Chapter XX

HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY FROM 1600 TO 1650.

Sect. I.

Aristotelian Logic—Campanella—Theosophists—Lord Herbert of Cherbury—Gassendi’s Remarks upon him.

Subjects of this chapter. 1. In the two preceding volumes, we have had occasion to excuse the heterogeneous character of the chapters that bear this title. The present is fully as much open to verbal criticism; and perhaps it is rather by excluding both moral and mathematical philosophy, that we give it some sort of unity, than from any close connexion in all the books that will come under our notice in the ensuing pages. But any tabular arrangement of literature, such as has often been attempted with no very satisfactory result, would be absolutely inappropriate to such a work as the present, which has already to labour with the inconvenience of more subdivisions than can be pleasing to the reader, and would interfere too continually with that general regard to chronology, without which the name of history seems incongruous. Hence the metaphysical inquiries that are conversant with the human mind, or with natural theology, the general principles of investigating truth, the comprehensive speculations of theoretical physics, subjects very distinct and not easily confounded by the most thoughtless, must fall, with no more special distribution, within the contents of this chapter. But since during the period which it embraces, men arose, who have laid the foundations of a new philosophy, and thus have rendered it a great epoch in the intellectual history of mankind, we shall not very strictly, though without much deviation, follow a chronological order, and after reviewing some of the less important labourers in speculative philosophy, come to the names of three who have most influenced posterity—Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes.

Aristotelians and Ramists. 2. We have seen in a former chapter how little progress had been made in this kind of philosophy during the sixteenth century. At its close the schools of logic were divided, though by no means in equal proportion, between the Aristotelians and the Ramists; the one sustained by ancient renown, by civil, or at least academical power, and by the common prejudice against innovation; the other deriving some strength from the love of novelty, and the prejudice against established authority, which the first age of the reformation had generated, and which continued, perhaps, to preserve a certain influence in the second. But neither from one nor the other had philosophy, whether in material or intellectual physics, much to hope; the disputations of the schools might be technically correct; but so little regard was paid to objective truth, or at least so little pains taken to ascertain it, that no advance in real knowledge signalised either of these parties of dialecticians. According, indeed, to a writer of this age, strongly attached to the Aristotelian party, Ramus had turned all physical science into the domain of logic, and argued from words to things still more than his opponents.[141] Lord Bacon, in the bitterest language, casts on him a similar reproach.[142] It seems that he caused this branch of philosophy to retrograde rather than advance.

No improvement till near the end of the century. 3. It was obvious at all events, that from the universities, or from the church, in any country, no improvement in philosophy was to be expected; yet those who had strayed from the beaten track, a Paracelsus, a Jordan Bruno, even a Telesio, had but lost themselves in irregular mysticism, or laid down theories of their own, as arbitrary and destitute of proof as those they endeavoured to supersede. The ancient philosophers, and especially Aristotle, were, with all their errors and defects, far more genuine high-priests of nature than any moderns of the sixteenth century. But there was a better prospect at its close, in separate though very important branches of physical science. Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, were laying the basis of a true philosophy; and they, who do not properly belong to this chapter, laboured very effectually to put an end to all antiquated errors, and to check the reception of novel paradoxes.

Methods of the Universities. 4. We may cast a glance, meantime, on those universities which still were so wise in their own conceit, and maintained a kind of reputation by the multitude of their disciples. Whatever has been said of the scholastic metaphysicians of the sixteenth century, may be understood as being applicable to their successors during the present period. That method was by no means extinct, though the books which contain it are forgotten. In all that part of Europe which acknowledged the authority of Rome, and in all the universities which were swayed by the orders of Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits, the metaphysics of the thirteenth century, the dialectics of the Peripatetic school, were still taught. If new books were written, as was frequently the case, they were written upon old systems. Brucker, who sometimes transcribes Morhof word for word, but frequently expands with so much more copiousness, that he may be presumed to have had a direct acquaintance with many of the books he mentions, has gone most elaborately into this subject.[143] The chairs of philosophy in Protestant German universities, except where the Ramists had got possession of them, which was not very common, especially after the first years of this period, were occupied by avowed Aristotelians; so that if one should enumerate the professors of physics, metaphysics, logic, and ethics, down to the close of the century, he would be almost giving a list of strenuous adherents to that system.[144] One cause of this was the “Philippic method,” or course of instruction in the philosophical books of Melanchthon, more clear and elegant, and better arranged than that of Aristotle himself or his commentators. But this, which long continued to prevail, was deemed by some too superficial, and tending to set aside the original authority. Brucker however admits, what seems at least to limit some of his expressions as to the prevalence of Peripateticism, that many reverted to the scholastic metaphysics, which raised its head about the beginning of the seventeenth century, even in the protestant regions of Germany. The universities of Altdorf and Helmstadt were the chief nurseries of the genuine Peripateticism.[145]

