the universities were 
 (with the exception of Bologna devoted to Law, and 
 Montpellier to INIedicine) almost wholly scholastic. 
 Their teachers left the mass of their pupils as Chaucer 
 describes them ; they canonised Duns Scotus and ban- 
 ished Eoger Bacon ; their care was not to find but to 
 decree ; less to prove than to assert. Whetstones of 
 logical razors, they thought little of the ends on which 
 Francis Bacon, perhaps in his turn too exclusively, 
 insists. They regarded mundane researches as the 
 "dim uncertain lights" of the 'Eeligio Laici' — 
 
 " Inque domes superas scandere cura fuit." 
 
51 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 THE MIDDLE AGE. 
 
 Long unfulfilled reforms have not unfrequently been, in 
 outline, prophesied by exceptional thinkers, formally 
 belonging to sects in the main conservative — thinkers 
 of whom EoGER Bacon of Ilchester (12U-1292) 
 is a conspicuous type. This illustrious man, the 
 most enlightened, before Leonardo da Yinci, among 
 the intellectual predecessors of a namesake from whom 
 he received scant justice,^ was a Franciscan friar, 
 regarded as the Doctor Mirabilis of the age, to whose 
 obscurantist zeal his work -svas largely sacrificed. 
 But he had no sympathy w^ith the methods of 
 his fellows, and, save in a few relics of superstition, 
 no communion with their prejudices. A KSchoolman 
 merely in name, he was as distinctly the first consider- 
 able physicist as Dante was the first great poet, or 
 Petrarch the first highly cultured critic of modern 
 Europe. This relation to the future herald of inductive 
 science has been compared to that which, a century 
 
 1 Mr Ellis doubts if Francis had seen the ' Opus Majus,' We leave 
 our readers, on any other hypothesis, to explain the coincidences 
 between it and the 'Novum Organuni,' 
 
52 Francis Bacon. 
 
 later, AVycliffe bore to Luther, and some of his positive 
 attainments were further in advance of liis time than 
 those of his great successor. He was, by all accounts, a 
 fair Greek and Arabic scholar, while the barbarity of 
 his Latin was shared by his contemporaries. 
 
 A theoretical musician, geometrician, and geographer,^ 
 he stumbled upon many of the leading laws of optics, 
 astronomy, chemistry, and mechanics, and his safe repu- 
 tation for logical acumen was only eclipsed by the dan- 
 gerous fame of his inventions.^ Eoger Bacon, as a 
 philosophical experimentalist, was an almost solitary 
 " bee " among " spiders and ants " ; but he is still more 
 remarkable as the first who recorded the modes of legiti- 
 mate investigation in the realm of nature. His great 
 inauguration of reform, the ' Opus ^lajus,' ^ the record of 
 a design to lay down the lines of a new '' Eatio inveni- 
 endi," abounds in anticipations of the ' jS^ovum Organum.' 
 
 1 Mr Speddiug has called attention to the interesting fact that 
 Pedro de Alliaco, in the 'Imago Mundi' (a.d. 1410), translated a 
 passage from Eoger Bacon suggesting the possibility of reaching to 
 the Indies by sailing to the west. Columbus is known to have been 
 familiar with this book, and impressed by it. 
 
 2 Dr Whewell enumerates among these the invention of gunpowder 
 (though an earlier reference to it has been supposed to be made in au 
 Arab MS, of a.d. 1249, and it is elsewhere attributed to a German 
 monk, Berthold Schwartz, 1320), of an improved clock, of lenses and 
 burning-glasses, and a telescope. The last is, however, doubted by 
 Hallam. Bacon also corrected the calendar, and gave an account 
 of the source of the colours, form, and apparent position of the rain- 
 bow, arriving at his result by an early use of the methods of agree- 
 ment and difference, characterised by Whewell as *' a most happy 
 example of experimental inquiry into nature. " 
 
 3 This work was dedicated to the author's patron, Gregory IV., 
 and sent, by request, to the Pontiff on his accession, which fixes its 
 date 1265. It remained unpublished till 1733, but was widely cir- 
 culated in MS. 
 
Eoycr Bacon. 53 
 
 In hotli works there is the saiiic exposition of the 
 causes of error in the past, the same exhortation to rely 
 on experience and experiment, the same faith in the 
 future of science,^ the same attempt to illustrate precept 
 by example^ and a like blending of confidence and 
 humility, the latter perhaps finding a finer expression in 
 the words of the elder writer : " Man is incapable of 
 perfect wisdom ; ... let him not boast or extol his 
 knowledge. "What he knows is little to what he takes 
 on credit, less to that of which he is ignorant. He is 
 mad who thinks highly of his wisdom, most mad who 
 vaunts it as a w^onder." 
 
 Part I. of the 'Opus Majus,' setting forth the four 
 sources of ignorance — the irrational sway of unverified 
 authority, the force of custom and habit, the oj)inion 
 that is misguided by mere sense - impressions, and the 
 false pride of fancied omniscience — nearly corresponds 
 to the treatment of the " Idola Theatri," " Specus," and 
 "Tribus" in the 'Organum.' The "Idola Fori" are 
 the theme of Part III., which, devoted to the study 
 of language as "one of the roots of knowledge," 
 handles the question, especially in reference to deriva- 
 tions and combinations of words, in a manner that, ac- 
 cording to Professor Max Miiller, does honour to the 
 philology of the 13th century. Eoger Bacon is more 
 rarely than Francis led astray by verbal ambiguities, and 
 his etymologies are generally more correct. In Part IV. 
 of his book, devoted to mathematics, he shows his 
 
 1 " The later men are, the more enlightened they are ; and Avise 
 men now are ignorant of much the Avorld will some day know," 
 is Roger Bacon's equivalent for, "The old age is the youth of the 
 world." 
 
54 Francis Bacon. 
 
 greater familiarity^ with that "door and key of the 
 sciences," and a better appreciation of the part it had 
 to play in advancing as well as formulating discovery. 
 Part y. is a dissertation on Optics, in which the phe- 
 nomena of reflection and refraction are clearly stated, 
 and the theory of the transmission of light and heat 
 by species, in which Bacon may have been confirmed by 
 his studies of Avicenna, is adopted. Part YI., the final 
 section of the work, is devoted to an exaltation of 
 *' Experimental Science," which, using a term familiar 
 to readers of Book II. of the later ' Organum,' has, he 
 announces^ three Prerogatives : 1. It tests the conclu- 
 sions of observation, as illustrated by his analysis of the 
 phenomena of the rainbow ; 2. It makes discoveries 
 which the other sciences cannot arrive at unaided, 
 under which head, showing himself still affected by the 
 traditions of Alchemy, he brings the arts of prolonging 
 life and of making gold ; 3. It, by its own power, dis- 
 plays the secrets of nature. 
 
 A remarkable feature of the ' Opus ]Majus ' is the 
 space devoted to a sketch, in the spirit of more recent 
 times, of the progress of early speculation from Thales to 
 Aristotle. In his references to the last, Eoger Bacon 
 again suggests a comparison with Francis by his apparent 
 inconsistency. Toward the end of the historical sur- 
 vey, he treats his predecessor with even more than the 
 respect accorded to him hi the ' De Augmentis,' regret- 
 ting the period during which his works were buried, 
 
 1 All science, he contends, requires mathematics, which, being the 
 simplest and most certain, engaged in a sphere where yvwpt/iwTepa 
 «/»v(rei are also yvtupi/xwrepa r)tJ.lv, and intuitively apprehended, is properly 
 prior to those more complex and difficult. Cf. Comte's Classification 
 of the Sciences. 
 
The ' Opus Majus: 55 
 
 before tliciu resuscitation by the Arabians : but he 
 protests against his decisions being final ; and, in the 
 course of the discussion on hxnguage, expresses him- 
 self Avith a vehemence equal to tliat of the 'Tem- 
 poris Partus Masculus.' " Si habereni potestateni 
 supra libros Aristotelis, ego facerem omnes cremari : 
 quia non est nisi temporis amissio studere in illis." 
 That this, however, is rather a protest against the bad 
 translations of " the philosopher " than a judgment 
 on his work, aj^pears from a passage at the close, 
 declaring that, "as Aristotle by his wisdom gave Alex- 
 ander^ the kingdom of the world, so if prelates and 
 princes would encourage study, and join in searching 
 out tlie secrets of nature and art, the Church would be 
 able more readily to triumph over Antichrist." The 
 glory of God and the advancement of man's estate are 
 set together as the goals of the new road from a new 
 starting-point in the ' Opus Majus ' (the second part of 
 which is devoted to the sacred sources of wisdom), as in 
 the ' Instauratio ^Nlagna.' 
 
 Devout aspirations are no safeguard against the risks 
 of enlightenment in an unenlightened age. Eoger 
 Bacon was the first in modem, as Anaxagoras in an- 
 cient times, to be publicly prosecuted for a philosophic 
 heresy. 2 In both instances the attack may have been 
 urged by political causes. The Greek, it is said, was 
 accused of Medism ; the English friar had abetted his 
 friend Bishop Grostete, in resistance to the extortions of 
 
 1 Aristotle and Galen are similarly compared to Alexander in a 
 posthumous work of William Gilbert (1603), wlio thus handed on 
 the image to Francis Bacon. 
 
 - The martyrdom of Hypatia was an assassination l)y a moh led by 
 a fanatic, and that of Boethius was wholly political. 
 
56 Fra7icis Bacon. 
 
 Innocent IV. But both assaults protest against physical 
 explanations of phenomena hitherto cherished as super- 
 natural. The ancient and modern thinker alike affronted 
 prejudice in a matter which could be understood. When 
 Parmenides summed his view of the material world 
 in " seeming, seeming," the masses — 
 
 " Kccfpoi b[xu)S Tv<pXoi t6 Te0e7roT6s aKplra <pv\a " — 
 
 remained as indifferent as they afterwards were to the 
 disputes between the Thomists and Scotists ; but Avhen 
 Anaxagoras ventured to refer Jupiter's bolts to the 
 friction of the clouds, or the elder Bacon, four cen- 
 turies too soon, to suggest an imitation of thunder, 
 the one was arraigned for impiety, and the other 
 denounced as a magician. Eumours, set afloat it may 
 be by jealousy, were accepted by ignorance, — that 
 strange noises were heard in the laboratory at Oxford, 
 that it was haimted by evil spirits, that the chemist 
 had sold himself for the gold of which he professed to 
 have the secret. His books were prohibited, and he 
 was himself thrown into prison, — " incarceratus sum," 
 he quaintly remarks, "propter incredibilem stultitiam 
 eorum cum quibus agere habui," — where he seems to 
 have lingered several years, till influential intercession 
 obtained his release. Bacon was encouraged by the 
 countenance of Clement TV. ; but, on the death of that 
 potentate, there was no one left able or bold enough to 
 recognise the importance of his investigations, and the 
 good seed fell among sand or was choked by thorns. 
 Perhaps the most accurate of all the anticipations in 
 the history of scientific method had no permanent influ- 
 ence on an age of clouds too dark to be pierced by the 
 
Raymond Lullij. 67 
 
 " lucida tela diei " ; and the ' 0i3us Majus ' had to give 
 ^vay to the ' Summa Theologiie.' The fate of their 
 authors in the memories of men and in literature is 
 curiously contrasted. The Master Scholiast is enshrined 
 in the ' Divina Commedia ' as the foremost of the lambs 
 of Dominic ; the real discoverer was as late as the close 
 of the sixteenth century classed, in the farce of Greene, 
 with Friar Bungay, as a vulgar necromancer. 
 
 Another name of nearly the same age appears with 
 a more shadowy renown. While Eoger Bacon was a 
 student at Oxford, ^Iichael the Scot was prosecuting, 
 with only inferior success, similar researches at the Court 
 of Frederick II. Especially distinguished in natural 
 history, he translated Aristotle's works in that depart- 
 ment, and was celebrated for his skill in Astronomy and 
 ]\Iedicine ; but he mixed up those true sciences with 
 their mirages. Astrology and Alchemy, and his fame as a 
 sorcerer has obscured his reputation in philosophy. At 
 a slightly later date, in the south of Europe, Arnold 
 OF YiLLANOVA became known for a wide miscellaneous 
 learning, and speculations associated with his medical 
 pursuits : while Raymond Lully, a native of Majorca, 
 set forth a new system of acquiring and arranging 
 knowledge that obtained for its author a scarcely 
 merited celebrity. This once notorious mystic, wan- 
 derer, and charlatan, claims mention as having, with 
 a glimmer of the Renaissance spirit, ventured to ques- 
 tion the authorised methods of his age ; but he offered 
 nothing substantial in their place. The 'Ars ]\Iagna,' 
 revealed to him in answer to j^rayers addressed to heaven 
 in a crisis of revulsion from a dissolute life, is rather the 
 record of a new excitement, made attractive by the im- 
 
58 Francis Bacon. 
 
 aginative audacity of a vague ambition, than a rational 
 system. The illumination of LuUy is like that of the 
 Neo-Platonists, but more superficial. His universals are 
 assumed : e.g.., he asserts that the Predicables and Cate- 
 gories came to him by insi^iration in a ray out of chaos, 
 and from these he draws, by a purely geometrical method, 
 his few intelligible conclusions. He seems to have taken 
 his Cabbalism from the Arabians, whom he proposed to 
 convert ; while his tables and trees of science are mere 
 catalogues of previous facts or fancies recombined by a 
 mechanical jDrocess. Leibnitz says his manner of using 
 machinery for mental labour might be convenient in 
 speaking from shorthand notes ; but it suggests the de- 
 vices of the philosophers of Laputa rather than the for- 
 mally accurate grinding organs of j\Ir Jevons. Francis 
 Bacon may have been unconsciously influenced by the 
 now long - forgotten fame of the ' Great Art ' in his 
 scheme of ciphers to represent thoughts and things ; 
 but he repudiates Lully's fancy that real knowledge can 
 be attained by logical legerdemain, and condemns his 
 system in one of his justest censures as "a method of 
 imposture," which " scatters about little drops of science 
 in such a manner that a smatterer may make ostentatious 
 use of them with a certain show of learning. . . . The 
 art of LuUy consisted in nothing but a mass and heap of 
 the words of each science. . . . Such collections are like 
 a rag-shop, where you find a patch of everything, with 
 nothing that is of any value." This Xeo-Spanish mystic 
 dogmatism, in spirit and method, had many aftermaths 
 in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and even seventeenth centuries, 
 but with Eaymond Lully the early reforming movement 
 of the thirteenth may be said to have set in clouds. 
 
The Fourteenth Century. 59 
 
 The flower seasons of literature are not always identi- 
 cal with those of the fruitage of science. The fourteenth 
 century, the age of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer, 
 was rife not only in material but in mental Avars ; it 
 was the age of the great English victories over France, 
 of Eienzi, of the early prime of the Venetian and 
 Florentine republics, of the Lollard forecast of the 
 lieformation, of the insurrections of the Jacquerie and 
 Tyler — ominous though far foreshadows of the Eevolu- 
 tion, — and of the Schism in the Papacy, from the results 
 of which the temporal power of St Peter's never wholly 
 recovered. But this period is the dead age of science. 
 For more than a hundred years nothing was done, or even 
 suggested, to forward any branch of j^hysical research, 
 and the solitary advances in man's knowledge of the 
 external world were the often challenged reports of the 
 travellers ]\Iarco Polo and MandevilJe. The ban upon 
 Eoger Bacon's books seems to have imposed itself on 
 all Europe during the whole of this interval of reaction, 
 and men turned back from experiment to reasoning and 
 Aristotle. The darkness was first broken by a cluster 
 rather than a series of events which, in the middle of 
 the fifteenth century, acted in concert to stir as well 
 as to widen the minds of men. The same j^ear, 1453, ! 
 saw the expulsion of the English from France, the 
 capture of Constantinople by the Turks, and the pub- 
 lication of the Mazarin Bible. The first event, the 
 final close of harassing' Avars that had absorbed the 
 energies of two nations, left each more free to de- 
 velop its own material and intellectual resources. The 
 art of Printing opened a new world, multiplying a 
 hundredfold memories of the past and hopes for the 
 
60 Francis Bacon. 
 
 future. The surveillance wliicli the hierarchy, even 
 under so enlightened a Pope as Nicholas V., still im- 
 posed on books was gradually relaxed, and in the later 
 years of the century the weapons were forged that 
 were wielded in the strife of the Eeformation, while 
 the postulates of the sciences were revised, and their 
 foundations relaid on firmer bases. The result of the 
 siege of Constantinople, dispersing the remnants of the 
 Greeks, brought into Western Europe, through Italy, a 
 new class of ideas. Scholasticism proper was in its 
 death-throes ; but Aristotle, more correctly understood, 
 still held sway over thought, when newly revived 
 studies opposed a rival authority, that of the whole 
 range of the classics. " A spark of freedom," says 
 Gibbon, "was produced by this collision of adverse 
 servitude." The first stages of the revival of Platonism 
 did comparatively little for the instauration of science, 
 which remained in abeyance to the cultivation of the 
 Arts, fostered by the free activity of the small Italian 
 States. A protest against bad style took precedence 
 of the protest against false methods ; but the spirit of 
 revolt in the air soon began to show itself in definite re- 
 sults. Nicholas of Cusa on the Moselle (1401-1464), 
 a Cardinal of the Church, was the first of his age to 
 oppose to the Aristotelian dogmatism the Socratic 
 yvw^t o-cavToV, as a pohit of departure for a new Pla- 
 tonic synthesis. The following sentence from his 
 ' De Docta Ignorantia ' again takes uj) the thread of 
 the ' Opus Majus ' : "If the case be so — that in things 
 most manifest by nature there is a difficulty, no less 
 than for an owl to look at the sun ; since the appe- 
 tite of knowledge is not implanted in us in vain, we 
 
Humanism. 61 
 
 ought to desire to know that we are ignorant. At- 
 taining to this, we arrive at indnided ifjnorcmce.^' 
 
 This writer is tlie earliest modern who distinctly 
 records his adherence to the heliocentric theory, and 
 asserts, without qualification, the motion of the earth : 
 " Jam nobis manifestum est terram in veritate moveri." 
 But it was an assertion without the proof of Copernicus, 
 another hypothesis opposed to that of Hipparchus. The 
 humanists, as well as the schoolmen, had their pedantry, 
 but it was more elastic ; and the form of the dialogue 
 into which their discussions were thrown gave more 
 opening to the j^resentation of various views. Among 
 the authors of an age of various activities, Leo Baptista 
 Alberti (1404-1472), painter, sculptor, architect, and 
 optician, endeavoured in his works, theoretic and prac- 
 tical, to promote the interests of a wide-ranging culture ; 
 while Laurentius Valla, classic and critic, led the assault 
 against Aristotle. During the same period (when the 
 surge of ^N'ominalism and Eealism was still seething, and 
 Louis XI. of France felt called on to take a side in the 
 controversy), Eudolph Agricola (1443-1485) was endeav- 
 ouring to perform the same service for Germany ; while 
 Joannes MuUer of Konigsberg^ (Eegiomontanus) made 
 more definite contributions to science (1436-1476) by 
 the advancement of Trigonometry, and a more accurate 
 registration of the positions of the sun and moon. 
 
 Meanwhile the " Platonic Academy," founded at Flor- 
 ence by Cosmo and matured by Lorenzo de IMedici, 
 gave the impulse of a central authority to studies, the 
 results of which Marsilius FicIxVUS (1433-1499), court 
 translator and commentator, helped to diffuse. His 
 1 Muller also adopted tlie view of the earth's motion. 
 
62 Francis Bacon. 
 
 rendering of Plato is generally accurate and in good 
 Latin. The same judgment has been passed on the con- 
 temporary version of Aristotle's 'Physics' by Hermo- 
 LAUS Barbarus^ (1454-1495), a student of philosophy 
 and science, who is, however, mainly remembered as the 
 legislator of his age in matters of style. The philosophy 
 of Ficinus is eclectic and mystical, and, in the manner of 
 his time, he attempted in his Avork, ' De Concordia Pla- 
 tonis et Aristotelis,' to reconcile incongruities ; blending 
 the arcana of the Cabbala with the illuminations of 
 Plotinus and the emanations of Averroes, though he 
 diverged from the last in his vindication of the doc- 
 trine of personal immortality. The love of mystery^ 
 which pervaded this and a later period (popularly repre- 
 sented in the plays now beginning to prelude the rise of 
 the regular drama), fuids expression, side by side with 
 traces of a more scientific spirit, in several encyclopsedic 
 thinkers and investigators of the century — as Purbach, 
 Eipley, Bartholomew Glanvill, and the shadowy figure 
 of Basil Valentine, reputed discoverer of antimony, — 
 at once alchemists and genuine chemists, whose works 
 (despite the fantasies by which they are partially ob- 
 scured) are important links in the history of mental 
 and material progress. 
 
 The influence of those thinkers, conspicuously of Fi- 
 cinus, is manifest in the youthful and versatile genius of 
 
 1 H. Barbarus seems to have been the first {vide his controversy 
 with John Picus of Mirandola) to express disgust at the Latin of the 
 schoolmen. His proposal to establish an artistic censorshijo of books 
 is in our days worthy of consideration. 
 
 2 For a concise statement of the main forms which this exhibited 
 at the close of the middle ages, vide Hallam, ' Lit. of Europe,' vol. i. 
 pp. 199-202. 
 
riatonism. 63 
 
 John Picus of Mirandola (1463-1494). To a preco- 
 cious knowledge of languages lie added a familiarity 
 with the learning of the schools, as then taught in the 
 Italian and French Universities, that emboldened him in 
 1486 to maintain nine hundred theses on all known 
 questions, "mathematical, physical, magical, and cab- 
 balistical," in the manner of the Aristotelian wit-com- 
 bats, in which students of the church and law were still 
 exercised. But the spirit of his philosophy is l^eo- 
 Platonic. In anticipation of Eacon's 'De Sapientia 
 Veterum,' his habit of reading allegories into the Scrip- 
 tures, and searching for hidden meanings in other real 
 or spurious sacred books, set a fashion of interpreta- 
 tion not wholly extinct ; and he allowed himself to be 
 persuaded that the remote Greeks, as well as the He- 
 brews, shadowed forth recondite truths under the veil 
 of mythological fancies. With him Cadmus, Medea, 
 and Jason, Danae, Ganymede, and Daedalus, the Sphinx 
 and the Chimaera, were types of modern discoveries and 
 research, as palpable as the " types " of Gospel history 
 in the Old Testament. Picus is associated with the 
 alchemists by the fact of his having written a treatise 
 on gold. Eeferring to his reputation among his con- 
 temporaries, a generally severe modern critic admits that 
 he was justly regarded as the phoenix of his age ; but 
 his range in fields of knowledge so various was in excess 
 of his originality in any, for to no branch of Science has 
 he made any distinct contribution. 
 
 A longer life had already, at the date of jMirandola's 
 death, made manifest the greater powers of the man 
 whose name is by universal consent the foremost of 
 the fifteenth century. Leonardo da Vinci has long 
 
64 Francis Bacon. 
 
 been recognised as the rival of Michael Angelo and 
 Eaphael. It is only of recent years that the pub- 
 lication of his writings has made him known as at 
 once a theoretical reformer and a practical man of 
 science. " These writings," says INIr Hallam, " accord- 
 ing at least to our estimate of the age in which he lived, 
 are more like revelations of physical truths vouchsafed 
 to a single mind than the superstructure of its reasoning 
 upon any established basis. The discoveries ^ which 
 made Galileo, and Kepler, and ]Majstlin, and Maurolycus, 
 and Castelli, and other names illustrious, the system of 
 Copernicus, the very theories of recent geologers, are 
 anticipated by Da Yinci within the compass of a few 
 
 1 Among these discoveries his Italian editor Veuturi refers to the at- 
 tainment, and in most instances the establishment by proof, of correct 
 theories («) in Mechanics, of — the equilibrium of the lever under 
 the action of oblique forces ; friction and resistance ; the influence 
 of gravity on bodies in repose and motion ; the descent and ascent of 
 bodies on inclined planes ; the relation of initial force to speed, and 
 of the motor power of machines to the weight of the bodies moved : 
 [h) in Optics — the camera obscura ; the laws of perspective; the 
 nature of coloured shadows ; the figure of light from the sun (which, 
 vide ante, baffled Aristotle, and was afterwards explained by Mauro- 
 lycus) ; the movements of the iris, and the duration of visual impres- 
 sions : (c) in Hydraulics, he anticipated the observations of the astro- 
 nomer Castelli on moving waters : and {d) in atmospheric Chemis- 
 try demonstrated that respirable air must support flame: (e) in 
 Astronomy, he distinctly assumes (in a treatise of 1510) the annual 
 rotation of the earth, and refers to it as a common opinion of his time ; 
 he found before Mffistlin that the obscure light of the unilluminated 
 part of the moon is due to the reflection of the earth, and knew of 
 the elevation of the equatorial above the polar waters : (/) In Geology 
 he had advanced so far as not only to assert, but, on grounds of 
 modern reasoning, to demonstrate, that the sea had once covered the 
 tops of mountains on Avhich shells had been discovered. Leonardo, 
 theoretically as well as practically, understood and wrote well on 
 fortification, architecture, and the art of painting. 
 
Leonardo da Vinci. 65 
 
 pages — not, perhaps, in the most precise language, or on 
 the most conclusive reasoning, but so as to strike us 
 with something like the awe of preternatural knowledge." 
 lUit it concerns us most that he, more distinctly even 
 than Eogcr Bacon, enunciated the views of the ' In- 
 stauratio Magna ' as to the proper method to be followed 
 in the investigation of nature, and the importance 
 assigned to its results. The force and application of the 
 following dicta, with numerous others to the same effect, 
 are unmistakable : — 
 
 " My design is first to examine facts, and afterwards to 
 demonstrate how bodies are constrained to act. It is the 
 method one must adhere to in all research into Nature. . . . 
 True, she begins from Keason and ends in Experience ; we 
 must begin with Experiment, and try to discover the 
 Reason." 
 
 " The interpreter of the artifices of Nature is Experience : 
 she is never deceived ; it is our judgment that is led astray 
 by imagining unreal effects. "We must scrutinise phenomena 
 and vary their circumstances, that we may elicit rules to 
 direct our speculation in Science, and control our practice in 
 Art principles which will prevent us from promising un- 
 attainable results. Those who consult authorities instead 
 of Nature are not her children, but at best the grand- 
 children of her who is the sole mistress of true spirits ; 
 while the foolish masses mock at the men who would rather 
 learn directly at her knees than consult her clerks." 
 
 " It is right for the understanding to acquire knowledge, 
 whatever it be ; one may then choose the good and reject 
 the useless." 
 
 It is hardly possible for words to come nearer the 
 most impressive passages of the ' Novum Organum.' Da 
 Vhici, more distinctly than Bacon, realised the import- 
 ance of mathematics in discovery, declaring that there is 
 
 p. — XIV. E 
 
66 Francis Bacon. 
 
 no certainty in sciences where they cannot be applied : 
 he more clearly understood the interdependence of ideas 
 and observation, saying, " Theory is the general, experi- 
 ments are the soldiers." As an architect, engineer, and 
 optician, he put into practice his precepts, and in doing 
 so, learnt to combine caution with confidence in his fore- 
 casts. But he lived in a less propitious age : ^ amid the 
 greatest galaxy of artists indeed that the world had seen, 
 he yet, as a patient philosopher of Nature, stood almost 
 as much alone as Eoger Bacon had done before him. 
 Art had only begun to give a stimulus to science, and 
 the theoretic and practical powers combined in Leonardo 
 remained for another hundred years comparatively apart. 
 
 1 The fact tliat none of his works were published till a century 
 after his death is significant. 
 
67 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE. 
 
 The landing of Colmnbus at St Salvador in 1492, and 
 the expulsion in the same year of the Moors from Gren- 
 ada, with the invasion of Italy (1494) by Charles VIII. 
 of France, and the establishment of our Tudor dynasty 
 (1495) on the field of Bosworth, mark the close of the 
 middle age. The Eenaissance,^ which folloAved close 
 on those events, as a protest of the mind against cen- 
 turies of vassalage, struck a blow at the shackles of 
 superstition, which no Jesuit or Puritan reaction availed 
 to fend ; but the leaders of the movement (unless we 
 include among them Da Vinci) contributed little to the 
 progress of physical science, while the menace of the 
 Eeformation ^ made the Church even less tolerant, at the 
 close than at the beginning of the era, to new phases of 
 thought. The change is nowhere more marked than in 
 the earlier and later reception given to the Copernican 
 system. 
 
 Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) himself is remark- 
 able for the caution with which he first put forth his 
 
 1 As regards the relation to each other of these inovemeiits, vide vol, 
 i. pp. 9-14. 
 
QS Francis Bacon. 
 
 treatise on ' The Eevolutions of the Heavenly Bodies,' 
 merely as "an hypothesis for their better explanation." 
 Quoting from Ptolemy the maxim, " He who is to follow 
 philosophy must be a free man," this Polish Catholic 
 canon and prebendary yet ventured to publish only in 
 the year of his death, on the urgency of Cardinal Schom- 
 berg, a discovery that he had made thirty-five years be- 
 fore. The book containing it had, however, been written 
 in 1539, and the MS., wdiich had a considerable circu- 
 lation, roused the enthusiasm of Dr Vogelinus of Con- 
 stance, who proclaimed it to be a Palingenesia or new 
 birth. Copernicus is one of the numerous great men 
 whose fame has elevated a scientific doctrine into an arti- 
 cle of faith ; and the acceptance of his views has been 
 made almost a test of sanity, by critics in whose eyes 
 their rejection has condemned the whole philosophy of 
 Francis Bacon to contempt. 
 
 Copernicus, as we have seen, started no new idea : his 
 unquestioned merit, his inalienable claim as one of the 
 Fathers of Astronomy, rests on his having shown to be 
 true that which the shrewdest of his predecessors had 
 merely guessed. An observer only second to Tycho 
 Brahe, and a mathematician whose accuracy has seldom 
 been surpassed, he demonstrated, by reasoning on the 
 relations of space and time, the rotations of the earth, 
 as the captains of Magellan demonstrated its rotundity 
 by sailing round it. Previous to his time, the rival 
 solutions of the same phenomena rested on almost equal 
 grounds. That of the Pythagoreans, followed by Aris- 
 tarchus, relied on greater simplicity ; that of Hippar- 
 chus was so much the more obvious that it has to this 
 day the support of common language, poetic tradition. 
 
The Copemican System. 69 
 
 and ignorant belief. Copernicus added ■weight to the 
 argument in favour of simplicity, by dispensing with 
 eleven of the Ptolemaic motions ; but his theory was 
 still inadequate. Adhering to the postulate of circular 
 motion, he had to retain the eccentrics and epicycles, 
 only lessening their number by translation into the 
 language of another centre. 
 
 For fifty years after the promulgation of the new 
 system, the question between it and the old was re- 
 garded as open, and for a century after, eminent men 
 ranged themselves on either side. The Prutenic Tables 
 were constructed on the authority of Copernicus by his 
 disciples Rhaeticus and Reinhold. Another, "Wursticus, 
 handed on his master's view to Giordano Bnmo, who set 
 it in the front of his " Xolan " philosophy. The Venetian 
 Benedetti (1530-1590), who first clearly refuted Aris- 
 totle's mechanics, remarks that "the enormous velocity 
 of the heavenly bodies, if the earth be the centre, is a 
 difficulty which does not occur according to the beautiful 
 theory of the Samian Aristarchus, expounded in a divine 
 manner by Nicolas Copernicus." Campanella is equally 
 positive. Kepler received the new views, disallowed 
 by his master Tycho, from his first teacher, Maestlin. 
 On the other hand, Maurolycus of Messina (1494- 
 1575) in'otests, "To amend the errors of all who have 
 preceded us would be a task too hard for Atlas. 
 Even Copernicus is tolerated, who makes the sun to 
 be fixed, and the earth to move roimd it in a circle ; 
 and who is more worthy of a whip or scourge than 
 a refutation." Similarly Jean Bodin (1530-1596) in 
 his * De Republica ' " declares that the events of the 
 world are determined by planetary influences, and that 
 
70 Francis Bacon. 
 
 the hypothesis of Copernicus is contrary to theology, 
 sense, and science." The Protestants generally accepted 
 the heliocentric view, with a faith that helped to incite 
 the persecution of Galileo, the main count of whose 
 accusation was his advocacy of ''the Pythagorean 
 heresy " ; but only towards the middle of the seven- 
 teenth century was the system established as a popular 
 creed. 
 
 At an earlier date, in Italy itself, the Church had 
 to reckon with a group of writers who, it may be 
 unconscious maskers, were undermining what they 
 did not venture, perhaps even mentally, to assail, by 
 the avowal of the dangerous, because in the long-run 
 either revolutionary or reactionary, view — that what 
 is contrary to Eeason may still be accepted as true 
 by Faith. This tribute of Science to Authority — 
 often sincerely paid by minds conscientiously admit- 
 ting a gulf between their respective spheres — is a 
 mode of argument which, though half countenanced by 
 Plato himself in passages of his 'Laws,' sustains the 
 assertion of Hume that thorough - going scepticism is 
 often the portal to implicit credence. Eepresented in 
 modern times by numerous thinkers of eminence, from 
 the Arabian Algazel to Cardinal K'ewman, this mode of 
 arguing found, during the later years of the fifteenth 
 century, its most conspicuous advocate in Pietro 
 PoMPOXAZZi, to whom so many suggestions of the 
 philosophy of Bacon have been assigned by some re- 
 cent critics, that it is proper, even in this rapid sketch, to 
 note some of their points of comparison and difference. 
 The once famous Italian, whose sympathy with so many 
 of our still haunting perplexities makes the recent 
 
Pictro Pomponazzi. 71 
 
 neglect of him strange, was born at ^lantna in 1462, 
 and an early student of the Averroist Achillini. Sub- 
 sequently, as professor at Padua, and then at Bologna 
 — centres of the speculative materialism of the age — 
 his eloquence attracted audiences (among his pupils 
 being the elder Scaligcr) almost as enthusiastic as those 
 of Abelard. Pomponazzi was, in philosophy, so loyal a 
 follower of Aristotle, that he compared his assailants to 
 fleas on an elephant ; but he clearly perceived the im- 
 possibility of reconciling his views with those of the 
 Church, and was driven to assign to each a distinct do- 
 main. In his celebrated treatise ' Dell' Anima/ he ad- 
 mits that, according to his master and to reason, the soul, 
 \l/vxq, is mortal. It cannot exist without a body ; the 
 mover must have something to move, the form some- 
 thing to form ; as the human intelligence must attach 
 itself to images formed by sense, and the will has to 
 act through corporeal agents. But there may be a uni- 
 versal soul, vov<s, in the stars, though the vital princi- 
 ples of vegetable and animal grow and decay, and 
 cease with the frames in which they are set. The 
 question is one which Reason cannot settle, and to 
 which the Gospels and the Church can alone give an 
 answer. To these he therefore returns in the spirit 
 of a filial submission. " It suffices that St Augus- 
 tine, wlio is more than Plato or Aristotle, has believed 
 in immortality, for me to add my faith to his." In 
 like manner he treats the problem of free-will and 
 destiny in the spirit of a trenchant scepticism tliat, pierc- 
 ing through shallow solutions, goes to the heart of the 
 matter, alleging that, if man is free, something escapes 
 Providence. So, on the origin of evil, he asks, " Why 
 
72 Francis Bacon. 
 
 does God not deliver man from his imperfections ? If it 
 is a sin in man to err, why is it not a sin in an Omnipo- 
 tent Being to surround with temptations his feeble will, 
 and in a world where the wicked, as a rule, make the 
 best of it % His intelligence inclines to the doctrine of 
 the Stoics, that the perfection of the whole makes all 
 contrasts necessary, and that evil is in a sense good, 
 an energetic element of progress ; but he reverts to his 
 rubric, " I believe as a Christian what I cannot as a 
 philosopher." Pomponazzi, whose concessions, sincere 
 or feigned, did not save him from the denunciation of 
 monks and friars, or his books at Venice from being 
 burnt by the jailer, is a Baconian in this severance of 
 revelation from the light of iN'ature, as in his preference 
 of sense to ideas, his views of miracles, divination, 
 and " natural magic," his maxim that when Eeason 
 fails we must go to I^ature for truth, in his belief 
 in progress, and his assertion that initial doubt is the 
 start of the development of science, carried so far as to 
 admit that even religions change; but his distinction 
 between the speculative and practical Eeason, the last 
 alone essential to common life, is more in the manner 
 of Kant. 
 
 Meanwhile, during the first half of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, the Platonism of the Eenaissance was losing itself 
 in clouds. Of the mystics of this age of ferment and 
 vague ambitions who exceeded the rest in celebrity, the 
 earliest in date was Cornelius Agrippa of Cologne 
 (1487-1535), a reputed wizard, according to Hallam, " one 
 of those ephemeral demagogues who rise on the ruins of a 
 throne," noted for attacking without understanding Ar- 
 istotle. His main work, ' De Incertitudine et Vanitate 
 
Paracelsus. 73 
 
 Scicntiaruin,'^ hy the author's own confession, inspired by 
 jealous vanity, propounds a system of a threefold world — 
 elemental, intellectual, and celestial — in which ideal ar- 
 chetypes, the wonders of the Magi and Avitchcraft, have 
 a prominent part. He is interesting as the immediate 
 forerunner of a more considerable man open to a like 
 criticism. The eccentric career of Aubeolus Paracelsus 
 (1493-1541) liesAvithout our review. As an experimen- 
 talist he did substantial service to his science, inventing 
 new analytical processes in chemistry, and directing at- 
 tention to its actions in the animal functions (e.r/., he 
 detected the calc of disease fancifully called Tartarus — 
 hence Tartar — and called the fermentation of fluids gas) ; 
 as a physician he was noted for pathological skill ; as 
 either an impostor^ or a fanatic he pretended to impos- 
 sible feats. His system is a medley of acute guesses and 
 crude symbolism, founded on his dogma of salt, sulphur, 
 and mercury (by which he replaced the four elements) 
 in the external world, corresponding to the body, spirit, 
 and soul in man. Assailing the old Alchemists, he is of 
 their sect ; one of the last adherents to the belief in the 
 universal solvent, the transmutation of metals, and the 
 elixir vitae. In theosophy — i.e., his faith in the direct 
 sway of spiritual beings, gnomes, sylphs, i^igmies, and 
 the astral element in the human frame, over thought 
 and life — he was a mystic of the mystics ; and, despite 
 his avowed reliance on sacred writings, his assertion that 
 everything in the world is animated makes him rank 
 
 1 This book, from which Bacon borrows in the ' Advancement of 
 Learning,' is highly commended by German critics. 
 
 2 Vide Browning's poem, the theme of which is the tragedy of a 
 man of genius becoming a quack to humour the impatience of his 
 audience. 
 
74 Francis Bacon. 
 
 with the pantheistic Platonists. Paracelsus was among 
 the Alchemists what Abelard was among the Schoolmen, 
 " vox satis vocalis," the most eloquent voice. Constant 
 though hostile references to his pseudo-science and nebu- 
 lous conceptions are scattered through the philosophical 
 works of Bacon. ^ Among his dhect successors we need 
 only mention Robert Fludd (1574-1637), "the most 
 
 1 As we have seen, Paracelsus is violently attacked in the * Tem- 
 poris Partus Masculus ' as worthy of imprisonment for his ostenta- 
 tious audacity ; and the chemists, " benumbed by its glamour," are 
 warned not to expect a complete tragedy from an ass that happens to 
 have scribbled with its hoofs an A on the sand. Similarly, in the course 
 of the"same diatribe, Bacon commends a certain Danish doctor, Petrus 
 Severinus (1542-1602), of whom little but the title of his work, 
 
 * Idea Medicinse Philosophicfe,' is known, for having made musical 
 the brayings of his master. More seriously or maturely, under the 
 head of "Prerogatives of Motion " (Nov. Org., ii.), objection is taken 
 to the Paracelsian triad ; and in the ' Historia Ventorum ' its deviser 
 is ridiculed for " seeking a place for his three principles even in the 
 Temple of Juno — that is, the air — and restricting the winds to Auster 
 (the South), Mercury, Zephyr (the West), Sulphur, and Boreas (the 
 North), Salt, omitting the baleful Eurus. " In another criticism of the 
 
 * Organum,' where Bacon says that in his theory of alimentation by 
 separation — i.e., that the component parts of the human body are 
 derived from corresponding elements in the food,— Paracelsus "deli- 
 rare juvat," — the latter has been shown to be essentially correct. In 
 the ' De Augmentis ' the author more reasonably protests against 
 the notion of the Alchemists that there are to be found in men's 
 bodies j^arallels which have respect to stars, minerals, and planets, 
 as a misapplication of the emblem of the microcosm. Elsewhere 
 (De Aug., B. ix. ) Bacon inveighs against the mystic superstition of 
 deriving all other philosophy from sacred works ; adding, "This dis- 
 temper has grown up in the school of Paracelsus and others, but the 
 beginning came from the Rabbis and the Cabbalists. " In the remark- 
 able "Tenth Century" of the * Sylva Syl varum ' on the Force of 
 Imagination, he writes : " Some held that if the spirit of man gave a 
 touch to the spirit of the Avorld it might command nature : Paracel- 
 sus and some darksome authors of magic do ascribe to imagination 
 exalted the power of wonder-working faith," which he characterises 
 as " bottomless folly." 
 
Tdesio. 75 
 
 learned of the Cabbalists," avIiu brought liis views of the 
 Macrocosm and j\Iicrocosm, of the identity of physical 
 and spiritual truths, into closer connection with IVIosaic 
 traditions ; ^ and Jacob Boehmen, in wdiose * Aurora ' 
 many subtle moral intuitions are shrouded by the vi- 
 sions and emanations that afifected the later and often 
 similar speculations of Swedenborg. 
 
 The mystic method of interpretation infected even 
 some of the more exact scientific thinkers of the cen- 
 tury — as Jerome Cardan (rival of N. Tartaglia as the 
 founder of the higher algebra, and a noted assailant 
 of Aristotle ; -) and George Agricola of Saxony, the 
 first modern mineralogist, whose investigations were still 
 confused by alchemy and a belief, long lingering in popu- 
 lar legends, in goblins of the mines. It appears even in 
 the titles of such miscellaneous collections of facts and 
 fancies as the ' De Miraculis ' of Levinus Lemnius, and 
 Giambattista Porta's^ 'Magia ]N'aturalis,' and is con- 
 spicuous in the works of the system-mongers of the age, 
 who replaced the old metaphysical constructions by others 
 reared, though with imperfect knowledge, on a physical 
 basis. Of these the most famous was Bernardino 
 Telesio (1508-1588) of Cosenza. This writer, who so 
 influenced his time as to found a school, prefaced 
 his work, 'De K'atura Reruni' (1565-66), with a pro- 
 test against the inadequacy of the Aristotelian physics, 
 
 1 This is refeiTed to in the chapter on Harmonics (De Aug.) in 
 such a manner as to countenance the view of IMr Ellis that Bacon was 
 acquainted with the works of Fludd, 
 
 2 In his Avork ' De Subtilitate et Varietate Rerum.' 
 
 ■^ Bacon certainly consulted Porta, and seems to have derived from 
 the ' De Occultis Literarum Notis ' (published 1563) hints for his 
 scheme of ciphers. 
 
76 Francis Bacon. 
 
 giving an account of his rejection of them in almost 
 Baconian terms. " Those before us seem to have 
 prosecuted their examination of the world with great 
 labour, but never to have looked at it, and so made an 
 arbitrary world of their own. We, not relying on our- 
 selves, and of a duller intellect than they, propose to 
 turn our regards to the world itself and its parts. . . . 
 The construction of the world and nature of bodies 
 in it is to be investigated by the senses and not by 
 reasoning." When, however, we come to examine 
 his own system, we find the a pHori method still sub- 
 stituted for the experimental, as with his predecessors.^ 
 His cosmogony, that of Parmenides and Democritus 
 mixed, rests on the postulates of atomic matter as 
 the substratum of body, and two incorporeal powers 
 Avhich contend for its mastery — Heat the source of 
 motion, and Cold the principle of immobility; concep- 
 tions even more arbitrary than those he sought to re- 
 place. Bacon treats with indulgence a scheme which 
 he to some extent followed ; but he admits that Telesio 
 was more successful in destroying than in building. 
 The same criticism may be passed on Patricius (1529- 
 1597), who, after parading his "philosophy of the 
 universe found anew," and the now trite denunciations 
 of Aristotle, introduces his readers to smatterings of 
 science, — speculations on the saltness of the sea, the 
 tides, the sex of plants, &c. — bound or confused to- 
 gether by reference to the idea of "Light," which he 
 
 1 Where, however, he follows Galen in holding that developed arte- 
 rial and other organic systems have their original in germ, modem 
 research supports him against Bacon's censure (Nov. Org., ii.) of hav- 
 ing arrived at this conclusion "leviter et inscite." 
 
