Baconianism

“ The effect is seen in such essays as that on "Of Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates," "Of Simulation and Dissimulation," "Of Great Places," "Of Cunning," "Of Suspicion," and "Of Negotiating." With scientific detachment he notes every means, important or trifling, worthy or ignoble, by which human nature is worked on, power acquired and maintained. There was, undoubtedly, in Bacon a certain degree of moral obliquity as well as weakness. But he was humane, and by no means without ideals. Behind all his worldly ambition and crooked policies lay an ideal enthusiasm for knowledge ”

“ But the more intelligent Baconians spurn them as airily as do you or I. Our case is not so strong that the arguments of these gentlemen can be ignored; and naughty temper does but hamper us in the task of demolition. If Bacon were proved to have written Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, would mankind be robbed of one of those illusions which are necessary to its happiness and welfare? If so, we have a good excuse for browbeating the poor Baconians. ”

“ Was his fate the result of a warfare between religion and science? Let us consider the question closely. The doctrines of Bacon were condemned by the church, the true doctrines along with the false. Church dignitaries chose the Dominican friar, Albertus Magnus, as their representative rather than the Franciscan friar, Boger Bacon. We, to-day, after six centuries of struggle with ignorance, know that Bacon's system, as a whole, is wonderfully original, comprehensive, correct in method, fruitful in results. We entirely forget his errors; we are amazed at his profound intelligence. ”

“ He said of Bacon, "He writes philosophy like a Lord Chancellor." This has been generally supposed to be only a sneer at the sutor ultra crepidam; but we cannot help suspecting that there was more intended by it. To us, Bacon is eminently the philosopher of error prevented, not of progress facilitated. When we throw off the idea of being led right, and betake ourselves to that of being kept from going wrong, we read his writings with a sense of their usefulness, his genius, and their probable effect upon purely experimental science, which we can be conscious of upon no other supposition. ”

“ It is a habit of mind that distinguishes really great men, like the sounder portion of the Prehistorical Congress of Bologna, in the autumn of 1871: “There is nothing in prehistorical discoveries that is in contradiction with revelation.” Bacon has bid us all put aside the idola, and thus free our minds from prejudice. We should begin by banishing the idol of self, the reliance on our own judgment, so as to be ready at once to abandon cherished ideas, and to look on the principles of science as more or less liable to be one day, by further investigation, shown to be other than we think them. ”

“ Since Bacon has ever been esteemed as the man who directed knowledge to its true source, to experience, he is, in fact, the special leader and representative of what is in England called Philosophy, and beyond which the English have not yet advanced. For they appear to constitute that people in Europe which, limited to the understanding of actuality, is destined, like the class of shopkeepers and workmen in the State, to live always immersed in matter, and to have actuality but not reason as object. ”

“ The position popularly assigned to Bacon in the history of science is indeed one of those history lies, as the Germans so bluntly but frankly call them, which, though very generally accepted, is entirely due to a lack of knowledge of the state of education and of the progress of scientific investigation long before his time. The reason for this ignorance is the unfortunate tradition which has been so long fostered in educational circles, {287} that nothing worth while ever came out of the Nazareth of the Middle Ages, or the centuries before the so-called reformation and the Renaissance. ”

“ But this writer and Spedding have dipped deep into the well of Truth, and with her waters have washed away the mud which had been flung by the envious hands of the pigmy contemporaries over whom Francis Bacon towered, and have shown the whole figure to be sterling gold from head to foot. Even Macaulay and Pope, however, while they mistake Bacon’s moral nature, acknowledge the vastness and exquisiteness of his intellect, though again on this side they fail to appreciate fully his “infinite capacity for taking pains.” ”

“ Mre know indeed that the philosophers were no better than other men. From the testimony of friends as well as of foes, from the confessions of Epictetus and Seneca, as well as from the sneers of Lucian and the fierce invectives of Juvenal, it is plain that these teachers of virtue had all the vices of their neighbours, with the additional vice of hypocrisy. Some people may think the object of the Baconian philosophy a low object, but they cannot deny that, high or low, it has been attained. They cannot deny that every year makes an addition to what Bacon called “fruit.” ”

“ We make no allowance for the imitative talents of a tragedian, if he stands convicted of forgery, nor for the courage of a soldier, if he is accused of murder. Bacon's character can only be judged by the historian, and by a careful study of the standard of public morality in Bacon's times. And the same may be said of the position which he took with regard to religion and theology. We may explain his inclination to keep religion distinct from philosophy by taking into account the practical tendencies of all his labors. ”

“ To give to the human mind a direction which it shall retain for ages is the rare prerogative of a few imperial spirits. It cannot, therefore, be uninteresting to inquire what was the moral and intellectual constitution which enabled Bacon to exercise so vast an influence on the world.
In the temper of Bacon,—we speak of Bacon the philosopher, not of Bacon the lawyer and politician,—there was a singular union of audacity and sobriety. ”

“ So I, for one, thought little about the general tendency of orthodox writers to claim Bacon by means of the Paradoxes. I knew that, in his "Confession of Faith" [306] he is a Trinitarian of a heterodox stamp. His second Person takes human nature before he took flesh, not for redemption, but as a condition precedent of creation. "God is so holy, pure, and jealous, that it is impossible for him to be pleased in any creature, though the work of his own hands.... ”

“ The loss was a serious one to mankind, which was poorer by the discrediting of an authoritative body of thought, a possession it seems ill able to dispense with. The Baconian philosophy was an imperfect substitute; it was little more than a system of enquiry, a manual of scientific procedure, for Bacon himself was not in the philosophical sense a profound or constructive thinker, though he was one of those men of talent who can give utterance to the tendencies of an epoch. ”