Scholastic Writers. 5. Of the metaphysical writers whom the older philosophy brought forth we must speak with much ignorance. Suarez of Granada is justly celebrated for some of his other works; but of his Metaphysical Disputations, published at Mentz, in 1614, in two folio volumes, and several times afterwards, I find no distinct character in Morhof or Brucker. They both, especially the former, have praised Lalemandet, a Franciscan, whose Decisiones Philosophicæ, on logic, physics, and metaphysics, appeared at Munich, in 1644 and 1645. Lalemandet, says Morhof, has well stated the questions between the Nominalist and Realist parties; observing that the difference between them is like that of a man who casts up a sum of money by figures, and one who counts the coins themselves.[146] This, however, seems no very happy illustration of the essential points of controversy. Vasquez, Tellez, and several more names, without going for the present below the middle of the century, may be found in the two writers quoted. Spain was peculiarly the nurse of these obsolete and unprofitable metaphysics.

6. The Aristotelian philosophy, unadulterated by the figments of the schoolmen, had eminent upholders in the Italian universities, especially in that of Padua. Cæsar Cremonini taught in that famous city till his death in 1630. Fortunio Liceto, his successor, was as staunch a disciple of the Peripatetic sect. We have a more full account of these men from Gabriel Naudé, both in his recorded conversation, the Naudæana, and in a volume of letters, than from any other quarter. His twelfth letter, especially, enters into some detail as to the state of the university of Padua, to which, for the purpose of hearing Cremonini, he had repaired in 1625. He does not much extol its condition; only Cremonini and one more were deemed by him safe teachers: the rest were mostly of a common class; the lectures were too few, and the vacations too long. He observes, as one might at this day, the scanty population of the city compared with its size, the grass growing and the birds singing in the streets, and, what we should not find now to be the case, the “general custom of Italy, which keeps women perpetually locked up in their chambers, like birds in cages.”[147] Naudé in many of these letters speaks in the most panegyrical terms of Cremonini,[148] and particularly for his standing up almost alone in defence of the Aristotelian philosophy, when Telesio, Patrizi, Bruno, and others had been propounding theories of their own. Licetus, the successor of Cremonini, maintained, he afterwards informs us, with little support the Peripatetic verity. It is probable that, by this time, Galileo, a more powerful adversary than Patrizi and Telesio, had drawn away the students of physical philosophy from Aristotle; nor did Naudé himself long continue in the faith he had imbibed from Cremonini. He became the intimate friend of Gassendi, and embraced a better system without repugnance, though he still kept up his correspondence with Licetus.

Treatises on logic. 7. Logic had never been more studied, according to a writer who has given a sort of history of the science about the beginning of this period, than in the preceding age; and in fact he enumerates above fifty treatises on the subject, between the time of Ramus and his own.[149] The Ramists, though of little importance in Italy, in Spain, and even in France, had much influence in Germany, England, and Scotland.[150] None however of the logical works of the sixteenth century obtained such reputation as those by Smiglecius, Burgersdicius, and our countryman Crakanthorp, all of whom flourished, if we may use such a word for those who bore no flowers, in the earlier part of the next age. As these men were famous in their generation, we may presume that they at least wrote better than their predecessors. But it is time to leave so jejune a subject, though we may not yet be able to produce what is much more valuable.