Giordano Bruno. 77 
 
 employed to give to liis assumptions tlie borrowed dignity 
 of principles. 
 
 About the same time Andreas Cesalpinus of Arezzo 
 (1519-1603), the first great modern botanist, in his 
 * Questiones Peripatetica?,' while giving suggestive hints 
 as to the " three steps of knowledge, — Induction, 
 from likeness and agreement, arriving at Universals ; 
 Division, from observation of dissimilarity discriminat- 
 ing species; and Definition, resolving its subject into 
 elements" — shows himself in the main a disciple of 
 Averroes. 
 
 A more attractive figure among the later Platonists, 
 from his fame as one of the last martyrs of philosophy, 
 and the imaginative style in which he clothed his con- 
 ceptions, is Giordano Bruno of ISTola (1550-1600). 
 His three main works are all in the lively, but, from 
 the temptation it affords to aggressive wit, somewhat 
 dangerous form of dialogue afterwards adopted by 
 Galileo. Of these the 'La Cena delle Ceneri,' inter- 
 esting as the record of a philosophic evening at the 
 house of Sir Fulke Greville, during the author's visit 
 to England (1583-84), professes to set forth a physical 
 view of the world, in which (with a use of geometri- 
 cal conceptions, recalling those of the Tima?us), he 
 extols Copernicus as a mathematician rather than a 
 philosopher, insists with the tenacity of a Pythagorean 
 on the necessity of circular motion, and derides the idea 
 of the gravitation of bodies. In this dialogue one of 
 the interlocutors observes, " In antiquity is wisdom ; " 
 the other answers, " Xo — we are older and have lived 
 longer than our predecessors." During the following 
 j^ears Bruno formulated his metaphysics in his 'Delia 
 
78 Francis Bacon. 
 
 Causa, Principio ed Uno,' and 'Dell' Infinito Universo 
 e Moiidi.' With less of Alchemy and more that is 
 directly traceable to the Eleatics, Plotinus, and pos- 
 sibly oriental sources, these are to a large extent Para- 
 celsian. The leading idea that the world and all it 
 contains, plants as well as moving creatures, are in- 
 spired by an intelligent soul, the " anima mundi " 
 seems definitely Pantheistic. Bruno's scheme is in 
 essence rather derived than original ; but it is animated 
 by poetic expression, flashes of insight — as when he first 
 asserts that the stars are suns with planets rolling round 
 them, — and obscured by relics of medieval allegory, as 
 the association of Porm with the male. Matter with the 
 female principle of the universe. Hallam's criticism of 
 the more mystical part of his work is applicable to the 
 whole school of those before and after him who con- 
 found clearness with superficiality and obscurity with 
 depth. " The speculations of Bruno now become more 
 and more subtle, and he admits that our understandings 
 cannot grasp what he pretends to demonstrate — the 
 identity of a simply active and simply passive prin- 
 ciple; the question really is whether we can see any 
 meaning in his propositions." The place of Bruno in 
 the development of physical inquiry is of comparatively 
 little moment ; but in his recognition of the immanence 
 of the divine in the universe, his assertion of the Deity 
 as a power not external but internal through all its 
 workings, of the essential unity binding together God, 
 Nature, and Man, his philosophy is a link in the chain 
 of modern Idealism. 
 
 Thomas Campanella (1568-1639) remains among the 
 sixteenth-century Platonists to be ranked as a prede- 
 
Camfanclla. 79 
 
 cesser of Bacon ; for though he hvecl later, his main work, 
 'De Sensu Itcrnni,'^ the record of a precocious genius, 
 was puhlislunl as early as 1590. In this he avows 
 himself a follower of Telesio, and justifies his position 
 by a general acceptance of his master's views, attach- 
 ing, however, more weight to their moral aspect, and, 
 in the manner of Bruno, to the principle of life per- 
 vading the universe. lie begins, like Telesio, with 
 a protest against authority, and gives a similar out- 
 line of his emancipation from its thralls ; stating 
 that, after a careful study of Aristotle, Plato, Galen, 
 and the Stoics, and their commentators, he was driven 
 " to compare them with that first and original writ- 
 ing the world," the "living statue of God," whose 
 purposes he found directly chiselled in signs and types 
 on all His works. All created things, he insists, are 
 sensible, else the world woidd be a chaos ; in this, 
 again, recalling the mysticism which substitutes a trans- 
 ference of human emotion to the universe, for the slower 
 discovery and calmer recognition of its laws. According 
 to Campanella, space and matter are the warp and woof 
 of the " all wise and good " ; Heat and Cold His work- 
 men : to these agents he also seems to assign some sort 
 of consciousness, asserting that Heat has a desire for its 
 own being, that feeling makes fire go up, and stones 
 down, and that a love of like for like, oj^posed to the 
 contrariety which is decay, leads waters in their course 
 to the sea. Throughout his physics are confused, as 
 
 1 Campanella's 'Civitas Solis,' written at a later date during the 
 years of his imprisonment, may in some points be compared with the 
 ' New Atlantis,' but the coincidences are probably accidental. The 
 resemblances to passages in Plato's ' Republic ' and Mora's ' Utopia ' 
 are more numerous. 
 
80 Francis Bacon. 
 
 those of the Greeks, by premature analogies ; and his 
 readiness to accept new views — e.g., those of Gilbert — 
 loses much of its value by his putting them to a vague 
 use. He seems to have failed to realise the consequence 
 of his own approved maxim, "Definition is the end 
 and epilogue of science." A zealous advocate of the 
 Copernican system, he surrounded it with the fanciful 
 halos formerly attached to the old Astronomy. In his 
 belief that the world is full of spirits, and, when the 
 soul shall be delivered from this dark cavern, we shall 
 behold their subtle essences, he shows himself a mystic 
 of the modern school. In his assertion that the sky 
 and stars signify thoughts to each other by their own 
 lights, and that the blessed spirits informing those liv- 
 ing mansions behold aU things in the divine idea, he 
 is, like Bruno, a poet more than a philosopher, and sets 
 a text for the speech of Lorenzo in Portia's garden, 
 or the reveries of Goethe's Faust, rather than for the 
 almost equally sublime conclusions of Laplace. 
 
 Most of those pioneers of physical speculation were, 
 in their lives, leaders of forlorn hopes, when Church 
 and State, still apt to confound progress with rebellion, 
 had replaced the old charge of magician by that of 
 heresiarch. But it must be admitted that in many 
 cases their own defects of temper and method were 
 in part responsible for the antagonism they aroused. 
 "With few exceptions they were over-daring in their 
 challenge to the past, and over-confident in themselves. 
 Insufficiently versed in the sciences they studied, to 
 recognise their bounds, they failed to see the limits of 
 their power. Each of them, with few exceptions, in- 
 spired by an overweening ambition often arrogantly 
 
Universities and Academics. 81 
 
 expressed, writes as if he were starting afresh : eacli in 
 turn assumes tlie tone, "They have said of old, hut I 
 tell you." Unaware of the almost infinite extent of 
 tlie arena they professed to have explored, none of 
 those speculators hesitated, any more than Bacon — 
 in this respect their latest heir — hesitated, to pass 
 judgment on everything. The self - assumption and 
 imaginative vagaries of the Platonists had, with eccle- 
 siastical and political conservatism, their share in pro- 
 moting a reaction in favour of a more definite sys- 
 tem. Scholasticism proper, dying hard, still found a 
 refuge in the Catholic Universities which, mainly under 
 the direction of the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits, 
 still taught the old metaphysics. The counter-influence 
 of the Academies,^ now being established in Italy as 
 centres for the cultivation of the modern languages, 
 did not make itself widely felt till a somewhat later 
 period, and the same may be said of the great "Vati- 
 can, Laurentian, and other libraries. Wherever the 
 Church had a mastering control, the bygone genera- 
 tions still governed from their graves : but the conclu- 
 sions and methods of medievalism were nowhere allowed 
 to pass unquestioned ; the laity, no longer silent through 
 ignorance, and only in some directions fettered by fear, 
 had begun to speak their minds, and the more en- 
 
 1 The chief of those were the Academies of Siena (1525), of Padua 
 and of Modena (1534), of Florence (1540), and of Rome early in the 
 century. The first distinctly devoted to "Nature" (if we except 
 the special medical and botanical schools) seems to have heen "The 
 Academy of the Lincei at Florence, instituted for the study ' magni 
 naturae lihri.' " M. de R^musat has pointed out that Bacon's name 
 is found on the list of rejected candidates for admission, but intimates 
 tliat it may have been brought forward without his knowledge, and 
 assigns the rejection to theological grounds. -^ „ t i C? 
 
 P. XIV. ' ^ p 
 
82 Francis Bacon, 
 
 lightened among the clergy were preparing to accept the 
 new conditions. Spain itself, the stronghold of ecclesi- 
 astical antiquarianism, had been brought, as the foster- 
 mother of maritime discovery, into contact with a wider 
 world ; and, early in the century, one of the most direct 
 assaults on the later schoolmen was delivered by the 
 Liidovicus Yives of Valencia (1-192-1540), whose Avork, 
 'De corruptis artibus et tradendis disciplinis,' in har- 
 mony with the spirit of the Kenaissance, sets forth 
 as its aim to remove impediments to the studies of 
 ' Literce Humaniores.' ^ The progress and growing love 
 of art, the desire for greater grace and variety of life, was 
 in the south of Europe tending to the same result as 
 the insurrection in the north on behalf of greater purity 
 and some amount of freedom in thought. The Re- 
 formation shook the power and narrowed the sway of 
 the central authority over the intellectual as well as the 
 spiritual world ; it renewed the courage that had been 
 temporarily inspired by the schism of the fourteenth 
 century, confirmed the work of satirists such as Rabelais, 
 and took advantage of the growing weakness fostered 
 by dissensions of Dominican, Franciscan, Thomist, and 
 Scotist, to set against the decrees of the Church a 
 new alternative. But on abstract questions the Re- 
 formers were sharply divided. Luther, though the 
 greatest the least widely read, arraigned tlie methods 
 in the same terms of reckless vehemence with which he 
 denounced the dogmas of the schools. Reuchlin was 
 a Platonist, and Melanchthon at least ultimately an 
 Aristotelian. The Protestants, moved, by their own 
 
 1 It is curious to note that this direct forerunner of Ramus 
 became the tutor of the Princess Mary of EngLand. 
 
Pdcr Eaimis. 83 
 
 counter - intolerance, to deny M'hatever the Catholic 
 Universities affirmed, often assailed the old logic, 
 physics, and ethics, on the same inadequate grounds on 
 -which they hesitated to accept the Gregorian Calen- 
 dar. Even Science (to which till near the close of 
 the century they contributed nothing) coming from 
 a suspected source was suspect. " St Thomas," says 
 M. Eemusat, "had to suffer for Eome, and Aristotle 
 for St Thomas." During the period of fanaticism in 
 England under Edward YL, the books of Duns Scotus 
 were torn up, and their leaves scattered among the col- 
 lege cpiadrangles. But the new disputations were as 
 tiresome as the old, and equally merit the oblivion 
 they share. 
 
 The great protesting logician of the age, Peter Eamus 
 (1515-1572), owes his reputation to his death at "St 
 Bartholomew," and the loud dogmatic assertion of his 
 claims, rather than to any real originality. Coming into 
 notice when, as a student at Paris in 1535, he took for 
 his degree thesis the theme, " jSTot all that Aristotle has 
 said is true," he, eight years later, as a professor in the 
 University, promulgated a system evidently suggested by 
 Plato's ' Soplrist,' by which he designed to replace the 
 ' Organon.' Eamus's own view of logic mainly differs from 
 that of Aristotle by the extension of its province over 
 that commonly assigned to rhetoric, in treating which 
 he borrowed many of his often apt examples from Cicero 
 and Quintilian. The first head of his work, " Invention, 
 or the Art of Finding Arguments," is, however, based 
 on the ' Topics ' ; and his division of propositions into 
 those true universally, primarily, and essentially, corres- 
 l»on(ls to that of the principles of demonstration, KaOoXov, 
 
84 Francis Bacon. 
 
 Kara TravTos and kuO olvto, in the Posterior Analytics (i. 4). 
 These revived distinctions, to Avhich, in his thirst for 
 the show of novelty, Ramus gave the affected titles of 
 the rules of wisdom, truth, and justice. Bacon extols ; ^ 
 but he protests against the Ramean dichotomy as "a 
 cloud that obscured knowledge," and blew away after 
 injuring the sciences. In this judgment most critics 
 concur. Aristotle himself objects to bimembral divi- 
 sion — i.e., on the ground of the absence or presence 
 of one quality — as leaving the negative side almost 
 meaningless ; and Professor Owen asserts that no ad- 
 vance in science was ever made by its employment. 
 It pervades all the system of Ramus, detracts from 
 the value of his classification, and prevents him from 
 arriving at sound definitions. The second part of his 
 treatise on Judgment and Disposition is ancient in all 
 but phraseology (e.g., the use of axioma, as enuncia- 
 tion, in the Baconian sense), and the fact that the 
 third is exalted over the first "figure" as the normal 
 type of syllogistic reasoning. 
 
 Ramus is more open than Aristotle to the charge of 
 pedantically arguing from words to things, and turning 
 physics into logic ; but his vaunted reforms had consider- 
 able currency. Fifty years after the author had been 
 driven from Paris for professing his views, the philoso- 
 phical chairs in the universities were divided between 
 Aristotelians and Ramists. Later still, Andrew Melville 
 introduced the new system mto Scotland, and Milton 
 
 1 Vide ' De Aiigmentis/ vi. 2. Bacon lias made use of two of these 
 divisions in an obscure passage of the 'Valerius Terminus.' In the 
 ' Temporis Partus Masculus ' he speaks of Ramus -with contempt, 
 referring to him as "Aristotelis rebellis neotericus," "ignorantiae 
 latibulo," " compendiorum pater," &c. 
 
Hevivcd Aristotdianism. 85 
 
 iiitido it the model of his treatise, ' iVrtis Logicre pleiiior 
 Institutio ad Petri Rami methodiim concinnata.' Mean- 
 while !Mclanclitlioii had, with some modifications, par- 
 tially reinstated the Peripatetic pliilosopliy in the councils 
 of the Eeformers, and in the latter half of the century 
 Aristotle, disentangled from scholasticism, re-emerged 
 with much of his old authority. In the controversy 
 thus more rationally renewed, men of equal culture 
 could afford to take opposite sides. 
 
 Fabricius of Aquapendente (1537-1619), an anatomist 
 of the Paduan school, and tutor of William Harvey, 
 professed, in answer to Patricius, his appreciation of the 
 elements of truth in the writers of antiquity, and of the 
 acuteness, even where technically incorrect, of their 
 physical conjectures ; while Nizolius of Bersallo, a noted 
 Ciceronian and keen JN'ominalist, recorded (1553), in his 
 work on ' The Principles of the Arts and Sciences refut- 
 ing the Falsehoods of the Metaphysicians,' his belief that 
 error and barbarism would prevail as long as Aristotle 
 ruled. 
 
 Similarly, the Portuguese physician Francisco Sanchez, 
 in his work 'Quod nihil Scitur,' 1576, inspired by a 
 mild Pyrrhonism, attacked the syllogistic logic as built 
 on mere abstractions ; and J. Aconcio, a Protestant Italian 
 refugee, published at Basle, 1558, in his * De Methodo,' 
 a sketch of a new discipline of investigation, " Eecta 
 contemplandi docendique ratio," in which he insists on 
 the need of new rules for Definition. To know any- 
 thing, he contends, is to know its causes and effects : 
 all men have Avithin them the germs of knowledge : 
 tlie task of logic is to blow to a flame the sparks lurk- 
 ing under the ashes. His analytic method has been 
 
86 Francis Bacon. 
 
 adjudged sounder than that of Eanius, but it was less 
 trumpeted, and comparatively little known. ^ 
 
 There is a sense in which Aristotle has never been 
 overthrown : the old ' Organon ' keeps its jjlace beside 
 the ncAV as a map of the processes of the mind : the 
 
 * Politics ' and the ' Ethics,' which did so much to mould 
 the thought of Hooker, and left their stamp on the 
 
 * De Augmentis,' share, and fortunately share, with 
 ' The Republic ' a commanding influence even over the 
 speculations of the nineteenth century. The usurpation 
 of Aristotle over a domain not his by riglit, a usur- 
 pation maintained by his followers rather than himself, 
 was brought to a close, not by argument, but by the 
 revelation of facts with which the old formulcC were 
 manifestly inadequate to deal. The latter j^art of the 
 sixteenth century was as rife in inventions as in change. 
 History and Jurisprudence were having a new birth in 
 the works of jNIachiavel, Guicciardini, and Bodin. The 
 results of western and eastern voyages were being re- 
 corded in the maps of Ortelius and Mercator, and in the 
 books of travel by Eamusio, Hakluyt, and Joseph 
 d'Acosta, which brought their tributes of observation 
 to the ' Globus Intellectualis.' The extension of Geog- 
 raphy giving a stimulus to Geodosy, suggested Casmann's 
 ' Problemata jNIarina,' the attempt of Chrysogonus to 
 form a theory of " The Tides," and that of the physician 
 Fernelius (1550-1558) to determine anew the magnitude 
 of the earth. The progress of medicine in particular,' 
 
 ^ Aconcio, Contio, or Aconzio, lived during <a considerable part of 
 his life in England ; but Bacon does not appear to have heard of his 
 work. 
 
Growth of the Sciences. 87 
 
 now L'0in2)aratively free from llie iijiiis fafnus oi alchemy, 
 and aided by the growth of institutions csijccially de- 
 voted to its service, anticipated the course prescribed by 
 the Baconian philosophy. Fracastorius (1483-1553) 
 had, before the middle of the century, made an alliance 
 between his art and literature; later, Vesalius (1514- 
 1564), the first great dissector, was followed by Ambrose 
 Pare, Eustacliius, and Fallopius. In the kindred de- 
 partment of botany, Duval, Brunfels, Bock, Leonard 
 Fuchs, and Luca Gliini (custodian at Pisa of the first 
 Botanical garden) led up to Cesalpinus and Bauhin ; 
 while Conrad Gesner (1561-1565) laid the foundations 
 of modern zoology. jMathematics were represented by 
 Maurolycus, the first geometrician and optician of his 
 age ; and Yieta, successor of Cardan and predecessor 
 of Harriot, the foremost algebraist. In physics, J. B. 
 Benedetti was the earliest to recognise the tendency of 
 propelled bodies to move in straight lines, and to analyse 
 the composition of forces; while 8inion Stevinus of 
 Bruges, as early as 1585, by giving the first correct 
 theory of the inclined plane, and of the vertical pressure 
 of fluids, opened a new era in statics and hydrostatics. 
 
 But the most important discoveries of the age were 
 made by a cluster of astronomers,^ who, living almost in 
 the same generation, seemed by destiny, if not design, 
 to draw out each other's qualities and to supplement 
 
 1 Of the romantic careers of those great men, who are, with Coper- 
 nicus, the fathers of modern astronomy, it is only jtossible liere to 
 note that the fact of their all being more or less victims to the pre- 
 judices of their age is, in some measure, an excuse for the habitually 
 cautious attitude maintained, despite his parade of defiance, by 
 Francis Bacon, who had certainly no wish to be included with them 
 in any future volume on " The Martyrs of Science." 
 
88 Francis Baco7i. 
 
 each other's defects. The work of the first — the iUus- 
 trious Dane, Tycho Brake (1546-1601) — was to arrange 
 and establish the foundations on which his successors 
 built. The greatest of observers up to his time, or, 
 without a telescope, of any age, he, by the aid of quad- 
 rants, sextants, and other instruments which would now 
 seem comparatively rude, accumulated more new facts 
 about the heavens than had been revealed since the date 
 of Hipparchus. Of these we need only mention the first 
 realisation of Seneca's forecast as to the possibility of 
 predicting a comet's path, an estimate hardly now sur- 
 passed in accuracy of the irregularities of the lunar motion 
 — i.e., the equation of the centre and evection known to 
 Ptolemy, the variation rediscovered after Aboul Wefa, the 
 change of Inclination, and the inequality of the l!^odes 
 — with a minute record and analysis of the position of 
 the planet Mars. Tycho could not theorise. He dis- 
 covered the wards of the lock, but failed to find the key. 
 His condemnation of Copernicus, who in his view 
 "moved the earth from its foundations, stopped the 
 revolution of the firmament, made the sun stand still, 
 and subverted the whole ancient order of the universe," is 
 more consistently maintained than Bacon's ; and his own 
 view, with some modifications, was similar to Bacon's. 
 For, whereas the Pythagoreans made the earth revolve 
 with the sun around a central fire, Tycho made the sun, 
 with the other planets attendant, revolve round the earth. ^ 
 There has never been, in the history of science, so re- 
 markable a conjunction of complementaiy genius as oc- 
 
 1 Cf. Bacou : "I affirm the sun-following arrangement of Venus 
 and Mercury, since it lias been found by Galileo that Jupiter also has 
 attendants." 
 
Tyclio Brake. 89 
 
 c'uiTcd when, in IGOO, Tyclio invited Kepler to join him 
 in the work of his observatory at Prague. John Kepler 
 (1571-1630), a horn theorist and enthusiast, long im- 
 mersed in the " somnia Pythagorea," the mystic mathe- 
 matics of his ' jMysteriiim Cosmographicum ' (1596), 
 turned the imaginative power — as essential to the great 
 discoverer as to the poet — to creative use Avhen he came 
 in contact with the man of facts. The first fruit of this 
 happy association was the ' Eudolphine Tables ' (so called 
 from the Austrian Emperor, Tycho's host after his ex- 
 pulsion from Uraniberg), a new catalogue of the stars, 
 which, though not published till many years after (1627), 
 was constructed during the lifetime of the friends. On 
 Tycho's death, Kepler set himself to reconcile the mass 
 of observations left to his charge with the Copernican 
 system. The result appeared in his work *De Stella 
 Martis' (pub. 1609), in wdiich, after lingering fantasies 
 about harmonies and a rhapsodical narration of his 
 struggles with the planet, he sets forth his first two 
 great Laws : ^ — 
 
 1. Tlie lilanets move round the sun, hut in ellipses, not 
 in circles ; and the sun is in one of the foci of the elUjpse. 
 2. The motion is not uniform ; hut the lilanet moves over 
 equal areas, hounded hy lines drawn to it from the sun, 
 in equal times — or, in technical terms, the " radius vector 
 sweej^s over equal areas in equal times" 
 
 Xine years later, Kepler in his 'Harmonice Mundi,' 
 dedicated 1618 to James I.,^ gave to the world his third 
 
 1 The proof at first only applied to "Mars," but Kepler soon ex- 
 tended it to the other planets. 
 
 - James, who thought the ' Organum' ''past understanding," prob- 
 ably never looked at Kepler's Avork ; but his first two Laws were 
 familiar to Hamot in 1610. 
 
90 Frcmcis Bacon. 
 
 Law. 3. The squares of the periods of the revolution of 
 the planets are to each other as the cubes of their mean 
 distances from the sun. In thus passing from a mere 
 formiilarising of geometrical to the establishment of a 
 physical relationship between the heavenly bodies, the 
 author, conscious of the greatness of his discovery, breaks 
 into a psean that time has vindicated, and that sug- 
 gests the almost conteniiDorary self-acclamations of the 
 ' Xovum Organum ' : — 
 
 " It is now eighteen months since I got the first glimpse of 
 light, three months since the dawn, very few days since the 
 unveiled sun burst upon me. ... I will indulge in my 
 sacred fury. ... I have stolen the golden vases of the 
 Egyptians to build up a tabernacle for my God — far away 
 from the confines of Egy2:)t. If you forgive me, I rejoice ; if 
 you are angry, I can bear it : the die is cast, the book is 
 written, to be read either now or by posterity — I care not 
 which : it may well wait a century for a reader, as God has 
 waited 6000 years for an observer." 
 
 That this knell of the old astronomy should not have 
 been heard by Bacon is readily accounted for by the 
 manner in which, at the time of its publication, he 
 was engaged; but that he knew as little of Kepler's 
 earlier work, and never names him, points to one of 
 the strangest of his ignorances. Bacon's knowledge 
 of foreign science seems to have come almost solely 
 from Italy. There is ample evidence of his acquaint- 
 ance with the work of the third and greatest of 
 the group of his immediate precursors. Kepler's ulti- 
 mate success has been justly appealed to as the most 
 salient previous example of tlie utility of a part of the 
 inductive process which Bacon unduly despised — the 
 
Kepler. 91 
 
 application to an adequate number of facts of construc- 
 tive hypotheses; and the ndicetr of Kepler's narration 
 of his own false as of his true conjectures, only adds 
 force to the criticism. JJy fancy after fancy, guess on 
 guess, he drove Kature to her hiding-place and won her 
 secrets. Xo quotation or image has ever more adroitly 
 represented her relation to the discoverer than his own 
 from A'irgil : — 
 
 " Male nie Galatea petit, lasciva puella : 
 Et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri." 
 
 Kepler reproaches Bacon's timidity ; Galileo, his over- 
 confidence. The transcendent fame of the great Italian, 
 like that of Leonardo da Yinci, rests on the versatility 
 of his genius. But, with a mind almost as cosmic in 
 its range as that of Bacon himself, he better understood 
 the relations of a limited life to a limitless field ; and 
 set himself, in more strictly defined departments, to 
 acquire and communicate more definite results. AVhile 
 the Englishman was boldly rearing a temple '' full of 
 long-sounding corridors," the Italian was supplying ap- 
 paratus to fill it. 
 
 Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), when a youth at the 
 University of Pisa, protested, in almost the same terms 
 as Bacon a few years earlier, against the ^Vristotelian- 
 ism of his age, and soon pushed his protests to still 
 bolder conclusions. To the passage about studying 
 Xatiu'e directly as the liook of the universe (in a letter 
 to Kepler, of date 1597), Galileo adds, "When we have 
 her decrees, authority goes for nothing ; reason is abso- 
 lute." In the course of the same correspondence, writing 
 from a mathematical chair at Padua, he confesses that 
 
92 Francis Bacon. 
 
 though he had for several years embraced the Copernican, 
 he still taught the Ptolemaic system ; and points out 
 that neither is consistent with the vieAvs of Aristotle, 
 nor with the Scriptures, which, he maintained, were not 
 designed to teach philosophy. The last declaration led 
 to his first citation to Rome, trial, censure, and promise 
 of silence, the breach of Avhich, in the famous dialogues 
 on the System of the World, 1632, was the cause of his 
 second arraignment, retractation, temporary imiDrison- 
 ment, and final retirement to the villa of Arcetri. What- 
 ever doubt may exist as to the sincerity of Bacon's 
 strongly professed orthodoxy, about the outward acqui- 
 escence of Galileo there is none. It was the mere en- 
 forced submission of a great man who had had enough 
 of martyrdom to make him retire from the strife, "vvith 
 a stifled contempt for his persecutors, and the mental 
 reserve typified, if not really expressed, in the traditional 
 aside in the Inquisition chamber, "It moves, all the 
 same." The caution which went along with his spirit 
 of defiance is, in all his scientific work, of practical 
 service. He flouted the men who would not look 
 through his telescope, ^ and could not refrain from exas- 
 perating them with his wit ; but the discoveries which 
 ultimately transformed the physics of his age were made 
 step by step, in a manner that has been called more 
 Baconian than Bacon's. Hence their defhiiteness and 
 their accuracy. Galileo's mistakes are insignificant ; his 
 achievements unassailable. His astronomical discoveries, 
 made in rapid succession (1609-1611), — of the inequali- 
 
 1 The idea of the telescope was suggested to Galileo by a report at 
 Venice, 1609, of the invention of a Dutch optician, to whom he stands 
 in somewhat the same relation as Guttenberg to Laurence Costar. 
 
Galileo. 93 
 
 ties on tlie surface of tlie moon, and its diurnal lihra- 
 tion ; the round discs of the planets, of the satellites of 
 Jupiter ; the nature of some of the nehuke ; the ring of 
 Saturn ; the spots on the sun, and its revolution un its 
 axis ; and the phases of Venus, — were all important in 
 themselves, and strong analogical arguments for the 
 Copernican theory. His enunciation of the laws of 
 falling and his treatise on floating bodies (1612) are 
 distinct steps in dynamics and hydrostatics. His exacti- 
 tude and sense of limitation is apparent in the antici- 
 patory protest against Bacon's view of Induction — " It 
 is impossible to give all the particulars where the cases 
 are innumerable ; where they are restricted, nothing 
 new is added." 
 
 Meanwhile in England, the foundations of an almost 
 wholly new science had been solidly laid by an experi- 
 mentalist and thinker, to whom Galileo accords the 
 praise of his generously expressed envy, as an author 
 whose fresh first-hand views contrast with the mere 
 repetitions of others who only " quote and quote to swell 
 their books." William Gilbert, of Colchester (1540- 
 1603), has been justly entitled the father of magnetism. 
 " His work," says Whewell, " contains all the funda- 
 mental facts of the science so fully stated that we have 
 at this day little to add to them." This writer is of 
 almost as much interest to us from his anticipation of 
 the comparatively impartial spirit of modern criticism, 
 as from his positive achievements. In his two works, 
 ^De Magnete' (1600) and the ' De Mundo N'ostro,' 
 published after his death in 1603, Gilbert, whose own 
 researches are mainly concerned with a theme of which 
 the ancients knew nothing, save a few isolated phe- 
 
94 Francis Bacon, 
 
 nomena, yet treats their leading thinkers with due re- 
 spect, acknowledging that " from them the stream of 
 wisdom has descended to posterity;" wliile he adds, 
 " but our age has discovered and brought to light many 
 things Avhich they, if they were alive, would gladly 
 embrace." Tracing the progress of thought from the 
 simplicity and ignorance of the early speculators to 
 Aristotle and Galen, he expresses his disapproval of 
 the host of commentators who perverted their masters' 
 teaching, laments " the shipwreck of science in the 
 deluge of Goths," and rejoices at " its revival in the 
 time of our grandfathers." The later age, he says, "has 
 exploded the barbarians and restored the Greeks and 
 Latins to their pristine honour." If these, too, are 
 responsible for errors that still mislead us, the remedy 
 is to be found in science again taking its start from 
 observation and experiment, in attending to the pro- 
 ductive processes, " frugifera instituta," of ISTature her- 
 self. The results of his own inductions ^ pursued on 
 this principle are, as far as they go, remarkal)ly correct. 
 He not only laid down the main facts of magnetism — 
 e.g.y clearly recognising its polarity — but had obviously 
 grasped the parallel between it and electricity; and in 
 his assertion that the earth itself is subject to the same 
 laws as the artificial magnet, his " Terella," he had 
 
 1 There can be little doubt tliat Gilbert was a Copernican, Some- 
 times he speaks as if any other view were absurd. Dr Whewell 
 asserts that, maintaining the diurnal, he hesitated about the annual, 
 rotation of the earth ; but Mr Hallani points out that his argument 
 for the one extends to the other. " Cum natura semper agit per 
 paucioi-a magis quam plura; atque rationi magis consentaneuni 
 videtur \inum exiguum corpus telluris diuruam volutationem efficere 
 quam mundum totum circumferri." 
 
Gilbert. 95 
 
 caught liold of the idea of force acting at a distance, 
 of no less vahie because it was still iniiDossihle for him 
 clearly to distinguish magnetism and gravity. 
 
 Bacon is nowhere more open to the charge of Ottoman 
 fratricide than when he censures a man who had so 
 exactly anticipated much of what is most cogent in his 
 own views, as a inere specialist so consumed by one-sided 
 zeal as to believe himself a magnet. Xowhere does he 
 show more obtuseness than in his refusal to recognise 
 the importance of the principle of attraction and repul- 
 sion, which he confounds with his own a lyrlori concep- 
 tion of " conforming natures." But elsewhere he accords 
 to Gilbert a more due meed, and the prominence he gives 
 to his name testifies to a sense of his importance. 
 
 Of other eminent Englishmen of the time who helped 
 to lay the rafters of the bridge from the old world of 
 speculation to the new world of discovery we need here 
 only name — Thomas Harriot (1560-1621), the mathema- 
 tician, famous for his solution of cubic equations, and co- 
 discoverer with Galileo of the solar sjDots and Jupiter's 
 satellites; John ISTapier (1550-1617), whose logarithmic 
 tables (1594-1614), according to Laplace, '' doubled the 
 life of astronomers by reducing the labour of months to 
 days;" and William Harvey, who, in 1619, announcing 
 his discovery of the circulation of the blood, opened a 
 new era of physiology. 
 
 These were the ktjpvk^^ A 109 ayy cXol rjSk kol dvSpiov 
 who gave to Bacon his materials, and helped to form his 
 mind. He owed as much to the spirit of an age of 
 Protestantism, in a wider than the theologic sense, of 
 expanded experience in all directions, of the full influ- 
 
96 Francis Bacon. 
 
 ence of the press, the breaking up of the old ecclesiastical 
 unity; of the growing beliefs in the importance of secular 
 knowledge, in progress as an essential of human life, 
 and in the largeness and richness of nature. " There 
 needed," says Dr Whewell, " some great theoretical 
 reformer to speak in the name of the experimental phil- 
 osophy, and to lay before the world a declaration of its 
 riu'hts." 
 
IL— THE 'INSTAUKATIO MAGNA.' 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE DESIGN, PLAN, AND PROGRESS OF BACON's WORK. 
 
 Hosier, it has been said, was an exaltation of the Cyclic 
 romancers. Dante gathered to a centre all the poetry- 
 latent in the early ages of the Chnrcli : Chaucer, by his 
 own confession, fed on the fields of the Trouveres ; Shake- 
 speare glorified the previous traditions of the English 
 Drama. But our interest in their ancestors is mainly 
 due to what these men have done. Similarly, if in a 
 less degree, Bacon has sent his readers to search the 
 l^ast, with which half his writing is engaged. He must 
 have been aware that he had been to a great extent fore- 
 stalled by his predecessors ; that he formulised rather 
 than invented, condensed rather than devised, the as- 
 sault on the methods of the Scholasticism which, in his 
 day, haunted men's minds only in the guise of an unlaid 
 ghost : but he was probably unconscious of the extent 
 of his debts, and the disingenuousness with Avhich he 
 
 p. XIV. G 
 
98 Francis Bacon, 
 
 strove to minimise them is frequent in ages of revolt. 
 With him and with Descartes^ Modern Philosophy 
 begins, under forms so different that the application to 
 their work of the same name has been questioned ; but 
 between the two writers there is, in several respects, an 
 affinity. Both felt the need of a reform, and had an 
 overweening assurance of having accomplished it. Des- 
 cartes says, " I do not recommend the study of my method 
 as an aid to the study of mathematics, but the study of 
 mathematics as an illustration of my method ; " and 
 Bacon declares, "I believe that I have, for ever and 
 legitimately, united the empirical method and the rational 
 method, the divorce of which is fatal to science and to 
 humanity." Both were laymen — the one a lawyer, bent 
 on natural philosophy, the other a soldier and geometri- 
 cian — inspired with a contempt for authority in the do- 
 main of thought. " The most general feature," says M. 
 Cousin, " of the philosophical revolution of the sixteenth 
 and seventeenth centuries is independence, both of eccle- 
 siasticism and the admiration of ancient genius. Com- 
 parative disdain and ignorance of the greatest thinkers 
 of Greece were the ransom of its independence. Leib- 
 nitz excepted, none of the leading philosophers of the 
 new era had much real knowledge of antiquity. Des- 
 cartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke hardly read any- 
 thing else than is found in nature and in consciousness." 
 Bacon, though more learned than those writers, was the 
 protagonist of their revolutionary spirit. That which 
 
 ^ Born 1596, Descartes was a generation younger than Bacon ; but 
 the dates of the pulolication of the ' Novum Organum ' (1620) and of 
 the ' Discourse on Method ' (1637) may be compared as indicating 
 the starting-points of their philosophic influence. 
 
Bacon and Descartes versus Scholasticism. 99 
 
 had turned away from tlie phenomenal world was dead : 
 men were reawakened to the diversity of life : it was 
 time for their minds to assume confidence, and force 
 their way through new labyrinths. This confidence 
 Bacon's work was, more than that of his forerunners, 
 by the larger utterance it gave to a more fully rounded 
 design, fitted to instil. He had been anticipated in frag- 
 ments, which he first brought together in a connected 
 and apparently conclusive form. After the suns and 
 showers of three centuries had been ripening the grain, 
 he announced the harvest. 
 
 In dealing with his philosophy, we shall first endeavour 
 to state his central idea, then to illustrate its develop- 
 ment, finally to exhibit the causes of his failure — for he 
 did fail in what he cared for most, and his permanent 
 achievements have been collateral. Bacon has been 
 accepted as an unreliable though often incisive critic, a 
 frequently inaccurate though zealous observer, and a 
 one-sided though suggestive logician. His ow^n idea of 
 his position was that of a discoverer of a " mundus alter 
 et idem," a new world, of more moment to mankind 
 than the Indies of Columbus. He would have received 
 with indignation the verdict that his work was mainly 
 negative ; that he would be known to the future by his 
 incidental wisdom, his warnings against the "ignes 
 fatui " of the schools, or the errors, '' more to be feared 
 than they," which are "always with us"; that he would 
 be commended by popular rhetoricians for his practical 
 aims, or that, mutatis mutandis, his verdict on the 
 alchemists would be pronounced on himself. He ar- 
 raigned the thinkers of the past because he fancied him- 
 self to have found what they had missed ; he assailed 
 
100 Francis Bacon. 
 
 their love of system because he had a supplanting sys- 
 tem ; he despised their a priori imaginations because, by 
 the excuse of an imagination almost Shakespearian in 
 its daring in another field, he conceived himself to have 
 banished from the future of the j^hysical drama the need 
 for further imaginings. Nowhere do we find a more 
 exalted conception of the majesty of J^Tature than in 
 Bacon's work; but he holds it as a cardinal doctrine 
 that she is finite, that the time is at hand when all 
 essential knowledge may be grasped, the world well 
 won, and the age of the Garden before the Fall restored. 
 Bacon constantly insists that we must enter the kingdom 
 of Nature " sub persona infantis," but he has himself the 
 air of one taking possession of a throne. He had little 
 of the submissive or reverential spirit which led Newton, 
 amid the acclaim of his great discovery, to confess him- 
 self still " a child gathering pebbles on the shore of the 
 infinite sea," or that of the modern j)oet " moving about 
 in worlds not realised." His always proud humility lay 
 in his acceptance of the dictum of the " Parmenides," 
 that the least of Nature's manifestations is worthy of our 
 note, that " he who feels contempt for any living thing 
 hath faculties which he has never used ; " but his aspira- 
 tions as a thinker dwarfed his ambition as a statesman. 
 By every image at command of a fancy among the 
 masters of prose equalled by Plato alone, he impresses 
 US with his belief in his possession of a clue, a key, a 
 secret, that had come to him by a sort of inspiration. 
 He had threaded the recesses of a labyrinth unknown to 
 Theseus, unlocked the door barred alike to Aristotle and 
 Aquinas, learned the " open sesame " where Paracelsus 
 had been calling " wheat " and '' rye." He had grazed the 
 
Bacon's Caitral Idea. 101 
 
 beach of the ' T^ew Atlantis,' though he might only live 
 to blow the clarion for the colonising generations ; he had 
 realised the magic of which the mayi only dreamt. The 
 gods had answered his prayer, as that of Pygmalion ; for 
 he knew the tune of '*The Winter's Tale," to call the 
 marble statues of the old philosophy down from their 
 pedestals to take life and colour, and move, fostering, 
 gladdening, and restoring, among men. 
 
 Bacon's idea of the ' Interpretation of I^ature ' receives 
 some light from the crude pre-Socratic speculations on 
 the one side, and on the other from the more defined 
 though still unjDroved conjectures, as those of Bosco- 
 witch, on the border land where physics seem to merge 
 into metaphysic. Like the earliest recorded thinkers 
 of Greece, Bacon found his unity in an examination 
 of the external world rather than in a mental analysis. 
 He will accept none of their conclusions, and is alive 
 to the inadequacy of the generalisations by which they 
 were reached ; but he holds that — in looking behind ap- 
 pearances to some physical bases, into which the shows 
 of the universe may be resolved — they were on a path 
 more fruitful of discovery than the impossible attempt 
 to separate non-existent substances from attributes, or 
 ideal paradigms from real things. His alienation from 
 purely metaphysical modes of thought is conspicuous in 
 all his criticisms. He replaces the opposition of pheno- 
 mena and noumena by his analogies, sometimes fanciful, 
 always suggestive, between all the spheres in which life 
 and order are manifest. He is ready as any Greek or 
 German to admit that " things are not w^hat they seem ; " 
 but, setting aside the inscrutable truths of religion, 
 he has no faith in anything that is not physical. His 
 
102 Francis Bacon. 
 
 " noumena " are " phenomena " interrogated and ex- 
 plained j Proteus grappled with through every alias 
 till he returns to his proper shape ; Heat confessing itself 
 to be an expansive motion. In dealing, as in the * De 
 Principiis,' with the question of the ultimate nature 
 of things, Bacon suggests rather than dogmatises ; hazard- 
 ing the view that all the assumed elements may be 
 reduced to one, as has been imagined by chemists like 
 Samuel Brown, who have tried to establish what the 
 alchemists vaguely guessed. Bacon is nowhere bold 
 enough to assert with Pythagoras, that all apparent 
 varieties of quality are resolvable into arrangements of 
 form,^ — a view which is at the root of the doctrine 
 that the difference, which is life, depends on number 
 as the expression of geometry : but he feels confident in 
 having gone far towards unity in his simplification of 
 apparently complex natures. Nature, with him, is a 
 mighty conjuress, who plays a myriad tricks with a few 
 cards : man as " interpres " has to detect and as " min- 
 ister " to re-j)lay those tricks, and so by mocking to 
 become her master. When we consider how many com- 
 binations may result from the various arrangement of, 
 say, six solid factors, how many more if these factors are 
 fluid, there appears nothing strange in the belief that 
 everything that strikes any of our senses may be re- 
 solved into the action and reaction of a limited num- 
 ber of ^' simple " — i.o., irresolvable — " natures." To dis- 
 cover these, by a process analogous to that of referring 
 the conclusion of a syllogism to its premisses, is Bacon's 
 
 1 If for the Pytliagorean triangles, expressed by tlie disposition 
 of their points, we substitute centres of living force, Ave have the 
 monadisni of Leibnitz. 
 
Bacon's Eldorado. 103 
 
 prime (jiiest ; for as, in formal reasoning, the conclusion 
 follows from the premisses, so, if we have once caught 
 hold of the " motifs " or apxaC of Nature, we shall be 
 able to reproduce her results. The " unseen iniiverse," 
 by which we are surrounded, is thus at once the "gar- 
 ment of God " and the heritage of man. 
 
 Bacon dismisses as a superstition the idea that we 
 profane the sanctuary in attempting to unravel its 
 mysteries : the forbidden fruit is the reserve of the 
 right of revelation to dictate to morality ; the rest of the 
 garden is the fulness of the primal life, to Avhicli we not 
 only may but can return. Man is with him "the roof 
 and crown of things," and his view of the relation of 
 the chief of creatures to the rest of creation is perfectly 
 expressed in the verse of his friend and coadjutor in 
 translation, George Herbert : — 
 
 " For us the winds do blow, 
 The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow. 
 
 Man is one world, and hath 
 Another to attend him." 
 
 How Bacon proposed to attain the key to a kingdom 
 richer than Ealeigh's Eldorado, and what rendered his 
 attempt in the main issue a futility, are questions the 
 answer to which involves a history and criticism of his 
 whole method and aim. 
 
