Note 120 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

As regards his intellectual inconsistencies, we can but say that they are such as meet us in men’s thinking at every new turn. Though we can see that Bacon’s orthodoxy “doth protest too much,” with an eye on king and commons and public opinion, we are not led to suppose that he had ever in his heart cast off his inherited creed. He shows frequent Christian prejudice in his references to pagans; and can write that “To seek to extinguish anger utterly is but the bravery of the Stoics,”120 pretending that the Christian books are more accommodating, and ignoring the Sermon on the Mount. In arguing that the “religion of the heathen” set men upon ending “all inquisition of nature in metaphysical or theological discourse,” and in charging the Turks with a special tendency to “ascribe ordinary effects to the immediate workings of God,”121 he is playing not very scrupulously on the vanity of his co-religionists. As he was only too well aware, both tendencies ruled the Christian thought of his own day, and derive direct from the sacred books—not from “abuse,” as he pretends. And on the metaphysical as on the common-sense side of his thought he is self-contradictory, even as most men have been before and since, because judgment cannot easily fulfil the precepts it frames for itself in illuminated hours. Latter-day students have been impressed, as was Leibnitz, by the original insight with which Bacon negated the possibility of our forming any concrete conception of a primary form of matter, and insisted on its necessary transcendence of our powers of knowledge.122 On the same principle he should have negated every modal conception of the still more recondite Something which he put as antecedent to matter, and called God.123 Yet in his normal thinking he seems to have been content with the commonplace formula given in his essay on Atheism—that we cannot suppose the totality of things to be “without a mind.” He has here endorsed in its essentials what he elsewhere calls “the heresy of the Anthropomorphites,”124 failing to apply his own law in his philosophy, as elsewhere in his physics. When, however, we realize that similar inconsistency is fallen into after him by Spinoza, and wholly escaped perhaps by no thinker, we are in a way to understand that with all his deflections from his own higher law Bacon may have profoundly and fruitfully influenced the thought of the next generation, if not that of his own.