Campanella. 8. The first name, in an opposite class, that we find in descending from the sixteenth century, is that of Thomas Campanella, whose earliest writings belong to it. His philosophy being wholly dogmatical, must be classed with that of the paradoxical innovators whom he followed and eclipsed. Campanella, a Dominican friar, and like his master Telesio, a native of Cosenza, having been accused, it is uncertain how far with truth, of a conspiracy against the Spanish government of his country, underwent an imprisonment of twenty-seven years; during which almost all his philosophical treatises were composed and given to the world. Ardent and rapid in his mind, and, as has just been seen, not destitute of leisure, he wrote on logic, physics, metaphysics, morals, politics, and grammar. Upon all these subjects his aim seems to have been to recede as far as possible from Aristotle. He had early begun to distrust this guide, and had formed a noble resolution to study all schemes of philosophy, comparing them with their archetype, the world itself, that he might distinguish how much exactness was to be found in those several copies, as they ought to be, from one autograph of nature.[151]

His theory taken from Telesio. 9. Campanella borrowed his primary theorems from Telesio, but enlarged that Parmenidean philosophy by the invention of his own fertile and imaginative genius. He lays down the fundamental principle, that the perfectly wise and good Being has created certain signs and types (statuas atque imagines) of himself, all of which, severally as well as collectively, represent power, wisdom, and love, and the objects of these namely, existence, truth, and excellence, with more or less evidence. God first created space, the basis of existence, the primal substance, an immovable and incorporeal capacity of receiving body. Next he created matter without form or figure. In this corporeal mass God called to being two workmen, incorporeal themselves, but incapable of subsisting apart from body, the organs of no physical forms, but of their maker alone. These are heat and cold, the active principles diffused through all things. They were enemies from the beginning, each striving to occupy all material substances itself; each, therefore, always contending with the other, while God foresaw the great good that their discord would produce.[152] The heavens, he says in another passage, were formed by heat out of attenuated matter, the earth by cold out of condensed matter; the sun, being a body of heat, as he rolls round the earth, attacks the colder substance, and converts part of it into air and vapour.[153] This last part of his theory Campanella must have afterwards changed in words, when he embraced the Copernican system.

Notion of universal sensibility. 10. He united to this physical theory another not wholly original, but enforced in all his writings with singular confidence and pertinacity, the sensibility of all created beings. All things, he says, feel; else would the world be a chaos. For neither would fire tend upwards, nor stones downwards, nor waters to the sea; but everything would remain where it was, were it not conscious that destruction awaits it by remaining amidst that which is contrary to itself, and that it can only be preserved by seeking that which is of a similar nature. Contrariety is necessary for the decay and reproduction of nature; but all things strive against their contraries, which they could not do, if they did not perceive what is their contrary.[154] God, who is primal power, wisdom, and love, has bestowed on all things the power of existence, and so much wisdom and love as is necessary for their conversation during that time only for which his providence has determined that they shall be. Heat, therefore, has power, and sense, and desire of its own being; so have all other things seeking to be eternal like God, and in God they are eternal, for nothing dies before him, but is only changed.[155] Even to the world, as a sentient being, the death of its parts is no evil, since the death of one is the birth of many. Bread that is swallowed dies to revive as blood, and blood dies, that it may live again in our flesh and bones; and thus as the life of man is compounded out of the deaths and lives of all his parts, so is it with the whole universe.[156] God said, Let all things feel, some more, some less, as they have more or less necessity to imitate my being. And let them desire to live in that which they understand to be good for them, lest my creation should come to nought.[157]

His imagination and eloquence. 11. The strength of Campanella’s genius lay in his imagination, which raises him sometimes to flights of impressive eloquence on this favourite theme. The sky and stars are endowed with the keenest sensibility; nor is it unreasonable to suppose that they signify their mutual thoughts to each other by the transference of light, and that their sensibility is full of pleasure. The blessed spirits that inform such living and bright mansions behold all things in nature and in the divine ideas; they have also a more glorious light than their own, through which they are elevated to a supernatural beatific vision.[158] We can hardly read this, without recollecting the most sublime passage, perhaps, in Shakspeare:—

12. The world is full of living spirits, he proceeds; and when the soul shall be delivered from this dark cavern, we shall behold their subtle essences. But now we cannot discern the forms of the air, and the winds as they rush by us; much less the angels and dæmons who people them. Miserable as we are, we recognise no other sensation than that which we observe in animals and plants, slow and half extinguished, and buried under a weight that oppresses it. We will not understand that all our actions and appetites and motions and powers flow from heaven. Look at the manner in which light is diffused over the earth, penetrating every part of it with endless variety of operation, which we must believe that it does not perform without exquisite pleasure.[160] And hence there is no vacuum in nature, except by violent means; since all bodies delight in mutual contact, and the world no more desires to be rent in its parts than an animal.