 Of no philosophical writer is it more difficult to give 
 an account, at once clear and sufficient. This arises 
 first from the fact that his work is exceptionally in- 
 complete. Of the three main contributions to his 
 design, the 'De Augmentis' alone is finished. The 
 fragment of the *Xovum Organum' is a head with- 
 
104 Frcmcis Bacon. 
 
 out limbs, and the ' Sylva Sylvariim ' a mass of dis- 
 jointed tliougli interesting observations, A volume 
 remains of posthumously published discourses and dis- 
 cussions, for the most part forecasts of the 'Organum,' 
 ■whose precise place in the author's scheme is often hard 
 to determine. The second obstacle to a satisfactory 
 analysis is Bacon's habit of repeating himself — the 
 same idea being hunted, with the same phrases, over 
 many fields — and the want of boundary-lines in his 
 treatment of subjects so various. His cross - divisions 
 are interminable ; and with outlines of existing systems 
 he mixes up rough anticipations rather than exact 
 statements of his own. The ' Valerius Terminus ' and 
 * The Advancement of Learning ' already glance at his 
 doctrine of Forms ; his ethical and religious meditations 
 are huddled rather than arranged in the later books of 
 the * De Augmentis '; and much of his earlier teaching is 
 thrice told in the unmethodical aphorisms of his latest. 
 One cannot ignore the minor treatises, because of the 
 light they often throw on the major ; but their biograph- 
 ical interest is diminished by uncertainty as to their 
 dates, often marked by such slight indications as the 
 discovery of a star, a reference to or fro, a change of 
 opinion, a quotation, a greater or less maturity of view. 
 The initial steps of his intellectual career are the more 
 Avorthy of note, that no proximately complete collection^ 
 
 1 The only important contributions to the 'Instanratio Magna,' 
 published by Bacon himself, were the 'Advancement of Learning,' 
 the 'Novum Organum,' and the 'De Augmentis,' though he widely 
 circulated the ' Cogitata et Visa,' and other tracts. The * Sj^va 
 Sylvarum* was edited and published by Eawley in 1627 — i.e., the 
 year after his master's death — as also the ' New Atlantis. ' Raw- 
 ley's further collection, the ' Resuscitatio of Sleeping Pieces,' ap- 
 
Forecasts of his Sf/sievi. 105 
 
 of his Avritings was made till more than a centuiy after 
 his death, and that so much of his tentative work 
 illustrates his ultimate design. 
 
 The first indication of his arraignment of the methods 
 of teaching in his time is the reference of his biographer, 
 Eawley, to the fact that when at Cambridge, as a boy 
 of sixteen, he "fell into dislike of the philosophy of 
 Aristotle, as only strong for disputations and conten- 
 tions, but barren of works for the benefit of the life of 
 man." The second is the ' Temporis Partus IMaximus ' 
 (vide ante). The third is the remarkable letter sent in 
 1592 to Burghley, in chagrin at the failure of early suits 
 for promotion, in which occur the characteristic and oft- 
 repeated phrases — 
 
 " I wax now somewhat ancient ; one-and-thirty years is 
 a great deal of sand in the hour-glass. ... I ever bare a 
 mind to serve her Majesty, not as a man born under Sol, 
 that loveth honour, nor under Jupiter, that loveth busi- 
 ness (for the contemplative planet carrieth me away wholly), 
 but as a man born under an excellent Sovereign that de- 
 serveth the dedication of all men's abilities. ... I have as 
 vast contemplative ends as I have moderate civil ends, for 
 I have taken all knowledge to be my province ; and if I 
 could purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with 
 frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the 
 other with blind experiments and auricular traditions and 
 
 peared in 1657. Four years earlier, Griiter's contribution of letters 
 and papers supplied to him by Sir William Boswell, ambassador to 
 Amsterdam, had appeared under the title 'Impetus Philosophici.' 
 Another collection Avas made by Tenison in 1679 : that of Stephens was 
 published in 1734. The complete— or professedly complete— editions 
 of Bacon are those of Blackbourne, 1730 ; Mallet, 1740 ; Bircb, 
 1763 ; Basil :\rontague, 1825-34 ; Spedding and Ellis, 1857-83. M. 
 Bouillet has also issued in French an edition of the ' (Euvres Philo- 
 sophiques,' Paris, 1834. 
 
106 Francis Bacon. 
 
 impostures, liatli committed so many spoils, I hope I should 
 bring in industrious observations and profitable inventions 
 and discoveries — the best state of that province. This, 
 whether it be curiosity, or vainglory, or nature, or (if one 
 take it favourably) 'philantliroina, is so fixed in my mind as 
 it cannot be removed." Then follows, almost menacingly, 
 the resolve — " If your Lordships will not carry me on, I will 
 not do as Anaxagoras did, who reduced himself to voluntary 
 poverty ; but this I will do : I will sell the inheritance that 
 I have, and purchase some lease of quick revenue, or some 
 office of gain that shall be executed by deputy, and so give 
 over all care of service, and become some sorry book-maker, 
 or a true pioneer in that mine of truth which (he said) lay 
 so deep." 
 
 In a later address to the "Atlas of this Common- 
 wealth," 1595, Bacon, referring to himself as "a tired 
 sea-sick suitor," says : " I do not think the ordinary 
 practice of the law, not serving the Queen in place, will 
 be admitted for a good account of the poor talent which 
 God has given me." In the same year he writes simi- 
 larly to Essex (to whom he had previously spoken of 
 retiring with a couple of men to Cambridge, there to 
 spend his life in studies and contemplations), and adds : 
 "I partly lean to Thales' opinion, that a philosopher 
 may be rich if he will." The last of these philosophic 
 resignations occurs in a letter to his cousin, after the 
 accession of James, in which the writer professes that 
 his ambition is now only in his pen, whereby he hoj^es 
 to maintain his memory. 
 
 Bacon's appeals had no effect on the statesmen to 
 whom they were mainly addressed. That Essex, indeed, 
 recognised the promise of his protege is seen otherwise 
 than in his munificent gift; but the Cecils were deaf 
 
Hope of Patronage for Philoso2)hij. 107 
 
 alike to the cajolements and the threats of their kinsman : 
 they prohably regarded his high-sounding phrases as the 
 rhetoric of a dreamer, and cared no more for the reform 
 of reasoning than either of the sovereigns whom they 
 served. Elizabeth, who preferred the witticisms of 
 Andrew Borde to the 'Faery Queen,' knew of no sci- 
 ences but those of statecraft and compliment; while 
 James would have set more store by a refutation of 
 Eeginald Scot's ' Discovery of Witchcraft ' than by the 
 'Kovum Organum.' These early remonstrances are of 
 value as revelations of the writer, and of the ideas and 
 designs already *' so fixed in his mind," that they could 
 not be diverted from their centre by all the struggles 
 and vicissitudes of forty years. Nowhere is the self- 
 deception which Bacon carried with him through life 
 more clearly marked than in his alternate tone of com- 
 plaisance and confidence, his professed abandonment of 
 ambitions by which he was perpetually, and to some 
 extent fatally, swayed ; the mixture of mean and mag- 
 nanimous motives ; his blending of personal with public 
 ends. But we have here more especially to note his sense 
 of the inadequacy of what had been done, of the almost 
 limitless range of what might be done ; conceptions (more 
 distinctly announced than by any of his predecessors) of 
 philosophy as at once the highest exercise of the mind, 
 and, if need be, a gainful art. Amid the variety of 
 Bacon's themes, there is a sameness, almost tiresome, in 
 his style, which makes it easy to detect. On this ground 
 alone there need be no hesitation in accepting ^Fr Sped- 
 ding's view that the ' Letters of Advice ' to the Earl of 
 Rutland, and to Foulke Greville (1596) on Travel and 
 Studies, attributed to the Earl of Essex, are really from 
 
108 Francis Bacon. 
 
 the hand of his friend. About the same time must have 
 been written the Letter to Henry Saville,^ as provost of 
 Eton, " Touching Helps for the Intellectual Powers." 
 This paper is a mere fragment^ but such as might have 
 been naturally addressed to a new head-master — giving 
 hints for education, and rules for the cultivation of the 
 memory. 
 
 Among the fragments belonging to this period, justly 
 attributed to Bacon's authorship, are his contributions 
 to the pedantic performances of the time, called "De- 
 vices," in which facts or fancies were set forth by imagin- 
 ary characters, after the manner of the dreary Moralities 
 then giving place to the real Drama — contributions rising 
 above the commonplaces by which they were surrounded, 
 almost as Comus transcends all other masques in verse. 
 Of the two earliest, belonging to '' a Triumph " given by 
 Essex before the Court in 1592, the ''Discourse in 
 Praise of the Queen," amid much fulsome adulation, is 
 marked by some of the writer's noblest patriotic senti- 
 ment ; while the " Praise of Knowledge " is in his char- 
 acteristic vein : e.g. — 
 
 " Are not the pleasures of the affections greater than the 
 pleasures of the senses ? And are not the pleasures of the 
 intellect greater than the pleasures of the affections ? Is not 
 knowledge a truly and only natural pleasure, whereof there 
 is no satiety ? Is it not knowledge alone that doth clear 
 the mind of all perturbations ? . . . But is this a vein only 
 of delight, and not of discovery — of contentment, and not of 
 benefit ? . . . Are we the richer by one poor invention, by 
 
 1 Vide Spedding, vol. ii. pp. 9, 11, 12, 14, 22, and 25. Passages 
 anticipate almost verbally the Essay on Studies. Cf. also the warn- 
 ing to Greville against Epitomes, and the praises of Tacitns and 
 Thiicydides, with the 'Advancement of Learning.' 
 
"Devices,'' "Gcsta Grayorum." 109 
 
 reason of all the learning that hath been these many hundred 
 years? The philosophy of the Grecians . . . is gathered out of 
 a few vulgar observations ; that of the alchemists out of a few 
 experiments of a furnace. The one never faileth to multiply 
 words, the other ever faileth to multiply gold. . . Let me 
 so give every man his due, as I give Time his due, which is 
 to discover truth. Many of these men had greater wits far 
 above mine own, and so are many in the universities of 
 Europe at this day. But, alas ! they learn nothing there 
 but to believe : first, to believe that others know that which 
 they know not ; and after, that themselves know that which 
 they know not." 
 
 There is as little doubt as to Eacon's part in the 
 speeches of the six counsellors in the Revels, " Gesta 
 Grayorum," celebrated at his Inn of Court in January 
 1595. The first and fifth are certainly his own, the 
 latter dwelling on the paramount importance of educa- 
 tion as the guardian of the laws ; the former, anticipating 
 alike the suggestions of the ' Commentarius Solutus ' and 
 the imaginary realisation of ' Solomon's House.' The 
 speeches of the Hermit and the Squire in the second, 
 otherwise fantastic, " Device " of Essex, at the close of 
 the year, are clearly from the same source. In January 
 1596 appeared the ' Promus of Formularies and Ele- 
 gancies,' wdiicli (begun December 1594) first displayed 
 the author's excess of quotation and aphorism, as did 
 the 'Colours of Good and Evil' (appended with the 
 * Meditationes Sacrse,' to the first edition of the 'Es- 
 says ') his love of antithesis. It has been conjectured 
 that several philosophical "opuscnla," afterwards super- 
 seded, may have been sketched during the later years 
 of the century ; but nothing of consequence w'as written, 
 in this sphere, previous to Elizabeth's death. Early 
 
110 Francis Bacon, 
 
 in the new reign, the hitherto baffled statesman and 
 discontented lawyer began to entertain the idea of pop- 
 ularising his researches into Nature, and planting the 
 seed of his thought in such a manner that it " should 
 have the best chance of growing, and in due season 
 bearing its fruit." AVith this in view, he seems to have 
 composed in Latin the " Proem " of his purposes, from 
 which (in Spedding's translation) we extract : — 
 
 " Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, . . . 
 I set myself to consider what service I was myself best fitted 
 by nature to perform. Now, ... if a man should succeed, 
 not in striking out some new invention, . . . but in kindling 
 a light in nature — a light that should at its very rising touch 
 and illuminate all the border regions that confine upon the 
 circle of our present knowledge ; and so spreading further 
 and further, should presently disclose and bring into sight all 
 that is most hidden and secret in the world,^ — that man (I 
 thought) would be the benefactor indeed of the human race, 
 the propagator of man's empire over the universe, the cham- 
 pion of liberty, the conqueror and subduer of necessities. 
 For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as 
 for the study of truth ; as having a mind nimble and versa- 
 tile enough to catch the resemblances of things (which is the 
 chief point), and at the same time steady enough to fix and 
 distinguish their subtler differences ; as being gifted by 
 nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to 
 meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to reconsider, careful- 
 ness to dispose and set in order ; and as being a man that 
 neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and 
 liates every kind of imposture. So I thought my nature had 
 a kind of familiarity and relationship with truth." 
 
 Bacon proceeds, with the complacency which alone 
 
 1 It is worth note, that whereas iu the letter to Burghley Bacon 
 dwells on the discovery of new distinct arts, he here first seems to 
 entertain the notion of one master-key to the secrets of nature. 
 
The rrommtm. Ill 
 
 detracts from the dignity of the piece, to attribute his 
 desire to rise in the State solely to his wish to have a 
 wider command of industry to aid his work ; and then 
 informs us tliat he felt himself no longer free to leave 
 undone what he could do by himself. There follows 
 one of the most striking and definite of political pro- 
 phecies, afterwards repeated with a yet more precise 
 reference to dangers brewing in the north, in the letter 
 of advice to Yilliers : — 
 
 "Nor am I discouraged from this work because I see 
 signs in the times of the decline and overthrow of that 
 knowledge and erudition which is now in use. Not that I 
 appreliend any more barbarian invasions. . . . But the civil 
 wars which may be expected, I think (judging from certain 
 fashions which have come in of late), to spread through many 
 countries, seem to portend for literature and the sciences a 
 tempest no less fatal, and one against which the printing- 
 office will be no effectual security. " Fair-weather learn- 
 ing," he concludes, " will sink under these impediments ; 
 but that maintained by 'works of utility and power will 
 withstand them.' For himself, it is * enough to have con- 
 structed the machine,' though he may not succeed in setting 
 it on work. 'The lame man keeping the course won the 
 race of tlie swift man who left it.' His heart is not set upon 
 external things, — fame, or the founding of sects, or private 
 gain, — to look for which in such an enterprise were * both 
 ridiculous and base.' Enough for him the consciousness 
 of desert, and 'those results with which Fortune cannot 
 interfere.' '' 
 
 Bacon greatly overrated his power of discerning dif- 
 ferences, and his profession of withdrawing from poli- 
 tics was probably as sincere as Caesar's or Eichard's 
 refusal of the crown. Contemporaneously with the 
 " Proem," he was writing his " Discourse on the Union 
 
112 Francis Bacon. 
 
 of the Kingdoms," in which solid arguments for the 
 great measure he all but carried, appear side by side 
 with an embryo treatise on Fluids, an expressed respect 
 for the Persian magic, and an assertion that the mid- 
 summer heat is due to the conjunction of certain stars. 
 Nor far removed in time is the essay on '' The Pacifi- 
 cation of the Church," and the " Apology concerning 
 the Earl of Essex." But the interval before his eleva- 
 tion to the Solicitorship was to him a time of compara- 
 tive leisure from affair's, and the use he made of it is 
 apparent in the fact that, during this period, he pub- 
 lished (1605) the most popular of his philosophical 
 works — ' The Advancement of Learning ' — and made 
 other contributions towards the furtherance of his 
 scheme. 
 
 To nearly the same date we must assign the ' Cogita- 
 tiones de Rerum Natura,' ^ a series of jottings on natural 
 history, in which are included the earliest that have 
 come to us of the author's notes on Motion, and the 
 ' Cogitationes de Scientia Humana ' — three fragments 
 setting forth the limits, end, and use of knowledge, 
 illustrated by interpretations of fable, and of interest as 
 containing several of the recurring maxims of the ' Or- 
 ganum,' and an anticipation of the ' Parasceve.' *' Pun- 
 dimenta solida Philosophiae ISTaturalis in Naturali His- 
 toria jaciuntur." 
 
 The A^ALERiQS Terminus, or "Of the Interpretation 
 of Nature," first distinctly (1603 ?) announcing a new 
 
 1 This is an example of a work whose date is determined by con- 
 jecture. It has been concluded that, because Bacon refers to the 
 new star in Cassiopeia, while he takes no notice of that in Ophiuchus, 
 on which Galileo lectured in 1604, it must have been composed not 
 long after that year. 
 
'Valerius Tcrmhms! 113 
 
 philosophy, whicli is to put an end (Terminus) " to the 
 wandering of mankind in search of truth," seems to have 
 been designed to introduce the ' Instauratio,' — an ex- 
 pression, however, wliich Bacon began to use oidy in 
 1607. In this interesting fragment we have the four 
 Idola of the ' Organum ' with the same names, save that 
 the term " of the palace " takes the place of " fori " ; 
 and, used in the same way, the expressions " axiom," 
 "summary law," "simple nature," &c.; while the pro- 
 cess of arriving at "Forms" is conveyed in the phrase 
 '' freeing of a direction." ^ This paper, especially in its 
 application of the Eamean rules (vide ante), is beset by 
 scholastic subtleties, and there is reason to believe that 
 its obscurity was to some extent designed. Despite the 
 author's desire that his discovery shoidd be the world's 
 gain, he had inherited, from the ages when it was the 
 fashion {vide ante) to regard recently acquired knowledge^ 
 
 1 Tliis practically means that when the false lights are extinguished 
 and the wrong ways fenced off, the mind is more free to follow the 
 true light, and walk in the straight way. 
 
 - In the dark and middle ages no new discovery was freely pub- 
 lished, and the arts were carefully guarded mystei'ies. To be wiser 
 than the time was a possible fortune or a danger : the fear of heresy 
 combined with the pride of exclusiveness to make men cautious in 
 the "traditio lampadis." The masters in alchemy handed down 
 their secrets "adfilios." Roger Bacon is said to have recorded his 
 invention of gunpowder, as Galileo his discovery of the phases of 
 Venus, in an anagram. Harvey protests, " So new are my discov- 
 eries, that I dread the enmity of all." Bacon, while throwing down 
 a reckless gauntlet to the past, is generally shy of giving offence to his 
 contemporaries. In the ' Temporis Partus Masculus' he adopts a 
 method such " ut idoneum et legitimum sibi lectorem seponet et 
 quasi adoptet." In the 'Advancement of Learning ' he advises "the 
 entry of trutli, with chalk to mark those minds which are capable to 
 lodge and harbour it." The same view appears in his interpretation 
 of the myths and the special preface to the ' Novum Organum.' 
 
 P, — XIV. H 
 
114 Francis Bacon. 
 
 as a secret, the notion that there are truths best shown, 
 at first, through a veil ; that, in philosophy as in poli- 
 tics, "the vulgar " were to be treated as children ; that 
 there was a call for esoteric as well as exoteric teaching. 
 His addition to the title of this work, " with the anno- 
 tations of Hermes Stella," indicates that the starlight 
 thrown on Nature's arcana would suffice to reveal them 
 to the audience, "fit though few," it was intended to 
 address. In chap, xviii. he defends the discretion of 
 withholding part of the truth, and of " publishing in a 
 manner not to the capacity of all, . . . both for the 
 avoiding of abuse in the excluded and the strengthening 
 of affection in the admitted." In numerous passages 
 of the * Eedargutio ' and the ' De Augmentis ' we have 
 similar traces of the reserve, belonging to a time when 
 thought was fettered, surviving in the man who most 
 emphatically pronounced it to be free. The popular 
 side and the exclusive side of Bacon's nature; the 
 arrogance of "procul este profani," and the concili- 
 ation of the prayer of the Miller of Huntingdon for 
 "peace among his willows, that his water might have 
 more work ; " his inheritance and his anticipation ; his 
 latent scorn and his longing for aid, — are at war in his 
 philosophy, as in his life. Sometimes the one mood, 
 sometimes the other, is uppermost, and he allows him- 
 self to be swayed by the one or the other to suit the 
 often inconsistent experiments of his plan. His anxiety 
 to bring his thoughts before the world in such a form 
 that they would be accepted, made him put on masks 
 and seek shifts of secrecy, audacity, modesty, to gain a 
 hearing. The same purpose accounts for the number of 
 his tentative efforts, some of which, thrown aside, are 
 
'Cogitata ct Visa! 115 
 
 better than the corresponding portions of those finally 
 adopted. 
 
 The date of the Cogitata et Yisa^ is nearly fixed 
 by the copy forwarded in 1607 to Sir Thomas Bodley. 
 Another -was, some time after, presented to Launcelot 
 Andrews, Bishop of Ely, with a letter throwing light on 
 the author's manner of composing his work : — 
 
 " I hasten not to publish ; perishing, I would prevent, . . . 
 for with nie it is thus : if I bind myself to an argument, it 
 loadeth my mind ; but if I rid my mind of the present cogi- 
 tation, it is rather a recreation. These miscellanies I pur. 
 pose to suppress if God give me leave to write a just and 
 perfect volume of philosophy, which I go on with slowly." 
 
 About the same time, to his friend Toby Matthews, 
 with a copy of the ' De Sapientia Veterum,' he writes : — 
 
 " My great work goeth forward ; but, after my manner, I 
 alter ever when I add. So that nothing is finished till all 
 be finished." 
 
 And to Casaubon — 
 
 " You are right in supposing that my great desire is to 
 draw the sciences out of their hiding-places into the light. 
 How great an enterprise in this kind I am attempting, and 
 with what small helps, you will learn perhaps hereafter." 
 
 The ' Cogitata et Visa,' covering the ground of the 
 first book of the ' Organnm,' begins by reference to the 
 
 1 This is an expansion of a previous tract, " Filum Labyrinthi 
 sive formula Inquisitionis," the first of three papers with the same 
 title. The second is the " Inquisitio legitima de motu," mentioned 
 (1608) in the 'Commentarins.' The tltird is the " Scala Intellectus," 
 forming the preface to Part IV, of the 'Instauratio.' Tlie same per- 
 plexing confusion of nomenclatiu'e appears in the two collections en- 
 titled ' Phenomena Universi.' 
 
116 Francis Bacon. 
 
 failure of the previous alchemy, magic, mechanics, and 
 medicine, as relying rather on chance than philosophy. 
 It was probably circulated after Bacon's appointment to 
 the Solicitorship, and is distinguished from the ' Eedar- 
 gutio ' by its calmer style of criticism. Already, in a 
 preface to the ' Temporis Partus Masculus,' he had pro- 
 posed to deal with the interpretation of nature in three 
 books: 1. The Preparation, 'Perpolitio et Applicatio,' 
 of the Mind = ' ^NTovum Organum,' Eook I. ; 2. ' Lumen 
 Naturae, sive Formula Interpretationis ' = ' Xovum Or- 
 ganum,' Book 11. ; 3. 'J^atura Illuniinata, sive Veritas 
 Rerum ' = the unaccomplished conclusion of the ' Instau- 
 ratio.' 
 
 In the ' Partis Instaurationis Secundas Delineatio et 
 Argumentum' (1606-1607), the initial survey of the 
 sciences is presumed ; the third, fourth, and sixth books 
 are to deal with results, and the fifth is referred to as 
 tentative. Bacon then lays down heads of the second, 
 which is the training of the intelleot in the art of inter- 
 pretation. He lets this be called Logic, that he may 
 lead men, as by the hand, with familiar names ; but 
 it differs from that commonly so called in the starting- 
 point of its inquiry, the order of its demonstrations, 
 and its end, which begins deeper and goes further. 
 The end of the new science being " Pes et Opera," to 
 discover facts and perform works, we must be prepared 
 to receive all the light that can be thrown on them, and 
 to this three processes are essential : 1. Mentis area 
 equancla, the arena of the mind must be levelled by 
 clearing away of misconceptions. There follows a refer- 
 ence to the " idola adscitia," with special emphasis laid 
 on those arising from false philosophies. " Itaque 
 
'Ddincatio d Anjumcnium' 117 
 
 primus imponitur hibor, iit omiiis i.sta inilitia Tlicoriarmii, 
 qu83 taiitas dedit piignas, niittatur ac rclegctur." 2. 
 Conversio mentis bona — ^.e., the mind must be made to 
 face the new truths, and, freed from the " idohi innata " ; 
 it must understand how great is the difference between 
 these and the ideas of the divine mind — /.e., the laws of 
 the universe ; above all, it must not despair of investiga- 
 tion as endless. " Ostendemus eam (/.c, scientiarum 
 regenerationem) errorum et vastitatis tennmuni.^' This 
 part of the paper shows how definitely Bacon had al- 
 ready conceived the scheme of the ' Organum.' 3. The 
 part which follows on the ministrations or aids to the 
 Senses, the Memory, and the Eeason, suggests some of 
 the further developments which that work might have 
 received had it advanced nearly to completion. 
 
 In 1609 appeared the 'De Sapientia Yeterum,' re- 
 markable as the only book (if we except the second edi- 
 tion of the Essays, 1612) that Bacon published between 
 the * Advancement of Learning ' and the ' ^ovum Or- 
 ganum.' To the same interval belong several physical 
 treatises, mostly fragmentary, among which the second 
 " Filum Labyrinthi," Avith the short tracts on " Heat 
 and Cold," "Sound and Hearing" (following a programme 
 sketched in the ' Commentarius '), must have a date 
 assigned to them after 1608. The first shows that the 
 writer was already possessed by the idea that all the ap- 
 parently diverse changes of nature were modes of motion, 
 — an idea developed in the treatment of heat in the ' !N'o- 
 vum Organum'; while the discussion of sound is ex- 
 panded in the 'Sylva Syl varum.' In the last-named 
 collection are reproduced most of the facts and observa- 
 tions recorded in the first " Phenomena Universi sive 
 
118 Francis Bacon. 
 
 Historia Xaturalis ad coiidendam Philosophiam " — de- 
 signed to be an enumeration of the " cardinal virtues " 
 — i.e., the essential qualities in nature — and probably to 
 introduce the third part of tlie 'Instauratio.' This was 
 finally superseded by the later work of the same title 
 in 1622 ; between Avhich date and 1608 (when it is not 
 mentioned in the ' Commentarius ') it necessarily falls. 
 
 The date 1612 may be confidently assigned to the 
 * Descriptio Globi Intellectualis ' and the * Thema 
 CcELi,' not only from their acceptance of the discoveries 
 announced by Galileo in his ' Sidereus Xuncius ' (1811), 
 but by the reference to the star in Cygnus, first ob- 
 served in 1600, as known for twelve years. The former 
 is difficult to classify : the first three chapters are 
 given to a division and survey of the sciences, while the 
 rest of the book is a review of the previous astronomy, to 
 which, in the ' Thema Coeli,' Bacon adds his own [vide 
 infra, chap, iv.) His " Essay on the Tides" must have 
 been circulated before 1616, when Galileo put forth a 
 refutation of it, himself substituting a theory, in its turn 
 to be refuted. Two papers only remain of this period, 
 which, though mere jottings, are of interest as the near- 
 est approaches in form to the 'Organum,' and for re- 
 markable sentences which they alone contain. On 
 the " De Interpretatione Naturae Sententiae, xii." Sped- 
 ding remarks that, of the rejected preparatory forms, it 
 is the most remarkable for weight, condensation, and 
 comprehensiveness, and that it still bears traces of the 
 dramatic form of the " Redargutio," which the Avriter 
 afterwards wholly discarded for the aphoristic or ex- 
 pository. It contains one of the strongest expressions 
 of his over-confidence — " Scientia celeris, tempus tardi 
 
*Thcma Gceli' and 'Novum Orf/anum.' 119 
 
 partus est . . . non longum (fill) seel ambiguuni est iter," 
 — and a passage in wliich lie throws distinctly doubt on 
 the freedom of the Avill, *' Qualis causa est fortuna i in 
 universo, talis est voluntas in homine." The " Aphorism! 
 ct Consilia de auxiliis IMentis," in Avhich the idea of im- 
 posing one nature on another is first prominent, contains 
 one of the clearest definitions of " form " — " Qui autem 
 unitatem naturae in materiis dissimillimis comprehendit, 
 is formas rerum novit." 
 
 The 'Novum Organum' appeared in 1620. On this, 
 the last product of Bacon's political prime, there fol- 
 lowed, during the years of his retirement, other works 
 which helped to fill w]) its gaps. First in order came 
 a fragment of the enlarged ' IS'atural History,' dedicated 
 to Prince Charles, with a " History of the Winds," and 
 lists or sketches of subjects to each of which the writer 
 had resolved to give the labour of a month. To one of 
 these, " Life and Death," he devoted an extensive and, 
 from the light it throws on his own character as on the 
 beliefs of his age, most interesting treatise published in 
 1623. In the same year appeared the *De Augmentis 
 SciENTiARUM ' and the metaphysical treatise, ' De Prin- 
 ciPiis ATQUE Ortginibus,' as appears from references to 
 the 'Organum,' after 1620. According to Rawley,^ 
 * The New Atlantis,' and the * Sylva Sylvarum,' the 
 
 1 Vide ' Novum Organura,' i. 60 : " Fortuna nomen rei qua; non est." 
 " The following is Rawley's list of the works mainly composed 
 during the last five years of Bacon's life— i.e., 1621-1626 — Henry 
 VII. and beginning of Henry VIII. : ' De Augmentis,' ' New At- 
 lantis,' Dialogue on Holy War, Paper on War with Spain, Treatises 
 on "The Winds," "Life and Death," "Dense and Rare," "Heavy 
 and Light," "De Magnete," "De Luce et Lumine," translation of 
 Psalms, last edition of Essays, revision of ' De Sapientia Veterum ' 
 and the 'Sylva Sylvarum.' 
 
120 Francis Bacon. 
 
 History of Henry VII., 1622, and the last edition of the 
 Essays, 1625, complete the list of Bacon's great works. 
 
 In the ' Distributio Operis ' that follows the preface 
 to his ' Organiim,' Bacon clearly sets before us the 
 scheme of what he meant the 'Instauratio Magna' to 
 be. It was to consist of six parts : — 
 
 I. Partitiones Scientiarum. — A survey of the pre- 
 existing sciences, physical and mental, designed to be 
 no mere summary, but to record the deficiencies in the 
 previous knowledge of mankind, and suggest the means 
 of supplying them. The promise of this part is fulfilled 
 in the *De Augmentis' and the 'Globus Intellectualis.' 
 
 II. Eatio Inveniendi, the true Method of Interpret- 
 ing Nature. — The treatment of this part is less than 
 half exhausted. Bacon admits that he put forth his 
 great torso, the 'JS'ovum Organum,' because his days 
 being numbered, he "would have it saved," and with 
 the hope of enlisting the aid of others in the compiling 
 of the " Natural History, which must be the foundation 
 of a true and active philosophy." 
 
 III. PHiENOMENA Universi. — A collection of facts from 
 every field of experience, representing aU the appearances 
 and changes made manifest by Nature or by Art. On 
 the practical exhaustiveness of this treasure-house of 
 materials on which the New INIethod was to be employed, 
 rested the validity of the whole. To this, with a draft 
 of 130 Histories, Bacon has only contributed the heads 
 of comparatively few discussions. {Vide sketch of 
 Scheme.) 
 
 IV. ScALA Intellectus. — A number of "types or 
 models, placing before our eyes the process of the mind 
 in the discovery of truth." The author's own compari- 
 
'Distrihutio Operis.' 121 
 
 son of those types to the diagrams of geometry has sug- 
 gested tliat this part was designed to give an account of 
 analytical investigation, as set forth by AVhewell and by 
 Mill in vol. ii. of his 'Logic.' But Bacon, as we know 
 from the recurring simile of the "pair of compasses," 
 regarded his own method as geometrical, and it is more 
 correct to say that he here intended to present some 
 chosen examples of its successful operation and of its 
 results. It has been conjectured that the ' Inquisitio 
 de Motu ' may fall under this head, as might the inquiry 
 into Heat, if detached from the ' Organum ' ; but the only 
 undisputed contribution to it by the author is the 
 3d "Filum Labyrinthi" or " Scala Intellectus," — a 
 porch to an almost empty house. It has been conjec- 
 tured that the reference in this fragment to a Natural 
 History already written points to its being subsequent 
 to the SSylva Sylvarum.' This is inconclusive; but 
 the reference helps to fix the meaning of the metaphor. 
 "The beginning of the path has been marked in the 
 ' Organum ' : entering upon it, the author has passed 
 through the dark and tangled wood of Nature. It noAV 
 remains to ascend to a more open and steeper region, 
 from the wood to the mountain - spurs," to which he 
 shortly adds the caution, "He who can restrain him- 
 self and climb step by step, and overcome the ridges of 
 things as of hills, by unwearied patience, one by one, he 
 will in due time arrive at the summits and peaks of 
 Nature, where he shall have a calm rest and a fairest 
 view, and a gentle slope downwards to good and useful 
 ends." But to the mode of this doAvnward slope he has 
 barely referred. 
 
 V. Prodromi, or Anticipations of the New Philos- 
 
122 Francis Bacon. 
 
 opliy. — This part was meant to give results of reason- 
 ing on carefully observed phenomena, without the full 
 use of the New Method; somewhat corresponding to 
 the liberty given in the ' Organum,' under the phrase, 
 '^ permissio intellectus." The preface to this sufficiently 
 indicates the design. Towards the close we read : "It 
 is clear to us that if any one of average mature powers 
 will resolutely set aside delusions and begin to inquire 
 anew for himself, he will penetrate far deeper into nature 
 by the mere force of his mind and its guesses than by 
 all sorts of reading, or musing, or disputing, even though 
 he does not apply the complete ajjparatus nor follow the 
 strict rules of interpretation." This part of his system 
 — under which the speculations ' De Fluxu et Eefluxu 
 Maris,' the ^ Cogitationes de Eerum IsTatura,' and the 
 ' Thema Coeli,' if not the * De Principiis,' is, Bacon says, 
 to be regarded as interest given in lieu of the principal, 
 which is — 
 
 YI. The Philosophia Secunda sive Scientia Activa 
 itself ; to which nothing m his writing corresponds, un- 
 less we assign to it the half-imaginary, half-prophetic 
 world of the 'De Atlantis.' " To perfect this last part," 
 he himself confesses, " is above our poAvers and beyond 
 our hopes. We may, as we trust, make no despicable 
 beginnings — the destinies of the human race must com- 
 plete 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." 
 
123 
 
 CHAPTEE II. 
 
 'advancement of learning,' 'de augmentis,' 'essay«.' 
 
 The ' Advancement of Learning ' was, with the ex- 
 ception of the first edition of his 'Essays' (1597), Bacon's 
 earliest publication. That he regarded it as a provis- 
 ional sketch appears in various references — e.r/., in his 
 letter to Dr Playfer, Margaret Professor of Divinity at 
 Cambridge, requesting him to translate the work into 
 Latin, in which occurs the familiar phrase : " Since I 
 have only taken upon me to ring a bell to call other wits 
 together, it cannot but be consonant to my desire to 
 have that bell heard as far as can be." It is clear that 
 Bacon, already planning his work on a larger scale, 
 published his two popular books to enlist the sym- 
 pathy of general readers, and especially of the king, 
 in his undertaking. At a later date, as appears from 
 the dedication of his 'Dialogue on a Holy War,' 
 pressed liy the urgency of devoting himself to the 
 'Natural History,' he detennined, after the composi- 
 tion in retirement of his 'Henry VII.,' to be satisfied 
 with having rendered into Latin, under his immediate 
 superintendence, what he had already written, as " some 
 preparative or key for the better opening of the 'Instaur- 
 
124 Francis Bacon. 
 
 ution,' because it exhibits a mixture of new conceits and 
 old, whereas the ' Instauration ' itself gives the new un- 
 mixed." '' The translation," he continues, " is to have 
 ample ^ additions, especially in handling the partition of 
 the Sciences, and so to quit his promise in that part." 
 
 The First Book of the 'Advancement of Learning,' to 
 all intents identical with the first of the ' De Augmentis,' 
 isj next to the 'Essays,' justly the most familiar of 
 the author's works. There could be no more adequate 
 prelude to the ' Great Instauration ' than this exaltation 
 of the Dignity of Knowledge, in language only rivalled 
 by the advocacy of Freedom of Speech in the 'Areo- 
 pagitica.' Nowhere does Bacon, in the fore-front of 
 his age, more suggest the thought that, while the 
 morning broke on all statues alike, Menmon alone 
 made music in reply. ISTowhere does he assert himself 
 as an orator of science more persuasive, if not greater, 
 than either Leonardo or Galileo : nowhere has he given 
 more conclusive answers to the imputation of narrow 
 if not sordid utilitarianism, preferred against his name 
 by those who have taken it to their market, without 
 more than a glance at his work. In face of INIacau- 
 lay's implication that the Baconian Logic can lead us 
 no further than to shun " mince -pies " : in view of 
 Hegel's sneer that we may expect from the nation that 
 speaks of Bacon's " philosophy " to hear of " a philos- 
 
 1 Besides expansion to more than twice the length, the ' De Augmen- 
 tis ' differs from the ' Advancement ' in the following particulars : His- 
 tory and Natural Philosophy are differently divided ; the treatment of 
 science is amplified, that of English history curtailed ; all allusions 
 likely to offend Roman Catholics are omitted. Bacon, intending his 
 work for circulation in Italy, says, " I have been mine own Index 
 Expurgatorius." 
 
The True End of KnovAedfjc. 125 
 
 ophy of cookery," it is worth while, even in our limits, 
 to (juote two exculpatory passages; because, no mere 
 nourishes of rhetoric, they are indicative of the author's 
 more or less consistent design and uniform mode of 
 thought. He is speaking in ' The Advancement,' in 
 terms repeated in the ' De Augmentis,' of the errors 
 and misunderstandings that have retarded the progress 
 of really productive thought : — 
 
 " But the greatest of all the rest is the mistaking or mis- 
 placing of the last or furthest end of knowledge. For men 
 have entered into a desire of learning, sometimes upon a 
 natural curiosity and incpiisitive appetite, sometimes for 
 ornament and reputation, and sometimes to enable them to 
 victory of wit and contradiction ; and most times for lucre 
 and profession ; and seldom sincerely to give a true account 
 of their gift of reason to the benefit and use of men, — as if 
 there were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest 
 a searching and restless spirit ; or a terrace for a wandering 
 and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect ; 
 or a tower of state for a proud mind to raise itself upon ; or 
 a fort and commanding ground for strife and contention ; or 
 a shop for profit or sale, and not a rich storehouse for the 
 glory of the Creator, and the relief of man's estate." 
 
 Further on, he writes : — 
 
 " I do not take upon me to obtain by any perorations or 
 pleadings of this case touching learning, to reverse the judg- 
 ment either of Esop's cock that preferred the barleycorn 
 before the gem ; or of Midas, that being chosen judge be- 
 tween Apollo, president of the Muses, and Pan, president of 
 sheep, judged for plenty ; or of Paris, that judged for pleasure 
 and love against wisdom and power : for these things must 
 continue as they have been, but so will that also continue 
 whereupon learning hath ever relied as on a firm foundation 
 that cannot be shaken— jnstijicata est sapientia a filiis suis." 
 
126 Francis Bacon. 
 
 Elsewhere, in the same spirit, Bacon declares, "It is 
 a corrupt judgment to think that there are no true 
 differences of things but according to utility." On the 
 other hand, he thus ('Advancement of Learning,' 11. 
 XXV., 'De Augmentis,' E. VII.) clenches his divergence 
 from the ancient and medieval schools : — 
 
 " Pompeius Magnus, being on a commission of purveyance 
 for a famine at Eome, and being dissuaded by his friends 
 not to hazard himself to sea in so rough weather, said onty 
 to them, ' necesse est ut eam, non ut vivam.' . . . This 
 decideth the question regarding the preferment of the Con- 
 templative and Active life, and decideth it against Aristotle. 
 For all the reasons which he bringeth for the contempla- 
 tive are private, and respecting the pleasure and dignity of 
 a man's self : not much unlike to that comparison which 
 Pythagoras made for the gracing and magnifying of phil- 
 osophy ; who, being asked what he was, answered * that if 
 Hiero were ever at the Olympian games, he knew that 
 some came to try their fortune for the prizes, and some 
 came as merchants to utter their commodities, and some 
 came to look on, and that he was one of them that came 
 to look on.' But men must hiov) that in this theatre of 
 man's life it is reserved only for God and the angels to 
 be lookers-on." 
 
 This is Bacon's " Philanthropia," which he supports 
 by reference to the Scriptures, and applies to the whole 
 range of physical as well as mental science, holding, 
 that men are the investigators, that tliey may become 
 the mimics of nature. His philosophy was half prac- 
 tical, half speculative. On the one side we have his 
 schemes for making gold, his healing-draughts and pre- 
 servatives, represented in later times by Davy lamps 
 and vaccinations ; on the other, his almost abstract 
 
Bacon and Descartes, 127 
 
 conception of *' Form." He left the contemplation of 
 the stars in their courses, to inquire into the agencies 
 which more directly affect man's life ; but he wished 
 to hnd general and not special agencies. AVhat Macau- 
 lay has said of the contrast between his aim and that 
 of the ancients can only be accepted with serious reser- 
 vations. When the old mythology had become an 
 artistic fossil, Philosophy was as a Eeligion to the 
 higher minds of Greece and Rome. Bacon never ceases 
 to offer homage to Religion : he admits its influence, its 
 necessity, its divinity. "I had rather believe all the 
 fables in the Legend, the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than 
 that this universal frame is Avithout a mind." He offers 
 incense without reserve on the altars, but his mind 
 dwells outside the temple. "These things have I 
 passed over briefly, for I can find no space or ground 
 that lieth unsown," is his note, save on the political 
 aspects of theology. Socrates brought down philosophy 
 from heaven to earth. Plato restored it to a commun- 
 ion with the transcendental ideas among which his 
 followers mainly dwelt. Descartes and Bacon again 
 recalled it by widely diverse incantations. " Cogito, 
 ergo sum," said the former: know thyself again, and 
 clear the mind of prepossessions, and " eritis sicut Dei, 
 scientes bonum et malum ; " from which Spinoza drew 
 the fuU conclusion. Bacon struck out another path, 
 saying man must live, and to live must conquer, and 
 to conquer must obey, and to obey must learn the ways 
 of nature. It is philosophy come to correct thought, 
 but also to stimulate invention. He was in part a 
 utilitarian, not because he loved truth less, but man 
 more. " Xatura3 imperare parendo," means that our 
 
128 Francis Bacon. 
 
 art must be based on her procedure, our practical 
 power on acquaintance with the working of her 
 laws. 
 
 In the following he conveys his most general view of 
 knowledge : " Science is the image of truth, inasmuch 
 as the truth of Bemg and the truth of Knowing only 
 differ as a direct ray of light does from a reflected one. 
 The object of philosophy is threefold — God, l^ature, 
 ^lan. Xature presents itself to our imderstanding, as 
 it were, by a direct ray of light, while God is revealed 
 to us only by a reflected one," — so striking the key of 
 his opposition to Descartes, who gets at Xature through 
 God, and not at God through I^ature. On the one 
 hand, we have the preference of *' Experimenta Lu- 
 cifera " to '' Experimenta Eructifera " ; on the other, of 
 the ySios irpaKTCKos to the yStos OeoiprjTiKos. 
 
 Our analysis of the ' De Augmentis,' in which ' The 
 Advancement ' is now merged, must restrict itself to an 
 enumeration of the main heads of its nine Books, and a 
 reference to the c^uestions of most modern interest which 
 they suggest. 
 
 I. Bacon's main contention is that recurring through- 
 out the 'Organum,' that we may take heart for the 
 future by noting the sources of ignorance in the past. 
 Among these he dwells on " the disgraces that learning 
 hath received " from the jealousy of " politiques " and 
 the bigotry of priests, pointing out that (as shown by 
 great examples of kmgs and statesmen) it has been, 
 when wisely used, an ally rather than a foe of good 
 government and of true religion. Under the head of 
 " Vanities in Studies," his reference to " delicate learn- 
 ing " is of as close application in our days of " sestheti- 
 
Antiquarians and Specialists. 129 
 
 cism " with form and void, as it was in those of Euplmes 
 and Marini : — 
 
 "Tlie admmation of ancient authors, the hate of the 
 schoohnen, the exact study of languages, . . . did bring in 
 an affectionate study and copie of speech. . . . This grew 
 speedily to an excess, for men began to hunt more after 
 words than matter ; and more after the choiceness of the 
 phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sen- 
 tence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying 
 and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than 
 after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of 
 argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment." 
 