“ He fell upon hard times, first the courtier of a princess whose thirst of praise and requisition of humility was unbounded, then the courtier and servant of a king who all but believed himself to be a god. The most marvellous fact of Bacon’s character is, that he who knew men so well, and whose insight into their feelings and motives was so clear, should have been so blind as to remain totally ignorant, as is apparent from all his letters and writings, of that youthful spirit of freedom which in the subsequent reign sprung into such vigorous manhood. ”

“ And it cannot be denied that the new era which Bacon heralded was fruitful in these very things,—that his philosophy encouraged this new development of material forces; but it may be questioned whether he had not something else in view than mere utility and physical progress, and whether his method could not equally be applied to metaphysical subjects; whether it did not pertain to the whole domain of truth, and take in the whole realm of human inquiry. I believe that Bacon was interested, not merely in the world of matter, but in the world of mind ”

“ Fowler's edition of the Novum Organum; and not least from M. de Rémusat's work on Bacon, which seems to me the most complete and the most just estimate both of Bacon's character and work which has yet appeared; though even in this clear and dispassionate survey we are reminded by some misconceptions, strange in M. de Rémusat, how what one nation takes for granted is incomprehensible to its neighbour; and what a gap there is still, even in matters of philosophy and literature, between the whole Continent and ourselves ”

“ In the treatise De Augmentis Scientiarum, and in the Novum Organum, we have less, no doubt, than Lord Bacon, under different conditions of life, might have achieved; he might have been more emphatically the high-priest of nature, if he had not been the chancellor of James I.; but no one man could have filled up the vast outline which he alone, in that stage of the world, could have so boldly sketched. [Pg 472]
Course of studying Lord Bacon. 41. The best order of studying the Baconian philosophy would be to read attentively the Advancement of Learning ”

“ But Bacon's horizon was not a narrow one. He believed in God and immortality and the Christian creed and hope. To him the restoration of the Reign of Man was a noble enterprise, because man was so great and belonged to so great an order of things, because the things which he was bid to search into with honesty and truthfulness were the works and laws of God, because it was so shameful and so miserable that from an ignorance which industry and good-sense could remedy, the tribes of mankind passed their days in self-imposed darkness and helplessness. ”

“ He began life with great gifts and noble ends; he was a serious, modest, and large-minded student both of books and things, and he turned his studies to full account. He had imagination and love of enterprise, which gave him an insight into Bacon's ideas such as none of Bacon's contemporaries had. He was a man of simple and earnest religion; he sympathized most with the Puritans, because they were serious and because they were hardly used. Those who most condemn him acknowledge his nobleness and generosity of nature. ”

“ Conversely, it is pleasant to revere Bacon, as we do now, and to revere Shakespeare, as we do now; but a wildest ecstasy of worship were ours could we concentrate on one of those two demigods all that reverence which now we apportion to each apart.
It is for this reason, mainly, that I wish success to the Baconians. But there is another reason, less elevated perhaps, but not less strong for me. I should like to watch the multifarious comedies which would spring from the downfall of an idol to which for three centuries a whole world had been kneeling. ”

“ Apart from the noise and stir of life, Bacon more sedulously bent his mind to the cultivation of philosophy, his true field of labour. With the exception of his Reign of Henry the Seventh, and a tract written against the match between Prince Charles and the Infanta of Spain, the five last years of his life were spent in making philosophical experiments, and in moulding his works to a more perfect form. It was his great wish that what he had written should be translated into the general language of learning, Latin ”

“ Brought up to consider philosophy as nearly allied to, if not identical with, heresy itself, many of them might perhaps be honest believers in its magical power; but we can hardly doubt that there were a few [Pg 43] more acute minds, who saw that Roger Bacon was in reality endeavouring to evoke a spirit whose influence would upset the power they had acquired over the thoughts of men, and allow them to read and reflect, without fear of excommunication, or the necessity of inquiring what Council had authorized the book. ”

“ It is characteristic of Bacon’s philosophical writings, that they have in them a spirit of movement, a perpetual reference to what man is to do in order to an end, rather than to his mere speculation upon what is. In his Essays, this is naturally still more prominent. They are, as quaintly described in the title page of the first edition, “places (loci) of persuasion and dissuasion;” counsels for those who would be great as well as wise. They are such as sprang from a mind ardent in two kinds of ambition, and hesitating whether to found a new philosophy, or to direct the vessel of the state. ”

“ Bacon, after he had added to a long and careful contemplation of almost every other object of knowledge a curious inspection into common life, and after having surveyed nature as a philosopher, had examined "men's business and bosoms" as a statesman; yet failed so much in the conduct of domestick affairs, that, in the most lucrative post to which a great and wealthy kingdom could advance him, he felt all the miseries of distressful poverty, and committed all the crimes to which poverty incites. ”

“ He disentangled and spoke the vague thoughts of his age, which other men had not the courage and clearness of mind to formulate. What Bacon did, indeed, and what he meant, are separate matters. He meant an infallible method by which man should be fully equipped for a struggle with nature ”

“ In the quaint but beautiful picture of courtesy, kindness, and wisdom, which he imagines in the New Atlantis, the representative of true philosophy, the "Father of Solomon's House," is introduced as one who "had an aspect as if he pitied men." But unless it is utilitarianism to be keenly alive to the needs and pains of life, and to be eager and busy to lighten and assuage them, Bacon's philosophy was not utilitarian. ”