Infelices qui sensum alium nullum agnoscimus, nisi obtusum animalium plantarumque, tardum, demortuum aggravatum; sepultum: nec quidem intelligere volumus omnem actionem nostram et appetitum et sensum et motum et vim a cœlo manare. Ecce lux quanto acutissimo expanditur sensu super terram, quo multiplicatur, generatur, amplificatur, idque non sine magna efficere voluptate existimanda est, l. iii. c. 5.

Campanella used to hear, as he tells us, whenever any evil was impending, a voice calling him by his name, sometimes with other words; he doubted whether this were his proper Dæmon, or the air itself speaking. It is not wonderful that his imagination was affected by length of confinement.

13. It is almost a descent in Campanella from these visions of the separate sensibility of nature in each particle, when he seizes hold of some physical fact or analogy to establish a subordinate and less paradoxical part of his theory. He was much pleased with Gilbert’s treatise on the magnet, and thought it of course a proof of the animation of the earth. The world is an animal, he says, sentient as a whole, and enjoying life in all its parts.[161] It is not surprising that he ascribes intelligence to plants; but he here remarks that we find the male and female sexes in them, and that the latter cannot fructify without the former. This is manifest in siliquose plants and in palms (which on this account he calls in another place the wiser plants, plantæ sapientiores), in which the two kinds incline towards each other for the purpose of fructification.[162]

His works published by Adami. 14. Campanella, when he uttered from his Neapolitan prison these dulcet sounds of fantasy, had the advantage of finding a pious disciple who spread them over other parts of Europe. This was Tobias Adami, initiated, as he tells us, in the same mysteries as himself (nostræ philosophiæ symmysta), who dedicated to the philosophers of Germany his own Prodromus Philosophiæ Instauratio, prefixed to his edition of Campanella’s Compendium de Rerum Natura, published at Frankfort in 1617. Most of the other writings of the master seem to have preceded this edition; for Adami enumerates them in his Prodromus. Campanella did not fully obtain his liberty till 1629, and died some years afterwards in France, where he had experienced the kindness of Peiresc, and the patronage of Richelieu. His philosophy made no very deep impression; it was too fanciful, too arbitrary, too much tinctured with marks of an imagination rendered morbid by solitude, to gain many proselytes in an age that was advancing in severe science. Gassendi, whose good nature led him to receive Campanella, oppressed by poverty and ill usage, with every courteous attention, was of all men the last to be seduced by his theories. No one, probably, since Campanella, aspiring to be reckoned among philosophers, has ventured to assert so much on matters of high speculative importance and to prove so little. Yet he seems worthy of the notice we have taken of him, if it were only as the last of the mere dogmatists in philosophy. He is doubtless much superior to Jordano Bruno, and I should presume, except in mathematics, to Cardan.[163]

Basson. 15. A less important adversary of the established theory in physics was Sebastian Basson, in his “Philosophiæ Naturalis adversus Aristotelem libri XII., in quibus abstrusa veterum physiologia restauratur, et Aristotelis errores solidis rationibus refelluntur. Genevæ, 1621.” This book shows great animosity against Aristotle, to whom, as Lord Bacon has himself insinuated, he allows only the credit of having preserved fragments of the older philosophers, like pearls in mud. It is difficult to give an account of this long work. In some places we perceive signs of a just philosophy; but in general his explanations of physical phænomena seem as bad as those of his opponents, and he displays no acquaintance with the writings and the discoveries of his great contemporaries. We find also some geometrical paradoxes; and in treating of astronomy he writes as if he had never heard of the Copernican system.