 Nor is there less aptitude in his characteristic protest 
 against the degenerate tendency of mere specialisation : — 
 
 "After the distribution of particular arts and sciences, 
 men have abandoned universality, which cannot but stop 
 all progression. For no perfect discovery can be made upon 
 a flat or level ; neither is it possible to discover the more 
 remote and deeper parts of a science, if you stand but upon 
 it, and ascend not to a higher." 
 
 II. Coming to the substance of his work. Bacon treats 
 of Human Learning as resting on the division of the 
 Faculties, and in the second Book discusses those based 
 on jMemory and Imagination — i.e., History and Poetry. 
 The former is subdivided into Natural and Civil, and 
 under the first we have to note his view of the three 
 phases of Nature : — 
 
 (1.) Free in its ordinary working — I.e., in her regular 
 processes or generations ; and here Bacon hints at the 
 future development of Astronomy, Geology, Geodosy, 
 and Zoology. 
 
 (2.) Free in errors, leading to the consideration of mar- 
 
 P. XIV. I 
 
130 Francis Bacon. 
 
 vels which, in the forms of reputed sorceries, dreams, 
 and divinations, he thinks worthy of more serious 
 treatment than they have received, — "for it is not 
 known in what cases and hoAv far effects attributed 
 to superstition particijDate of natural causes." This 
 suggests the interesting question as to how far Bacon 
 was ready to accept as true, alleged supernatural man- 
 ifestations and occurrences. To what extent he be- 
 lieved in Astrology, Alchemy, Magic, and Witchcraft, 
 it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine; for 
 his expressions on the subject are conflicting. Some 
 of these may be due to concession to the superstitions 
 of his royal patron, more to the divided allegiance 
 of a transition time. He never clearly accepts the 
 reasonable scepticism of Cicero about the influences 
 of the stars, — " What contagion can reach us from 
 so great a distance ? " or of Pliny, " Homer tells us 
 that Hector and Polydamas were born on the same 
 night. . . . Every hour in every part of the world are 
 born lords and slaves." ISTor does he, on the other hand, 
 with Seneca, take the psychical effects of the planets for 
 granted. His attitude is rather that of Tacitus, in refer- 
 ence to the so-caUed Chaldeans : " It is a class of men 
 which in our city will always be prohibited and always 
 exist ; " ^ and again, — " For my own part, I doubt ; but 
 the majority of men will hold by the opinion that our 
 fates are fixed at birth." ^ Bacon's contention seems, in 
 the main, to have been the just one, that in most widely 
 spread beliefs there is an element of truth exaggerated : 
 e.g., the Horoscope, the Ascendant, and the Houses of 
 the Zodiac are fictions ; but the heavenly bodies affect 
 1 Anu., ii. 32. 2 Ann., vi. 22. 
 
Nature Free and Bound. 131 
 
 human life through atmospheric changes : there is no 
 " evil eye," hut influences heyond the ken of our phil- 
 osophy " roll from soul to soul " ; necromancy is an 
 imagination or a trick ; hut there is a " natural magic " 
 Avliich, hy the new use of natural means, can produce 
 marvellous effects. On the whole, in common with 
 many of his most distinguished predecessors and com- 
 peers — as Eoger Bacon, Cardan, Tycho Brahe, and 
 Kepler — he leant, in these matters, to the side of cred- 
 ulity ; and if he may he excused for his lingering belief 
 in Astrology, which did nothing to j^i'omote the true 
 science of the stars, he may be almost justified in his 
 half faith in Alchemy, which was the cradle of Chemistry, 
 in essence less a false than a hasty anticipation. 
 
 (3.) Bound in Arts. The study of those which are 
 mechanical is the best foundation for natural philos- 
 ophy. Under the head of Civil History, he com- 
 plains that there is yet no "History of Learning," 
 by which " the literary spirit of each age may be 
 charmed as it were from the dead ; " for, without this, 
 the rest is ''as the statue of Polyphemus without the 
 eye." The function of ancient history is, "to carry the 
 mind in writing back into the past, and bring it into 
 sympathy with antiquit}^" He denounces Epitomes as 
 mere base and unprofitable dregs, and sets high store 
 on the biographies and letters of great men. Passing to 
 Poetry, in a passage worthy of Sir Philip Sidney's ' De- 
 fence,' as " that which bestows upon human nature those 
 things which history denies it," he says it presents to 
 the mind " a more perfect order and a more beautiful 
 variety " than we can find in the real world, " correcting 
 the inec|ualities of fortune and bringing refreshment 
 
132 Francis Bacon. 
 
 amid the satiety of common things." It is the elo- 
 quence of a man who had in himself all of the poet 
 save "the passionate heart." The drama, he holds, 
 which has " the stage for its world," may be made the 
 means of a noble discipline, as "a kind of musician's 
 bow, by which men's minds may be played upon : " 
 but the highest kind of Poetry is parabolical, shadow- 
 ing forth — as in the myths which, " as a breath from the 
 traditions of more ancient nations, fell into the pipes of 
 the Greeks" — secrets and mysteries of religion, policy, 
 and philosophy, under the veil of tales and symbols. 
 Bacon concludes the book with the fables of Pan, Per- 
 seus, and Dionysius, as in the 'De Sapientia Yeterum.' 
 III. The third Book, which treats of philosophy as 
 the product of the reason, is of special interest from the 
 light it throws on some parts of the "Organum." Be- 
 ginning with the division of its objects into God, [N'ature, 
 and Man, Bacon first dwells on the fact that the branches 
 of knowledge meet in one stem, and that there is a mii- 
 versal science, the mother of the rest, which he entitles 
 " Philosophia Prima," or summary philosophy, concerned 
 with general principles common to all special sciences. 
 In illustration of these he instances the axioms of 
 mathematics, and points out that they are applicable 
 also to ethics ; as shown in the Aristotelian discussion of 
 distributive justice, where equals added to unequals re- 
 sult in injustice. In adducing similar concords between 
 the rules of physics and politics, music, acoustics, &c., 
 in which we may see " the same footsteps of nature 
 treading or printing upon different subjects and matters," 
 he is sometimes led away by his love of analogies. 
 After treating slightly of Natural Theology, and assign- 
 
Anticipation of N'eivton. 133 
 
 ing to it the evidences for the being, power, and good- 
 ness of the Deity, as well as the nature of angels and 
 evil spirits, he divides Natural Philosophy into the in- 
 quisition of causes and the production of effects. In the 
 one case we ascend from experiments to " axioms " (used 
 here, as in the 'Organum,' in the sense of inducted 
 general truths); in the other we descend from " axioms " 
 to the invention of new experiments. AVhen the causes 
 inquired into are transitory^ and in motion, they are 
 the objects of physic ; but when they are abstract 
 and fixed, and presuppose a mind and idea, the science 
 assigned to them is metaphysic. After a confusing 
 crowd of subdivisions, there follows a passage of remark- 
 able interest on the lack of physical inquiry hitherto 
 apparent in Astronomy. Astronomers, he says, have 
 brought us the ox of Prometheus, a beautiful hide 
 but stuffed with straw. They have arranged skilful 
 systems on the basis of mathematical calculation, to 
 resolve the visible phenomena into circular move- 
 ments, but they have neglected to ask the cause of 
 the phenomena. The interior of the ox (namely, the 
 physical reasons) is wanting, " out of which (with 
 
 1 Aristotle, ra ivSexofJuva and TO. JU.TJ evSexofxeva aAAw? elvai. Mucll of 
 
 the book, and Bacon's AVTiting generally, is, despite his disclaimers, 
 distinctly Aristotelian, He also assigns to this " Prime Philosophy " 
 the consideration of what he calls essences or transcendentals, as 
 much little, like unlike, &c. — relations elevated into distinct objects 
 of investigation, after the manner of the ancient schools. Some of 
 the axioms under this head, as "things agi'eeing with a tlmd agree 
 with each other," are analytical; others, as "Quantum naturre nee 
 minuitur nee augetur," founded on our notion of Substance, are 
 synthetical a priori truths; Avhile others, as those regarding the 
 relations of the organs of sense to optical instruments, are mere 
 analogies. 
 
134 F^xtncis Bacon. 
 
 the help of hypotheses) a theory might be devised 
 "vvhich would not merely satisfy the phenomena, but 
 would set forth the substance, motion, and influence 
 of the heavenly bodies as they really are." This is pre- 
 cisely what Newton, working on the data of Kepler, 
 really did ; and, in a subsequent paragraph, Bacon, sug- 
 gesting that the discovery is to be made by obtaining 
 information of heavenly things from those seen amongst 
 ourselves, comes still nearer in his anticipation. But 
 he rarely '' dips into the future " without immediately 
 reverting to the past ; and in the next section he pro- 
 fesses to retain a limited belief in astrology — not as " a 
 revel among the stars," but in the influence on human 
 life of their great processions. Later on, after one of his 
 tiresome lists of dichotomous qualities which he calls 
 configurations of matter, and a recommendation of a 
 history of popular errors and of the progress of phil- 
 osophy, we come to the discussion of forms and final 
 causes that inay be most conveniently collated with the 
 corresponding passages of the ' Organum ' (^vide infra). 
 The book ends with a definition, so far accurate, of pure 
 and mixed Mathematics. 
 
 IV. Man, according to Bacon not being a part of 
 Nature, has reserved for him a special investigation; 
 and the fourth Book treats of his body and mind, both 
 from a physiological point of view. This section, 
 though full of interest from its dealing with a sub- 
 ject which engaged so much of the author's attention, 
 may be passed over lightly as lying outside his system. 
 The doctrine of " the League " between body and soul 
 introduces reflections, often subtle, as to the relation of 
 Physiognomy to Character. Chiromancy, on the other 
 
Medical Theories. 135 
 
 liand, lie declares a vain imposture ; while as regards 
 riirenology, and the allocation of special passions to 
 particular organs, he is in doubt. Of the arts con- 
 cerning the body, the chief place is, of course, given 
 to Medicine, to whose professors Bacon assigns a high 
 dignity ; their office being to regulate " a musical in- 
 strument of much and exquisite workmanship^ easily 
 put out of tune ; " but he objects to then- frequent em- 
 piricism and tendency to treat all their patients alike, 
 which Hippocrates is praised for avoiding. Some of 
 the lacunae he notes in the art are remarkable, — as the 
 recommendation to study comparative anatomy, to prac- 
 tise vivisection on animals, and to consider it part of 
 theu' duty to " avert the dolours of death" by procuring 
 Euthanasia. Bacon dwells on the prolongation ^ of life : 
 " for though to a Christian, making for the Land of 
 Promise, the world is but a wilderness, yet even while 
 we travel in it, to have our shoes and garments 
 (that is, our bodies) not worn out by the way, must be 
 accounted as a gift of divine grace." On the head of 
 " Athletics " he hints at their possible excess ; and, dis- 
 daining arts voluptuary, after the manner of Plato, refers 
 only in a few sentences to ]\Iusic and Painting. His 
 Psychology is that of Lucretius : the rational soul (ani- 
 mus) is divine; the irrational (anima), the breath of 
 life and the sense which we share with the brutes, is a 
 part of the frame. He desiderates a better explanation 
 of Voluntary Motion, but merely touches on the distinc- 
 tion between Sensation and Perception ; ending with 
 
 1 Cf. " Hamlet," Act III. sc. iii. 
 
 2 This book should be compare<l throughout with the longer 
 treatise " On Life and Death." 
 
1S6 Francis Bacon. 
 
 the expression of a Avisli for further investigations into 
 the nature of Light. 
 
 V. Bacon next sets forth his view of Logic, the rule 
 of our understanding, as Ethics ^ is of our will and affec- 
 tions, " altera decreta, altera actiones progignit," and ex- 
 tends its province, with Eannis, over the ground com- 
 monly assigned to Ehetoric. There are, he says, four 
 rational arts — that of Inquiry or Livention, Examination 
 or Judgment, IMemory and Tradition; and then com- 
 plains that discoveries have hitherto been made by an 
 instinct like that of the animals. Yet even this is better 
 than the old Induction, which is a mere hasty conclusion 
 from a number of particulars, without regard to contra- 
 dictory instances. The syllogism onl}^ avails for argu- 
 ment : it consists of propositions, and these of mere 
 signs for popular notions ; whereas in Physics we wish 
 to command nature, whose subtilty is greater than the 
 subtilty of words. The failures of the past have given 
 rise to the Academic assertion that we can only know 
 appearances ; but the sceptics have erred in laying the 
 blame on the senses instead of on the wandering and 
 contumacy of the mind. "We require a new Art of the 
 Interpretation of Nature. Eeserving this, of which he 
 says so much, and with which he does so little, for the 
 * Organum ' itself, Bacon proceeds to offer a number of 
 suggestions for his ExiJerientia Liter ata — i.e., varying, 
 extendmg, and applying experiments ; in what he calls 
 the Hunt of Pan, — confessing this to be hardly a philo- 
 sophic Art, but a kind of sagacity, — the sagacity, indeed, 
 
 1 In discussing tlie function of the imagination as an agent of both, 
 he again follows closely in the steps of Aristotle— ri'rfe Ethics, Book 
 III. 1-3. 
 
Logic and Rhetoric. 137 
 
 on which the real progress of science has liitherto been 
 destined to rely. 
 
 Again, in the list of those, often pedantically named, 
 suggestions, we have anticipations of discovery " scattered 
 like donatives among the people," in the sciences of 
 heat,^ mechanics, and optics, along with world-old ideas 
 of the affections of gravity and levity, great masses ab- 
 horring motion, &c. As regards the search for argu- 
 ments, Bacon advises orators and advocates to have a 
 ready-made supply, as the shoes in a shop, in what he 
 calls the Promptuary. He commends the Aristotelian 
 " Topics " as heads for argument or investigation, 
 and adduces, in illustration, the main questions to be 
 asked in an inquiry into the nature of "heavy and 
 light." Speaking of Judgment, he leaves the syl- 
 logism with the remark that it has "been beaten 
 over and over by the subtlest labours of men's wits," 
 and " is but the reduction of propositions to principles 
 in a middle " — meaning, apparently, that the middle is 
 the means of resolving the minor into a major, with a 
 difference. Then, after a reference to sophistical falla- 
 cies and those of interpretation, the latter being con- 
 cerned with the cloudy use of words which is the soph- 
 ism of sophisms, he concludes this section by his doc- 
 trine of Idols, and a few hints for strengthening and 
 quickening the Memory. 
 
 VI. The sixth, as tlie f(nirth Book, given to a collat- 
 
 ^ Among Bacon's just remarks is that an unsuccessful is often as 
 instructive as a successful experiment. In this Book he accejits the 
 result of Galileo's experiment from the tower of Pisa, with a reserva- 
 tion, saying the two weights will take almost the sante time in fall- 
 ing ; and in one interesting passage he suggests the idea of a centri- 
 fugal balancing the centripetal force. 
 
138 Francis Bacon. 
 
 eral subject, may be briefly dismissed ; though there is 
 no section of the *De Augmentis' of more occasional 
 interest. Especially in the collection of Antitheta to- 
 wards the close — a storehouse of thoughts and phrases, 
 most of which we find incorporated in the final edition 
 of the 'Essays' — we have a vivid illustration of the 
 writer's habit of turning all questions on every side, 
 and seeing what could be said in defence and attack of 
 almost every proposition. Many of those adversative 
 judgments representing the different aspects or real 
 autonomies of life, " colours of good and evil," are so 
 incisive on either hand, that they pull the reader's mind 
 to and fro, like the reputed arguments of Carneades. 
 In the mam part of the book, treating of Grammar and 
 Rhetoric proper, some of the points to be noted are : 
 his recognition of the function of Hieroglyphics, the 
 Chinese alphabet. Gestures, the relation between lan- 
 guages and national character. Bacon's desiderating a 
 comparative Grammar, his depreciation of Etymology, his 
 just view of the form of verse as varying by rights Avitli 
 the subject, his well-timed protest against the practice 
 (initiated by Spenser's friend, Gabriel Harvey) of trying 
 to " train the modern tongues into ancient measures," 
 and his conclusive refutation of the phonetic fallacy. 
 After a few pages devoted to Ciphers, and an anticipa- 
 tion of Telegraphy, he handles the method of Discourse, 
 — Magistral where precepts are laid down to be simply 
 accepted by the vulgar, or Initiative where a doctrine is 
 conveyed to the true sons of science. There follows a 
 defence of Aphorisms, which, "not to be ridiculous, 
 must be cut out of the heart and pith of the matter," 
 interesting because of Bacon's own excessive use of 
 
Ethics. 139 
 
 thcni ; and then an exposition of the diversities of 
 Method, ''the architecture of the sciences," demanded 
 by different themes — e.g.y Mathematics, as the simplest, 
 being contrasted with Politics, as the most complex of 
 knowledges, — as well as by different audiences. ^leta- 
 phors and comparisons are defended as a means of gain- 
 ing an entrance for truth not agreeable to ordinary 
 presuppositions. A number of sophisms folloAV, with 
 refutations often as sophistical as themselves, and the 
 M'liole is wound up with some excellent remarks on 
 Education. 
 
 YIT. Xowhere is the unmetaphysical side of Bacon's 
 mind more manifested than in his handling of Ethics, 
 which is the subject of this short Book. When he 
 wrote, modern metaphysics had not begun ; but he 
 turns away from, or almost wholly ignores, the specula- 
 tions of the schools, with which he was familiar. Ee- 
 ferring to Aristotle and the Stoics, he pays no more 
 attention to their discursions on the freedom of the 
 Will than to Abelard's morality in intention and in act. 
 His theoretic Ethics are as superficial as his Psychology ; 
 and of Ontology, save as a basis for Physics, he had no 
 conception. AYe have here mainly a protest, from the 
 point of vicAv of a philanthropic statesman, against the 
 comparatively vague views of his predecessors, and the 
 isolated character of the old ideals. 
 
 Dividing his subject into two heads. Bacon first en- 
 larges on the Exemplar of Good, and decides, in an 
 argument clenched by quotations already given, in 
 favour of the active against the contemplative life. 
 Following Aristotle in holding the good of the State 
 to be greater than that of the individual, he has no 
 
140 Fra7icis Bacon. 
 
 Oeoipia to superadd. He holds that we are likest God 
 when we live in charity with men ; and, from this point 
 of view, protests against the "fugitive and cloistered 
 virtue" alike of Lucretius and Pyrrho, Epictetus and 
 the medieval saints, who spent their time in tending 
 their souls, as Herodicus did in mending his health. 
 In support of his thesis he appeals to the analogy of 
 nature (where the agent is always superior to the patient) 
 and to experience, teaching that inertia of any sort 
 begets such satiety that "for very weariness a man 
 might wish to die." " Tranquillam degere vitam," with- 
 out the "vigour of fruition," he reckons an insanity. 
 To make life a mecJitatio mortis is to misconceive its 
 aim. Better, says the heathen, " fortem posce animum 
 mortis terrore carentem." As the term Virtue is ap- 
 plied to the state of a mind well composed in itself, so 
 its condition when well framed towards others is Duty 
 — whether that common to every one as a member of a 
 State, or that called into exercise in pursuit of a man's 
 special avocation in life. He approves Plato's view 
 (Rep., iii.), that it is well for men to join the 
 wisdom of the serpent to the innocence of the dove; 
 "so that we are much beholden to jNIachiavelli (to whom 
 references in this and the next book are constant) and 
 other writers who openly declare and describe what men 
 do, and not only what they ought to do, ... for bad men 
 are apt to think that honesty grows of ignorance." " The 
 fool receives not the words of the wise unless thou 
 speakest the things that are in his heart." Is it, then, 
 true, as said Jason of Thessaly, " some things must be 
 done unjustly that many may be done justly " ? No, 
 answers Bacon — the reply is good — " Present justice is 
 
Politics. 141 
 
 in your power ; for that which is to come you have no 
 security." So much of the fruit of Hfe ; it remains to 
 speak of its husbandry, the Georgics of the ;Mind : 
 under Avhich head, while censuring Aristotle for draw- 
 ing pictures of ideal excellence, and never analysing the 
 affections, from which our actions spring. Bacon himself 
 does not attempt to analyse them. Instead, he submits 
 practical precepts, many of Avliich are memorable — 
 e.g., In attempts to improve your character, know what 
 is in your power and what beyond it ; set before your- 
 self concrete exemplars in life, and even in fiction ; 
 " the poets and writers of history are the best doctors 
 of this knowledge ; " take upon yourself tasks neither 
 too great, which dishearten, nor too small, which ener- 
 vate ; " bear with all your strength " (quoting Aristotle) 
 " to the extreme contrary to your inclination ; cherish 
 the good hours of the mind. But," he adds, " the most 
 effectual remedy to the reducing the mind unto virtue 
 is the electing and propounding to a man's self good 
 and virtuous ends of his life and actions ; " this done, 
 he need not set himself, like a carver, to make an image ; 
 but let his better nature grow like a flower. After a 
 splendid passage on the moral transfiguration of a mind 
 inflamed with charity, he accepts the charge of common- 
 place in his views; but his aim here is utility, not 
 grandeur. " Great is the magnificence of the ivory 
 gate, but the true dreams pass through the gate of 
 horn." 
 
 VIII. The same want of system accompanies a won- 
 derful M'ealth of practical wisdom in Bacon's treat- 
 ment of the virtue of "man congregate," that is, Civil 
 Knowledge. The restraint under which this book is 
 
142 Francis Bacon. 
 
 confessedly written, in some respects detracts from its 
 value, and renders it incaj^able of comparison with the 
 ' EepubUc ' or ' Politics/ or even the * Leviathan,' 
 Avhile its insight of detail can only be displayed in 
 quotation. We look in vain for any theory of gov- 
 ernment, other than that conveyed in suggestions for 
 its preservation, supported by the author's unfailing- 
 richness of allusion, and a blending of Greek, Roman, 
 and Italian instances. Much of the treatise is occu- 
 pied with comparatively extraneous matter, relating 
 rather to the shifts of diplomacy and the conduct of 
 affairs, control of countenance and manner, the recep- 
 tion of suitors and use of underlings, than to the build- 
 ing and guiding of a State. Bacon is so apt to dis- 
 appoint us when he nears his goal, that his work may 
 be said largely to consist of great introductions; and 
 throughout the latter books of the ' De Augmentis,' 
 with the strong crisp style of the 'Essays' we have 
 the same excess of antithesis, aphorism, and refer- 
 ence. These, however, never fail to stimulate as 
 well as instruct. The comments on the 'Proverbs,' 
 which fill so many pages, themselves afford material 
 for indefinite commentary; and there is something 
 peculiarly characteristic of the writer in the idea of il- 
 lustratmg the counsels of Solomon by those of Taci- 
 tus and Machiavelli, and by his own experience in 
 the Court of James. On the text, " Lend not thine ear 
 to all words that are spoken," we have a gloss warning 
 us against useless curiosity, even about things that 
 concern us, in terms that display at once Bacon's cynical 
 and his nobler side. " First there ensues vexation, . . . 
 seeing all things human are full of treachery and in- 
 
Tlic Architect of Fortune. 143 
 
 gratitude. And therefore if we conld obtain a magic 
 glass, wherein we might view all the enmities and all 
 the hostile designs that are at work against us, it were 
 better for us to throw it down at once and break it to 
 pieces, for these matters are but as the rustling of leaves, 
 and have short eluration." The proverb, " A poor man 
 that oppresses the poor is like a sweeping rain," suggests 
 the familiar truth, " The oppression of a poor and hungry 
 man is far more severe than that of a rich and full one. 
 ... A sponge when dry sucks in strongly, but not 
 so when wet." " Be not righteous overmuch " (after 
 a quotation from the 'Annals,' "there are seasons 
 wherein great virtues are the surest ruins,") is explained 
 to mean, in the mouth of Solomon, — who, " though he 
 often notes what is bad, never enjoins it," — that we 
 should avoid not virtue, "but the vain and invidious 
 affectation and show thereof." The "dead flies" of 
 Ecclesiastes appropriately invite the reflection, " It is a 
 very hard and unhappy condition of men pre-eminent 
 for virtue, that their errors, be they ever so trifling, are 
 never excused." 
 
 It is often a hard condition when men of the world 
 are exposed to the censure of pedants. 'No part of 
 Bacon's work has received from critics, who have made 
 of his ' Essays ' texts for a moral class-book, more un- 
 discriminating criticism than the precepts which follow 
 on " The Knowledge of Advancement in Life." It was 
 a natural part of the plan of a book emphatically pro- 
 fessing to be practical, to deal with this subject; and 
 the writer, at once a satirist and a shrewd observer, has 
 often illustrated the truism that perfect candour is not 
 always the best policy. It is plain that those who 
 
144 Francis Bacon. 
 
 desire " to make the wheels of the mind concentric and 
 voluble with the wheels of fortune," whose chief end is 
 to " get on," do well " not to row against the stream ; " 
 not to say all they think ; to keep their coimsel ; to avoid 
 association with luckless men or causes ; to mingle mo- 
 desty and confidence, and shun over-meddlesomeness; 
 to insinuate rather than push themselves to the front ; 
 " to profess to despise what they cannot attain ; " to 
 let their vices take colour from the nearest virtues, 
 " dulness assuming gravity, cowardice mildness," — even 
 to remember the Spanish proverb, " Tell a lie and find a 
 troth," or the Italian, " There is always less money, less 
 wisdom, and less faith than men imagine." In defence 
 even of these sometimes questionable precepts, we may 
 appeal to one of the greatest metaphysical critics of 
 Germany : "To reproach MachiaveUi with immorality 
 (his theme being to keep on a throne a prince girt by 
 enemies), is the same as to reproach a fencing-master 
 because he does not begin his instructions with a moral 
 lecture against murder." But Bacon is at special pains 
 to make it clear that, in those passages, he has been 
 looking only to the " morality of consequences," and 
 that he is conscious of a higher standard. As early as 
 1593, in the "Discourse on Praise of Knowledge," he 
 anticipates the objections that have been brought against 
 him. " I did ever hold it for an insolent and unlucky 
 saying, ' Faber quisque suse fortunae,' except it be only 
 uttered as a hortative or spur to correct sloth, * Faber 
 quisque ingenii sui ' is more profitable," &c. In the 
 ' Advancement of Learning ' the same caveats appear, 
 which are amplified in the 'De Augmentis ' — e.g., 
 " Not, however, that learning esteems this Architec- 
 
Bacon's Ethics. 145 
 
 ture . . . otherwise than as an inferior work. For 
 no man's fortune can be an end worthy of the gift of 
 being that has been given liim by God ; and often the 
 worthiest men abandon their fortunes willingly, that 
 they may have leisure for higher pursuits. But never- 
 theless fortune, as an instrument of virtue and merit, 
 deserves its own speculation and doctrine." " The 
 divine glass in which we ought to behold ourselves is 
 the AYord of God ; but the political glass is nothing else 
 than the state of the world or times wherein we live." 
 Elsewhere he protests against " the Sabbathless pursuit 
 of fortune," and assents to Virgil (^i. ix. 252), saying, 
 " All virtue is most rewarded, and all wickedness most 
 punished, in itself." In the same spirit the "Letter of 
 Advice to Villiers " inculcates : " Eefer your actions 
 chiefly to the good of your sovereign and the country. 
 . . . Men are born not to cram m their fortunes, but 
 to exercise their virtues." 
 
 Neither Bacon's practical attitude nor his theoretic 
 ethics were those of a Marcus Aurelius. He wrote, felt, 
 and acted as an ambitious statesman, amid surroundings 
 almost as corrupt as those of the Papal Court which 
 gave a deeper dye to the cynicism of Machiavelli (whose 
 influence on his mind has been but slightly exaggerated) ; 
 he would have been more dishonest than he was had he 
 wholly withheld the expression of his view, that " the 
 jDolitician, as such, must study human nature as it is, its 
 vices with the rest, and take things as they are, not as they 
 ought to be." But, unlike Machiavelli, he was often 
 amiably inconsistent ; for he was never deserted by the 
 aspirations which the circumstances of his career tended 
 to suppress ; and, in his mind, " the elements were so 
 
 p. — XIV. K 
 
146 Francis Bacon. 
 
 mixed," that it is almost impossible to determine their 
 proportion. His habit was not to strike a mean between 
 the higher and lower life, but to give an incisive voice to 
 each in turn, in Antitheta which taken apart can hardly 
 fail to delude his readers. Hence the special unfairness of 
 separating those which give the worst from those which 
 represent, with equal sincerity, the best side of his 
 character — e.g., on the familiar phrases, " Truth may 
 come to the price of a pearl, . . . but it will not rise 
 to the price of a diamond. ... A mixture of a lie doth 
 ever add pleasure," there follows his far more frequent 
 refrain, '' Howsoever these things are thus in men's 
 depraved affections, yet truth, which only doth judge 
 itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the 
 love-making or wooing of it ; the knowledge of truth, 
 which is the presence of it ; and the belief of truth, 
 which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of 
 human nature. . . . Certainly it is heaven upon earth to 
 have a man's mind move in charity, rest in Providence, 
 and turn upon the poles of truth." Compare similar 
 antitheses in the essays on " Eevenge," on " Simulation 
 and Dissimulation," on "Wisdom for a Man's Self," — " in 
 many branches a depraved thing, it is the wisdom of 
 rats, that will be sure to leave a house before its fall." 
 It is the mere malice of detraction to say that the 
 worldly view is the man ; the loftier, " a mere tribute 
 to convention." 
 
 In so far as he touches, which is but slightly, on 
 its ideal side, Bacon regards Ethics as a handmaid of 
 Theology : his answer to the question, How do we know 
 an action to be right ? is : By its effects, and " an inward 
 instinct according to the law of conscience, which is a 
 
Bacons Politics. 147 
 
 relic of man's ancient purity." But what makes it right 
 is the good of others, especially of the State — ie.^ the 
 greater whole, of which the individual is a part. After a 
 " Treatise Touching tlie Extension of Empire," nearly 
 identical with the Essay on " The True Greatness of 
 Kingdoms," the Eighth Book of the 'De Augmentis' 
 ends with a series of admirable and authoritative sug- 
 gestions, in aphoristic form, on the theory of the ad- 
 ministration and codification of Laws. At starting, he 
 remarks that there are " three fountains of injustice — 
 namely, mere force, a malicious ensnarement imder colour 
 of law, and harshness of the law itself." These, and 
 other evils, he proposes to remedy by a revisal of the 
 whole Corpus Juris, not patching, as " from this ensues 
 a torment like that of Mezentius, whereby the living 
 laws are stilled in the embraces of the dead ; " and lays 
 it down that the end and scope of all laws is "no other 
 than the happiness of the citizens." 
 
 We have seen what Bacon's practical Politics really 
 were — ?.e., a perpetual application of the fifth precept of 
 his ' Architect of Fortune.' " Imitate nature, which 
 does nothing in vain. ... In every action a man should 
 have one intention so underlying another that, if he can- 
 not obtain his wishes in the best degeee, he may yet be 
 satisfied if he succeed in a second, or even a third ; . . . 
 for nothing is more impolitic than to be entirely bent on 
 one action." Consistently with this attitude, he always 
 writes as an English statesman, having in his mind the 
 golden mean, " mediocria firma"; never as an idealist. 
 But there had come to him^, through the Eenaissance, 
 almost the exact idea of an Aristotelian state, modified 
 by the Eoman examples of Plutarch and Livy, the study 
 
148 Francis Bacon. 
 
 of Cicero's * Letters,' and the experiences of the struggle 
 between Italian tyrannies and republics, presented by 
 Machiavelli and Guicciardini. His conception of the 
 more or less hostile relation of one State to another was 
 almost wholly Greek, especially in his views (to which 
 we have before referred) on Commerce, as regulated by 
 a sliding-scale of retaliatory restrictions — a view wholly 
 antagonistic to Cosmopolitanism. 
 
 Comparing the " Essay on Kingdoms " with passages in 
 the ' De Augmentis,' and the interpretation of the myth 
 of Perseus, we find his attitude as regards War to vary 
 only in degree : his belief being that it is a necessary 
 evil, but not one of the greatest, and with many compen- 
 sations ; that the Spartans only went to slight excess in 
 making the military strength of their citizens the aim of 
 their training. Bacon's advice to England is always the 
 same (' De Augmentis,' Book VIII.) : " Security " {i.e., 
 in Shakespeare's sense) "is an ill guard for a kingdom. 
 The seas are our walls, and the ships oiu: bulwarks. 
 ... I, in my disposition and profession, am wholly 
 for peace ; . . . justice is the best protector of it at 
 home, and provision for war is the best prevention of 
 it from abroad." He follows the ancients in his idea of 
 the relation of the various classes of the community 
 within the State itself, in his disparagement of the 
 tradesmen as /SdvavcroL, his reliance on the nobility and 
 yeomanry, belief in agriculture as the best of peaceful 
 avocations — the mainstay of a nation ; in his regret that 
 indoor crafts cannot now be relegated to slaves ; in 
 his holding the mercantile theory of money as the 
 standard of value. He is Platonic in assigning to the 
 State the entire control of the Education, physical and 
 
G^^eeh Ideals. 149 
 
 mental, of its citizens ; the endowment and cultivation 
 of the Arts ; the limits to Eeligious nonconformity ; 
 the divisions of freehold Land ; in his notion of an 
 ideal Constitution, relying on the paternal govern- 
 ment of a philosophic King. He is Aristotelian in his 
 assertion that " envy in commonwealths is a wholesome 
 kind of ostracism," and, above all, in his well-established 
 principle, that diflerent Constitutions are adapted to vari- 
 ous conditions of life and stages of civilisation. Bacon's 
 advocacy of colonisation belongs to an age of growing 
 empire, and he urges tlie example of Eome in her 
 readiness to widen the range of her citizenship. His 
 strong assertion of authority — '^a king must be both 
 loved and feared, else he is lost " — in Politics, con- 
 trasts with his renunciation of it in Science. He is 
 least modern in the dictum, that " the lowest of all 
 flatteries is the flattery of the common people." 
 
150 
 
 CHAPTEK III. 
 
 THE 'novum ORGANUM.' 
 
 Towards the close of the ' De Aiigmentis ' we are told 
 that, in coasting the old sciences, the •writer has only 
 been tuning the harp of the Muses. The * Novum Or- 
 ganum' itself, which, with its prayers, prefaces, plans, 
 and dedications, was, on its publication, inaugurated 
 with all the pomp of the author's Chancellorship, is 
 the melody. Though containing little not to be found 
 in germ at least, in Bacon's earlier treatises, it is the 
 form in which, after twelve revisions, corresponding pro- 
 bably to the years of its composition (1608-1620), he 
 was satisfied to convey the central ideas of his phil- 
 osophy. That the work is best analysed not always in 
 the actual but in the logical order of its parts, results 
 from the often unmethodical arrangement of its con- 
 stantly overlapping aphorisms. The First strikes the 
 key-note of the whole, and its full import can only be 
 realised when we have grasped the system which it in- 
 troduces. "Man, naturae minister et interpres, can do 
 and understand only as he has observed the course of 
 nature," means that we can accomplish nothing but 
 by discovering her uniform laws, and adjusting cir- 
 
Man " Interjpres et Minister .'' 151 
 
 cumstances so as to make their action free. " N^atura 
 lion nisi parendo vincitur," imjDlies that no effect can he 
 produced without a knowledge of the cause : all we can 
 do is to combine or sunder, the rest is an inner craft. 
 " That art which you say passes nature is an art which 
 nature makes." Man is Nature's interpreter when, 
 through phenomena, he detects her " forms," the unseen 
 mechanism behind the visible sign, the underlying fact 
 that remains while its manifestations change and pass. 
 !Man is her minister, as he is her copyist in arranging 
 things in her order. To attain the cause, we have to 
 rise to axioms, the 6Sos avco ; to produce the effect, 
 we must descend — the 680? Kara) — to works, recognis- 
 ing that a cause in speculation, in practice becomes a 
 riile. But to reach this result, to adjust anew the bal- 
 ance of mind and things, " mentis et rerum commercium 
 restituere in integrum," and so to make philosophy re- 
 store the golden age, there is need of a new "ratio 
 inveniendi" which, steering clear of the mere observa- 
 tion on the one hand, on the other of isolated facts, and 
 the determination to make them agree with precon- 
 ceived theories, shall find the laws or reasons of things 
 hidden from the old Dialectic. 
 
 Bacon's remarks on the existing Sciences and the Logic 
 of the schools (Aphorisms, 5-37) repeat in other w-ords 
 the censures we have before endeavoured to condense. 
 The former are sterile, for they have but decked out 
 chance discoveries by compilations and glosses; the 
 latter, useless for works, has only set its seal on 
 error, giving no account of first principles, which are 
 to it d/xecrot Tr/Dorao-eis : it can only reason down from 
 notions harshly assumed ; in which, when we attempt 
 
152 Francis Bacon. 
 
 to rise above mere surf ace - impressions^ there is no 
 soundness. Thus the syllogism catches assent, but lets 
 the things slip through. "I leave," he says in the 
 plan of the work, ''to the old demonstrations their 
 rule over popular arts, ' civilia et artes quae in sermone 
 et opinione positae sunt ; ' but in dealing with the nature 
 of things I use induction throughout." In Aphorism 19 
 the old and the new way are succinctly contrasted. The 
 one impatiently flies from particulars, useless because 
 vague generalities ; and, taking the truth of these for 
 granted, proceeds to invent principles of less generality, 
 but more practical bearing. The other derives " axioms " 
 from observation and experiment by a gradual and un- 
 broken ascent, so that it reaches the most general axioms 
 last of all. This is the true way, yet untried. 
 
 The partial truth in the sentence, " qui tractaverunt 
 scientias aut empirici aut dogmatici fuerunt," and its 
 exaggeration, is manifest in a survey of the previous 
 philosophies thus condemned. The new method, which 
 was to take progress from the circle in which it had 
 been revolving, and make it end in discovery, was, 
 according to Bacon, a kind of Logic, but it differed 
 from the common logic in three respects — 
 
 (a) In its end ; seeking " non argumenta sed artes." 
 
 {h) In its means ; rejecting the syllogism, and avoid- 
 ing hasty generalisations. 
 
 (c) In its start; assuming nothing as true without 
 verification by experiment, and experiment conducted 
 with a view to truth, not in the erratic manner of those 
 who have sought too hurriedly for results, forgetting the 
 divine order, which in the Creation set light before life. 
 
 After these introductory propositions Bacon's first 
 
Idola Trihus. 153 
 
 step is preparatory. The " intellcctus sihi permissus " 
 is not to be trusted : it is liable to all the errors of the 
 old sciences and logic. He does not believe that the 
 human mind is full grown in reason : he holds that, like 
 a child, it must creep before it -walks, and begin to walk 
 on crutches. " Mens jam, ab ipso principio, nullo niodo 
 sibi permittatur, sed perpetuo regatur." Man is not the 
 measure of things, howbeit they are destined for his 
 use. Our Seyise, in the first place, is defective ; there 
 are countless things too fine or too remote for it. INIany 
 mmute bodies escape the eye, or things that move as fast 
 as a bullet, or as slow as an hour-hand : interposing bodies 
 intercept sight and sound, and the senses often clash : 
 they require such aids as those described in the * Xew 
 Atlantis.' Then, the Understanding is not a dry light, 
 but " receives an infusion from the will and the affec- 
 tions." Bacon ranks the disturbing causes which distort 
 our view first under two heads : the Acquired, that 
 come from dogmas and wrong modes of reasoning ; and 
 those Innate to the Intellect itself ; which, like a broken 
 mirror, deforms the faces of things. He more fully de- 
 scribes them as four " phantoms of the mind " : reverence 
 for authority ; common talk or popular opinion ] a 
 lawyer's or a politician's bias, which he knew in Coke 
 and Cecil ; lastly, the interest and passion which coloured 
 the " dry light " in his own as in all minds. These are 
 the Idola "placita quaedam inania," which are to 
 science as fallacies are to logic, the prima facie pitfalls 
 in the way, the duties of omission in natural philosophy. 
 As Bacon devotes a large part of the first book of the 
 ' Organum ' to an analysis of these Idola, it is desirable, 
 even in a brief outline, to notice them more fully. 
 
154 Francis Baco7i. 
 
 First, he discusses the Idola Trihus, or predispositions 
 which more or less beset every one ; for " the mind of 
 man dra\^Ti over and clouded with the sable pavilion of 
 the body, is so far from being like a smooth, clear, and 
 equal glass, that might sincerely take and reflect the 
 beams of things according to their true incidence, that 
 it is rather like an enchanted glass full of impostures." ^ 
 AYe are warped by the strength of first impressions, 
 and having adopted opinions, hold them tenaciously ; 
 or Ave look only to affirmatives and not t-o negatives. 
 " It was a good answer that was made by one who, 
 when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture 
 of those who had paid their vows on escape from 
 shipAvreck, asked, 'But where are they painted who 
 were drowned after their vows ? ' " We are prone 
 to assent or dissent without due suspension of judg- 
 ment. " The understanding is unquiet ; it cannot stop 
 or rest, and still presses onward, but in vain : it runs 
 into subtilties and refinements and endless inquiry." 
 The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled 
 with hearing. "We suppose that nature acts as we do, 
 which is a false analogy : ^ we presume there is more 
 
 1 Cf. Locke. Men do not look through glasses which represent 
 images in their trne forms and colours, for they put coloured spec- 
 tacles before their eyes, and look on things through false glasses, 
 and then think themselves excused in following the false appearances 
 which they themselves put upon them. The meaning of the term 
 "Idola" is made clear in the ' Delineatio,' where Bacon Avrites : 
 " In seeking for light, if the mind Avere an even mirror it would 
 reflect correct images ; but, being unequal or like an enchanted glass 
 full of superstition and imposture, it gives false reflections = Idols. 
 Until it is made even to receive divine ideas, it is full of ' larva ' and 
 ' incantata. ' " 
 
 2 Vide Brown's Discussion of Cause and Effect. 
 
Idola S'pcciis. 155 
 
 regularity in tlie world than tlicre is ; and so, d(?termin- 
 ing all cases by the same rule, are diverted from the 
 truth by an excessive love of uniformity. 
 
 Bacon then discusses the Idola S2yec2i,% peculiar to 
 individuals, — " for every one (besides the faults he 
 shares with his race) has a cave or den of his own, 
 which refracts and discolours the light of nature. 
 "Whence it was well said by Heraclitus, that men look 
 for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the 
 greater or common world." These Idola take their rise 
 in peculiarities of mental or bodily structure, in educa- 
 tion, habit, or accident. Among them are professional 
 zeal, the narrow devotion of men to certain studies, 
 " either because they have bestowed much thought on 
 them, or, as it were, have lived all their lives in the 
 midst of them. So Aristotle turned the world into a 
 syllogism, the race of chemists into a laboratory ; while 
 Gilbert looks upon it as a mighty magnet : similarly 
 with all systems that have a catch-word, and make 
 that the pivot of the universe. AYe cannot be con- 
 tent to add things recent without rejecting the old. 
 Surely the advice of the prophet is the true direction : 
 " State super vias antiquas et videte quaenam sit via 
 recta et bona et ambulate in ea. Antiquity deserveth 
 that reverence that men should make a stay awhile, 
 and look about to discover which is the best way ; but 
 when the discovery is made, then to make progres- 
 sion." Some love the old, others the new ; some at- 
 tend to minute points, others prefer large objects. 
 The distinction between the legal minds that are keen 
 to see varieties, to split meanings, and the theological 
 that enhance resemblances ; between the acute and 
 
156 Francis Bacon. 
 
 subtle and the lofty and discursive faculty, — is one 
 of the most real in the book. Equally according to 
 experience is the remark, that both err in excess "by 
 catching the one at graduation, the other at shadoM^s." 
 
 The Idola Fori, " omnium molestissima," are those 
 of society and language. These Bacon calls delusions of 
 "the market-place," on account of the commerce and 
 consort of men there. They have crept into the under- 
 standing through the alliance of words and names. 
 " For men believe that their reason governs words ; 
 but it is also true that words, like the arrows from a 
 Tartar bow (vide ' De Augmentis,' Book V.), are shot 
 back, and react on the mind." The names which give 
 rise to Fallacies are of two kinds : those applied to 
 things " which do not exist, as fortune, the primum 
 mobile, planetary orbits, the element of fire, and like 
 fictions which owe their origin to false and idle 
 theories ; " or those of things which do exist, but of 
 which our conceptions are confused, whether actions as 
 generate, corrupt, &c., or of qualities as humid, heavy, 
 rare, dense, &c. 
 