Berigard. 16. Claude Berigard, born at Moulins, became professor of natural philosophy at Pisa and Padua. In his Circuli Pisani, published in 1643, he attempted to revive, as it is commonly said, the Ionic or corpuscular philosophy of Anaxagoras, in opposition to the Aristotelian. The book is rare; but Brucker, who had seen it, seems to have satisfactorily repelled the charge of atheism, brought by some against Berigard.[164]

Magnen. Another Frenchman domiciled in Italy, Magnen, trod nearly the same path as Berigard, professing, however, to follow the modification of the corpuscular theory introduced by Democritus.[165] It seems to be observable as to these writers, Basson and the others, that, coming with no sufficient knowledge of what had recently been discovered in mathematical and experimental science, and following the bad methods of the universities, even when they deviated from their usual doctrines, dogmatizing and asserting when they should have proved, arguing synthetically from axioms, and never ascending from particular facts, they could do little good to philosophy, except by contributing, so far as they might be said to have had any influence, to shake the authority of Aristotle.

Paracelsists. 17. This authority, which at least required but the deference of modest reason to one of the greatest of mankind, was ill exchanged, in any part of science, for the unintelligible dreams of the school of Paracelsus, which had many disciples in Germany, and a very few in England. Germany indeed has been the native soil of mysticism in Europe. The tendency to reflex observation of the mind, characteristic of that people, has exempted them from much gross error, and given them insight into many depths of truth, but at the expense of some confusion, some liability to self-deceit, and to some want of strictness in metaphysical reasoning. It was accompanied by a profound sense of the presence of Deity; yet one which, acting on their thoughtful spirits, became rather an impression than an intellectual act, and settled into a mysterious indefinite theopathy, when it did not even evaporate in pantheism.

And Theosophists. 18. The founder, perhaps, of this sect was Tauler of Strasburg, in the fourteenth century, whose sermons in the native language, which, however, are supposed to have been translated from Latin, are full of what many have called by the vague word mysticism, an intense aspiration for the union of the soul with God. An anonymous work generally entitled The German Theology, written in the fifteenth century, pursues the same track of devotional thought. It was a favourite book with Luther, and was translated into Latin by Castalio.[166] These indeed are to be considered chiefly as theological; but the study of them led readily to a state of mental emotion, wherein a dogmatic pseudo-philosophy, like that of Paracelsus, abounding with assertions that imposed on the imagination, and appealing frequently both to scriptural authority and the evidence of inward light, was sure to be favourably received. The mystics, therefore, and the theosophists belonged to the same class, and it is not uncommon to use the names indifferently.

Fludd. 19. It may appear not here required to dwell on a subject scarcely falling under any province of literary history, but two writers within this period have been sufficiently distinguished to deserve mention. One of these was Robert Fludd, an English physician, who died in 1637; a man of indefatigable diligence in collecting the dreams and follies of past ages, blending them in a portentous combination with new fancies of his own. The Rabbinical and Cabbalistic authors, as well as the Paracelsists, the writers on magic, and whatever was most worthy to be rejected and forgotten, form the basis of his creed. Among his numerous works the most known was his “Mosaic Philosophy,” in which, like many before his time as well as since, he endeavoured to build a scheme of physical philosophy on the first chapters in Genesis. I do not know whether he found there his two grand principles or forces of nature: a northern force of condensation, and a southern force of dilatation. These seem to be the Parmenidean cold and heat, expressed in a jargon affected in order to make dupes. In peopling the universe with dæmons, and in ascribing all phænomena to their invisible agency, he pursued the steps of Agrippa and Paracelsus, or rather of the whole school of fanatics and impostors called magical. He took also from older writers the doctrine of a constant analogy between universal nature, or the macrocosm, and that of man, or the microcosm; so that what was known in one might lead us to what was unknown in the other.[167] Fludd possessed, however, some acquaintance with science, especially in chemistry and mechanics; and his rhapsodies were so far from being universally contemned in his own age, that Gassendi thought it not unworthy of him to enter into a prolix confutation of the Fluddian philosophy.[168]