 Lastly, there are the false notions which have immi- 
 grated into men's minds from the dogmas of philosophers. 
 These are called Idola Tlieatri, because all the received 
 systems are " but so many stage - plays, representing 
 worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic 
 fashion." Bacon's criticism of this class of delusions is 
 his criticism of the ancient and medieval philosophies, 
 repeated from the ' Eedargutio ' and the ' Cogitata et 
 Visa.' Under this head he gives a triple classification 
 of false systems : — 
 
 1. The Sophisticcd ; where dialectic subtilties are 
 
Idola Fori d Theatri. 157 
 
 built on common notions, represented chiefly by Aris- 
 totle, whom he again accuses of substituting formulae 
 for the investigation of nature, and, after destroying 
 other sects by hostile confutations, laying down his 
 arbitrary laws. 
 
 2. Tlie Empirical; wdiere theories are rashly educed 
 from a few observations by men who, turning too 
 eagerly from light to fruit, heap up isolated facts, 
 and rely on random experiments. 
 
 3. The Superstitwus ; where theories of Nature are 
 built on mystical traditions, represented by Pythagoras, 
 and more subtly by Plato among the ancients ; and 
 by all who in more recent times confound theology 
 and science, history and philosophy. 
 
 The same contrast between false and true philosophers 
 is reproduced in the often tantalisingly tautological re- 
 mainder of the book ; in the course of which no protest is 
 more emphatic than that against the Acatalepsia of the 
 New Academy, and the more thorough-going Pyrrhonic 
 Scepticism which " doomed men to perpetual darkness," 
 and made them think the true difi'erences of things are 
 past finding out. Bacon himself started with a doubt 
 of received opinions ; but it was not the paralysing doubt 
 of dogmatic negation, — it was (like that of Socrates in 
 earlier, of Descartes in later times) the starting-point 
 for a new construction — an Acatalepsia preparing the 
 way for a Eucatalepsia. In grappling with the Idola,^ 
 he " met the spectres of the mind " and essayed to lay 
 
 1 It is evident that those Idola may either act together or separ- 
 ately in the same mind and in reference to the same thing. If I say, 
 "the sun moves round the earth," because my eyes tell me so, it is 
 an Tdolum Tribus ; if because common language _says so, it is an 
 
158 Francis Bacon. 
 
 them. Among the remedies against their influence 
 which he has indicated is the memorable caution, " Let 
 every student of nature take this as a rule, that what- 
 ever the mind seizes and dwells on with peculiar satis- 
 faction is to be held in suspicion." Equally suggestive 
 in reference to the motives that should guide us on the 
 forward path is the distinction he draws between the 
 '' love of excelling " and " the love of excellence." Those 
 who are led by the former may make good soldiers and 
 servants of State, but only those who are true to the 
 latter will make good princes or philosophers. 
 
 Following on the discussion of the Idola, Bacon 
 notes their bulwarks : defective sense-impressions, no- 
 tions ill drawn from them, induction without exclusions ; 
 whereas selection and not mere accumulation lies at 
 the root of the new Logic. On this follows one of the 
 recurring protests against utilitarianism in experiment; 
 and then (Aph. 71-92), beating over often -beaten 
 ground, a list of Jive signs, and fifteen causes, often 
 cross-divisions, of the defects of the received sciences. 
 Under the first head, he observes that their origin with 
 the Greeks was unpropitious, their progress slow, and 
 their fruit scanty, introducing his image of time as a 
 river that drowned the more solid systems of Herac- 
 litus and Democritus, and carried down on its surface 
 the lighter planks of Aristotle and Plato. Under the 
 second he dwells on the shortness of the propitious 
 periods ; for during all the middle age the Arabians 
 and Schoolmen rather crushed the sciences by a multi- 
 
 Idolum Fori ; if because Ptolemy says so, it is an Idolum Theatri ; 
 if because that view agrees with other theories of my own, as was the 
 case with Bacon himself, it is an Idolum Specus. 
 
Nil Desperaruhim. 159 
 
 tilde of treatises than added to their weight; the ne- 
 glect of Natural Philosophy, " the great mother of the 
 Sciences," which have been torn from her womb and so 
 severed from tlieir root ; waste of time in unprofitable 
 talk ; reverence for " the world's youth ; " ^ a lazy con- 
 tent with discoveries already made ; the quackery of 
 magicians and the habit of limiting investigation to one 
 subject, as the magnet, the sea, the heavens, of which 
 Bacon, in the wide range of his ambition, did not realise 
 the need. He ends his list with his prevailing note — 
 that of the herald, bell-ringer, and trumpeter of the 
 race : " The greatest obstacle to progress is that men 
 despair and tliink things impossible," — and then passes 
 to the grounds of Hope (Aph. 92-115). 
 
 After a characteristic appeal to prophecy, he main- 
 tains that our knowledge of the errors of the past, as 
 arising from the divorce of the experimental and reason- 
 ing faculties, is an argument for trust in the future. We 
 have now a better understanding of the true functions 
 of Philosophy, which must no longer be subservient 
 either to Logic or to Mathematics ; we have the begin- 
 nings of a more extensive Natural History, and new 
 helps to making it profitable, — a result which will be 
 achieved if we do not sever the sciences from their stem, 
 and discard the common childish induction by simple 
 enumeration, whose conclusions, exposed to the refuta- 
 tion of a single negative, are precarious. Everything 
 may be expected from the new method when we con- 
 sider what has been done without it. Living in the 
 
 1 To previous instances of the use of this phrase we may add that 
 of Otto Casnaann, It has been traced to Esdras. ** The world has 
 lost its youth, and the times begin to wax old." 
 
160 Francis Bacon. 
 
 wake of such a series of discoveries as gunpowder, silk, 
 the mariner's compass, and the printing-press, in the 
 fresh air of the breezes of hope that blow upon us from 
 the new world, we need never speak of impossibility. 
 That which men have done is " but earnest of the things 
 which they shall do." Bacon concludes the Pars 
 Destruens of his book, and sums it up as mainly con- 
 sisting of three refutations, which may thus be tabulated 
 in reference to the Idola : — 
 
 1. Eedargutio Philosophiarum, refutation j 
 
 of received theories, I Idola 
 
 2. Eedargutio Demonstrationum, refuta- j Tfieatri. 
 
 tion of wrong modes of reasoning, J 
 
 3. Eedargutio Eationis humanae naturae, j j-, , 
 
 refutation of the natural and un- I T-'hi.^ 
 aided, and therefore illegitimate, j „ 
 workings of the mind, J 
 
 The Idola Fori may be considered as falling under 
 both heads 2 and 3. 
 
 He concludes his first Book (Aph. 116-130) by 
 answers to objections, and further hints of his design. 
 He is no founder of a sect ; nor does he think it much 
 matters what one may think, with or against Telesio, 
 as to the principles of things. His purpose is to lay 
 more firmly the foundations of man's power ; and though 
 he has collected a number of results for the fifth part of 
 the ' Instauration,' he has " no entire or universal theory 
 to propound." His Natural History, which is the thirds 
 and his Tables of Discovery, which compose the fourth 
 part, are incomplete and insufficiently verified; but, 
 in weak health, and trammelled by affairs, he has 
 
Nothinri mean in Nature. 161 
 
 yet made some advance. All errors may be corrected 
 when their causes have been discovered, but prejudices 
 must be set aside; and we must not shrink from our 
 task because it may bring us in contact with things 
 called mean and apparently trivial. There is nothing 
 mean in nature : we cannot measure use by show : 
 " quicquid essentia dignum ^ est, id etiam scientia dig- 
 num, qu£e est essentise imago." Despise no detail — 
 " Sol 2 enim seque palatia et cloacas ingreditur, neque 
 tamen polluitur." !N"or are the matters we are called 
 on to consider too subtle, for things apparently useless 
 often teem with fruit, — *' the knowledge of simple 
 natures well defined is light ; " nor commonplace, for 
 they are keys to what is rare. As to presumption, 
 surely there is none in saying that we can draw a 
 better circle with a pair of compasses tkan without 
 them. The theorists and fabulists of the past drew 
 up far conclusions by logic as wheels draw water from 
 a well, " whereas I pledge mankind in a liquor strained 
 from coimtless grapes." The new, like the old logic, 
 when complete, will apply (Aph. 127) to all the 
 sciences. " I form a history and tables of discovery 
 for anger, fear, shame, and the like ; for matters polit- 
 ical; and again, for the mental operations of memory, 
 composition, and division, judgment and the rest, not 
 less than for heat and cold, light or vegetation, though 
 the method of invention may be somewhat modified 
 
 1 Cf. Plato, Parmenicles. 
 
 2 Cf. Shakespeare, " Winter's Tale," Act IV. sc. iii. : — 
 " The self-same sun, that shines upon his court, 
 
 Hides not his visage from our cottage, but 
 Looks on it alike." 
 —XIV. L 
 
162 Francis Bacon. 
 
 according to the subject of the inquiry." Though it 
 be still defective, the end is such that, magna 2-)rcemia, 
 it is worth a trial. Meanwhile much may be done even 
 by the methods in vogue. If we pursue our researches 
 in order, and keep the sciences close to nature, we may 
 begin with Alexander's heart. 
 
 One of Bacon's devices for attracting attention was to 
 startle. He begins the Second Book of the ' Organum ' 
 by a sudden enunciation of the most obscure part of his 
 philosophy. " On a given body to generate and super- 
 induce a new nature or natures is the work and aim of 
 human power" — i.e., man is minister naturae. "Of a 
 given nature to discover the form, or true specific dif- 
 ference, or nature engendering nature, or source of 
 emanation, ... is the work and aim of human know- 
 ledge" — z.e., man is interpres naturce. To understand 
 this, which may have provoked the criticism of King 
 James, we have some way to travel, and it seems best 
 to start from the step which Bacon proposed to take 
 after his road was levelled and ground cleared. In 
 logical as well as practical order, that first step was to 
 make a complete list of the Phcenomena universi, to 
 which he calls attention in the Plan of the 'Instauratio.' 
 In the " Parasceve," ^ or preparatory essay published in 
 the same volume at the end of the ' Organum,' that " it 
 might be put out of peril," he dwells on the importance 
 of this part of his scheme, declaring that without such 
 a history nothing can be done, " if all the wits of all the 
 
 1 This interesting paper is to some extent a repetition of 'De 
 Aug.,' B. III., but Bacon adds new physical illustrations, and dwells 
 on the necessity of, at least, a history of the cardinal virtues or 
 leading forces of nature, as precedent to Interpretation. 
 
"Fhcvnomcna Universi." 163 
 
 ages had met or shall meet" in a world imiversity. 
 "Whereas let such a history be once provided, . . . and 
 the investigation of nature and of all sciences will be the 
 work of a few years. This, therefore, must be done, or 
 tlie business must be given up." 
 
 Bacon's system hangs together: the possibility of 
 carrying out his method of exclusions depended upon 
 the completeness of the history. One of his funda- 
 mental conceptions, to all practical intent a misconcep- 
 tion, was the finity of nature, which he regarded as a 
 chess-board on a gigantic scale divided into definite 
 squares. The notion of infinity in the modern sense — 
 i.e. J as distinct from the indefinite airapov — is no more 
 present to his mind than it was to that of the Greeks : 
 for their finality he substitutes another of his own. 
 Speusippus is reputed to have been the first to attempt 
 a conspectus of the sciences, to have said that he 
 who would define anything must know everything, and 
 to have Avritten ten books stating the resemblances of 
 all things he knew. The revival of this attempt in the 
 16th century was natural to the overweening age 
 whose new knowledge was vast, but vague and undi- 
 vided, and those who received it as a whole did not 
 recognise the complexity of its details. Like the old 
 Ionic philosophers, though from another point of view, 
 they tried anew to grasp the total bulk of things. While 
 Sir Walter Ealeigh was writing a history of the whole 
 world. Bacon thought that he might put labels on the 
 whole of nature. He did not know by how many parts 
 her subtilty passes the subtilty of the human mind, or 
 how many new instruments were needed to wring her 
 secrets from her tenacious grasp ; and his lists are a 
 
164 Francis Bacon. 
 
 jumble of things great and small — his instances and con- 
 clusions medleys of shrewd suggestion and almost child- 
 ish fancies, or mistakes in meteorology, medicine, acous- 
 tics, optics, astronomy. But, like Galileo, he main- 
 tained that nature must be interpreted like a book, and 
 that we must learn the aljDhabet — though far longer than 
 he knew — before arranging the facts of an 'Historia 
 i!^aturalis,' and so dealing with them as to construct a 
 ' Scientia I^aturalis.' 
 
 The accumulation of those facts, as a store-forest 
 " particularum sylva et materia," is the administration 
 to Sense referred to in the ' Delineatio.' The adminis- 
 tration to Memory is supplied by arranging them accord- 
 ing to a fixed prmciple, with a view to find the clue to 
 their causes, in three Tables of Investigation, of which 
 the first is — 
 
 1 . The Ta hie of Affirmatives — ' ' Essentiae et Presentise ; 
 Positivae sive Convenientes." This is to contain a 
 collection of all the known instances that agree in hav- 
 ing the same quahty. E.g., if the subject to be inquired 
 into is heat,^ of all bodies that give forth heat — as the 
 sun, lightning, flame, burning - glasses, the blood of 
 mammalia, living animals, hot iron, &c., &c. The use 
 of this table is to show the error of attempting to dis- 
 cover the nature of anything in the thing itself, because 
 the true cause must explain all the known effects. We 
 are advised, in forming it, to collect instances from all 
 quarters, and from varied and dissimilar objects. This 
 
 1 This is, of course, the subject selected by Bacon in the ' Organum ' 
 in place of motion, as designed in the ' Filum Labyrinthi,' probably 
 from his having come to the conclusion that motion was itself a 
 " simple nature." 
 
Affirmatives and Negatives. 165 
 
 being done, it approaches the least exact of the experi- 
 mental methods whose canon is thus laid down by Mr 
 Mill : "If two or more instances of the phenomenon 
 under investigation have only one circumstance in com- 
 mon, the circumstance in which alone all the instances 
 agree is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon." 
 But any conclusion arrived at from an inspection of 
 this table will be a guess ; for Bacon curiously remarks, 
 only God and the angels can tell the cause from the 
 contemplation of the affirmatives. The human mind 
 must make use of — 
 
 2. The second table of Negative Instances^ " Negativie 
 vel Contradictorise," also called that of Declination, or 
 Absence " in proximo," — a collection of examples of 
 bodies otherwise similar (else the list would be endless), 
 which do not agree in the same nature. Thus the nega- 
 tive table of Heat would contain such instances as the 
 moon's rays, blood of fish, dead animals, &c. We are 
 brought a step nearer to our discovery by setting aside 
 whatever is non-essential or extraneous. The employ- 
 ment of this table along with the first corresponds in 
 some degree to the " Joint ;^^ethod of Agreement and 
 Difference " ^ in modern logic, and corrects the prem- 
 ature generalisations that might be made from the 
 Affirmatives alone. Thus, when it appears that the 
 blood of terrestrial animals is hot and the blood of fish 
 cold, the hasty conclusion that the blood of animals is 
 hot is vetoed : so also the notion that Heat has its source 
 in the heavenly bodies, or that it always accompanies 
 Light by the fact (alleged by Bacon) that the moon's 
 rays are cold. Another use of his table is, he tells us, 
 1 Vide Mill, Logic, vol. i. p. 429. 
 
166 Francis Bacon. 
 
 "to discover the nature sought by observing some of 
 its qualities that are absent in the otherwise analogous 
 nature, like the images of Cassius and Brutus in the 
 funeral of Junia, . . . eo ipso prsefulgebant quia non 
 visebantur." Thus boiling water is hot, ice is cold ; 
 living bodies are hot, dead bodies are cold : but in 
 boiling water and in living bodies there is motion of 
 parts; in ice and dead bodies they are fixed. Does it 
 not seem, therefore, that motion of parts is of the nature 
 of Heat 1 The stress Bacon lays on negative instances 
 is one of the earliest applications to philosophy of the 
 principle, " Audiatur et altera pars." He constantly 
 urges that the cardinal defect of the old Induction was 
 the neglect of this ; that our conclusions can never 
 be legitimate or secure till they have passed through 
 the sieve of this table, and have no more to apprehend 
 from an unforeseen exception. Then alone experience 
 has ceased to be empirical, and become critical. 
 
 3. A third table is that of Comixirison, Majus et 
 Minus — i.e., a collection of instances where the pheno- 
 menon sought to be explained is present in various 
 degrees. Thus Heat is unequal in various kinds of 
 flame, rising in degree from that of burning spirits of 
 wine to that of a blast furnace : it varies in the same 
 animals, under different circumstances ; it is greater in 
 boiling lead than in boiling water, &c. The use of this 
 table is that of ]\fr Mill's "Method of Concomitant 
 Variations," and its canon may be stated in the same 
 way: "Whatever phenomenon varies in any manner, 
 whenever another phenomenon varies in some particular 
 manner, is either a cause or an effect of that phenomenon, 
 or is connected with it through some fact of causation." 
 
Tabic of Variations. 167 
 
 This method, employed alone, often throws suggestive 
 light on the relation of antecedents and consequents ; 
 but its efficacy largely depends on the skilful use of 
 Experiment, in which Bacon, while recognising its im- 
 portance, was in practice singularly deficient. 
 
 So far all is plain. These tables of Presentation, as 
 they are called, and the use made of them, are rude 
 forms of the modern laws of Induction. There is want- 
 ing only the recognition of Theory as a motive and 
 principle of arrangement. Nor is Bacon without a 
 vague idea of the value, at this stage, of conjecture or 
 hypothesis as applied to the interpretation of the facts, 
 which he expresses, in his own metaphorical way, under 
 the name of the "Vindemiatio Prima" or "Permissio 
 Intellectus" — i.e., an indulgence to the understanding 
 to gather early grapes. The image, as his images often 
 do, carries its own fallacy in still underrating the im- 
 portance of the part that has to be played by such tenta- 
 tive conjectures as those of Kepler, and such special 
 investigations as those of Galileo, in the advance of 
 discovery; but, as far as it goes, it is a concession to the 
 methods since pursued in science. Proceeding on the 
 basis of Mill's rule, — " Whatever circumstance may be 
 excluded, without prejudice to the phenomenon, or can 
 be absent notwithstanding its presence, is not connected 
 with it in the way of causation," — Bacon throws into a 
 'preliminary Table of Exclusions everything about Heat 
 which is not present in the affirmative instances or which 
 is present in the negative, everything which increases 
 when the phenomenon decreases, and vice versa. From 
 its possible causes he throws aside Light, Fluidity, and 
 Quiescence, and arrives at his residue or result in an 
 
168 Francis Bacon. 
 
 approximation to the nature of the quality he wishes to 
 decipher. Thus it appears that the essential nature of 
 Heat is Motion. Flame is perpetually in motion ; so are 
 hot or boiling fluids. Heat is increased by motion, as 
 in bellows and blasts ; all bodies are destroyed, or 
 have the position of their parts altered by heat ; when 
 it escapes, as in death, the body rests. Motion is 
 therefore clearly the genus of Heat. Going further, in 
 his conjecture, as to the true specific differences which 
 limit motion and constitute it the Form of Heat, he 
 concludes that it is a motion, " expansive, restrained, 
 and acting in its strife upon the smaller particles of 
 bodies — a motion which, while it expands all ways, has 
 at the same time an inclination upwards." " If, there- 
 fore, in any body you can excite a dilating motion, and 
 can turn it so back upon itself that the dilation shall 
 not proceed equally, but have its way in one part and 
 be counteracted in another, you will generate Heat." 
 This conclusion, though attained by an imperfect pro- 
 cess, and defective in detail, is surely not so far from 
 announcing the principle of heat, which is often arrested 
 motion, as critics, to whom detail is everything, have 
 assumed. 
 
 But this is only the first vintage, beyond which, as a 
 matter of fact. Bacon in none of his investigations was 
 able to get. He had worked up to the modem canon 
 of the method of Eesidues, — " subduct from any phe- 
 nomenon such part as is known by previous inductions 
 to be the eff'ect of certain antecedents, and the residue 
 of the phenomenon is the effect of the remaining ante- 
 cedents," — but he failed properly to apply it. His course 
 should have been, through further testing experiments, 
 
Method of Exclusions. 169 
 
 to analyse the manifestations of one or two forces, lint 
 he was hurried on by the very impatience, misled by 
 the same love of miiformity, which in his predecessors 
 he denounced. Above all, he had set before himself 
 an impracticable design. It must always be borne in 
 mind that Bacon's idea of Induction was no mere index 
 or guide, but a system as rigid as a mathematical prob- 
 lem, as certain as the operation of a natural law which 
 was designed to do for the premisses of discovery what 
 Aristotle had done for the conclusions of argument.^ 
 It was a formula for leading us to laws, without the pos- 
 sibility of a contradictory instance — laws which would 
 lead us to fresh results in practice, by a process like 
 moving the handle of a calculating machine. The 
 ordinary Induction, he maintains, is like "chasing a 
 quarry over an open country;" in the new it is con- 
 fined within limits and brought to bay. Ruling the 
 latter are two leading conceptions, — that of Form, as 
 "the sole survivor of all the natures, combined with 
 which the given nature was first presented to us" (a 
 conception we shall presently discuss) ; and that of the 
 strict Method of Exclusions. This Exclusion is not an 
 assortment of facts sufficient to enable us, as in mod- 
 em Induction, on a presumption of the uniformity of 
 Nature, to infer the law ; it is a rejection of everytTdng 
 extraneous, and thus the key of interpretation, the 
 adequate " ministration to the Reason " foreshadowed 
 in the 'Delineatio.' Confident at starting in the lim- 
 itations of the park where he has to hunt his game, 
 Bacon states his intention of running it down " per 
 
 1 Bacon assuredly did not succeed in doing this, as Professor Fowler 
 seems to assert he did. 
 
170 Francis Bacon. 
 
 omnimodum exclusionem," till all the rejections having 
 been made, and Nature sifted in the fire of the mind 
 (Aph. 16), " abeuntibus in fiimum opinionibus volatil- 
 ibus," all light opinions vanishing like smoke, there 
 will remain at the bottom (as the mystic rose of 
 Alchemy) the " true and solid cause." "It is only 
 thus," he says (Aph. 17), "that the power of man can 
 be emancipated from the common course of nature, and 
 exalted to new efficients and new modes of life." Every 
 exclusion is an added element of liberty, as it frees the 
 mind from being bound to a nature which is not, and 
 enables it to run in search of that which is, essential. 
 At the close of the rejections about Heat, we are told, 
 "All and each of the above natures do not belong 
 to its Form, and from all of them man is freed in his 
 operation." ^ But it is evident that this process can 
 only he exhaustive ichen the list of negatives is coin- 
 plete, — that the possibility of its completion of the list 
 depends on the practical finity of Nature. Another 
 and a fatal flaw in Bacon's system seems to have been, 
 at first dimly then increasingly, apparent to himself. 
 He again and again insists that everything may be 
 resolved into an aggregate of Simple natures, and 
 admits (Aph. 19) that till we have a well-defined list 
 of these, the Exclusives cannot be satisfactory. " This 
 part is not at all complete, nor can it possibly be so 
 at first ; . . . for if we do not yet possess sound and 
 true notions of Simple natures, how can the process 
 of exclusion be made accurate?" Therefore he will 
 
 ' E.g., Whiteness, tlie instance given in ' Val. Ter.,' may be pro- 
 duced in various ways ; but we "give the direction," which is other- 
 wise fettered or chained to unessentials by rejecting them. 
 
E.vhaustioii of Negatives. 171 
 
 " not rest satisfied with the precepts laid down, hut will 
 desire and supply more powerful aids (* fortiora et ulte- 
 riora auxilia') for the use of the understanding." A 
 similar promise is made (B. I., Aph. 14, 15, 16, 18) where, 
 arraigning the vagueness of commonly received scientific 
 conceptions, he says we must have " a better method of 
 definition ; " but the subsidiary reasoning processes con- 
 fessedly required for it are wanting. Bacon has done 
 little to fulfil these promises ; his induction remains in 
 need of notions which have " their only hope " from his 
 induction ; and we need not wonder that he has been 
 charged with reasoning in a circle. His exact method 
 failed, partly because it is impossible to make the forma- 
 tion of conceptions mechanical ; because he did not re- 
 cognise that science must progress by the application of 
 tentative ideas ^ to facts ; partly because Nature is prac- 
 tically infinite, and the best alphabet of the universe 
 can only be that of the knowledge of a single age. It 
 is hardly fair to say that he abandoned his Method of 
 Exclusions ; for we cannot tell to what the completion 
 of the fragment of the ' Organum ' (a fourth, according to 
 some estimates of the original design) may have grown ; 
 but it is plain that he began to doubt his power of fit- 
 ting the key to a lock for which it was in reality too 
 small. He felt that he needed more help, not only from 
 mental processes, but from other men; and fell back, 
 with his habitual h^-vTipo^i ttXov?, on concrete examples, 
 on contributions to the " royal work " of Natural His- 
 
 1 These ideas are of two kinds : one, represented by Kepler's link- 
 ing together the points in a star's progress by an ellipse, is a geo- 
 metrical — the other, by Newton's law of gravity, is a physical — 
 imagination. 
 
172 Francis Bacon. 
 
 tory at the base, and (as in the ' De Principiis ') imagina- 
 tions of his own regarding the clouds around the sum- 
 mit of his system. 
 
 In Aph. 21, Bacon gives a Hst of some of the further 
 aids or fortiora auxilia to which (Aph. 19) he had re- 
 ferred. Among these, his proposal to vary the investi- 
 gation according to the nature of the subject is a trib- 
 ute to the true scientific method then employed by 
 Galileo, and since adopted ; the " Rectification " was 
 probably meant to correspond to our " Verification " ^ of 
 Inductions, " the Limits of Investigation " was like the 
 impossible synopsis of the Universe, and the ascending 
 and descending scale, — an anticipation of the Scala Intel- 
 lectus, or exemplars of inductive processes and results. 
 Of the nine heads, one alone is handled in the ' Organum' 
 — that of Prerogative Instances. These are cases in 
 which the law of which we are in search comes forward 
 with such prominence as to merit or arrest our attention 
 in a peculiar degree ; as Sir John Herschel says, " Char- 
 acteristic phenomena selected from a number that would 
 confuse, presenting themselves in such a forcible way as 
 to impress us with the idea of causation." Some of 
 these seem to show the cause at a glance, and are as 
 final as tests in chemistry ; others are like the Instantia 
 Crucis, equally decisive in arbitrating between two 
 hypotheses, — as when the mind is in doubt between two 
 causes {e.g., whether the tides rise together or roll from 
 shore to shore), it removes the one and leaves the other ; 
 many are analogies, pointing to research rather than 
 themselves direct sources of knowledge. 
 
 1 Several of these aids have been unfolded and illustrated with the 
 lights of modern science by such writers as Whewell and Mill. 
 
Prerogative Instances. 173 
 
 Bacon enumerates and illustrates at length, with more 
 than his usual display of a physical knowledge at once 
 copious and inaccurate, twenty-seven of these Instances, 
 of which the following are the most important : — 
 
 1. Listantim Solitariai ; where the same quality exists 
 in bodies different in every other respect, or Avhere 
 bodies, otherwise the snme, diff'er only in respect of 
 this quality. Thus, colour is found in prisms, flowers, 
 rainbows, drops of dew, which are in every other respect 
 unlike. The different parts of the leaf of a tulip agree 
 in everytliing but the colour ; flame and a heated stone 
 diff'er in everything ; a cold and a heated stone agree in 
 everything except the heat. The use of these instances, 
 having nothing in common iDut the nature we are ex- 
 amining, corresponds to the more exact use of the 
 "Method of Difference" in recent Logic. 
 
 2. Instantim Migrantes, travelling instances ; where 
 the property in question is, as it were, caught coming 
 into existence, or seen passing from one state to another. 
 Thus, clean water and glass are transparent ; if we freeze 
 or agitate the water, or pulverise the glass, they become 
 white — whiteness, as it were, comes upon the field. 
 Masticating pepper and striking a light are instances of 
 heat and light travelling into existence. Under this 
 head are introduced some curious speculations about 
 colour.^ 
 
 3. InstanticB Ostentince, glaring instances ; Avhere the 
 nature sought appears in a peculiarly conspicuous man- 
 ner. They show some property in its highest energy, as 
 
 1 As in ' Val. Term.' Bacon says that equality of arrangement of 
 parts produces transparency : uneven bodies are white, uneven and 
 irregular black. 
 
174 Francis Bacon. 
 
 the expansive power of heat is shown in the thermom- 
 eter, " vitrum calendare seris " ; and quicksilver being 
 heavier than the diamond, shows that weight does not 
 depend on compactness. 
 
 4. Instant ice Manipulares. Experiments, physical or 
 mental, as aids to memory or sense, which help to dis- 
 cover hidden operations, or by ''uniting natures" — i.e., 
 arranging facts in groups — "pave the way to forms." 
 
 5. Instantue Confonnes, analogous instances; where 
 one department of nature or phase of life seems to throw 
 light upon another, presenting facts with a resemblance 
 amid great diversity. Thus, the structures of the human 
 eye, of the telescope, and of the microscope are analogous, 
 as bearing on the power of sight. Gums and gems are 
 exudations of juices, the one of trees, the other of rocks. 
 So we may compare the hairs of beasts and the feathers 
 of birds, &c. 
 
 6. Under the heads of Instantice Monodicm and Devi- 
 antes, singular and deviating instances, he dwells on the 
 importance of paying attention to the strange phenomena, 
 apparent irrjegularities, and freaks of nature. 
 
 7. Instantue Potest at is, in which the power of human 
 wit is shown in useful inventions, and the masterpieces 
 and mysteries of any art which exerts wonder, "for 
 wonder is the child of rarity. . . . Matters of supersti- 
 tion and magic should not be omitted, . . . for it may 
 be that in some of them a natural operation lies at the 
 bottom, as in fascination, sympathy of things at a dis- 
 tance, transmission of impressions from spirit to spirit 
 no less than from body to body, and the like." 
 
 8. Instantice Comitatas atqxie Hostiles. These are 
 instances of qualities always found together, as flame 
 
Prerogative Instances. 176 
 
 and lieat,^ or never found together — e.g.y solids are 
 never both transparent and malleable. 
 
 9. Instant ice Fivderis, instances of alliance ; -where 
 the same work is done or change wrought by causes 
 apparently heterogeneous — e.g.^ when the heat of fire, 
 falsely supposed to be merely destructive, ripens grapes 
 in the same way as the heat of the sun, supposed to be 
 generative, we say that the difference between them is 
 not radical — i.e., they have the same form. 
 
 10. Instant ice Crucis. Decisive when the mind is in 
 doubt between two alternatives. Bacon's speculations on 
 the tides, his astronomical hypotheses, a crude theory 
 of projectiles, and a discussion of the polarity of the 
 magnet, are here introduced. 
 
 11. Instantice JanucBy of the Gate, instances of direct 
 aids given to the senses, are interesting from the refer- 
 ence to the possible light to be thrown by the micro- 
 scope on the Atomic theory, and to the resolution of the 
 Milky Way into stars by Galileo. 
 
 12. Instantice Qtiaiiti — i.e., such as inquire into the 
 proportion of the quantity of a body with respect to its 
 virtue, of which, in the 'De Augmentis,' we have a 
 suggestive though humorous example : " Men should 
 remember the mockery of ^sop's housewife, who con- 
 ceited that by doubling her measure of barley her hen 
 would daily lay her two eggs; but the hen grew fat 
 and laid none." It is the modern fallacy regarding 
 education. 
 
 It only remains to note that under the head. Instances 
 of Strife, which discuss the contending forces of nature, 
 
 1 Bacon's instance, which only holds good on one side — i.e., flame 
 is always hot, but heat does not always flame. 
 
176 Francis Bacon. 
 
 we have what is practically a contmuation of the " Filum 
 Labyrinthi " in the discussion of nineteen kinds of Mo- 
 tion; and that the book concludes with an unfulfilled 
 promise to expound the rectifications of induction, and 
 then to proceed to concretes, latent processes, and con- 
 figurations. 
 
 In Bacon's Tables and Instances, with a constant 
 reference by way of caution to the Idola, and the use 
 of the Experientia Literata, which he claims as a pre- 
 rogative of modern times, we have as much of his 
 method as he was enabled to expound. Its incomplete- 
 ness is confessed, its defects manifest; but the con- 
 tention that there is in it nothing new, that it is a 
 mere restatement of common practice, is an ignoratio 
 elenchi, which would lead us to conclude that, because 
 the burnt dog as well as the burnt child dreads the 
 fire, it is idle to inquire into the nature of heat, or 
 that mensuration and trigonometry are useless because, 
 for practical purposes, a man can find the length and 
 breadth of most fields with his eyes and legs. Mac- 
 aulay's jest about the Judge and the three names and 
 Jacobinism is on a par with Locke's declaration that it 
 has been his " ill luck never to find a science founded on 
 axioms ; " and that the laAvs of Identity, Contradiction, 
 and Excluded Middle are like the utterances, if he could 
 speak, of " a monkey shifting his oyster from one hand 
 to the other, and saying oyster in right hand is subject, 
 and oyster in left hand is predicate." Equally absiu-d is 
 the criticism that Bacon's method was not his own, be- 
 cause it was latent in his age. So, no doubt, the law of 
 gravity was latent in the age of Newton, and the steam- 
 engine in the age of Watt. We have seen that previous 
 
Plato* s Inchtction. 177 
 
 thinkers had anticipated many of the princii^les of a 
 phytiical method : it is a truism that every man is, to 
 some extent, the child of his age ; hut tlie characteristic 
 of origmality is to be the lirst-horn in the new thought. 
 ** Tlie point," as Mr Lewes has remarked, "is to find a 
 man dwelling on the necessity of a graduated Induction 
 through successive steps of generality at a time when 
 men had just begun to perceive that they must begin 
 from experience in some way or other." Bacon was the 
 first loudly to pTOclaim, if not the first to perceive, that 
 " the regularity of nature's laws marked them out as 
 objects of precise and certain knowledge." The dis- 
 coveries of the latter half of the fifteenth and the 
 whole of the sixteenth century had given the motive 
 to more systematic investigation. Bacon indicated, in 
 some measure correctly, the path it had to pursue, espec- 
 ially in his protest against " notions scarcely beneath the 
 surface," and his dwelling on what he calls " middle 
 axioms," as in reality the most important practical 
 guides ; and his treatment at the hands of many recent 
 critics only goes to confirm one of his own assertions, 
 that "great discoveries appear simple when they are 
 made." 
 
 Still more fallacious is the contention that, in his 
 analysis of the Inductive method. Bacon had been fore- 
 stalled by the Greeks. AVe might as well assert that 
 Xewton was anticipated by the ancients because they ob- 
 served the phenomena of "attraction" and used the word. 
 Induction, eVaywyT;, is mentioned in connection with 
 Socrates; but with him it meant simply a process of 
 drawing on the mind to convictions about morals, by 
 interrogations, and the use of Example and Analogy. 
 
 p. — XIV, M 
 
178 Francis Bacon. 
 
 It made no claim to logical accuracy. Plato's Dialectic 
 is a more elaborate process of rising from particulars to 
 generals. In the ' Philebus ' Ave are told : " The best way 
 of arriving at Truth is not hard to point, but very hard 
 to follow. The philosophers of the present day seize upon 
 the One at hazard too soon or too late, and then snatch 
 at the Infinite ; but the intermediate steps escape them." 
 Here and elsewhere in the 'Dialogues,' we have an idea 
 of a series of subordinations, and the notion of imity as 
 an end, which seems at first sight Baconian ; but Plato's 
 process is from thought to higher thought, not from ob- 
 servation to law. He moves in another world, and either 
 slights what we call " Nature," or interprets it, as in the 
 ' Timaeus,' through Pj'^thagorean fantasies. The summa 
 genera of his search are the paradigms set forth in the 
 * Parmenides,' which he fails to tell us how to attain. 
 The ' Theietetus,' after refuting the view that know- 
 ledge is mere sensation, starts the question what is true 
 and what is false opinion ; and the * Sophist ' can only 
 answer that " not-being is difference." 
 
 With Aristotle, Induction appears as a logical form : 
 he defines it as a peculiar kind of syllogism — "to Sta 
 Tov kripov Odrepov UKpov T(2 fxicrio a-vWoyLa-aa-Oai" — by 
 which, instead of the minor being connected with the 
 major through the middle, the middle is connected with 
 the major through the minor, — a statement easily made 
 clear by a slight diagram, premising that by ,the major 
 is here meant the most and the minor the least general 
 notion : — 
 
 ^ Bodies revolving in ellipses, Major. 
 
 f All the planets, =«» — . Middle. 
 
 ^Mercury, Mars, Venus, &c., ^ Minor. 
 
Aristotle s Luluction. 179 
 
 Aristotle's Induction is here a mere summary, reassert- 
 ing of the whole that which had previously been ascer- 
 tained of all tlie parts. Its conclusion does not go one 
 inch beyond the premisses : it is a mental analysis, and 
 may be brought under the ordinary rules of the syllogism 
 by the expedient of quantifying the predicate, which 
 makes it possible to draw a universal affirmative, A, in 
 the third figure, as thus — 
 
 Isosceles, scalene, and equilateral triangles have their 
 angles equal to two right angles. 
 
 Isosceles, scalene, and ec[uilateral triangles are all 
 triangles. 
 
 .'. All triangles have their angles, &c. 
 
 That Aristotle not only practised, but recognised, real 
 Induction, is plain, especially from a passage ('Post. 
 An.,' ii. 23) Avhere, 'vvriting Trcpl Trj<s cTraywy^g, he says, 
 "We find some animals with little bile live long, as 
 man, the horse, the mule, and infer that all do." Eut 
 for this he lays down no rules : he does not try to find 
 any link of cause and effect between the phenomena, 
 and is satisfied ('Post. An,,' i. 34) to refer to dyxtVota, 
 or the sagacity of happy guessing, in connection witli 
 observation detached from experiment. Bacon's Induc- 
 tion deals with facts so as to elicit a law out of them : 
 it is a process of discovery, and cannot be reduced 
 to syllogistic form, save by tlie notorious j^^titio prin- 
 dpii of Whately's major, " These instances may stand 
 for all instances." Bacon's ideal method, on the other 
 hand, being in a sense geometrical, would give to the old 
 inductive syllogism an immense, and in jDoint of fact 
 impossible, extension, — as thus : 
 
180 Francis Bacon. 
 
 The heat in ah c \b an expansive motion. 
 
 The heat in ah ci^ all heat. 
 
 .•. All heat is an expansive motion. 
 It is this extension he lias in view when he dechires 
 ('Nov. Org.,' li. i. 6), it would be an unsound fancy to ex- 
 pect that things which have never yet been done can be 
 done except by means which have never yet been tried, 
 when he says that he is " in hac re plane protopirus et 
 vestigia nullius sequutus;" and when he proposes to 
 analyse Invention, as Aristotle analysed Propositions, 
 and as the Greeks in general Keflection. But his claim 
 to originality is largely valid, even as regards his ac- 
 complished work. It rests not least on his ' Eedargutio ' 
 — more sustained and complete, as well as more persua- 
 sive, than any which had gone before — of the old wrong 
 methods of physical reasoning, the old weary roimd of 
 a priori deductions, the dry dogmatism and card-house 
 system-building of the middle age, and the isolated em- 
 piricism of more recent times. ]^o criticism has shaken 
 his position, that it is only when we pass by well-defined 
 steps fom observing phenomena to apprehending laws 
 that theory becomes practical, contemplation operative, 
 and knowledge productive. It remains true that when, 
 by aid of the miderstanding duly restrained, inventive 
 art produces the useful, and aesthetic art the beautiful, 
 " Scientia humana atque potestas in idem concidunt." 
 If Bacon's method is a mere restatement of common 
 practice, or a revival of anything that had gone before, 
 he not only exaggerates but wholly misconceives his 
 work ; for he is perpetually emphasising the difference, and 
 insisting that his Induction is distinguished as experience 
 from formal logic, and as logic from the experience of 
 
Baco)bs Induction. 181 
 
 daily life. Possessed, bej'ond any of his predecessors, 
 ■with the idea of the progressiveness of knowlege, lie feels 
 hiniself removed toto coslo from those avIio thought 
 that all, or nearly all, things were already known — Travra 
 yap (Tx^^o^' evprjTai. He constantly brings his own aims 
 and ideas into direct contrast with those before prevalent, 
 and, in the spirit of a confident iconoclast, endeavours to 
 substitute the one for the other. ^ 
 
 But even in his own mind the substitution was 
 incomplete, for he had set before himself, as the 
 end of his research, an idea which, being half physical 
 and half metaphysical, recalls the confusion of the 
 Schools. His method, however it may eiT on one side 
 by defect, on another by presumption, was in many of 
 its features modern, but its aim was neither modern 
 nor ancient. It was, indeed, something never attempted 
 before, but it was also something which wdll never be 
 attempted again. Eecent Induction — that of Mill and 
 "Wliewell, Herschel, Faraday, and Darwin — is the means 
 by which the great sequences of nature, called laws, are 
 investigated by the aid of apt conjecture, and by care- 
 ful verification established. But Bacon thought to 
 accomplish more than this. By aid of a method, which, 
 from its exhaustiveness, he held to be as certain in its 
 residts as a demonstration of Euclid, "necessario con- 
 cludit " ; so mechanical that when once understood all 
 men might employ it ; yet so startling that it was to 
 be as a new sun to the borrowed beams of stars ; he 
 aspired to penetrate into the inner nature of things, and 
 so hold them in command. "In idem concidunt" 
 means that knowledge of the cause will ahvays enable 
 ^ Kuno Fischer's list of those oppositions is interesting. 
 
182 Francis Bacon. 
 
 us to reproduce the effect ; and given tlie basis (' jN"ovmn 
 Organum,' ii. 1) in a concrete body^ {vide 'Novum Or- 
 ganum,' ii. 5), we can impose upon it the qualities which 
 are the main objects of liis clue. 
 
 Accepting the old maxim, " vere scire est per causas 
 scire," which is true when translated " all philosophy is 
 an inquiry after causes," and their traditionary fourfold 
 division, Bacon assigns them as follows to his sciences : — 
 
 Metaphysic is the science of Final and Formal 
 Causes, and results in Scientific Magic. 
 
 Physic is the science of Efficient and Material 
 Causes, and results in Mechanic. 
 
 Many of Bacon's arguments in the ' De Augmentis ' 
 and the ' Organum ' are employed to ex])el from physics 
 the inquiry after Final Causes prominent in the works 
 of Ai'istotle and the Schoolmen : " Causarum finalium in- 
 quisitio tanquam virgo Deo consecrata non parit opera." 
 He makes the too sweeping assertion that in the 
 domain of nature the inquiry is barren : we want to 
 know not lohy a thing is, but what it is. Final causes 
 are "ex natura hommis potius quam universi," and 
 must be discarded by the natural philosopher. Efficient 
 and Material causes, on the other hand, belong properly 
 to Physics, but they are " res perfunctoriae " superficial : 
 the former will only (' Novum Organum,' ii. 3), under 
 certain circumstances, produce the required result ; they 
 cannot lead us to the root of knowledge, or enable us to 
 grasp the natures of things. Our science is content to 
 find efficient causes, and desjDairs of grasping the natures 
 of things ; but Bacon makes the latter the prime objects 
 
 1 Wliat conception Bacon had of this concrete body, without the 
 " natures" he designed to impose upon it, it is impossible to say. 
 
Bc(co)is "Forms." 183 
 
 of his pursuit under the title of ''Forms," related to 
 permanent qualities as eflicient causes are to changes or 
 events : when present, they will always be accompanied 
 "by the nature we are examining as interpretes ; being 
 found, they will always result in the production of the 
 nature we desire as ministri (' K'ovuni Organum,' ii. 4). 
 The difficulty of apprehending this conception is in- 
 creased by the variously inconsistent terms in which 
 it is set before us. Sometimes Bacon insists that it 
 is simple, as when ('De Aug.,' iv. 3) he says, "!Men 
 ought to have sunk their speculations for a while, and 
 inquired what that is which is common to all lucid 
 bodies ; in other Avords, into the Form of Light, which 
 will explain at once the light of the sun, rotten wood, 
 scales of fish, &c." Elsewhere he talks of Form as if it 
 were a mystery of faith which men are slow to believe, 
 *' they have a received and inveterate opinion that es- 
 sential Forms or true difierences of things cannot by any 
 diligence be found out : " and he himself seems to ap- 
 proach the subject with a sort of awe, as Plato in the 
 'Eepublic' approaches the Idea of Good. As regards 
 the name, he teUs us, in the ' Advancement of Learn- 
 ing,' — " It seemeth best to keep way with antiquity 
 usque ad aras, and therefore to retain the ancient 
 terms, though I sometimes alter the uses;" but, per- 
 ceiving that the old names may bring back with them 
 the old conceptions, he is careful to tell us, to some 
 extent at least, what he did not mean. 
 