Jacob Behmen. 20. Jacob Behmen, or rather Boehm, a shoemaker of Gorlitz, is far more generally familiar to our ears than his contemporary Fludd. He was, however, much inferior to him in reading, and in fact seems to have read little but the Bible and the writings of Paracelsus. He recounts the visions and ecstasies during which a supernatural illumination had been conveyed to him. It came indeed without the gift of transferring the light to others; for scarce any have been able to pierce the clouds in which his meaning has been charitably presumed to lie hid. The chief work of Behmen is his Aurora, written about 1612, and containing a record of the visions wherein the mysteries of nature were revealed to him. It was not published till 1641. He is said to have been a man of great goodness of heart, which his writings display; but, in literature, this cannot give a sanction to the incoherencies of madness. His language, as far as I have seen any extracts from his works, is coloured with the phraseology of the alchemists and astrologers; as for his philosophy, so to style it, we find according to Brucker, who has taken some pains with the subject, manifest traces of the system of emanation, so ancient and so attractive; and from this and several other reasons, he is inclined to think the unlearned shoemaker of Gorlitz must have had assistance from men of more education in developing his visions.[169] But the emanative theory is one into which a mind absorbed in contemplation may very naturally fall. Behmen had his disciples, which such enthusiasts rarely want; and his name is sufficiently known to justify the mention of it even in philosophical history.

Lord Herbert De Veritate 21. We come now to an English writer of a different class, little known as such at present, but who, without doing much for the advancement of metaphysical philosophy, had at least the merit of devoting to it with a sincere and independent spirit the leisure of high rank, and of a life not obscure in the world—Lord Herbert of Cherbury. The principal work of this remarkable man is his Latin treatise, published in 1624, “On truth as it is distinguished from Revelation, from Probability, from Possibility, and from Falsehood.” Its object is to inquire what are the sure means of discerning and discovering truth. This, as, like other authors, he sets out by proclaiming, had been hitherto done by no one, and he treats both ancient and modern philosophers rather haughtily, as being men tied to particular opinions, from which they dare not depart. “It is not from an hypocritical or mercenary writer, that we are to look for perfect truth. Their interest is not to lay aside their mask, or think for themselves. A liberal and independent author alone will do this.” [170] So general an invective, after Lord Bacon, and indeed after others, like Campanella, who could not be charged with following any conceits rather than their own, bespeaks either ignorance of philosophical literature, or a supercilious neglect of it.

His axioms. 22. Lord Herbert lays down seven primary axioms. 1. Truth exists: 2. It is coeval with the things to which it relates: 3. It exists everywhere: 4. It is self-evident:[171] 5. There are as many truths, as there are differences in things: 6. These differences are made known to us by our natural faculties: 7. There is a truth belonging to these truths; “Est veritas quædam harum veritatum.” This axiom he explains as obscurely, as it is strangely expressed. All truth he then distinguishes into the truth of the thing or object, the truth of the appearance, the truth of the perception, and the truth of the understanding. The truth of the object is the inherent conformity of the object with itself, or that which makes everything what it is.[172] The truth of appearance is the conditional conformity of the appearance with the object. The truth of perception is the conditional conformity of our senses (facultates nostras prodromas) with the appearances of things. The truth of understanding is the due conformity between the aforesaid conformities. All truth, therefore, is conformity, all conformity relation. Three things are to be observed in every inquiry after truth; the thing or object, the sense or faculty, and the laws or conditions by which its conformity or relation is determined. Lord Herbert is so obscure, partly by not thoroughly grasping his subject, partly by writing in Latin, partly perhaps by the “sphalmata et errata in typographo, quædam fortasse in seipso,” of which he complains at the end, that it has been necessary to omit several sentences as unintelligible, though what I have just given is far enough from being too clear.