 1. The foiin we are seeking after is not, of course, 
 the outward shape, Avhicli is a mere matter of sight and 
 touch. 
 
 2. It is not the Pars formalis of the Schoolmen, 
 
184 Francis Bacon. 
 
 Avhose sujDra-sensible forms (resulting from their con- 
 fused jumble of Plato and Aristotle) lie repudiates, 
 calling them mere " commenta " or fictions. 
 
 3. It is not the Platonic i8ea, or any abstraction 
 separable from concrete realities. 
 
 4. It is not a Law of Mature as now understood ; for 
 laws of nature are simply registers of general or univer- 
 sal truths inductively ascertained. 
 
 5. It approaches nearer to the Aristotelian €1809, but 
 is not identical with it, because it has more to do with 
 physical investigation. 
 
 Bacon's doctrine of Form, being a mode of explaining 
 phenomenal by a noumenal and yet physical world, it 
 has to be observed that he nowhere openly grapples 
 with the question of the relation of substance to attri- 
 bute, which has been the battle-ground of so much later 
 metaphysics. He very vaguely,^ if at all, admits the 
 existence of any ovo-ta, vX-q^ vTroKii/xei/ov, or " noumenon " 
 as a substratum of qualities. For aU he says to the con- 
 trary, suhstances may sunply be the imions of qualities^ 
 and in his so-called materialism we may find the germ 
 of the idealism of Berkeley. So much is plain, that 
 Bacon regards every complex body as a turma or con- 
 geries of " natures," which it is the object of his higher 
 logic to discover and analyse, the analysis being a 
 statement of their Forms — i.e., the resolution of them 
 into simpler, better known natures, determined by a 
 differentia to act or exist in a certain way. As aids in 
 the process, he sets before us two subordinate concep- 
 tions, which make, as it were, the bridge from his 
 
 1 The nearest approach to it being the data basis of ' Novum 
 Organum,' ii. 1, above referred to. 
 
Latent Process. 185 
 
 physic to liis mctapliysic — conceptions to "wliicli recent 
 science has given increased validity. These are — 
 
 1. Tlie Latent Schematism, or invisible and lience 
 latent structure of bodies, on which many of their 
 qualities depend (* De Augmentis,' ii. 1, ' Novum 
 Organum,' ii. 2 and 48), as the structure of crystals 
 displayed by cleavage, and the disposition of their various 
 properties, as density, rarity, Aveight, &c. 
 
 2. The Latent Process, having the same relation to 
 bodies molecularly in motion as the Schematism has to 
 bodies (if such there be) molecularly at rest. It is the 
 secret process by which changes are brought about, as the 
 process which takes place in the cannon between the ai> 
 plication of the match and the expulsion of the ball, or 
 in a seed before the sprout is shown. Bacon accepting 
 as an axiom the law of continuity in nature, holds that 
 we may infer the succession of unseen changes from 
 those which are seen : but this, he says, is hard to do ; it 
 is the work " not of fire only, but of the finer analysis 
 of the mind." Both conceptions have, since he wrote, 
 received illustrations in the more and more penetrating 
 investigations of Physiology and Botany that, under the 
 guidance of Cuvier and Bichat, Schleiden and Schwann, 
 Spallanzani and Yirchow and Bernard, have gone from 
 organ to tissue, and from tissue to cell and protoplasm. 
 
 In a noteworthy passage of the 'De Augmentis,' 
 repeated from the 'Advancement of Learning' (iii. 
 4), it is made plain that the doctrine of Form is not 
 designed for complex bodies. 
 
 " The forms of substances ... are so perplexed that they 
 are not to be inquired : no more than it were possible . . . 
 to seek in gross the forms of those sounds that make Mords, 
 
186 Francis Bacon. 
 
 which by composition of letters are infinite. But, on the 
 other hand, to inquire the form of those sounds or voices 
 which make simple letters is easily comprehensible. . . . 
 In like manner, to inquire the form of a lion, of an oak, 
 of gold — nay, of water, of air — is a vain pursuit ; but to in- 
 quire the forms of sense, of voluntary motion, of vegetation, 
 of colours, of gravity and levity, of density, of tenuity, of 
 heat and 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 the true 
 forms of these is that part of metaphysic we now define." 
 
 It is clear, then, that Forms relate to Qualities. Bacon 
 lias nowhere drawn a definite line between those which 
 are Primary^ and those which are, in our nomencla- 
 ture, Secondary ; but his distinction between the Essen- 
 tial, which he seems to regard as causes of the l^on- 
 essential, is an approach to the division ; and the ques- 
 tion arises, with which class is Form concerned 1 The 
 inquiry is complicated by Bacon's own confusing and 
 sometimes inconsistent imagery. In ' Novum Organuni,' 
 ii. 2, he speaks of Form as a Law. !N'othing, he says 
 (in opposition, as has been pointed out, to the old Eeal- 
 ism), actually exists but ^^ corporaindividua, edentia actus 
 (an assertion of the activity of substance), puros (^.e., 
 cvreXexctai, not mere KtvT^o-cts), individuos (meaning that 
 the analysis of the thing into simple natures is con- 
 
 ■> It has been observed that "Primary Qualities" are, like Bacon's 
 Forms, more or less ideal. Locke defined them as "such that are 
 inseparable from the body in whatever state we find it, giving as 
 instances, Solidity, Extension, Figure, Motion or Rest, and Num- 
 ber ; " while Brown gives Solidity, Extension, and Resistance. Neither 
 has clearly shown how we can derive from them the Secondary Quali- 
 ties, as Colour, &c. 
 
" Causa Immancns'' 187 
 
 ccptual, not real) c.v laje,^^ Avliicli is the Forni.^ Elsc- 
 Avhere he calls it, with an echo of the Arabic Aris- 
 totelians, " fons emanationis," that from which the thing 
 flows; again, it is ''res ipsissima." " In another passage 
 it is " vera diftcrentia " ; - again, it is the " natura 
 naturans " — a phrase nsed by some of the scholiasts, 
 by Bruno, and afterwards by Spinoza — and the " causa 
 immanens." It is "interius" and " existens," as op- 
 posed to " exterius " and " apparens," — the hidden 
 nature elicited from the concrete manifestation, the 
 spring of the unseen operations of the latent process of 
 bodies in motion, or the ground of the configuration of 
 bodies at rest. A clearer view is presented in the 
 definition ('JS'ovum Organum/ ii. 1), ^^ Natura alia qucB 
 sit cum natura data convertihilis et tamen sit limitatio 
 naturoi notioris,^^ elsewhere called "viagls communis" 
 Bacon seems to mean that the elements of complex 
 bodies may in their turn be further resolved. The form 
 nature and the phenomenal nature are present always in 
 a fixed proportion : we have to reach the one through 
 the other, breaking down the less known species into a 
 better known genus and difference. Thus, Heat is re- 
 
 1 The interjected comments are slightly condensed from those of 
 Mr Ellis, who makes the remark about Realism : but elsewhere the 
 same critic observes that, in reference to another aspect of his Forms, 
 Bacon was himself inconsistently " led astray by a sort of Realism, 
 which held that the objects of our thoughts may be regarded as an 
 assemblage of abstract conceptions {notiones) really residing in the 
 objects as essential qualities, whereas we can never analyse or exhaust 
 the forms they may assume." 
 
 2 Those two expressions are not logically reconcilable, as "the 
 very thing" is the genus + the differentia ; but Bacon dwells on the 
 latter as the more important. 
 
188 Francis Bacon. 
 
 solved into Motion ^ (inagis communis) + a hind of ex- 
 'pansion ; whiteness into the mixture of transparent 
 bodies + a special arrangement of their particles. This 
 analysis, in his belief, not only adds to our knowledge 
 but to our power; for, although nature is herself the 
 agent and plays her own cards, we can shuffle them so 
 as to determine tlie residt. Arrangement with Bacon is, 
 as with Pythagoras, almost everything ; and it is in our 
 power, -when we have availed ourselves of the key, to 
 manipulate the internal structures of things, as in "a 
 sort of microscopic building." A^^len the map is drawn, 
 Ave may thus reduce all the phenomena of the universe 
 to combinations of simple natures, which we may re- 
 combine and superinduce on various substances, — as the 
 alchemists thought we could reduce all the elements to 
 one, and so transmute them through their common 
 basis. It may help to make this notion, which cannot 
 from its vagueness be made clear, a little more compre- 
 hensible, if we compare Bacon's mode of treating a 
 physical problem with that of the ancient schools and 
 of modern science. Let the question be. What is gold ? 
 1. Plato, though in the later Dialogues he dwelt more 
 on larger and mainly moral themes, might have answered : 
 There is an Idea of gold in the divine mind, of which 
 
 1 In the passage quoted from *De Augmentis/ iii. 4, Bacon men- 
 tions ** voluntary motion " as a thing of which we may find the 
 form, but elsewhere speaks as if motion were one of those "simple 
 natures," into combinations of which he held all the phenomena of 
 the universe might be reduced. We can attach no meaning to the 
 form of a "simple nature," which is by definition irresolvable. 
 "Form" can only be understood as the differentia of a simple 
 nature (which is the genus), or as the simple nature itself, iilus the 
 differentia ; but the decision is perplexed by Bacon's confused 
 classification of qualities and relations. 
 
IVhat is Gold? 189 
 
 all special golds arc copies : the hmnaii mind partially 
 participates in this Idea, and by a process of contempla- 
 tion may attain to realise it. 
 
 '2. Aristotle would have answered : There arc varieties 
 of gold, but there is something common to all by which 
 we recognise them as such; the to tl t]v etrnt — that 
 which makes each to be so — which, withdrawn, we can 
 no longer concede it to be gold. Ey comparing the 
 kinds and rejecting everything peculiar to each, that 
 common to all — the logical definition, the metaphysical 
 ciSos — remains as the result of a mental analysis. 
 
 3. A chemist would take the gold into his laboratory, 
 subject it to a physical analysis, and find that it had 
 certain properties — i.e., was subject to certain laws, and 
 made up of certain elements which he could decompose 
 no further, and which he might be able to put together 
 again or not, according to circumstances. 
 
 4. Bacon, by a process of analysis, half mental half 
 physical, discovers that the Turma or congeries known 
 as gold has a certain Schematism — a way in which its 
 " natures," density, softness, colour, &c., are arranged. 
 Find that Schematism and the Forms of these natures, 
 and we may make gold. For, he says in the 'Sylva 
 Syl varum,' after enumerating the qualities, "if a man 
 can make a metal that has all these properties, dis- 
 pute whether it be gold or no." But Bacon necessarily 
 failed to find his simple natures : and as, when failing in 
 his search for simple notions, he fell back on the hope of 
 other Inductive processes, so now, finding it impossible 
 to demonstrate his process, he left it incomplete, be- 
 took himself to concrete examples in !N'atural History — 
 
 " Atque opere in medio defixa reliqiiit aratra." 
 
190 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 NATURAL HISTORIES, ' SYLVA SYLVARUM,' AND 
 'DE PRINCIPIIS.' 
 
 Bacon became conscious that the task he had set himself 
 was incapable of completion. His sands were running ; 
 the aid of other men, ^' at home or beyond seas," in the 
 progress of his work, had failed him; and he turned 
 from what was at the outset his chief design,^ the per- 
 fection of a new logical machinery, to the accumulation 
 of the material on the fulness of which he now felt dis- 
 covery must rely. In the ' Distributio Operis,' he still 
 writes as if he hoped to see Part III. of the * Instauratio ' 
 brought near to a close, — ^Tertia Pars complectitur 
 Phenomena Universi,' — and even Part TV. fairly ad- 
 vanced ; but, in the General Preface, he admits that it 
 is beyond the compass of a life ; and this belief grew on 
 him. During his later years, with restricted means, the 
 limits set to his achievement were narrowed; and, in 
 
 1 Mr Ellis's view is supported by the fact that Bacon, in his earlier 
 works, as the ' Valerius Terminus, ' makes hardly any reference to 
 the ' History,' and dwells, almost exclusively, on the ' Interpreta- 
 tion of Nature,' as the centre of his system, Mr Spedding, how- 
 ever, claims that place for a complete classified natural history ; 
 and, in a curious dialogue affixed to the 'Parasceve,' argues as if 
 he believed it capable of accomplishment. 
 
Natural History. 191 
 
 the introduction to the 'Natural History' (1622), dedi- 
 cated to Prince Charles, while giving still greater pro- 
 minence to the subject, as " tlie key of all knowledge 
 and operation," he speaks more despondently ^ of the 
 completion of the work he had once held might be 
 accomplished in a few years (as Aristotle's ' History of 
 Animals,' by aid of Alexander) : now he can only hope to 
 see started a process of investigation, where one set of 
 persons may collect and another interpret. In the same 
 paper he shows himself more aware of the impossi- 
 bility of fully demonstrating his Inductive progress, or 
 attaining, by any short cut, the conceptions he ad- 
 mitted to be indispensable; and we iind him, in the 
 special introduction to the ' Organum,' and later in 
 the preface to the 'Prodromi,' attaching more weight 
 to the ordinary methods. He desires to implement, 
 not to destroy, and admits there may be " two streams 
 and disjDensations of knowledge," as there are two 
 tribes of students : those without the gates, content to 
 adorn our present possessions; and the true sons of 
 science, who aspire to overcome nature by invention. 
 In the 'Parasceve' he emphasises the importance of 
 facts and their utility in themselves, even though they 
 may not lead us to the ultimate laws imaged in the 
 * De Augmentis ' as the apex of the pyramid : elsewhere 
 he refers to experiments and observations as not only 
 supplying Part III., but being no mean preparation for 
 the types of the ' Scala Intellectus.' Nothing is more 
 characteristic of the unconquerable elasticity that makes 
 
 1 Later still he confesses to Fulgentius that it will require the 
 research of ages, but holds that, soon or late, it will he a kt V «'? ««', 
 the possession of a Promised Land. 
 
192 Francis Bacon. 
 
 Bacon the Antaeus, alike of politics and philosophy; 
 nothing is more marvellous than the tenacious confidence 
 with which, in the overture to the ' Historia ^aturalis,' 
 lie ignores his failures, and magnifies the remams of his 
 partially frustrated design. No passage of his eloquence 
 approaches more near in tone to that of the Liturgy 
 than these closing paragraphs, after reference to the false 
 lights of fancy and the chains of custom : — 
 
 " The constellation of Lyra rises by edict, and authority 
 is taken for truth, not truth for authority. . . . We copy 
 the sin of our first parents while we sufier for it. They 
 wished to be like God, but their i3osterity wish to be even 
 greater. For we create worlds, we direct and domineer 
 over nature, we will have it that all things are as in our 
 folly we think they should be, not as seems fittest to the 
 divine wisdom, or as they are in fact. ... If, therefore, 
 there be any humility towards the Creator, any reverence 
 for or disposition to magnify His works, any charity for 
 man and anxiety to relieve his sorrows and necessities, any 
 love of truth in nature, any hatred of darkness, any desire 
 for the purification of the understanding, — we must entreat 
 men again and again to discard, or at least set apart for a 
 while, these volatile and preposterous philosophies, which 
 have preferred theses to hypotheses, led experience captive, 
 and triumphed over the works of God : and to approach 
 with humility and veneration to unroll the volume of 
 creation, to linger and meditate therein, and with minds 
 washed clean from opinions to study it in purity and 
 integrity. For this is that sound and language which 
 ' went forth into all lands,' and did not incur the confusion 
 of Babel : this should men study to be perfect in ; and, be- 
 coming again as little children, condescend to take the 
 alphabet of it into their hands, and spare no pains to 
 search and unravel the interpretation thereof, but pursue 
 it strenuously and persevere even unto death," 
 
Theory and Practice. 193 
 
 *' jMagna ausiis : " Eacon almost invariably disap- 
 points us in dealing with the particulars to which he 
 lias given introductions so imposing. Defeated in his 
 search for simple " natures," he was thrown back on the 
 fruitful field of special phenomena. That he failed to 
 reap more than a few sheaves from its abundant harvest 
 was due in part to " the vaulting ambition " belonging 
 to himself and to his time. None of the leading Eliza- 
 bethans had learnt to limit tlieir aspirations : all foun- 
 tains of perennial interest, no one of the group will ever 
 be regarded as an authority — Bacon, in some respects, 
 least of all. He had undertaken a task for which he 
 was constitutionally unfit. Politicians still find in his 
 papers of State traces of almost prophetic power : he 
 is the European master of prudential morality ; in the 
 * De Augmentis ' we have a manual of private and pub- 
 lic diplomacy lit up by gleams of loftier views : modern 
 logicians move, in some degree, in the track of his 
 method; but no physicist turns his pages for a single 
 fact.^ His anticipations are, like those of the 'Fairy 
 
 1 It is, nevertheless, generally admitted that Bacon has feome claims 
 to a place among physicists. His idea of Heat as an undulatory 
 motion — especially the passage in the 'Novum Organum begin- 
 ning, " The third specific difference" — has enlisted the approval of 
 Tj-ndall ; his refutation of the fancy of Caloric by an appeal to 
 friction has been accepted ; also his view of colours, as the manner 
 in which bodies, in virtue of different textures, reflect different rays. 
 Sir John Herschel admits that some of the prerogative instances of 
 the * Novum Organum ' might have given Newton suggestions as to 
 the discovery of the composition of Light. Bacon's experiments 
 with his rude thermometer ('Novum Organum,' ii, 13, &c.) on the 
 compressibility and density of water and the weight of air have 
 been generally commended, as his guesses (' Novum Organum,' ii. 35, 
 36-45) at the facts of attraction and repulsion according to distance. 
 Humboldt compliments his view of the connection of wind with 
 P. — XIV. N 
 
194 Francis Bacon. 
 
 Queen ' about the stars, flights of an imagination almost 
 as unique in prose as Shakespeare's in verse, sustained 
 by the conviction that there are more things "than are 
 dreamed of in our philosophy." But, with a synthetic 
 power rarely rivalled, Bacon was an indifferent analyst ; 
 his care was not to " part and prove," but to announce 
 and harmonise. As a lawyer, he had little reputation 
 for the examination of his witnesses; as a man of 
 science he has less. He lacks the sense of proportion, 
 which gives their respective places to things small and 
 great : hence his lists — as of the one hundred and 
 thirty desiderated histories appended to the ' Parasceve ' ; 
 that which accompanys his ' Abecedarium ' or system 
 of notation; that of proposed inquiries in the *Com- 
 mentarius Solutus,' or of the ''Magnalia l^aturae" at 
 the close of the ' New Atlantis ' — are confused and 
 confusing heaps of suggestions, bound together by no 
 principle save a common theme or name. He was 
 hampered by his own "Idola Fori," partly because 
 he had not shaken himself free from the dominion 
 of those very notions which he was combating with 
 all the resources of his eloquence. It was inevitable 
 
 climate, and credits him with being the first to state the law of rota- 
 tion in winds; while Geoffroi St Hilaire, in a paper on artificial 
 incubation (1816), speaks with approval of the experiments sug- 
 gested in the ' New Atlantis. ' The constant reference in the same 
 work to the Avonders to be revealed by the microscope have received 
 no more than due notice. The same may be said of Bacon's fore- 
 casts about the time required for the passage to the earth of the light 
 of stars ; his suggestions of telephones, balloons, submarine boats, 
 new explosives ; the cures of disease and mitigation of pain by some 
 equivalent for chloroform ; of his acute guesses as to the formation 
 of strata, the succession of species {vide 'Novum Organum,' i. 66), 
 his constant groping after the laAv of gravitation, and his idea of the 
 union of formal and physical Astronomy. 
 
Influence of the Tast. 195 
 
 to his position on tlie verge of two ages, that while 
 consciously pressing toAvard the future he was uncon- 
 sciously influenced by the past. His Physics and Psy- 
 chology recall the first guesses of Thales and Dio- 
 genes of ApoUonia. llis conception of the "Anima" 
 and " Spiraculuni," tlie assertion that all bodies are 
 animated, tliat they abhor a solution of continuity, that 
 cream rises to the surface from the desire of homo- 
 geneous elements for each other, that there is a tendency 
 on the earth's surface for some things to go up and 
 others down, and, among the spheres, " afTection " for a 
 forward or a backward course, with many of the pro- 
 fessedly universal axioms of the receptacle of theses 
 to which he gives the .name of " Prime Philosophy," 
 belong rather to the late -born heir of Democritus, or 
 the successor of Paracelsus, than to the forerunner of 
 Newton. 
 
 In Bacon, the Indian myth about the strength of the 
 dead warrior passing into his conqueror often seems re- 
 versed ; for he inherited the mental diseases of those he 
 imagines himself to have slain. His mode of dividing 
 nature is more that of Aristotle than of Galileo. In the 
 act of arraigning the former he is nowhere more Aristo- 
 telian than when he speaks of heat and cold, dense and 
 rare, light and heavy, natures and appetites, as if they 
 were absolute qualities, instead of terms as relative as 
 up and down, broad and narrow, straight and crooked. 
 Similarly, he separates things akin, unites things difi'er- 
 ent, and rushes without counting his steps to the " max- 
 ime generalia" he deprecates. Apart from preconcep- 
 tions, he had, on his own last chosen field, none of the 
 practical talent or tact of the experimentalist, which, by 
 
196 Francis Bacon. 
 
 a combination of manual skill and selective intuition, 
 has often led those with a tithe of his genius to great 
 results. We need not, therefore, be surprised that 
 Bacon's discoveries had been, as far as they were true, 
 for the most part anticipated; that he even receded 
 from many positions previously held ; or that the record 
 of his definite mistakes is greater than that of his achieve- 
 ments. From Aristotle downwards he misconceives or 
 misrepresents the majority of his predecessors. In Ge- 
 ometry he ignores almost all that had been done from the 
 time of Euclid to that of Vieta. Complaining, in 1623, 
 of the want of new methods of calculation, he says 
 nothing of Napier's Logarithms, published in 1614. In 
 Mechanics he takes no note of Archimedes (whose solu- 
 tion of the problem of the crown he failed to understand), 
 Ghetaldus, and Galileo, referring to the last only as an 
 observer of the moon and stars. He proposes an inquiry 
 about the lever without realising its theory, and an ex- 
 periment on windmills futile from neglect of an essential 
 point. In Astronomy he seems to have been ignorant of 
 the researches of Tycho Brahe, never to have heard of 
 Kepler, and his rejection of the theory of Copernicus 
 increases in dogmatism. In the ' De Fluxu et Eefluxu 
 Maris' he doubts the rotation of the earth; in the 
 ' Thema Cceli ' he inclines to its fixity ; in the ' De 
 Augmentis ' he refers to the opposite view as " falsissi- 
 mum." He speaks of the poles of the earth, unaware 
 of the precession of the equinoxes ; and of the north as 
 above, the south heloiv, to explain the cold winds in our 
 latitude. He depreciates Eoger Bacon, who invented 
 gunpowder, whereas Francis thought the courage of 
 soldiers might be increased by eating it ; and does not 
 
Ignorances. 197 
 
 recognise Harvey, whose discovery of the circulation of 
 the blood — acliiovod by the use of the argument from 
 final causes denounced in the ' De Augmentis ' — was 
 made known in 1619. His mistakes about heat i)ar- 
 tially excuse the modern ignoring of his true intuition 
 as to its nature. His "Tables," suggested in 1608, 
 make no reference to Galileo's thermometer, designed 
 in 1597, and made known in England in 1603. Assert- 
 ing that the moon's rays give no warmth, he believes 
 that the conjunction of any two of the three highest 
 planets is among the causes of excessive heat. He 
 maintains that heated iron does not expand in bulk, 
 and that delated ^ air does not increase in heat. Bacon, 
 often a victim to the practical credulity w^hich constantly 
 appears as the mocking shadow of scepticism, is as ready 
 to accept marvels as ^landeville was to invent them. 
 He admits all the popular views as to the influence of the 
 moon on the weather, and the rising of Orion bringing 
 storms. He believes that ordnance had been known in 
 China for two thousand years ; that ashes remain undis- 
 turbed on "the windless summits" of Mounts Atlios 
 and Olympus ; that the Andes are the highest of moun- 
 tains, because everything in America is bigger than in 
 Europe ; that the bloodstone is a preventive of bleeding 
 at the nose ; and that the heart of an ape, worn near 
 the heart of a man, increases audacity. 
 
 It is this sort of illegitimate " permissio intellectus " 
 
 1 'Novum Organum,' ii,, AjjIi. 18. Yet almost in the next page, 
 Aph. 20, he says that air manifestly expands with lieat. There is 
 the same inconsistency in his views as regards a vacuum : e.g., 'No- 
 vum Organum,' Aph. 8, and 'Hist. Densi et Rari,' he pronounces 
 against it ; while in ' Novum Organum,' Aph. 28, and the 'De Prin- 
 cipiis,' he speaks of it as an open question. 
 
198 Fra7icis Bacon. 
 
 — this blending of almost cliildisli acquiescence and 
 almost superhuman daring, ranging from the reception 
 of discredited superstitions to ^'things unattempted yet 
 in prose or rhyme " — that is so distasteful to most mod- 
 ern leaders of exact though limited research ; who feel 
 that no stretch of imagination can suddenly " storm the 
 citadels" of JS'ature, and that the favourite maxim, 
 "Possunt quia posse videntur," may be pressed till it 
 become an empty boast. It is this neglect of the other 
 maxim, " Figere contemplationes et morari et hserere in 
 onini subtilitate differentiarum," that withheld Bacon — 
 whose overstretched analogies over-played the part of 
 the hypotheses he discarded — from a single definite dis- 
 covery; that would make it a waste of time for com- 
 petent specialists even to examine or discuss the value 
 of his fragmentary contributions to the progress of 
 Natural Science. Of these, the ' History of the AYinds/ 
 the first published part of the ' Natural History/ is in- 
 troduced by an '^ aditus," or overture, again inspired by a 
 breeze of the west. " Venti humanse genti alas adderunt. 
 To men the winds are as Avings, for by them they are 
 borne and fly — not indeed through the air, but over the 
 sea, . . . and the whole world is made open to them. 
 To the earth they serve for brooms, sweeping and clean- 
 ing both it and the air. Yet they do violence to the nature 
 of the ocean, which would otherwise rest in harmless 
 calm." There follows a list of thirty-three possible and 
 impossible inquiries, ending with the remark expressive of 
 a thought growing more and more familiar to his mind, 
 " Poster! csetera videant." The body of the book, com- 
 piled from Aristotle's 'Problems,' Pliny's 'Natural His- 
 tory,' and Acosta's ' History of the Indies,' with references 
 
Winds and Tides. 199 
 
 to Mrgil, Paracelsus, and Gilbert/ is a mass of facts and 
 inferences thrown together under heads not always logi- 
 cally arranged, but redeemed from diUness by suggestive 
 metaphor and description — as in the account of an Eng- 
 lish man-of-war of the time. At the beginning of the 
 seventeenth century little progress could be expected in 
 the department of Meteorology, scarcely even noAv become 
 a science, though the phenomena with which it is con- 
 cerned have been in all ages among the first to attract 
 attention. 
 
 Of somewhat the same nature is the earlier treatise 
 on the Tides. This subject, of little interest to the 
 nations of antiquity, whose navigation was mainly con- 
 fined to the IMediterranean, naturally came into promi- 
 nence with the extension of maritime discovery, and 
 during the sixteenth century called forth the research 
 and stimidated the ingenuity of Cesalpinus, Patricius, 
 Acosta, Otto Casmann, and Chrysogonus, without, how- 
 ever, even in the hands of Galileo himself^ leading to 
 a true solution. Bacon — who, in the ' Novum Organum,' 
 rejects the theory of the last-named on the ground of its 
 involving the earth's motion, and that of Telesio to the 
 effect that the sea boiled over when heated by the sun, 
 moon, and stars — on more solid grounds has, in this tract, 
 suggested many reasonable considerations; and, by an 
 induction as far as it goes correct, arrived at the conclu- 
 sion that the tidal wave is progressive, not on remote 
 shores simultaneous. He is also entitled to the credit of 
 being the first to point out the necessity of assuming 
 
 1 Bacon must have seen his ' PhysiologiaNova,' Avhich, though not 
 actually published till 1643, is known to have been circulated in 
 1612. 
 
200 Francis Bacon, 
 
 a derivative tide. But his ideas of undulation are 
 necessarily vague ; and, after touching on the influence 
 of the moon, he reverts to the supposed diurnal motion of 
 the planets and to the data of an imperfect geographical 
 knowledge. Similarly the treatises * De Luce et Lumine ' 
 and ' Historia Soni et Auditus ' are expressions of anti- 
 quated views of Optics and Acoustics, supported by a 
 limited range of observation and experiment. The * De 
 Magnete ' is a mere page of disjointed statements, singu- 
 larly meagre if written after the appearance of Gilbert's 
 work in 1600. In the 'Calor et Frigus' and 'Historia 
 Densi et Eari,' Bacon's inaccuracies are of less moment 
 than the fundamental confusion Avhich the titles them- 
 selves display. 
 
 The systematic and successive development of most 
 of the physical sciences belongs to a later age : Bacon's 
 great reproach in this department is his distinctly 
 retrograde Astronomy. In the ' Descriptio Globi 
 Intellectualis ' and ' Them a Cceli,' we perceive in 
 every page the influence of ideas as obsolete as those 
 of the 'Timseus,' modified by the anxiety to be a 
 "novelist," and, at all hazards, to contradict his pre- 
 decessors. Nowhere is Bacon's jealousy of Hypotheses 
 and subordination of Mathematics so injurious as in 
 his treatment of a Science, where the distinction be- 
 tween the real and the apparent is all - important ; 
 where experiment, in the ordinary sense, is impos- 
 sible; where the advances, even then so considerable, 
 which had been made in the past, resulted from the 
 application of theories to observations ; and Avhere even 
 inappropriate hypotheses (according to the Baconian 
 rule, *' citius emergit Veritas ex errore quam ex confusi- 
 
Astronomy. 201 
 
 one ") had been the essential precursors of otliers more 
 and more nearly true. Bacon's method, rigidly applied, 
 would have foreclosed the earliest discoveries of the 
 Greeks, in a sphere where the evidence of sight is in- 
 capable of correction by the other senses. According to 
 his Avay of working, it has been observed, not even the 
 identity of Hesperus and Lucifer could have been de- 
 termined. Here again he is, however, inconsistent with 
 himself ; for, after rightly protesting against the postu- 
 late of circular motion, he brings in two hypotheses of 
 his own, resting on a basis no more firm than those he 
 scornfully dismissed, — i.e.y that the courses of the planets 
 must be explained by motion in the same direction 
 with different velocities — a view derived from Lucretius 
 through Telesio — and the postulate that they move in 
 spu-als, without attempting to determine more definitely 
 the nature of the curves. His other assertions — as that 
 the spirals are quicker and approach nearer to circles as 
 we recede from the earth, which is the centre of rest ; 
 that the farther atmosphere becomes more rare, till, in 
 the region of the moon, flame can support itself, and 
 in that of Jupiter and Saturn it begins to be dispersed 
 and extinguished — are no advance on the fancies of 
 Anaximander. 
 
 Li the * HiSTORiA ViT^ et Mortis ' (published 
 separately in 1623, in preference, by reason of its 
 greater importance, to the postponed treatises on Salt, 
 Mercury, Sulphur, &c., of wdiich we have only the 
 "aditus"). Bacon, treading on more human ground, 
 discusses at greater length the theme of the Fourth 
 Book of the *De Augmentis.' This volume is remark- 
 able for the prominence given to the means for the 
 
202 Francis Bacon. 
 
 prolongation of life (among the duties of a pliysician, 
 omnium nohilissijua), taking for granted that the causes 
 of the duration of existence and of health are the same. 
 Much of the treatise is occupied with examples, vari- 
 ously substantiated, of long life, in which the author 
 draws on his sources, — Pliny, Valerius Maximus, the 
 ' Res Memorandse ' of Petrarch, with similar collec- 
 tions of Fulgosius and Egnatius, the 'Theatrum Vitae 
 Humanse' of Zwingler (the only German, save Para- 
 celsus, anywhere quoted in his works), and the ' De 
 Mirabili Potestate Artis et Xaturae' of Eoger Bacon,^ 
 — with his usual want of discrimination. The theory 
 of the work, in which, as elsewhere, we have a con- 
 geries of intuitions since proved correct, and such 
 popular errors as those afterwards narrated by Sir 
 Thomas Bro^vne, relies on the author's psychology. 
 There are, he says, two kinds of spirits : 1. Crude and 
 mortuary, present in inorganic bodies, and " only seen 
 in operations " — an extension of the idea of life derived 
 from Paracelsus, and the prcA'^alent belief in the virtues 
 of crystals, &c., that appears in Lilly's ' Euphues ' and 
 other representative transcripts of the beliefs of the age. 
 2. Vital : the cause of the phenomena of life that tends 
 to slip from the body or to burn it, — (a) by drying 
 up moisture ; (b) by flying through the pores ; (c) by 
 contracting denser parts. The main object of physicians 
 should be to resist these processes, by means detailed in 
 a long series of directions and prescriptions, and so "to 
 
 1 This tract Avas published in English in 1618, and Bacon's reference 
 to it is our only distinct evidence of any acquaintance with the works 
 of his famous forerunner, Eoger Bacon also wrote ' De Retardentibus 
 Senectutis Accidentibus,' but this was only published in 1683. 
 
" YoiUh and Jc/c" 203 
 
 keep the wine of life from oozing aAvay." The chapter 
 of most literary and general interest is that on " Youth 
 and Age," whicli, in the account of the infirmities of the 
 latter, is closely paralleled by Hamlet's satirical speech 
 to Polonius, while the pathetic contrast of the Avholc 
 suggests comparison with the verses of Coleridge on the 
 same theme. 
 
 Xo other great writer has repeated himself so much 
 or so often as Bacon has done. In the last three years 
 of his life (1624-1626), he gathered up in the ' Sylva 
 Sylvarum ' ^ an accumulation of facts, beliefs, fables, and 
 conjectures ranging over all the fields of nature. Eaw- 
 ley's preface to this work, Avritten during Bacon's life 
 and presumably with his sanction, informs us that his 
 lordship regarded it as payment of a debt, in lieu of 
 the Third Part of the ' Instauratio ' ; that he felt res- 
 tive under the necessity of devoting so much time to 
 the accumulation of details, as if, " like the Israelites, 
 he had to dig the clay, burn the brick, and gather the 
 stubble for the fire ; " that, whereas the natural histories 
 extant, compiled for delight and use, are full of pleasant 
 descriptions, his lordship intended one " such as might 
 be fundamental to the illumination of the understanding 
 and the extracting of axioms ; " that, " as for the vulgar- 
 ness of his instances, he held that true axioms must be 
 
 1 Mr Ellis considers tlie title of this work to be a Hebraism, like 
 " the love of love," " the wood amid the woods." Mr Spedding takes 
 it to mean " a collection of collections." In the preface to the * Scala 
 Intellectus,' the tangled wood of nature is represented as leading us 
 to the heights of discovery. We are informed by Rawley that the 
 * Sylva Sylvarum ' was the mere beginning of an intended work on 
 the ' Phcenomena Universi,' which, Bacon says, in a letter to R. P. 
 Baranzan, would be six times larger than Pliny's 'Natural History.' 
 
204 Francis Bacon. 
 
 drawn from plain experience, not from doubtful ; " that 
 " his course was to make wonders plain, not plain things 
 wonderful ; " that he added to liis facts the suggestion 
 of causes, lest men should think their minds lost in a 
 wood of experience ; and that he put together his par- 
 ticulars without much apparent method, "though he 
 that looketh attentively into them shall find that they 
 have a secret order." In adducing the thousand " pre- 
 rogative instances and experiments, solitary or in con- 
 cert, a hundred to each century," of which the hook 
 is composed — in gathering facts, conclusions, and con- 
 jectures from every clime and time of natural phenom- 
 ena. Bacon laboured under the disadvantage of never 
 having been, save in his youthful trip to France, him- 
 self a traveller. If he does not, like the German, 
 construct a camel from his inner consciousness, he has 
 to rely largely on second-hand infonnation which he 
 has not the critical acumen to test, and so receives, 
 with rare protests and doubts, the records of his autho- 
 rities, reading and skimmmg, rather than digesting, 
 Aristotle's ' Problems ' and ' Meteorologies,' Pliny's 
 ' Natural History,' Porta's ' Natural Magic,' Cardan's 
 'De Subtilitate,' and 'Sandy's Travels' — the last of 
 which he follows from book to book in their actual 
 rather than their logical order, taking up the points 
 of narrative as they came to his hand. The popular- 
 ity of this book was (as pointed out by Mr Ellis) in 
 large measure due to what, in our more sceptical and 
 scrutinising age, would be deemed a fault — the author's 
 ready acceptance of marvels. About these there was 
 a greater curiosity than now, when the zeal for the 
 discovery of causes and the love of explanation has 
 
'Sylva Sylvarum.' 205 
 
 succeeded to the more primitive delight in wonder 
 that pervaded the Elizabethan age, and lingered even 
 in civilised centres, to the time when Dr Johnson was 
 brought to London to be touched by Queen Anne for 
 the cure of his scrofula. 
 
 The mystery of the secret order of the ' Sylva Syl- 
 varum,' suggested by Eawley, remains unsolved ; and it 
 is more difficult than in the case of the ^ De Augmentis ' 
 even to state the often interleaved subjects of the several 
 " Centuries " ; the adequate criticism of any one of their 
 themes being, in our age of subdivision, employment 
 enough for many specialists : — 
 
 I. The Firsts devoted to wdiat Bacon calls " Percola- 
 tion," or the passing of bodies through one another, con- 
 tains many interesting suggestions as to the movements 
 and classifications of liquids, with a view to their medical 
 effects, their straining, condensation, mixing, infusions, 
 &c. In the course of these examples, he gives us a clearer 
 view of his conception of mortuary spirits ; as the rare- 
 faction of a natural body, enclosed in the tangible parts as 
 in a cover, typified by the relation of Proserpine to Pluto. 
 Nowhere do we find a closer approximation to the true 
 conception of the law of gravity than when it is stated 
 that it worketh more weakly as it recedes from the 
 earthy " because the appetite of union with dense bodies 
 is made more dull by distance ; " and nowhere a more 
 curious anticipation of the discoveries of heat than in 
 the following : ^' We know the effects of Heat to be 
 such as will scarce fall under the conceit of man, if the 
 force of it be well kept together." The book concludes 
 with a protest against the idea that anything can be 
 annihilated except by Omnipotence, and a suggestion 
 
206 Francis Bacon. 
 
 that if we press Matter nigh to death, it will, like Pro- 
 teus, reveal its essences, being unable to escape. 
 
 II. The Second is devoted to Music — its concords, 
 discords, and harmonies, and the relation of terrestrial 
 to celestial sounds. On this head it may be remarked 
 that many of the views propounded have been received 
 with acceptance by critics of our own day, as Charles 
 Butler of Magdalen. 
 
 III. The Tliird is devoted to the motions of sounds 
 generally. They move in all ways; but "linea recta 
 brevissima." Then follow discussions on various prob- 
 lems, — repercussion of echoes, the construction of notes, 
 the relation of the ear to sound, &c., leading up to 
 suggestive hints for practice in the art of health — e.g., 
 as long life proceeds from the placid motion of the spirits, 
 which then less prey on the body, do nothing " invita 
 Minerva," but everything " secundum genium." 
 
 IV. The Fourth Booh, of *' Instances and Trials," deals 
 with the processes of art — i.e., contrivances to accelerate 
 or retard the ordmary working of Mature ; under which 
 head Bacon treats of the fermentation and preservation 
 of vinous and malt liquors ; the prevention, by cold and 
 excludmg the air^ of putrefaction (of special interest as 
 the suggestion of his last experiment), the means of 
 hastening birth and growth ; the relation of nourishment 
 to life and health ; the continuity of flame (including a 
 reference to subterranean fires), and the transformation 
 of metals, introducing some remarkable paragraphs on 
 the making of gold. This work he judges to be pos- 
 sible; and, in entering into details, while repudiating 
 the methods of the Alchemists, and referring the 
 results to the work of long-continued heat (as in liis 
 
Zoology and Botany. 207 
 
 assertion that silver is more easy of manufacture from 
 load or quicksilver), he provokes a reference to the 
 great satirical play of Ben Jonson, which had fifteen 
 years previously — i.e., in 1610 — been brought ujion 
 the boards. It is remarkable that, in his practical 
 directions, Bacon makes no reference to his doctrine of 
 Forms and superadded Natures, "which conies in only as 
 an appendix. 
 
 \., YI., and VII. These Centuries (though, at the close 
 of the last, implemented by zoological and anatomical 
 speculations more properly belonging to the section ^ 
 which follows) are engaged with questions relating to 
 the nature and management of Plants, to speculations 
 on Agriculture and Horticidture. Amid much shrewd 
 observation on the relations of climate, soil, and 
 seed, on medicinal effects, on grafting, manuring, the 
 exclusion or concentration of solar rays, &c., with cu- 
 rious references to exceptional growths — as mosses, 
 mushrooms, and the mistletoe — the writer is often led 
 away from his scientific purpose by his belief in sym- 
 pathies and antipathies between the mineral, vegetable, 
 and animal worlds. His ' Georgics of the Earth ' are, 
 however, entitled to the same praise as his ' Georgics 
 of the Mind ' : they show the almost unparalleled 
 range of his interests, and relate to a subject he had 
 really studied — to which he had in his ' Essay on Gar- 
 dens ' given a more artistic form than is to be found in 
 Evelyn's ' Silva ' — and they have called forth the enthu- 
 siastic praise of modern botanists. 
 
 YIIL and IX. In the eighth and ninth divisions of 
 
 1 The arbitrary division according to centuries is fatal to a really 
 methodical arrangement of the work. 
 
208 Francis Bacon. 
 
 his universal repertoire^ Bacon's want of method (exceed- 
 ing that of Browne or Burton) amounts to disorder. We 
 have the old views of heat and light and weight, of the 
 influence of celestial rays, of growth and friction, the 
 rise of water over flame, the want of rain in Egypt, 
 the refining of metals, weather progn-ostics, the source 
 of fevers, the nature of the teeth, the treatment of 
 wounds, pestilences, drinks, and baths, — almost every 
 fact and fancy of the then known psychology and 
 physiology, side by side with new conjectures as to 
 the possibility of men flying like birds, the source of 
 appetites, sleep, spontaneous generation, &c. The most 
 interesting sections are devoted to a discussion of the 
 relations of the mental afl'ections, as fear, grief, and 
 pain, joy, anger, shame, dislike, disgust, pity, wonder, 
 laughter, &c., to facial expressions, and bodily postures, 
 which may have supphed hints to Lavater, whom many 
 of those suggestions, often even in detail, forestall. 
 
 X. The tenth Century is devoted to the subject of 
 the force of Imagination ; the mysterious passages of 
 thought from one human being to another ; the har- 
 mony between psychical and physical influences, which 
 in our day has claimed so much attention and brought 
 into collision the extremes of credence and of scepticism. 
 Against the latter Bacon records his protest, in warning 
 us against the excessive incredulity which is a mark 
 rather of inexperience than of critical power : but he 
 has by no means " a bottomless maw " for marvels ; and 
 this book supplies as sound criteria for testing such phe- 
 nomena as " willing," telegraphy, " second sight," ani- 
 mal magnetism, conjuring, &c., as even our nineteenth 
 century has devised. The ' Sylva Sylvarum,' though a 
 
' Dg Princiioiis.' 209 
 
 jest-book for specialists, affords, on the whole, the best 
 collection of experiments and observations up to the 
 date of its publication. 
 
 Towards the close of his life we find Bacon working 
 at the two ends, as it were, of his system.^ He had 
 laid what he himself regarded as its incomplete foun- 
 dations in the ' Sylva Syl varum.' In the ' De Principiis 
 ATQUE Originibus ' (certainly, from its allusions, of later 
 date than the ' Organum ') we have a statement of his 
 ultimate cosmological, if not metaphysical, views. The 
 addition to the title of this interesting tract, ' Secundum 
 Fabulas Cupidinis et Coeli,' shows that his mind was 
 still in the groove of the earlier ' De Sapientia Yeterum ' ; 
 where he tries to find, and presents with all the adorn- 
 ments of his imagery and the super-subtleties of his 
 interpretation, traces of philosophical truths shadowed 
 under the veil of mythology. As far as Eacon had 
 arrived at any definite cosmological conclusions, they 
 were those of Democritus, who, most among the theorists 
 of antiquity, is exempt from his censure and compli- 
 mented by his praise. The Atomists, dissecting instead 
 of abstracting, had, in his view, kept in touch with 
 Xature : their views preceded as his own succeeded the 
 
 1 The expression is justified by Bacon's own conception of know- 
 ledge as a pyramid, in ' De Ang.,' B. iv., which may be thus 
 represented : — 
 
 Summary Law of Nature. 
 
 Metaphysics. 
 
 Physics. 
 
 Natural History. 
 P. XIV. o 
 
210 Francis Bacon. 
 
 centimes of pure speculation between. The question 
 of their scepticism was hardly raised in his mind, 
 and he contents himself with remarking that they 
 pushed their Physics too far — a charge he also brings 
 against Aristotle for his denying or ignoring a supreme 
 First Cause. With them, he held that all Philosophy 
 was included in the ^NTatural Sciences. They, as well 
 as he, tried to explain the secondary by the primary 
 qualities of matter, and assumed the existence of matter 
 and mind in all questions of knowledge. Too late for 
 the method of the schools, too soon for that of Descartes, 
 Bacon looked upon both sides of the argument regarding 
 perception and sensation as " ingenious sophistry." He 
 rejects the postulates of the Atomists as to a Vacuum 
 and the unchangeableness of the Atoms, but he agrees 
 with them in taking for granted our knowledge of 
 external things, and referring their impressions on the 
 sense to media.. Finally^ his Psychology is either 
 empiric or Lucretian. 
 
 The fragmentary 'De Principiis,' — marred by the 
 writer's ignorance of the fundamental position of 
 the Eleatics and by misconceptions of Aristotle, and 
 adorned by its old-world poetic references, — starts from 
 the Orphic myth of an Eros, or Love older than the 
 passion-firing Cupid, sprung from Zeus and Aphrodite, 
 the primeval issue of Chaos, sire of gods and men and 
 all animated things, ''that light whose smile kindles 
 the universe," and gives to it an interpretation which, 
 in Aristotelian language, amounts to the assertion that 
 Chaos unformed is mere 8wa/xis, while Eros is evepycio, 
 matter actually existing as a formative cause, the first 
 principle and starting impulse of phenomena. Bacon 
 
The Elder Eros. 211 
 
 begins his arguments by a refutation of the view that 
 the original of things is to be found in matter 
 without form — a view he attributes to Aristotle (who 
 disclaims it in his reference to Hesiod and others, ot Ik 
 wKTo<s y€vvu)VT€s,) not perceiving that the Aristotelian 
 TTpC^Tt] v\r] is as mere an abstraction as the pure cTSo?, 
 and that, in all intelligible philosophy, the universe con- 
 sists of their various unions. Passing from the rude 
 mass of void and formless chaos, he comes to consider 
 " matter itself," — i.e., substance in the first sense in 
 which it has any meaning to us — and finds its nature 
 more or less clearly shadowed in the fable. Primary 
 matter, possessed of some definite qualities, without 
 which its existence would be to us wholly inconceiv- 
 able, it is vain for us to look beyond ; and hence we are 
 told that the parents of Eros are unknown. "It is the 
 cause of causes itself, only without cause next to God." 
 " ^N'othing was before it, . . . neither genus nor form ; 
 . . . whatsoever its power and operation be, it must be 
 taken absolutely as it is found. . . . For there is a true 
 limit of causes in nature ; and it is as imskilful and 
 superficial to require a cause when we come to ultimate 
 force and positive law, as not to look for a cause in 
 things subordinate." If, however, we insist on pushing 
 the question, On what do the primary qualities themselves 
 depend "? Bacon can only answer, — on the " lex summa 
 essentia3 atque naturae — vis scilicet priniis particulis a 
 Deo indita, ex cujus multiplicatione omnis rerum varietas 
 emergat et confletur." Whether this law can ever be 
 discovered, he does not say, — " it is a thing which the 
 thoughts of man may ofi'er at, but hardly take in ; " but 
 in philosophy we must start from qualified or formed 
 
212 Francis Bacon. 
 
 matter, for " that which primarily exists must no less 
 exist than that from which it derives existence, and in 
 Scripture it is not said that God created vAry, but heaven 
 and earth." ^ 
 
 The fancy, poetised by Aristophanes, that the ^gg of 
 Eros was laid by night, Bacon declares to point to the 
 exclusions and negatives by which we arrive at laws. 
 Our knowledge of true forms emerges from the dark- 
 ness of ignorance, and in the process we do not know 
 what may be evolved from it. These natures need 
 have no outward resemblance to their manifestations; 
 the primitive qualities can only be reached by exclusions, 
 for they do not touch the sense, and Democritus " did 
 excellently well in teaching that atoms were unlike 
 anything sensible, . . . saying that they resembled 
 neither fire nor anything else that could be felt." The 
 same philosopher is, however, blamed for inconsistency 
 in detail, giving the atoms upward and downward 
 motions, impacts, and motus jjlagce of ordinary bodies : 
 Avhereas the Parable exactly maintains the true view 
 of heterogeneity — i.e., "a strongly marked antithesis 
 between the fundamental qualities of matter and the 
 sensible qualities of which alone we are directly cog- 
 nisant." It has been correctly pointed out that Bacon's 
 manner of handling it shows that his conception of the 
 atomic theory was consistent with its most modern de- 
 velopments: that, when freed from the hypothesis of fixed 
 size, figure, &c., really belonging to compound bodies, 
 which he rejects, " the atomic theory becomes a theory of 
 forces only; and of whatever ulterior developments it 
 
 1 Throughout this compulsorily brief account I have collated with 
 my own reading of Bacon's Essay the analysis of Mr Ellis. 
 
Cicpid not Chaos. 213 
 
 may be capable, these can only be introduced when it 
 has assumed this form." Such, in a crude shape, was 
 perhaps the vaguely defined idea of Pythagoras ^ (though 
 he has been accused by Thirhvall of confounding a geo- 
 metrical point with a material atom), and some of his 
 conceptions received a new life in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury in the Iatro-!Mathematical school of Chemistry. 
 Such more undoubtedly were the speculations of Bos- 
 covich and the monadism of Leibnitz. 
 
 Having disposed of the first of the cosmological errors, 
 which consists in making Cupid identical with Chaos, or 
 formless, and therefore unimaginable, matter. Bacon dis- 
 cusses those which, at the other extreme, endow him with 
 secondary qualities. " Ita personatus est (/.e., he is a 
 person, not v\r)) ut sit tamen nudus." The actual exist- 
 ence of separate forms has been asserted by some, of 
 separate matter not even by those who have taken it 
 for a principle ; and " to constitute entities from things 
 imaginary seems perverse;" but the pre-Socratic ancients, 
 agreeing in their views of matter as active and formed, 
 fell, with the exception of Democritus, into one or other 
 of three mistakes : — 
 
 1. Throw^ing a veil over the naked Cupid — i.e., de- 
 riving the diversity of things from one physical prin- 
 ciple. Under this head we have a critical survey of 
 the views of Thales, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus, who 
 resolved all the manifestations of nature into water, air, 
 and fire respectively — a survey which may be compared 
 ■svith the often closely corresponding passages in the first 
 Book of Lucretius, 'De Rerum ^N'atura.' 
 
 1 In the ' Cogitationes cle Renini Natura,' Bacon draws a parallel 
 between the atoms of Democritus and the number of Pythagoras. 
 
214 Francis Bacon. 
 
 2. Giving Cupid ii tunic — i.e., referring everything to 
 the influence of two or more opposing principles, as the 
 love and strife of Empedocles and Parmenides. Among 
 the followers of the latter he ranks Telesio ; and a great 
 part of the book is occupied with objections to the de- 
 tail's of his system, which the critic (owing to his many 
 points of agreement ^ with its author) treats with care- 
 ful respect. Telesio and his followers are censured for 
 empiricism m their use of the conceptions of heat and 
 cold ; for astronomical errors which Bacon does little to 
 correct ; and for omitting to consider facts relating to 
 the impenetrability, indestructibility, cohesion, and at- 
 traction of matter. They are also blamed for indulging 
 in " a pastoral philosophy, which contemplates the world 
 placidly and at its ease." In the course of this discus- 
 sion, stress is laid on the DuaHsm which lies so much at 
 the root of nature and history, in antagonistic forces or 
 productive powers, — as the principle of sex, the conflicts 
 of morals, and the "constant interchange of light and 
 bloom," in the manifestations of the universe. 
 
 3. Giving Cupid a cloaJc — assuming an infinity of prin- 
 ciples externally like their products. An examination 
 of this error) represented by the ofxoiofxipeia of Anaxag- 
 oras), is deferred for the unwritten treatise on " Coelum." 
 Its place is hardly supplied by the fable of that name 
 that appears in the 'De Scientia Humana' and 'De 
 Sapientia Veterum,' which is a mere picturesque rep- 
 
 1 Telesio's view of the nature of the soul is nearly identical with 
 Bacon's, especially in his holding the spiritus that pervades the 
 animal and vegetable world to be a material essence, which in its 
 turn is inspired by a spark of the divine soul. The ideas of a soul 
 of the Universe in Campanella and Bruno are more nearly represented 
 by Wordsworth. 
 
Atomism. 2 1 5 
 
 resentation of tlic development of things from tlic void, 
 with carefully guarded theological caveats and confused 
 references to Genesis and heathen mythology, where 
 Saturn is assumed to typify matter as it existed form- 
 less, before the six days' work. 
 
 Finally, as far as we can discern, the true view ac- 
 cording to Bacon remains with a corrected Atomism — 
 that there is only one material but comparatively unde- 
 fined prmciple, " idque fixum ct invariabile " (a point 
 on which he is inconsistent), and this is intended to be 
 conveyed by the assertion that Cupid is " personatus " 
 yet " nativus et exutus," clad only in his wings. 
 
216 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 INFLUENCE. 
 
 We are told that, next to the 'Essays,' Bacon's *De 
 Sapientia Vetenmi ' (1609) was during his life his 
 most popular work, — a verdict for which its constant 
 literary charm and suggestive touches, with the passion 
 for allegory that in his age still survived, sufficiently 
 account. But it is also one of the best mirrors of the 
 author's mind, equally reflecting his caution in politics 
 and religion, his audacity in criticism, his inconsistent 
 conservatism and innovation in science. We are not 
 here concerned to discuss the validity of the speculative 
 Euhemerism, which may be compared with earlier 
 Ethical and later Philological under-readings. It is 
 enough to note that nowhere is the constraining power 
 of the central idea to which Bacon made all things do 
 homage, more manifest than in the richly varied fancies 
 of an alchemy turning the myths. of the world's youth 
 into the gold of his new philosophy. Throughout the 
 whole of those often strangely forced but always shining 
 comments, every phase of interpretation is employed to 
 convey the "writer's sense of the patience required and 
 
' Dc Sapic7iHd Vcterum.' 217 
 
 the lures to be resisted in the search for Truth. The 
 seeker is : — Mercury restoring the sinews of Jupiter — i.e., 
 the cunning hand to an age of enterprise ; Prometheus, 
 eldest runner in the race of thought, transmitting 
 through generations the torch of light; CEdipus, who 
 wrested her secrets from the Sphinx ; Odysseus, who 
 "Avould not make his judgment blind," yet bound his 
 will from the Sirens ; or, higher, Orpheus, who oversung 
 them with the praises of the gods. The servant of the 
 Muses will not spend the youth of iNTarcissus in self- 
 regard, to live the age of Tithonus in self-satiety, fruit- 
 less and careless, and " passing traceless, as the way of 
 a ship on the sea ; " but, like the musician whose lyre 
 moved stones and trees, he will dig again the springs of 
 Helicon, and dare Hades to revive the truth, earning 
 immortality by merit and renown. The benefactor of 
 mankmd must disdain the arts of Daedalus to hearken 
 the songs of Apollo : he will not, as Vulcan, try to force 
 Minerva ; but win her to the bridals of earth and sky : 
 he will recognise that Art is swifter than JN'ature if it 
 turn not aside, with Atalanta, for the prizes of the mar- 
 ket. The wise moralist will shun the flight of Icarus, 
 and steer the middle way. The spokesman of Metis, 
 not satisfied, like Cato, with the part of Cassandra, will 
 put his hand to the hehn of the State; but he will 
 never forget that presumption is the prey of the winged 
 Nemesis, daughter of "Ocean and Night, that is the 
 vicissitudes of things, and the dark and secret judg- 
 ments of God," — Nemesis on which " the curious and 
 malignant nature of the vulgar," exulting "when the 
 fortimate and powerful fall," has set a crown. The 
 fable of Prometheus as Providence most strikingly 
 
218 Francis Bacon. 
 
 concentrates the practical side of tlie writer's phil- 
 osophy. 
 
 " The chief aim of the parable appears to be, that man, if 
 we look to final causes, may be regarded as the centre of the 
 world, insomuch that if man were taken away from the 
 M^orld, the rest would seem to be all astray, without aim or 
 purpose — to be like a besom without a binding, as the saying 
 is, and to be leading to nothing. For the whole world 
 works together in the service of man, and there is nothing 
 from which he does not derive use and fruit. The revolu- 
 tions and courses of the stars serve him both for distinction 
 of the seasons and distribution of the quarters of the world. 
 The appearances of the middle sky afford him prognostica- 
 tions of weather. The winds sail his ships and work his 
 mills and engines. Plants and animals of all kinds are 
 made to furnish him either with dwelling and shelter, or 
 clothing, or food, or medicine, or to lighten his labour, or 
 to give him pleasure and comfort ; insomuch that all things 
 seem to be going about man's business, and not their own. 
 Nor is it without meaning added that in the mass and com- 
 position of which man was made particles taken from the 
 different animals were infused and mixed up with the clay ; 
 for it is most true that of all things in the universe man is 
 the most composite, so that he was not without reason called 
 by the ancients the little world 
 
 " Prometheus applied himself with all haste to the inven- 
 tion of fire, which in all human necessities and business is 
 the great minister, . . . insomuch that if the soul be the 
 form of forms, and the hand the instrument of instruments, 
 fire may rightly be called the help of helps and the mean of 
 means. . . . But the accusation against him — i.e.^ prefer- 
 ring of complaints against nature and the arts — is a thing 
 well pleasing to the gods, and draws down new alms and 
 bounties from the divine goodness. ^T)iscontent with what 
 we have attained is more profitable than overflow of con- 
 gratulation, for conceit of plenty is the cause of want.' " 
 
The Sacrilege of Diomcdcs. 219 
 
 Among liacon's warning apologues, the most emphatic 
 is his treatment of the talc of Diomcdcs ; who, for 
 wounding Venus in the hand, led a life under ban, 
 till even Daunus his host slew him, as a man hated by 
 heaven, who had assaulted "with the sword a goddess 
 whom it was forbidden even to touch ; " and his follow- 
 ers, who bewailed him, were changed into swans, who 
 had to sing at thcii* own death. Such is the fate of 
 those who violently attack even a vain religion — a thing 
 set apart, and touched at the peril even of those who 
 pity the rash reformer. With this in view, Bacon seems 
 to close his ' Coelum,' or fable of " the Origin of things." 
 
 " It must be said, however, of all this, that, as there is 
 philosophy in the fable, so there is fable in the philosophy ; 
 for we know that all such speculations are but the oracles of 
 sense, which have long since ceased and failed — the world, 
 both matter and fabric, being in truth the work of the Creator." 
 
 In the same spirit, he asserts that the crime for which 
 Prometheus was chained to Caucasus is 
 
 " no other than that into which men fall, when puffed w]) 
 with arts and knowledge, of trying to bring the divine wis- 
 dom itself under the dominion of sense and reason, from 
 which attempt inevitably follows laceration of the mind, 
 and vexation without end or rest ; and therefore men must 
 modestly distinguish between the oracles of sense and of 
 faith, unless they mean to have at once a heretical religion 
 and a fabulous philosophy. . . . The voyage of Hercules, 
 sailing in a pitcher to set Prometheus free, seems to present 
 an image of God the Word hastening, in the frail vessel of 
 the fiesh, to redeem the human race. But I purposely re- 
 frain myself from all licence of speculation in this kind, lest 
 peradventure I bring strange fire to the altar of the Lord." 
 
 Every passage in which Bacon has referred to revealed 
 
220 Francis Bacon. 
 
 Eeligion has the same note. In the short Mnth Book 
 of the ' De Augmentis,' having sailed round the world of 
 sciences, it remains for him to " pay his vows " ; pro- 
 ceeding further, he would have to " step out of the bark 
 of human reason and enter into the ship of the Church, 
 which is only able by the divine compass to direct its 
 course. Neither will the stars of philosophy, which 
 have hitherto so nobly shone upon us, any longer supply 
 their light ; so that on this theme silence is golden." 
 To remove all ambiguity, he adds ; " As we are bound 
 to obey the divine law, though we find a reluctation in 
 our will, so we are to believe the Word of God, though 
 we find a reluctation in our reason ; " and proceeds to 
 state that " if we believe only that which is agreeable to 
 our sense, we give consent to the matter and not to the 
 author. . . . Sarah's laugh at Abraham's faith was ' an 
 image of natural reason.' . . . Sacred theology ought to 
 be derived from the oracles of God, and not from the 
 light of nature. ... It is written, ' The heavens declare 
 the glory,' but nowhere that they declare the will, of 
 God. ' Love your enemies ' does not sound human : it is 
 a voice beyond." "\Yhen, indeed, the articles of religion 
 have been set in their place, wholly exempt from the 
 examination of reason, it is then permitted us to draw 
 inferences, "as to play a game of chess according to 
 the rules ; but the ' placets ' of God are removed from 
 question." That Bacon's position is not that of the 
 Arabian AlgazeP is plain : nor was it even, at all events 
 
 ^ Kenan's judgment on the results of Algazel's teacliing marks de- 
 cisively the gulf between him and Bacon: "Ceux qui, apres avoir 
 philosophy, embrassent le mysticisme en desespoir de cause, sont 
 d'ordinaire les ennemis les plus intolerauts de la philosophic. Gazali, 
 
Religion above Ilcason. 221 
 
 avowedly, that of the Italian Pomponazzi, to whom he 
 was more akin; for he constantly protests against the idea 
 that what is false in philosophy may bo true in faith. 
 " There is no such opposition between God's Word and 
 His works," — each has its sphere, the one surpassing 
 but not contradicting the other ; and many of his 
 assaults on the scholastic mode of thought are levelled 
 against the habit of confounding them by absurd in- 
 terpretations : as when ('De Augmentis,' iv.) he writes : 
 '' In this vanity some have with extreme IcAdty indulged, 
 so far as to attempt to found a system of natural phil- 
 osophy on the first chapter of Genesis, or on the Book 
 of Job." Similarly, he objects to Paracelsus deriving 
 philosophy from sacred works, as if all other were pro- 
 fane and heathen ; asserting that " to seek philosophy in 
 divinity is to seek the dead among the living ; to seek 
 divinity in philosophy is to seek the living among the 
 dead." The most distinct statement of his view be- 
 tween the two extremes is in the ' Valerius Terminus ' : — 
 
 " I make a bank to rule the waters by setting down this 
 firmament, that all knowledge is to be limited by religion 
 and to be referred to use and action. For, if any man shall 
 think, by inquiry into these material things, to attain to any 
 light for the revealing of the nature or will of God, he shall 
 dangerously abuse himself. . . . The contemplation of the 
 creatures of God hath for end knowledge ; but as to the na- 
 ture of God no knowledge but wonder, which is nothing else 
 but contemplation broken off or losing itself. Nay, further, 
 as it was aptly said by one of Plato's school, the sense of 
 man resembles the sun, which openeth and revealeth the 
 
 devenu soufi, entreprit de prouver rinipuissauce radicale de la raison, 
 et, par une nianceuvre qui a toujours seduit les esprits plus ardents 
 que sages, de fonder la religion sur le scepticism. " 
 
222 Francis Bacon. 
 
 terrestrial globe, but obscureth and concealeth the celestial : ^ 
 so doth the sense discover natural things, but darken and 
 shut up divine. . . . ' God is only self-like, having nothing 
 in common with any creature, otherwise than in shadow or 
 trope. Therefore, attend His will as Himself openeth it, and 
 give unto faith that which unto faith belongeth.' . . . But 
 there are which, in a contrary extreme, do offer too great a 
 restraint to lawful knowledge. ... If they mean that the 
 ignorance of a second cause doth make men more to depend 
 on the providence of God, as supposing the effects to come 
 immediately from His hand, I demand of them, as Job of 
 his friends, ' Will you lie for God as man will for man to 
 gratify him 1 ' 
 
 " There are two reasons why religion should protect all 
 increase of natural knowledge : . . . the one because it lead- 
 eth to the greater exaltation of the glory of God ; ... if we 
 should rest in the contemplation of those shows which first 
 offer themselves, . . . we should judge of the store of some 
 excellent jeweller by that only which is set out to the street ; 
 . . . the other because it is a help against unbelief. The 
 later book will certify us nothing which the first teaches shall 
 be thought impossible. . . . Most sure it is . . . that a little 
 philosophy inclineth the mind to Atheism, but a further pro- 
 ceeding bringeth it back to Religion. . . . 
 
 "A religion that is jealous of the variety of learning, dis- 
 course, opinions, or sects (as misdoubting it may shake the 
 foundations), or that cherisheth devotion upon simplicity 
 and ignorance, as ascribing ordinary effects to the immediate 
 working of God, is adverse to knowledge. Such is the reli- 
 gion of the Turk, and such hath been the abuse of Christian 
 religion." 
 
 Bacon's two apparent attitudes on this question recall 
 his own distinction between nature free and nature in 
 
 1 This passage may have suggested the Avell - known sonnet of 
 Blanco Wliite :— 
 
 " Mysterious Night, when our first parents knew 
 Thee by report divine, and heard thy name," &c. 
 
Bacon's Christianity. 223 
 
 bonds. When lie regards the universe as a great com- 
 mentary on the work of God, ho writes as a rationalist : 
 " It were better to have no opinion of God at all than 
 such an opinion as is unworthy of Him." When he 
 contemplates the invisible Church of all the faithful, or 
 the visible Church of his steadfast though politically 
 Erastian Anglicanism, he accepts the doctrines of the 
 Fall and its consequences, the Trinity, Justification by 
 Faith, ]\Iiracles, &c., without reserve, and on entering 
 the precincts of the temple throws off the shoes of his 
 philosophy. The fact that Bacon's philosophy was, 
 though aspiring, mainly terrestrial ; that its basis was 
 apart from religion ; the empirical consequences drawn 
 from it in the eighteenth century, together with his 
 own almost exclusive predilection for positive science, 
 the absence in his works of any ajDpeal to the hopes 
 and fears of a future life, and the worldly motives 
 which actuated so much of his own career, — have (as in 
 the cases of Pomponazzi and Galileo) given rise to the 
 widespread belief that his orthodox protestations (in an 
 age when " free thought " was widely though secretly 
 spreading) are mere conciliatory instances of his own 
 " custom in dissimulation," — concessions more or less 
 transparent to prudence or to power. It has been 
 maintained that " all his tributes to religion do not 
 outweigh his neglect of it as a central motive;" that 
 his Christianity, further than the admitted genuine- 
 ness of his pity for human suffering, is the lip service of 
 a man who, with the fates of Bruno, Campanella, and 
 Yanini before his eyes, lived in fear of being arraigned 
 for heresy ; that he treats sacred texts as he treats old 
 fables, making them handles for his purpose to impress 
 
224 Francis Bacon. 
 
 and give weight to his preconceived ideas ; in fine, that 
 his Protestant orthodoxy is a mere matter of style, like 
 the Catholicism of Montaigne or Rabelais. On the 
 other hand, it is argued that " no spirit of irreligion has 
 inspired any of Bacon's works," that no one of them is 
 calculated to weaken any dogma of faith, and that many 
 of his positive affirmations, as in his " Confession," 
 " Meditationes Sacrae," his prayers and letters passim^ 
 were made under no inducement to hypocrisy; when 
 thrown out of gear with the world, and on his own re- 
 sources, he was most likely to be sincere. On this vexed 
 question it may at least be asserted with confidence, 
 that the extremist zeal of such writers as Joseph de 
 jMaistre, imputing to Bacon cryptic Atheism, and a desire 
 to propagate it, absurdly errs; and that the Abb6 Eymery, 
 who, about the same date, cited his name as a religious 
 philosopher, in opposition to those of D'Alembert and 
 Diderot, was more nearly just ; for if Bacon's system is 
 not reared on religious sentiment, it leads to that senti- 
 ment as its crown. -^ 
 
 1 With the following judgment of an eminent scholar 
 and thinker I entirely agree : " It is rare to find a scien- 
 tific man who has much interest in, or understanding 
 of, religious problems. From Boyle to Brewster, they are 
 content to accept the prevailing orthodoxy as something 
 given, and only attack it on outlying points if it attacks 
 them. Bacon was so far a scientific man that his treasure 
 and his heart were set on the natural world. But, further, 
 he was a philosopher ; and his philosophic insight, coupled 
 with his devotion to the world, also determined him to leave 
 religion alone. For he must have seen, and he did see, that 
 his methods applied to theology would upturn everything ; 
 and he must also have known that this could not but rouse 
 
Summary of Religion. 225 
 
 It renicains briefly to siimniariso the defects and the 
 intent of the ]^ew Philosopliy, and to offer some esti- 
 mate of its after - influence. Bacon's weakness as a 
 critic is manifest. Denouncing tradition, commanding 
 
 in arms against his method the very sentiment which it was 
 the aim of his life to conciliate on its behalf. There were 
 recent examples in plenty of the ' heretical religion ' that 
 natural philosophy produced when it laboured on theologic 
 ground, and it had aroused antagonism both among Pro- 
 testants and Catholics. Nor was he blind to tiie evils of 
 the ' fantastical philosophy ' which the works of such men 
 as Paracelsus, &c., exemplify. Bacon, as a man of science, 
 was almost exclusively interested in nature ; as a philoso- 
 pher, he was able to see where the interest was endangered. 
 No man pursues his theories to their last consequences in 
 all directions. So it is not wonderful that he stopped short 
 when it suited him — availing himself, in order to do this, of 
 a distinction, current in the ordinary thought of the time, in 
 previous philosophy, and certainly not excluded from his 
 own system, so long as it is regarded from one side. But, 
 however other interests may habitually divert the religious 
 interest, the latter cannot be altogether ignored. It asserts 
 itself as an element of culture and as a personal need. As 
 an element of culture. Bacon's intellectual inquisitiveness 
 could not leave it alone : even when he had dismissed it 
 from his scheme of philosophy, it could not be effaced from 
 the map of the ' Globus Intellectualis.' So he manages to 
 find a quasi justification for correcting its results, even if 
 he leaves its data untouched. Doing this, however, as 
 an amateur, he does not go so far as to discover that such 
 correction Avould ultimately affect the data themselves. 
 When he has recourse to it from a personal motive, as in 
 the prayer when under a cloud, he, from his previous disre- 
 gard of the subject in its essentials, has no option but to 
 accept it in its orthodox form, only translating it into the 
 language of his own individuality." 
 
 p. XIV. p 
 
226 Francis Bacon. 
 
 a return to experience, his OAvn facts are dra^vn more 
 from "books (in which, he says, "we converse with 
 the wise, as in action with fools ") than from nature. 
 Hence he was only able to suggest, not to realise; 
 and was withheld from setting a firm foot on the 
 shore of his America, or conquering, like Alexander, 
 any part of his kingdom. His inaccuracies of detail, his 
 indifference to the psychological problems of conscious- 
 ness, sensation, perception, — to the relation of the 
 ego and the non-ego, of space and time, the origin of 
 knowledge, &c., — are due partly to the limitations of 
 his mind, in part to his surroundings. No man can 
 leap beyond his own shadow, hardly one beyond the 
 shadow of his age. His inconsistencies belong to his 
 marginal standpoint, to his love of antitheses, to his 
 insistence on minutiae, and the hasty presumptions 
 that led him to disdain them. His confusion of 
 relations with elements is an inheritance. His ac- 
 ceptance of an unproved physiology reminds us that 
 biology has yet failed to define life. In chemistry he 
 is at least never retrograde. His definite errors are 
 largely counterbalanced by his anticipations. The 
 fundamental misconceptions which vitiated his system 
 are radical, and may be set in contrast with the cor- 
 rect conclusions of Laplace : — 
 
 " The sure method in the search for truth consists in ris- 
 ing from phenomena to laws, and from laws to forces. Laws 
 are the links of phenomena : when they have disclosed the 
 principle of the forces from which they are derived, it is 
 left to verify the last, when possible, by experience, or by 
 examining whether the conclusion satisfies the phenomena. 
 If by a rigorous analysis we see that all the facts, however 
 
Defects of System. 227 
 
 numerous and varied, can be derived from this principle, 
 science then acquires the highest degree of certainty that it 
 can attain. Such has astronomy become by the discovery of 
 universal gravitation." 
 
 I. Eacon had, as we have seen, set before himself, 
 as the goal of his research, an unattainable end. It has 
 been said that, like Plato, he asked too much ; and 
 thought to solve mysteries which Nature by no 
 torture or binding of Proteus has been ever forced 
 to reveal. AVe may weed his work of its contra- 
 dictions, as his admission of compound "forms," his 
 speaking of heat as " simple," and yet seeking to 
 resolve it. AYe may grant that he has pointed the 
 way to the analysis of Nature : but to ask the mean- 
 ing of her primitive qualities is to batter at the last 
 gate of Spenser's ' Busiris,' bearing the inscription, 
 "Be not too bold." Bacon's audacity in this respect 
 contrasts with the modest temperance of more prac- 
 tically successful men of science, who owed their 
 triumphs in large measure to self-restraint. Leonardo 
 da Vinci achieved so jnuch because he did not confuse 
 his experiments with pseudo - metaphysical or a prio7'i 
 fancies. Copernicus, in laying down the first draft of 
 the planetary motions approximately true, disclaimed 
 any inquiry after their causes. Galileo, on the same 
 theme, declares, " The cause of the acceleration is not 
 a necessary part of the investigation." Gassendi, in 
 acknowledging, with polite censure. Lord Herbert of 
 Cherbury's fantastic book, confesses that he does not 
 believe any more than Butler, the satirist, in find- 
 ing " first nature undressed." " I am in darkness 
 when I attempt to investigate the real nature of 
 
228 Francis Bacon. 
 
 the least thing." And Newton admits, "The cause 
 of gravity I did not pretend to know." "To ask 
 what gravity is, is to mistake the last, perhaps un- 
 attainable, step for the first j " and the attempts to 
 explain it by elastic ethers or Cartesian vortices have 
 always been open to the charge of " obscurum per ob- 
 scurius." When Bacon, after praising Galileo's optical 
 instruments as skiffs or barks that opened a new com- 
 merce with the heavens, objects to his experiments 
 stopping short with a few discoveries, he shows his 
 want of appreciation of the limits of human power, and 
 of the modesty of a true discoverer. His own aim was 
 " to storm and occupy the citadels of things," and find 
 their Forms. But Causes are not "Forms." "The 
 laws and determinations of actuality" are beyond our 
 reach, and no inquiry into "the divisions and veins 
 of Nature " would enable us to attain them. Nor can 
 we by any means " be freed from the common course 
 of Nature, and expanded to new modes of operation." 
 In the ' Organum ' it is assumed that the ultimate cause 
 of any quality will always be single — i.e., that it will 
 always have one Form ; but, as far as analysis has been 
 able to go, this is not the fact ; and Bacon, though 
 ('Novum Organum,' ii. 17) anticipating the objection 
 that forms may mix and combine things heterogeneous, 
 fails to meet it by the mere assertion that we are " held 
 in captivity by custom." Substances cannot always be 
 resolved into an aggregation of simple elements : nor 
 movements, to all appearance identical, be referred to 
 the same sources, for the same effect is not always 
 produced by the same cause : it may be the product of 
 a + & = c, 01 x + y = c. Bacon neglected to consider the 
 
Plurality of Causes. 229 
 
 new established facts of the Phirality of Causes and 
 intermixture of effects which makes the reahsation of 
 his ^'Forms'' impossible.^ 
 
 II. Bacon overstretched the sphere of his method. 
 As we have seen, he thought it ^would apply to Ethics 
 as well as to Physics, and proposes to construct Tables, 
 Positive and Negative and Exclusive, of Anger, Fear, 
 
 1 Mr J. S. Mill (* Logic/ vol. ii. pp. 110, 111) adds, as follows, some 
 important considerations, which give a wider scope to the above criti- 
 cism : " The methods of induction applicable to the ascertainment 
 of causes and eftects are grounded on the principle that everything 
 which has a beginning must have some cause or other ; that among 
 the circumstances which actually existed at the time of its commence- 
 ment, there is certainly some one combination on which the effect in 
 question is unconditionally consequent, and on the repetition of which 
 it Avould certainly again recur." But, he proceeds to show, as regards 
 a property as blackness or a sensation as pain, we have no such cer- 
 tainty, for each may arise from a various, if not utterly indefinable, 
 consensus of causes. . . . " To overlook this grand distinction was 
 the capital error in Bacon's view. . . . The principle of elimination 
 — that great logical instrument which he had the immense merit of 
 first bringing into general use — he deemed applicable in the same 
 sense, and in as unqualified a manner, to the investigation of the 
 coexistences as to that of the successions of phenomena. He seems 
 to have thought that as every event has ... an invariable ante- 
 cedent, so every property of an object has an invariable coexistent, 
 which he called its form ; and the examples he chiefly selected for 
 the application and illustration of his method were inquiries into 
 such forms. . . . Such inquiries could lead to no result. The ob- 
 jects seldom have any such circumstance (one general property) in 
 common. They usually agree in the one point inquired into, and 
 nothing else. ... A great proportion of the properties . . . like- 
 liest to be really ultimate would seem to be inherently properties of 
 many diff'erent kinds of things, not allied in any other respect. . . . 
 As for the properties we are able to give some account of, they have 
 generally nothing to do with the iiltimate resemblances or diversities 
 in the objects themselves, but depend on some outward circumstances, 
 as is the case with the favourite subjects of Bacon's scientific in- 
 quiries — hotness, coldness, solidity, fluidity, &c. Tliey are often co- 
 existences independent of causation." 
 
230 Francis Bacon. 
 
 Hatred, Love, as of Density, Heat, Cold. There is no 
 doubt that, by fixing attention on the necessity of col- 
 lecting, testing, and comparing facts, sciences such as 
 Political Economy and Sociology, as well as Physics, 
 have been advanced; and this principle has in recent 
 times been largely applied by such writers as Comte, 
 Mill, and Buckle. But when stated, as in the ' Novum 
 Organum,' without reservation, it ignores the difficulty 
 if not the bar arising from the peculiarly complex ac- 
 tion, if not the absolute freedom, of the human will — a 
 problem Avhich Bacon wholly ignores. In Morals we can- 
 not, as in Physics, submit nature to unrestricted tests : 
 our perceptions refuse to be decomposed in a crucible, or 
 our passions to be divided by a prism. Knowledge 
 of the mental powers is a sort of experience : History 
 and Biography are Observations on mankind. Medicine, 
 Education, the effects of Punishment and Eeward, are 
 in a sense Experiments ; but the uniformity of nature 
 does not hold good in the same degree in the Moral as in 
 the Physical world. We can only avoid the Idola, and 
 place ourselves in the right attitude for seeing the truth. 
 III. Bacon overestimated the precision of his method : 
 for the mathematical or geometrical certitude on which 
 he relied rested on unattainable conditions. He held it 
 to be such when comj^lete " ut non multum ingeniorum 
 acumini et robori relinquatur, ut faciamus intellectum 
 humanum rebus et naturce parem," so that once in jdos- 
 session of it, all intellects might work alike. Macaulay's 
 criticism fairly meets this view. ]S"o method will bridge 
 the gulf between a dunce and a man of genius ; nor even 
 in physics is it possible to attain the vantage-ground of 
 such absolute confidence. We cannot map out nature 
 or catalogue her phenomena, so as to exclude new con- 
 
Mathematical Metliod. 231 
 
 tingoncics, or exhaust her negative instances. Exclu- 
 sions are only decisive when the subject-matter is finite ; 
 and experience can never prove that a contradictory is 
 impossible. 
 
 IV. There is a serious error expressed, '^N'ovum 
 Organum/ i. 19, where it is laid down as a rule that 
 we must, in our search for truth, proceed by an ex- 
 haustive process — i.e., from the lowest particulars to 
 those above, and so on, including all the facts, and reach- 
 ing general principles only at the end of our journey. 
 Bacon is not himself faithful to this rule, nor has any 
 discoverer been so. He is right in pointing out that the 
 chief value of most sciences lies in their " axiomata 
 media " ; for the higher generalisations rest for their proof 
 on the lower, and are too vague, and include too few cir- 
 cumstances for general use ; while the lowest generalisa- 
 tions, until resolved into middle principles, are for the 
 most part empirical. But he is wrong in asserting that 
 our road in discovery alivays lies from the lowest to the 
 middle, and from these to the highest principles ; for in 
 practice the highest are often ascertained first, and the 
 middle deduced from them. The history of Astronomy, 
 and Bacon's own image of knowledge as a pyramid, may 
 illustrate this — 
 
 •Theories of Vortices, &c. 
 Maxima Generalia 
 
 .Gravitation. 
 
 Elliptical Orbits. 
 Axiomata Media - 
 
 Theories of Perturbations, 
 &c. 
 
 Lowest Generalisa- / V V V \ Irregularities in Motion, 
 tions. A, /\ /\ /\ /\ &c. 
 
 Facts. / \/ v v V \ Observed Stars. 
 
232 Francis Bacon. 
 
 In Astronomy the middle coUegations of facts were de- 
 duced from the highest law reaUy attained, that of Gravi- 
 tation. " In such cases," says Sir John Herschel, " the 
 inductive and deductive methods of inquiry may be said 
 to go hand in hand, the one verifying the conclusions de- 
 duced by the other ; and the combination of experiment 
 and theory . . . forms an engine of discovery infinitely 
 more powerful than either taken separately." IN'ature 
 being inexhaustible, we cannot always wait to ascend 
 step by step, and truth must often be caught by the ap- 
 plication — which Bacon indeed collaterally recognises in 
 his ' Permissio Intellectus ' — of an idea to affirmatives. 
 Almost every advance in science involves a new concep- 
 tion, and the genius of a discoverer lies in his power to 
 leap at the law by means of a hypothesis to be after- 
 wards verified. Bacon's ' Alphabet of Science,' were it 
 possible, would only represent the present state of an 
 ever-extending knowledge. He ignored the necessity 
 for a divining power in science, and so underestimated 
 the value of the Deductive Method. 
 
 M. de Eemusat, erroneously taking Bacon as a ty^De 
 of English common-sense, and so ignoring the more than 
 insidar imagination that preferred 'Experimenta Luci- 
 f era ' to ' Experimenta Fructifera,' yet admits that some 
 forms of common-sense amoimt to genius, and that it is 
 difficult for us now to realise the importance of the revolt 
 from the substitution of memory for experience, of the 
 rebellion against the old doctrines, which acted as the 
 police of the sciences. The same critic asserts that the 
 ' !N"ovum Organum ' spoke for the age in giving it a voice, 
 and that there is a consensus of three centuries in its 
 favour. But there is nothing to show that the work 
 
Bacon* s Infl^ience. 233 
 
 was at first received in England witli any enthusiasm. 
 Most of those, as Bodley and Matthews, to Avhom it 
 was sent, seem to have been afraid of its novelties, and 
 guarded in their utterances. The only cordial welcome 
 that has come to us is that of Sir Henry Wotton, who 
 wished to send the work to Kepler, saying on its recep- 
 tion, "The scholastic philosophy has ceased to exist," 
 and that of Professor Collins of Cambridge, who con- 
 fessed to Raw ley that, after reading the ' De Augmentis,' 
 he had to begin his studies anew ; — imless we add that 
 of Isaac Walton, who named the author " the great sec- 
 retary of nature and of science." Francis Osbom (' Mis- 
 cellanies,' pub. 1659) says that a clamour of atheism was 
 raised against Bacon ; and Oldenburg, the first secre- 
 tary of the Eoyal Society, admits that even after the 
 publication of his great works, he stood in need of a 
 warrant or surety from all learned Europe. His tes- 
 tamentary appeal "to foreign nations" seems to imply 
 that he looked to the Continent for a wider recognition ; 
 and that his expectation was not wholly in vain is 
 shown by several testimonies, one of the earliest that 
 of the mathematician Marin Mersenne, who, in his 
 'V^rite des Sciences' (1625), speaks of the Idola as 
 the four buttresses of the ' Organum ' of Verulam. An- 
 other Frenchman, A. Ballet, says that when Descartes 
 was in Paris in 1626, and heard the news of Bacon's 
 death, he, with all who cared for the establishment of 
 philosophy, were profoundly affected by it. Descartes 
 himself, little noted for displays of enthusiasm regarding 
 his famous contemporaries, writes to INlersenne, "You 
 desire to know how best to make experience useful : 
 on this point I have nothing to add to Verulam ; " — add- 
 
234 Francis Bacon. 
 
 ing a wish that some one would write the history of 
 astronomy according to Bacon's method : he elsewhere 
 refers to the fulfilment of the prophecy of the Chancellor 
 of England, "multi pertransibunt et augebatur scientia." 
 Descartes' opponent, Pierre Gassendi, yet praises him 
 for his points of resemblance to Bacon, whose logic, 
 he says, is consecrated to truth, and from the pur- 
 suit of whose method we may expect the development 
 of a new and at last perfect philosophy. Further on 
 in the century, Puffendorf, the jurist, declares, " It was 
 the late Chancellor Bacon who raised the standard and 
 urged on the march of discovery ; " and at its close, 
 Boerhaave, the chemist, professes his belief that Des- 
 cartes owes all that is best in him to the same source. 
 This assertion is undoubtedly open to dispute; for 
 between the ' ^N'ovum Organum ' and the * Discourse on 
 Method ' there is little in common save the same protests 
 against authority, and some rules of observation appa- 
 rently transferred from the earlier to the later work. 
 The two great innovators both started by analysis, 
 but of different objects, and drew their sources, as it 
 were, from opposite sides of the same ridge. The Ideal- 
 ism of Descartes culminated in Spinoza, in whom the 
 latent antithesis to Bacon reaches its climax : the aim 
 of the one thinker was, as stated by Kuno Pischer, free 
 contemplation attained when outward things cease to 
 govern us ; the aim of the other was culture and power 
 attained when we have been taught to govern outward 
 things. The adherents of each remain in an attitude of 
 antagonism, that can only be reduced by the " concilia- 
 tion of contradictories." It has been dogmatically as- 
 serted by proficients in either department, that the course 
 
Bacon and Descartes. 235 
 
 of Mental Philosophy since the middle of the seven- 
 teenth century has been Cartesian ; of Physical Science, 
 Galilean ; and that there is no room for Bacon, save as 
 a maker of fine phrases. The grain of truth in the 
 former assertion lies in the fact that Descartes gave to 
 philosophy the psychological basis adopted by Hobbes ^ 
 and Locke and Hume, equally with Berkeley, Eeid, and 
 Kant. But the difference between the two groups is, 
 that the spirit of the former, as that of Bentham, Mill, 
 and Comte, is more Baconian than Cartesian. From 
 the 'Instauratio Magna,' or its influences, they have 
 inherited and transniitted that mode of thought which 
 refers science for its source to observation, discards in- 
 nate ideas, subordinates metaphysic, and inclines to refer 
 psychology to physiology. Bacon himself was not a 
 materialist, but it may be admitted that the exclusive 
 application of the inductive method to mental science 
 tends to materialism. One of the earliest suspicions of 
 the fact is recorded in the confession of a reactionary 
 royalist of the century, H. Stubb, that he had been for a 
 time led astray by the mechanical school ; but it does not 
 seem to have aroused systematic antagonism till D'Alem- 
 bert and Diderot inscribed Bacon's name on the front of 
 
 1 HoblDcs, thongh among tlie personal friends of Bacon, seems to 
 have received from liim directly only casual suggestions — e.g., as to 
 the influence of self-love among the motives of life ; and does not name 
 him when, in his preface to the ' Elementa Philosophise,' he dwells on 
 the revival of science promoted by Galileo, Kepler, and Harvey. He 
 only cites Bacon twice incidentally in reference to the movements of 
 the sea and an experiment on water [vide Remusat, * Bacon, sa Vie, 
 son Temps, sa Philosophic,' pp. 405-409), and never speaks of Induction 
 in his Logic save in his controversy with Wallis — his own philosophy, 
 though sensational, being almost purely deductive. Similarly, Locke 
 is only indebted to the ' Orgauura ' for the basis of the Book III. of 
 his "Essay" in the 'Idola Fori.' 
 