Conditions of truth. 23. Truth, he goes on to say, exists as to the object, or outward thing itself, when our faculties are capable of determining everything concerning it; but though this definition is exact, it is doubtful whether any such truth exists in nature. The first condition of discerning truth in things, is that they should have a relation to ourselves; (ut intra nostram stet analogiam) since multitudes of things may exist which the senses cannot discover. The three chief conditions of this condition seem to be: 1. That it should be of a proper size, neither immense, nor too small; 2. That it should have its determining difference, or principle of individuation, to distinguish it from other things; 3. That it should be accommodated to some sense or perceptive faculty. These are the universally necessary conditions of truth (that is of knowledge) as it regards the object. The truth of appearance depends on others, which are more particular; as that the object should be perceived for a sufficient time, through a proper medium, at a due distance, in a proper situation.[173] Truth of perception is conditional also, and its conditions are, that the sense should be sound, and the attention directed towards it. Truth of understanding depends on the κοιναι εννοιαι, the common notions possessed by every man of sane mind, and implanted by nature. The understanding teaches us by means of these, that infinity and eternity exist, though our senses cannot perceive them. The understanding deals also with universals, and truth is known as to universals, when the particulars are rightly apprehended.

Instinctive truths. 24. Our faculties are as numerous as the differences of things; and thus it is, that the world corresponds by perfect analogy to the human soul, degrees of perception being as much distinct from one another as different modes of it. All our powers may however be reduced to four heads; natural instinct, internal perception, external sensation, and reason. What is not known by one of these four means cannot be known at all. Instinctive truths are proved by universal consent. Here he comes to his general basis of religion, maintaining the existence of κοιναι εννοιαι or common notions of mankind, on that subject, principles against which no one can dispute, without violating the laws of his nature.[174] Natural instinct he defines to be an act of those faculties existing in every man of sane mind, by which the common notions as to the relations of things not perceived by the senses, (rerum internarum) and especially such as tend to the conversation of the individual, of the species, and of the whole, are formed without any process of reasoning. These common notions, though excited in us by the objects of sense, are not conveyed to us by them; they are implanted in us by nature, so that God seems to have imparted to us not only a part of his image, but of his wisdom.[175] And whatever is understood and perceived by all men alike deserves to be accounted one of these notions. Some of them are instinctive, others are deduced from such as are. The former are distinguishable by six marks; priority, independence, universality, certainty; so that no man can doubt them without putting off as it were his nature, necessity, that is, usefulness for the preservation of man; lastly, intuitive apprehension, for these common notions do not require to be inferred.[176]

Internal perceptions. 25. Internal perceptions denote the conformity of objects with those faculties existing in every man of sane mind, which, being developed by his natural instinct, are conversant with the internal relations of things, in a secondary and particular manner, and by means of natural instinct.[177] By this ill-worded definition he probably intends to distinguish the general power, or instinctive knowledge, from its exercise and application in any instance. But I have found it very difficult to follow Lord Herbert. It is by means, he says, of these internal senses that we discern the nature of things in their intrinsic relations, or hidden types of being.[178] And it is necessary well to distinguish the conforming faculty in the mind or internal perception, from the bodily sense. The cloudiness of his expression increases as we proceed, and in many pages I cannot venture to translate or abridge it. The injudicious use of a language in which he did not write with facility, and which is not very well adapted, at the best, to metaphysical disquisition, has doubtless increased the perplexity into which he has thrown his readers.

Five natural notions of natural religion. 26. In the conclusion of this treatise, Herbert lays down the five common notions of natural religion, implanted, as he conceives, in the breasts of all mankind. 1. That there is a God; 2. That he ought to be worshipped; 3. That virtue and piety are the chief parts of worship; 4. That we are to repent and turn from our sins; 5. That they are rewards and punishments in another life.[179] Nothing can be admitted in religion which contradicts these primary notions; but if any one has a revelation from heaven in addition to these, which may happen to him sleeping or waking, he should keep it to himself, since nothing can be of importance to the human race, which is not established by the evidence of their common faculties. Nor can anything be known to be revealed, which is not revealed to ourselves; all else being tradition and historic testimony, which does not amount to knowledge. The specific difference of man from other animals he makes not reason, but the capacity of religion. It is a curious coincidence, that John Wesley has said something of the same kind.[180] It is also remarkable that we find in another work of Lord Herbert, De Religione Gentilium, which dwells again on his five articles of natural religion, essential, as he expressly lays it down, to salvation, the same illustration of the being of a Deity from the analogy of a watch or clock, which Paley has since employed. I believe that it occurs in an intermediate writer.[181]