236 Francis Bacon. 
 
 their Encyclop^die ^ — the former saluting him as the 
 most universal of philosophers, and the latter adopting 
 the title * De Interpretatione Philosophise ' for one of his 
 sceptical books. When the National Convention de- 
 cided to publish his works at the expense of the State, 
 their patronage provoked the retaliation of De Maistre 
 and others, who " only saw incendiaries in the bearers 
 of the torch." Meanwhile, during the seventeenth cen- 
 tury in England, where Bacon's esoteric method re- 
 mained in abeyance, the influence of his exoteric Physics 
 was beginning to prevail. It is admitted that the sug- 
 gestion of the " College of Philosophy," instituted in 
 London (1645), and after the Eestoration extended into 
 ''The Eoyal Society" (1662), was due to the prophetic 
 scheme of " Solomon's House " ^ in the ' ISTew Atlantis.' 
 Wallis, one of the founders of the "Society," exalts him 
 by name, along with Galileo, as their master. Sprat 
 says, " It was a work becoming the largeness of Bacon's 
 wit to devise and the greatness of Clarendon's prudence 
 to establish." Boyle ^ invokes for its inauguration " that 
 
 1 In wliich the classification of the sciences in the ' De Augmentis ' 
 is distinctly adopted. 
 
 2 The earliest suggestion of this appears in the ' Praise of Know- 
 ledge' {v. ante), where Bacon writes: "I will recommend to your 
 Highness four principal works and monuments — 1. The collecting of 
 a most perfect and general library ; 2. A spacious (botanical) and 
 zoological garden ; ... 3. A goodly cabinet wherein whatsoever the 
 hand of man by art or engine hath made, . . . whatsoever singularity 
 chance and the scufile of things hath produced, . . . shall be sorted 
 and included ; ... 4. A still house so furnished with mills, instru- 
 ments, furnaces, and vessels, as may be a place fit for the philoso- 
 pher's Stone." 
 
 3 Many of these testimonies to Bacon's influence are given by Mac- 
 vey Napier in the * Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,' 
 vol. viii. pp. 373 et seq. 
 
Influence in England, 237 
 
 profound naturalist, . . . our great Ycrulam." Dr Hooke, 
 asserting that Bacon alone, among preceding thinkers, 
 conceived the idea of a mental engine for discovery in 
 the 'View of Natural Philosophy' (pub. 1705), pro- 
 fesses himself his disciple, and maintains that physical 
 as well as mathematical inquiries are capable of demon- 
 stration. Evelyn in his ' Sylva,' and Glanvill in his 
 ' Plus Ultra,' bear the same testimony. It is of more 
 consequence to remark that the tree which Bacon planted 
 was beginning to bear fruit in his successors, by whom 
 more was done in two than by his predecessors in twenty 
 centuries ; that the false methods he condemned were 
 little by little abandoned j that his idea of working on 
 facts by " scala " of ascension was accepted ; that cer- 
 titude was being added to his novelty, and the great 
 lacuna in his system, a neglect of the path downwards 
 from generals to particulars, supplied in the contribu- 
 tions to his ' Scientia Activa,' made by Boyle, Newton, 
 Limioeus, Cuvier, and others. If Newton owed any- 
 thing to Bacon, he does not acknowledge it ; but it is 
 confessed that his "analytical method" has close points 
 of contact with the Baconian Induction, that both are 
 inspired by the same ruling ideas of the relation of 
 cause to effect and the stability of Nature's laws, of 
 method as a means of gradual ascent to the solution of 
 natural problems ; and that the latter, especially in his 
 Optics, consciously or unconsciously, avails himself of 
 the rules of the former to an extent that justifies the 
 remark of Horace AYalpole : " Bacon was the prophet of 
 tilings that Newton revealed ; " of Addison, who per- 
 ceives in him " the predecessor of Boyle and the rival of 
 Newton ; " or of Maclauriu, that " it only wanted Bacon 
 
238 Francis Bacon. 
 
 to be more listened to, to pave the way for the * Prin- 
 cipia.' " 
 
 During the same period, on the Continent, the new 
 philosophy found enthusiastic advocates. A French 
 friend of Hobhes wrote to him : "If England had only 
 given to science Gilbert, Harvey, and Bacon, she might 
 have disputed the palm with France and with Italy, 
 who have given us Galileo, Descartes, and Gassendi; 
 but Bacon has carried it over all others in grandeur of 
 design." Boyle ranks Yerulam among the greatest minds 
 of his age. Huyghaens records his belief that Bacon 
 succeeded in his method, and taught men to make the 
 best use of experience, though failing in discovery from 
 deficiency in mathematics. Yico confesses that he owed 
 to the ' De Sapientia Veterum ' the idea of searching for 
 truth in mythology, and commends its author for having 
 made the English mind familiar with the true sense of 
 Induction. Voltaire asserts that the ' J^ovum Organum ' 
 is the scaffold on which the English have built their 
 philosophy, and then let it fall. At a later date Kant 
 himself refers to it as the work of " one of the greatest 
 physicists of modem times." 
 
 The majority of German metaphysicians, repelled 
 by his dogmatic protests against a 'priori views, have 
 treated Bacon as hardly in their blame as the majority 
 of German critics have dealt with Shakespeare in their 
 praise. Spinoza, granting that he recounts well without 
 proving, is inclined to regard his school as that of a 
 superficial industrialism; and similarly Hegel has adopted 
 Macaulay's view, without, as Macaulay does, regarding it 
 as complimentary. 
 
 Yet it is a German of wider if not deeper mind — 
 
Leibnitz on Bacon. 239 
 
 not a metaphysician alone but a jurisconsult, mathema- 
 tician, naturalist, linguist, and critic, the rival of Locke 
 as of Newton, the precursor of Cuvicr, Savigny, and 
 Grimm — it is Leibnitz who has shown the most thorough 
 appreciation of the Baconian philosoj)hy. He conceived 
 his own Monadism, which has been said to have "rescued 
 Cartesianism from the abyss of passivity into which it 
 threatened to fall," to be akin to the doctrine of the 
 ' De Principiis,' and expressed his belief in the assertion, 
 " We do well to think highly of Verulam, for his hard 
 sayings have in them a deep meaning." Elsewhere he 
 declares that Bacon recalls philosophy from space to 
 earth and life, and has first put the art of experiment 
 into precepts ; and, classing him in some respects with 
 Descartes, says that, as compared with the former, the 
 latter "creeps on the ground." The effect of this 
 acknowledged influence is apparent by the anonymous 
 tract, " Gulielmi Placiti ' Plus Ultra,' sive initia et speci- 
 mena scientise generalis, de instaurcttione et augmentis 
 scientiarum, ac de proficienda mente, reruinque inven- 
 tione ad publicam f elicitatem ; " the conclusion of w^hich 
 was designed to convey an exhortation to those worthy 
 to increase the happiness of the race. In another work 
 he refers to the 'De Augmentis' as chief among the 
 writings of the reformers who had in his youth directed 
 him to the right path. But the most important appli- 
 cation of the Baconian method made by Leibnitz is his 
 reform of the Science of Language ; his decisive con- 
 futation of the presumption that all dialects must be 
 offshoots of Hebrew ; his assertion that " this study 
 must be conducted on the same principles as those of the 
 exact sciences, beginning from the languages best known 
 
240 Francis Bacon. 
 
 to us, and so ascending step by step to those more 
 remote," thus laying the foundations of Philology as 
 securely as Galileo and Kepler laid those of Astronomy. 
 
 A century later the Scotch Psychological school claims 
 to be Baconian in its application of the Inductive pro- 
 cesses to the science of the mind. Eeid explicitly dates 
 from the * I^ovum Organum ' the new impulse in a 
 direction more just and more fertile than that of the 
 Organon of Aristotle ; and Dugald Stewart, regretting 
 that Bacon has been more praised than studied, adopts 
 his principles as converting common-sense into science, 
 and vindicates the originality of his Logic. M. Royer 
 Collard maintained that Inductive Reasoning had 
 been created by the ' Instauratio Magna,' and that 
 Bacon had supplied to Newton his leading rules with 
 the instrument of all the discoveries one can make in 
 Nature. M. Joufifroy followed in the same track ; and 
 Comte himself, while repudiating previous systems, 
 assigns to Bacon a great share in the movement that 
 first led men to conceive of an empire of science greater 
 and more lasting than that of mere industrialism in 
 society. To this view M. Littre adheres, and it is 
 implicitly recognised by the followers of Bentham, 
 Mill, Lewes, and others in England. 
 
 Among the more recent thinkers of Germany, Scho- 
 penhauer is conspicuous by the terms of generous recog- 
 nition in which, though from a different standpoint, he 
 invariably refers to Bacon, who enlists his sympathy by 
 a frequently cynical view of the world, and a like keen 
 sense of human suffering. Schopenhauer's assertions — 
 " That which is acted on is always matter, and thus the 
 whole being and essence of matter consists in the orderly 
 
Schopenhauer on Baeon. 241 
 
 changes which one part of it brings about in another 
 part ; " "To repeat the whole nature of the world . . . 
 in concepts, and thus to store up a reflected image of it 
 always at tlie command of the reason, this and nothing 
 else is philosophy : " with the iteration of the practical 
 precept, " beautifully expressed by Verulam : The in- 
 tellect is not a dry light. . . . Love and hate falsify 
 our judgments entirely," — might well have enlisted the 
 sympathy of Eacon, to whom the great protester against 
 the complacencies of Oj)timism, in the following, again 
 refers : " Philosophy wiU be a sum total of general 
 judgments, whose ground of knowledge is the world 
 in its entirety. ... It will be a complete recapitu- 
 lation, as it were a reflection, of the world in abstract 
 concepts, which is only possible by the union of the 
 essentially identical in one concept and the relegation 
 of the different to another. This task was already 
 prescribed to philosophy by Bacon of Verulam, when he 
 said : ' Ea demuni vera est philosophia, qua3 mundi 
 ipsius voces fidelissime reddit ; et, veluti dictante 
 mundo, conscripta est, et nihil aliud est^ quam ejus- 
 modi Simulacrum et Reflectio, neque addit quidquam de 
 proprio, sed tamen iterat et resonat' (De Aug., ii. 13)." 
 K^or is the following less capable of being construed 
 into the language of the * Instauratio ' : " The bridge by 
 Avhich metaphysic passes beyond experience is nothing 
 else than the analysis of experience into phenomena, 
 and the thing in itself (z'.e., the Form)." Kant's merit 
 is, that he presents to us the kernel of the phenomenon 
 different from the phenomenon itself : — 
 
 " 1st nicht der Kern der Natur 
 Menschen in's Herzen." 
 
 P. XIV. Q 
 
242 Francis Bacon. 
 
 Bacon is not appreciated by pure Logicians, who com- 
 plain of his imperfect analysis of the Inductive process 
 itself; and retort on his attacks on the Syllogism by 
 reasserting its analytical value. It may be admitted 
 that he dwelt on facts to the subordination of Dialectic, 
 at a time when Dialectic had been excluding facts ; that, 
 in our day, a writer, inspired by the same spirit of re- 
 form, woiild — in view of the chaotic sentiments that 
 take the place of argument, and the want of propor- 
 tion that mars our expositions and our art — have dwelt 
 more on the necessity of logical clearness and arrange- 
 ment. But most of those adverse criticisms lack the 
 historical sense. 
 
 Bacon is the hete noire and butt of Specialists, the 
 modern Schoolmen, who resent his insufficient view of 
 their little worlds. Mere politicians complain that he 
 was neither a Wliig nor a Tory : mere theologians see 
 that, with all his orthodox protestations, Eeligion was 
 on the fringe of his system : mere physicists, led by 
 Harvey, who begins the attack in his dictum that he 
 " wrote like a Lord Chancellor," dislike or distrust 
 his metaphysics, and dwell, as Baron Liebig does, with 
 acrimonious exclusiveness on his defects. Their com- 
 ments are narrowly correct; but, like those of mere 
 dryasdust philologists on the classics of literature, 
 so one-sided as to be impertinent. The inaccuracies 
 inevitable to universal views, must be conceded to the 
 ingratitude of those prone to bite the hand that feeds 
 them. Scientific and literary men of larger grasp — 
 as Laplace, who refers to Bacon as " this great philos- 
 opher, the brightest man of the bright century when 
 he ended his career ; " Playfair, who says, " It is easier 
 
Specialist and wider Vieius. 243 
 
 to find new Galileos than new Bacons ; " Ilerschel, who 
 compares him to " the star that announces the day ; " 
 Mackintosh, who says, "His authority will have no 
 end ; " INIill, who, while marking his lacunae, reveres his 
 name ; AVhewell, who sets it on the forefront of his 
 comprehensive survey; and Tyndall, whose literary 
 grace is only less unique than that of his master, — are 
 at one with historians like Hallam in proclaiming him 
 the first great mover in a mighty impulse. 
 
 Bacon wanted not only the analytic skill and the 
 attention to details but the concentration of thought 
 essential to the precise ascertainment of any one of the 
 laws of nature. Definite discovery was not his metier : 
 it was left for Galileo and his followers to practise 
 what he discarded. When his breadth of view is com- 
 pared to that of N'ewton, Boyle, Leibnitz, Franklin, 
 Laplace, Herschel, Faraday, and Eowan Hamilton, we 
 must remember that these were all exact mathematicians 
 as well as comprehensive thinkers. Bacon has closer 
 kindred with Plato and Aristotle, Goethe and Hum- 
 boldt : like these, even where he failed he has left his 
 mark. His sentence on the first is applicable to himself : 
 " A man of sublime genius, who took a view of every- 
 thing as from a lofty rock." His self-criticism is sound, 
 — " fungar vice cotis acutum reddere quae ferrum valet 
 expers ipsa secandi." He sharpened the instruments 
 for others to use : he pointed the path, which he could 
 not follow, to the walls of the citadel he failed to storm. 
 Cowley has compared him to Moses — 
 
 " ^Yh.o did upon the very border stand 
 Of that fair promised land ; " 
 
 and ^\T[th how keen an eye he ranged the horizon we 
 
244 Francis Bacon. 
 
 may infer from the forecasts of the discoveries of Boyle, 
 Spallanzani, and Darwin, in the " Magnalia " of the ']N"ew 
 Atlantis' and elsewhere, scattered through his work. 
 But his claim to have " moved the intellects that move 
 the world" does not rest on these. Bacon made an 
 epoch by the view he opened up, disclosing a way "to 
 unpathed Avaters, undreamed shores;" by training his 
 contemporaries to habits of investigation, and inspiring 
 them with a share of his zeal for observation, which 
 he first set on a rank of equal dignity with abstract 
 thought. 
 
 He invented nothing, but he called the sciences back 
 to their sources, and so, in the phrase of M. de Eemusat, 
 "threw out a thought full of the future." His prede- 
 cessors in reform addressed a narrower audience, and 
 spoke in lower tones. It was only Bacon's enthusiasm 
 through half a century maintained, his dauntless tenacity 
 — " viam aut inveniam aut faciam," — and his splendid 
 powers of speech, that gave to science wings to make 
 way through the minds of men. Dean Church admits 
 that the tentative efforts of Brimo, Telesio, and Campa- 
 nella were short flights, and that Bacon was the first 
 to recognise the need of more thoroughness and system 
 to match the magnitude of the work he set before his 
 successors. 
 
 Finally, we must remember that his Philosophy was 
 only half his work : he has built a pyramid in Law as 
 well, and jurists still appeal to his maxims.-^ His 
 contributions to " History " are " Imagines " of great 
 
 1 Bentham says the Code Napoleon was suggested by Bacon's early 
 Maxims of the Law — a sheaf or cluster towards his great scheme of 
 codification. 
 
Bacon's Essays. 245 
 
 rulors, so sculptured and painted as to throw a light on 
 the causes and the limits of their power that has been 
 generally esteemed correct, and served as a guide to his 
 successors in this department, the philosophic historians 
 of later times. The ' Essays,' to which we have only 
 been able to refer, are ingots from an apparently inex- 
 haustible mine — condensed counsels for those who would 
 be great as well as wise, springing " from a mind hesi- 
 tating whether to direct the vessel of the State or to 
 found a new Philosophy;" mirrors for magistrates, as 
 well as sounding-lines for discovery in our greatest age ; 
 suggestions and criticisms since beaten into gold-leaf 
 over England, as the wisdom of Horace's Odes over 
 Italy, till their originality has been half forgot. 
 
 "Bacon," says Hallam, "was more eminently the phil- 
 osopher of human than general nature. In his ' Centuries 
 of Natural History ' he is like one making out a prospect, 
 but often deceived by the haze. But if we compare what 
 may be found in the 6tli, 7th, and 8th books of the 'De 
 Augmentis,' in the ' Essays,' the ' History of Henry YII.,' 
 and the various short treatises contained in his works on 
 morals and politics and on human nature, from experience 
 of which all such wisdom is drawn, with the rhetoric, ethics, 
 and politics of Aristotle, or with the historians most cele- 
 brated for their deep insight into civil society and character, 
 — with Thucydides, Tacitus, Philip de Comines, Machiavel, 
 Davila, Hume, — we shall find, I think, that one man may 
 almost be compared with all of these together." 
 
 In some respects this eulogy is overstrained ; for the 
 Ethics and Politics of the 'De Augmentis' and the 
 'Essays' are marred by the cynicism of long waiting 
 years, of expectations frustrated and hopes deferred; 
 but Hallam, recognising in Bacon the philosophy of 
 
246 Francis Bacon. 
 
 " Coriolaniis " and " Troilus and Cressida," fails to see his 
 ra]Di?ort ^Yit]l that of ^' Hamlet " and "The Tempest": 
 he has nowhere done full justice to the value of Bacon's 
 protest against authority, or to his conception of the 
 true end of knowledge, " the glory of God and the relief 
 of man's estate." On the first head, the judgment of Mr 
 Ellis — who has contrasted Bacon's earnest religious tone 
 with that of Galileo's irony, without sufficiently consider- 
 ing that the latter was in the lion's den — seems of more 
 weight than that of Joseph de Maistre. Of Bacon's sin- 
 cerity on the latter, no reader of the ' Instauratio ' has 
 any doubt, Nor Leonardo nor Galileo had his far-rang- 
 ing view of the unity of nature and of science, or of the 
 ultimate consilience of knowledge and practical power. 
 He taught the truth expressed in the words of a modern 
 poet — 
 
 " The one becomes the whole, the whole the part, 
 When through them both what each concealed is seen," — 
 
 and pointed the way to the ideal world, where 
 
 " Men are to man transformed, and Life to Art." 
 
 Bacon lauds Parmenides and Plato for saying, "All 
 things by scale ascend to unity ; " and he goes beyond 
 them in his belief in principles that rule and constitute 
 the fabric of the world. His perception of analogies, 
 however " portentous," led him right in tracing a nexus 
 in the scheme of things. He reflects and repeats the 
 old vague efforts in the same direction, — from Heraclitus's 
 finer fire, the start and goal of the way up and down, to 
 Plato's triads ; from the speculations on phenomena and 
 noumena that ran through the period between Xeno- 
 crates and Zeno, to the metaphysical paradigms of the 
 
The Unity of Science. 247 
 
 medieval realists, physically realised in Owen's arche- 
 typal skeleton, and welcomed back in altered guise by 
 an eloquent physical expositor of our own day, who 
 Avrites in Baconian vein : " The Dryad of old poetry has 
 been recalled to life by modern science. . . . We need 
 to see that we not only enter the storehouses of fact, but 
 seek and keep the keys. . . . AYe have not to learn 
 dogmas, but to seize the clues. 
 
 Eut, with all its uncritical want of precision, Bacon's 
 own view is no mere summary : it is a real though some- 
 times shadowy premonition of the later discoveries that 
 have linked together, under the conception of "Cor- 
 relation of Forces," the polarity of Magnetism, the spark 
 of Electricity, the affinity of Chemical elements and of 
 Crystalline poles, Heat, Light, and picture - rendering 
 rays, as undulations of the universal air. Similar syn- 
 theses are embodied in Schelliug's Harmonies of 
 jSTature, and, in the comprehensive view of Hegel, 
 " Magnetism is the universal act of investing multi- 
 plicity with unity ; " but they are nowhere clad in such 
 imaginative reahty as in Bacon's extension of the world 
 by the revelation of an unseen universe, — a Fairy- 
 land of Science, in which we are " citizens of no mean 
 city." 
 
 The eras of Comte revolve, but in widening circles, 
 as the positive again merges in the religious. The Greeks 
 followed a mirage of the land they never reached. The 
 forces of JN'ature address the child in picture and in 
 myth : heaven lies about him, because his fancies do 
 not transcend the dome of blue, and he sees in the twi- 
 light the celestial gates : the stars to him are gods, and 
 make a " sphery chime." Later, " the intellectual power, 
 
248 Francis Bacon. 
 
 through words and things, pursues its dim and perilous 
 way " to the same goal, and !N'ature once more appears 
 as "the garment of divinity." The world is one — " one 
 law, one element," is the first utterance and the last, the 
 Alpha and Omega of philosophy ; but, at the close, the 
 fictitious has been exchanged for the real, when Faith, 
 Fancy, and Truth are blended in a higher Metaphysic. 
 These ideas are common to Bacon with other theorists. 
 He stands almost alone in his belief in being able to 
 make them live. He indulged in no Aristotelian Ocoipta 
 or Neo-Platonic dream, but gave himself to minister to 
 the wants of mankind at large, which he loved with a 
 piiilanthropy often inconsistent with personal devotions. 
 He revived the " games in honour of Prometheus — 
 that is, of human nature — that the victory might no 
 longer depend upon the unsteady and wavering torch of 
 each single man, but emulation and good fortune be 
 brought to aid." With him knowledge alone had no 
 satiety : in age, when " the Loves are changed into the 
 Graces," he still ran the race as in the heyday of youth, 
 never feeling the weariness of Faust, and only at times 
 the " suave mari magno." His Philosoj)hy has its con- 
 crete presentation in the ' New Atlantis ' that rises 
 from the sea, like Prospero's isle, the most practical and 
 among the most poetic of the anticipations of the Future. 
 An allegory of his fragmentary work, it is among torsos 
 the most beautiful ; and, in closing the record of his 
 varied life, we linger on the somid of the sea rippling 
 by its richly coloured shore. Its detail may be faulty ; 
 its design is prophetic ; nor in Plato or Augustine, nor 
 in More or Sidney, in Campanella or Milton, is there so 
 much sympathy with the " increasing purpose " of man's 
 
Tlie 'Nm Atlantis: 249 
 
 thought and will. Bacon never soars away from life ; 
 he realises its complexity, its temptations, and the in- 
 definite range of its aggregate power. Like Shakespeare, 
 he " puts a girdle round the world ; " and he has left a 
 name to be a perennial beacon ; for though in a sense 
 one of the " infanti perduti," he has been duly enthroned 
 among the eternal benefactors of his race. 
 
250 
 
 Francis Bacon. 
 
 I. 
 
 GREEK MEN" OF SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHERS 
 REFERRED TO BY BACON. 
 
 Thales, 
 
 Anaximenes, 
 
 Pythagoras, 
 
 Parmenides, 
 
 Heraclitus, 
 
 Leucippus, 
 
 Anaxagoras, 
 
 Deinocritus of Abdera, 
 
 Empedocles of Agrigentum 
 
 Philolaus, . 
 
 Socrates, . 
 
 Hippocrates, 
 
 Aristippus, 
 
 Plato, 
 
 Diogenes, the Cynic, 
 
 Eudoxus, . 
 
 Aristotle, . 
 
 Pyrrho, 
 
 Zeno of Citium, , 
 
 Epicurus, . 
 
 Archimedes, 
 
 Carneades of Cyrene. 
 
 Hipparchus, 
 
 Cicero, 
 
 Lucretius, . 
 
 Celsus, 
 
 Era of Seven Sages, 
 
 Eleatic School, 
 
 Atomic Theory, 
 
 Atomic Theory, 
 
 Eclectic, 
 
 Pythagorean, 
 
 Physician, 
 Cyrenaic, 
 
 Mathematician, 
 
 Sceptic, 
 Stoic, . 
 Epicurean and Atomist 
 
 New Academy, 
 
 Astronomer, 
 
 Eclectic, 
 
 Atomist and Epicurean; 
 
 Physician, 
 
 Proximate 
 Dates. 
 
 B.C. 
 
 644-548 
 
 fl. 548 
 
 fl. 531 
 
 fl; 505 
 
 fl. 505 
 
 fl. 480 
 
 500-428 
 
 fl. 450 
 
 fl. 444 
 
 c. 425 
 
 468-399 
 
 460-357 
 
 400-365 
 
 429-347 
 
 419-324 
 
 fl. 360 
 
 384-322 
 
 fl. 350 
 
 362-264 
 
 341-270 
 
 287-212 
 
 213-129 
 
 fl. 160 
 
 106-43 
 
 99-55 
 
 A.D. fl. 17 
 
Greek Men of Science, etc. 
 
 251 
 
 Names. 
 
 
 
 Troximato 
 Dates. 
 
 Philo JudjTCUs, . 
 
 . 
 
 B.C. 20- .? 
 
 Apollouius of Tyaua, . 
 
 • 
 
 B.C. 4- ? 
 A.D. 
 
 L. AnucTus Seneca, 
 
 . 
 
 3-65 
 
 Pliny, major. 
 
 , 
 
 
 23-79 
 
 Pliny, minor, 
 
 
 
 61-105 
 
 Plutarch, . 
 
 
 
 40-120 
 
 Epictetus, . 
 
 . Stoic, . 
 
 
 fl. 117-138 
 
 Ptolemy, . 
 
 . Astronomer, 
 
 
 139-161 
 
 Lucian, 
 
 . Sceptic, 
 
 
 120-200 
 
 Galen, 
 
 . Physician, 
 
 
 130-200 
 
 Sextus Empiricus, 
 
 . Sceptic, 
 
 
 fl. 225 
 
 Julian, 
 
 . 
 
 reigned 361-363 
 
 Proclus, 
 
 . 
 
 . 
 
 412-485 
 
252 
 
 Francis Bacon. 
 
 II. 
 
 LIST OF BACON'S MOST EMINENT PREDECESSORS 
 AND CONTEMPORARIES. 
 
 (Those marked with an asterisk are referred to or quoted by Bacon, 
 though not always by name.) 
 
 Names. 
 
 
 Proximate 
 Dates. 
 
 A.D. 
 
 Geber, 
 
 Alchemist, . 
 
 d. 777 
 
 Alcuin, 
 
 .... 
 
 735-804 
 
 Khalif Jaafar al Mansur, 
 
 . 
 
 754-775 
 
 J. Scotus Erigena, 
 
 . 
 
 d. 875 
 
 Albategni, . 
 
 Astronomer, . 
 
 850-925 
 
 *Rhazes, . 
 
 Chemist and Physician, 
 
 860-940 
 
 Alfarabi, . . . . 
 
 Astronomer, . 
 
 d. 950 
 
 Aboul-Wefa, 
 
 Astronomer, . 
 
 fl. 975 
 
 Gerbert (Silvester II.), 
 
 . 
 
 940-1003 
 
 *Avicenna (Ibn Sina), 
 
 Arab Aristotelian, 
 
 978-1037 
 
 Alhazen, . 
 
 Astronomer and Optician, d. 1038 
 
 Anselm, 
 
 . fl 
 
 1093-1109 
 
 Roscelin, . 
 
 . 
 
 d. 1106 
 
 Algazel, 
 
 . 
 
 1058-1111 
 
 Abelard, . 
 
 . 
 
 1079-1142 
 
 Peter Lombard, . 
 
 Schoolman, . 
 
 d. 1164 
 
 John of Salisbury, 
 
 Attacks Schoolmen, 
 
 1110-80 
 
 *Averro^s (Ibn Roschid), 
 
 Arab Aristotelian, 
 
 1120-98 
 
 Vincent of Beauvais, . 
 
 . ' Speculum Mundi,' c 
 
 1190-1264 
 
 Albertus Magnus, 
 
 Schoolman, . 
 
 1193-1280 
 
 Michael the Scot, 
 
 Physicist and Magician, 
 
 ? 1200-70 
 
 *Roger Bacon, . 
 
 Physicist, 
 
 1214-92 
 
 Alphonso of Castile, . 
 
 * Alphonsine Tables,' 
 
 1221-84 
 
 *Thomas Aquinas, 
 
 Schoolman, . 
 
 1227-74 
 
 *Duns Scotus, . 
 
 Schoolman, . 
 
 1265-1308 
 
 *Raymond Lully, 
 
 Logician and Mystic, 
 
 1235-1315 
 
 *Arnold of Villanova, . 
 
 Physician and Alchemist, 1235-1315 
 
 William Occam, . 
 
 Logician, 
 
 1300-47 
 
Bacon's Predecessors and Contemporaries. 253 
 
 Names. 
 *Pedro de Alliaco, 
 Nicholas of Cusa, 
 Lauren tius Valla, 
 *L. Costar and J. Guttenberg 
 J. Muller (Regiomoutanus), 
 Pico della Miraudola, . 
 *Marsilius Ficiuus, 
 Pietro Pomponazzi, 
 Bartholomew Glanvill, 
 
 *Columbus, 
 
 *Philippe de Comines, 
 Leonardo da Viuci, 
 *Erasmus, . 
 
 * Cornelius Agi'ippa, 
 
 *Machiavelli, 
 *Guicciardini, 
 
 * Copernicus, 
 *H. Fracastoriuis 
 ^Paracelsus, 
 *Polidore Vergil, 
 
 * George Agricola, 
 Ludovicus Vives, 
 
 *Melanchthou, . 
 
 F. Maurolycus of Messina, 
 *F. Chrysogonus, 
 
 *J. F. Feruelius, 
 
 J. Acontio, 
 
 Conrad Gesner, . 
 
 *J. Cardan, 
 
 Leonard Fuclis, . 
 
 A. Vesalius, 
 
 G. Mercator, 
 
 1435-1506 
 
 Proximate 
 Dates. 
 
 * Imago Mundi,' . . fl. 1410 
 
 Heliocentric Theory, . 1401-54 
 
 Attacks Aristotle, . 1407-57 
 
 Invention of Printing, fl. 1438-45 
 
 1436-76 
 
 1463-94 
 
 Italian Platonist, . . 1433-99 
 
 1462-1526 
 
 Properties of Things,' fl. 1478 
 
 / America discovered, 
 
 I 1492, 
 
 1445-1511 
 
 1452-1519 
 
 1467-1536 
 
 {* De incertitudine ^ 
 et vanitate scien- V 1486-1535 
 tiarum,' J 
 
 1469-1527 
 
 1482-1540 
 
 1473-1543 
 
 Physician of Verona, . 1483-1553 
 Chemist and Alchemist, 1493-1541 
 Compiler, . . c. 1470-1555 
 Metallurgist, &c., . . 1494-1555 
 Attacks Aristotle, . . 1498-1540 
 /Reformer and Aris- 
 l totelian. 
 Optician, . . . 1494-1575 
 Work on " Tides," . fl. 1527 
 
 1497-1560 
 
 I to Henry VIII. 
 
 /Ast. ana Ph,.oia„| 
 Bibliotheca Univer- ) 
 
 c. 1500-58 
 1492-1566 
 c. 1516-65 
 
 f 
 
 ( salis, 
 
 Mathematician, . 1501-76 
 
 / Botanist and reviver 1 - _ -- ^ „ 
 I of Galenism, J 
 
 First scientific Anatomist, 1514-64 
 
 Geographer, . . . 1512-94 
 
254 Francis Bacon. 
 
 
 Names. 
 
 
 Proximate 
 Dates. 
 
 *Telesio of Cosenza, . 
 
 I 1565, J 
 
 *Peter Eamus, . 
 
 Logician, 
 
 1515-72 
 
 *A. Cesalpinus, . 
 
 Botanist, 
 
 1519-1603 
 
 Levinus Lemnius, 
 
 ' ' De Miraculis ISTa- ' 
 I turse,' 
 
 fl. 1559-64 
 
 J. B. Benedetti, . 
 
 Physicist, 
 
 1530-90 
 
 *F. Patricius, 
 
 ' Nova Philosophia, ' 
 
 1529-97 
 
 G. Fabricius (Aquapendente 
 
 ), Physician, 
 
 1537-1619 
 
 *Montaigne, 
 
 . 
 
 1533-92 
 
 ^Francis Vieta, . 
 
 Mathematician, 
 
 1540-1603 
 
 *Giainbattista Porta, . 
 
 'Magna Naturalis,' c 
 
 1540-1615 
 
 *Joseph d'Acosta, 
 
 ' Voyage to the Indies, ' 
 
 1540-99 
 
 *Petrus Severinus 
 
 / ' Idea Medicinae Phi- \ 
 I losophicse,' / 
 
 1542-1602 
 
 *Tycho Brahe, . 
 
 Astronomer, . 
 
 1546-1601 
 
 * Giordano Bruno, 
 
 . 
 
 1580-1600 
 
 *Otto Casmann, . 
 
 'On Tides,' . 
 
 fl. 1596 
 
 *William Gilbert, 
 
 Magnetism, . 
 
 1540-1603 
 
 John Napier, 
 
 Logarithms (1614), 
 
 1550-1617 
 
 *T. Harriot, 
 
 Math, and Ast., . 
 
 1560-1621 
 
 *M. Ghetaldus, . 
 
 Hydrostatist, 
 
 1566-1627 
 
 *Simou Stevinus, 
 
 Math, and Mechanician, 
 
 ? -1633 
 
 *Robert Fludd, . 
 
 Physicist and Mystic, 
 
 1574-1637 
 
 Jacob Boelimen, . 
 
 Mystic, 
 
 1575-1624 
 
 *Galileo, . 
 
 Astronomer, &c., . 
 
 1564-1642 
 
 Kepler, 
 
 Astronomer, . 
 
 . 1571-1630 
 
 *T. Campanella, 
 
 Platonist, &c. 
 
 1568-1639 
 
 Van Helmont, . 
 
 Chemist, 
 
 1577-1644 
 
 William Harvey, 
 
 / Circulation of the \ 
 I blood (1619), J 
 
 1578-1656 
 
 Rene Descartes, . 
 
 
 1596-1650 
 
Chronological List of Chief J Forks. 255 
 
 III. 
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF BACON'S CHIEF WORKS. 
 
 B. =Bacon, G. =Grutcr. Impetus Philoso- 
 
 R. (l) = Rawley. First collection, phici, 1653. 
 
 1627. S.= Stephens. 1734, 
 
 R. ('2)=Rawlcy. Second collec- Sp.= Speckling, 1857. 
 
 tion, 1657. • Resuscitatio ' of Sleep- T. = Tenison. 1G79. 
 ing Pieces. 
 
 * Those to which an asterisk is appended, and other State or political 
 
 papers, were circulated, rather than published, shortly after their com- 
 position. 
 
 Titles. 
 
 Letter of Advice to Queen Elizabeth, ^t. 24, 
 Temporis Partus Maxinius, . . ^t, 25, 
 On the Controversies of the Church, ^t. 29, 
 Conference of Pleasure. Masque for Essex, 
 Praises of Fortitude, of Love, of the Queen, of 
 
 Knowledge, 
 Promua of Formularies and Elegancies, . 
 
 Observations on a Libel, 
 
 Contributions to ' Gesta Grayorum.' Speeches 
 
 of Counsellors, and suggestion of Palace of 
 
 Learning, 
 First Edition of Essays (10), with " Colours of 
 
 Good and Evil " and Meditationes Sacra, 
 Declaration of Treasons of Essex, 
 
 Confession of Faith, a7ite 
 
 Cogitationes de Rerum Natura, 
 Cogitationes de Scientia Humana, 
 De Interpretatione Naturae Procemium, 
 Discourses on the Union, . . 
 Considerations. Pacification of the Church 
 Advancement of Learning. Book I,, 
 
 Dates of 
 
 Dates of 
 
 Writing. 
 
 Publication 
 
 1584 
 
 * 
 
 1585 
 
 
 1589 
 
 * 
 
 .1593 
 
 1595 
 1593 
 
 .1594 
 
 • (?) 
 1601 
 1603 
 
 1 1600-4 I 
 
 1603-5 
 1603-4 
 1603 
 
 Sp. 1859 
 
 B. 1597 
 
 G. 1653 
 
 Sp. 1857 
 
 G. 1653 
 
 B. 1605 
 
256 
 
 Francis Bacon. 
 
 Titles. 
 
 Valerius Terminus (View of Form, as "freeing 
 
 a direction "), 
 Apology concerning the Earl of Essex, 
 Advancement of Learning. Book II. , Idola 
 1st Filum Labyrintlii. Formula Inquisitiones, 
 Delineatio et Argumentum, with first intima 
 
 tion of scheme of Instauratio Magna, 
 Cogitata et Visa, 
 
 In Felicem Memoriam Elizabethse, 
 2d Filum LabjTinthi. Inquisitio de Motu, 
 Commentarius Solutus, 
 Calor et Frigus, 
 Historia Soni et Auditus, .... post 
 Temporis Partus Masculus, 
 Redargutio Philosophiarum, 
 De Sapientia Veterum, 
 Beginning of History of Great Britain 
 1st Phenomena Universi, . 
 Descriptio Globi Intellectualis, 
 
 Thema Coeli, 
 
 Second Edition of Essays (38), . 
 
 New Atlantis (according to Gardiner), 
 
 De Fluxu et Retluxu Maris, . . . ante 
 
 De Interpretatione Naturae Sententise xii 
 
 Aphorismi et Consilia de Auxiliis Mentis, ante 
 
 First Letter of Advice to Villiers, 
 
 Second Letter of Advice to Villiers 
 
 Declaration on Sir Walter Raleigh, 
 
 Novum Organum, Descriptio Operis, and Para 
 
 sceve and Catalogues, 
 2d Phenomena Universi, or— 
 
 Historia Naturalis, dedicated to Prince 
 Charles, 
 
 Historia Ventorum, Aditus, and Fragment of 
 Abecedarium, 
 History of Henry VII. , 
 Dialogue on a Holy War, . 
 Beginning of Henry VIIL, 
 Historia Vitse et Mortis, . 
 De Augmentis, .... 
 Historia Densi et Rari. De Magnete, 
 De Luce et Lumine, .... 
 
 Dates of 
 Writing. 
 
 } 1603 (?) 
 
 1604 
 1605 
 1606-7 
 
 } 1606-7 
 
 1607 
 
 1608 
 
 1608 
 
 1608 
 
 1608 (?) 
 
 1608 
 
 1 1609 { 
 
 1609 
 1610 
 1608-20 
 
 Dates of 
 Publication. 
 
 S. 1734 
 
 B. 1605 
 S. 1734 
 
 G. 1653 
 
 G. 1653 
 
 * 
 
 G. 1653 
 
 Sp. 1859 
 S. 1734 
 R. (2) 1657 
 G. 1653 
 G. 1653 
 B. 1609 
 
 G. 1653 
 
 f G. 1653 
 
 t G. 1653 
 
 B. 1612 
 
 R. (1) 1627 
 
 G. 1653 
 
 G. 1653 
 
 G. 1653 
 
 >1612 
 
 1607-12 
 
 1614-17 
 
 1616 
 
 1610-20 
 
 1620 
 
 1616 
 
 1618 (?) 
 
 1618 
 
 1608-20 B. 1620 
 
 1622 
 
 1621-22 
 
 1622 
 
 1623 
 
 1623 
 
 1622-23 
 
 1623-24 1 
 
 B. 1622 
 T. 1679 
 
 B. 1622 
 
 B. 1623 
 
 1623 
 
 R. (2) 1657 
 
 G. 1653 
 
Cliromlofjical List of Chief Worlds. 2b7 
 
 „.,. P.-itcs of Dates of 
 
 ^'"^''- Writing, rublication. 
 
 3d Filum Labyrinthi. Scala Intellectus aiuK 
 
 Protlromi. Prefaces to Parts iv. and v. of 1 1624-25 (?) G. 1653 
 
 Instauratio, ) 
 
 De Priucipiis atque Originibus, . . post 1620 G. 1653 
 
 New Atlantis (Rawley and Speddiug), . . 1624 R (1) 1627 
 Apophthegms, new and old, and translations Kg^i g igoS 
 
 of Psalms, i 
 
 Third Edition of Essays (58), .... 1612-24 B. 1625 
 
 Sylva Sylvarum, 1624-26 R. (1)1627 
 
 Miscellanies and Historical Fragments. Prayers, |.i(;oo26 
 
 &c., I 
 
 Physiological and Medical Remains, ... T. 1679 
 
 -XIV. 
 
258 Francis Bacon. 
 
 IV. 
 SCHEME or 'IXSTAUEATIO MAG:NrA; 
 
 AND MAIN WORKS UNDER EACH HEAD. 
 
 Preliminary Matter. 
 
 "Temporis Partus Mascuhis." "De Interpretatione Ka- 
 turae Prooemium." " Delineatio et Argumentiim." " Redar- 
 gutio Pliilosophiarum." Part of " Cogitata et Visa." Pars 
 Destruens of ' Novum Organum.' Prefaces, Dedications, &c. 
 All that censures tlie Old Philosophy as being inanimate 
 like a statue, or refers to Empiricism as only careful for 
 Experiments of Fruit. 
 
 ' ' DISTRIB UTIO OPERIS." 
 
 I. Partitiones Scientiarum. — Division of the Sciences 
 and Review of Results hitherto attained. 
 
 'The Advancement of Learning' and 'De Augmentis,' 
 "Magnalia Naturae," 'De Sapientia Veterum.' Contribu- 
 tions to History. Part of " Descriptio Globi Intellectualis." 
 
 II. De Interpretatione Nature. 
 
 " Valerius Terminus." " Cogitationes de Scientia Hu- 
 mana." " Sententise XII." " Aphorismi et Consilia de Aux- 
 iliis Mentis." Part of "Cogitata et Visa." 1st "Filum 
 
Scheme of ' Listauratio Magna.' 259 
 
 Labyrinthi." ' Novum Organuin,' Book I. Suggestions of 
 Xuw ^[etliod. 'Novum Orgaimm,' Book II. 
 
 III. PHiENOMENA Universi. — An Alphabet of the Universe. 
 
 " Parasceve." " Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis." 
 Historia3 : " Ventorum," " Vita) et Mortis," " Densi et Eaii," 
 "Soni et Auditus" — with prefaces to Light and Heavy; 
 Sympathy and Antipathy ; Sulphur, Salt and Mercury — 
 " De Magnete," " De Luce et Lumine," " Calor et Frigus." 
 " Cogitationes de Rerum Natura." Part of " Descriptio 
 Globi Intellectuals" and 'Sylva Sylvarum.' 
 
 lY. ScALA Intellectus. — Examples of Results of New 
 Method. 
 
 Speculations on Heat in ' Novum Organum ' ; on Motion 
 in "Formula Inquisitionis de Motu." The 3d "Filum 
 Labyrinthi" is preface to this part. 
 
 V. " Prodromi sive Anticipationes Philosophic Sec- 
 UXDC" — Examples of Results attained by careful use of old 
 methods. 
 
 " De Fluxu et Refluxu Maris," " Thema Cceli," and parts 
 of the ' De Principiis/ 
 
 VI. Philosophia Secunda sive Scientia Activa. — 
 Reserved for "future generations" and the "royal work" 
 of the rulers of the ' New Atlantis.' 
 
 END OF bacon. 
 
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