Remarks of Gassendi on Herbert. 27. Lord Herbert sent a copy of his treatise De Veritate several years after its publication to Gassendi. We have a letter to the noble author in the third volume of the works of that philosopher, showing, in the candid and sincere spirit natural to him, the objections that struck his mind in reading the book.[182] Gassendi observes that the distinctions of four kinds of truth are not new; the veritas rei of Lord Herbert being what is usually called substance, his veritas apparentiæ no more than accident, and the other two being only sense and reason. Gassendi seems not wholly to approve, but gives us the best, a definition of truth little differing from Herbert’s, the agreement of the cognizant intellect with the thing known: “Intellectûs cognoscentis cum re cognita congruentia.” The obscurity of the treatise De Veritate could ill suit an understanding like that of Gassendi, always tending to acquire clear conceptions; and though he writes with great civility, it is not without smartly opposing what he does not approve. The aim of Lord Herbert’s work, he says, is that the intellect may pierce into the nature of things, knowing them as they are in themselves without the fallacies of appearance and sense. But for himself he confesses that such knowledge he has always found above him, and that he is in darkness when he attempts to investigate the real nature of the least thing; making many of the observations on this which we read also in Locke. And he well says that we have enough for our use in the accidents or appearances of things without knowing their substances, in reply to Herbert, who had declared that we should be miserably deficient, if, while nature has given us senses to discern sounds and colours and such fleeting qualities of things, we had no sure road to eternal, and necessary truths.[183] The universality of those innate principles, especially moral and religious, on which his correspondent had built so much, is doubted by Gassendi on the usual grounds, that many have denied, or been ignorant of them. The letter is imperfect, some sheets of the autograph having been lost.

28. Too much space may seem to have been bestowed on a writer who cannot be ranked high among metaphysicians. But Lord Herbert was not only a distinguished name, but may claim the precedence among those philosophers in England. If his treatise De Veritate is not as an entire work very successful, or founded always upon principles which have stood the test of severe reflection, it is still a monument of an original, independent thinker, without rhapsodies of imagination, without pedantic technicalities, and above all, bearing witness to a sincere love of the truth he sought to apprehend. The ambitious expectation that the real essences of things might be discovered, if it were truly his, as Gassendi seems to suppose, could not be warranted by anything, at least within the knowledge of that age. But from some expressions of Herbert I should infer that he did not think our faculties competent to solve the whole problem of quiddity, as the logicians called it, or the real nature of anything, at least, objectively without us.[184] He is indeed so obscure, that I will not vouch for his entire consistency. It has been an additional motive to say as much as I have done concerning Lord Herbert, that I know not where any account of his treatise De Veritate will be found. Brucker is strangely silent about this writer, and Buhle has merely adverted to the letter of Gassendi. Descartes has spoken of Lord Herbert’s book with much respect, though several of their leading principles were far from the same. It was translated into French in 1639, and this translation he found less difficult than the original.[185]

Gassendi’s defence of Epicurus. 29. Gassendi himself ought, perhaps, to be counted wholly among the philosophers of this period, since many of his writings were published, and all may have been completed within it. They are contained in six large folio volumes, rather closely printed. The Exercitationes Paradoxicæ, published in 1624, are the earliest. These contain an attack on the logic of Aristotle, the fortress that so many bold spirits were eager to assail. But in more advanced life Gassendi withdrew in great measure from this warfare, and his Logic, in the Syntagma Philosophicum, the record of his latest opinions, is chiefly modelled on the Aristotelian, with sufficient commendation of its author. In the study of ancient philosophy, however, Gassendi was impressed with an admiration of Epicurus. His physical theory, founded on corpuscles and a vacuum, his ethics, in their principle and precepts, his rules of logic and guidance of the intellect, seemed to the cool and independent mind of the French philosopher more worthy of regard than the opposite schemes prevailing in the schools, and not to be rejected on account of any discredit attached to the name. Combining with the Epicurean physics and ethics the religious element which had been unnecessarily discarded from the philosophy of the Garden, Gassendi displayed both in a form no longer obnoxious. The Syntagma Philosophiæ Epicuri, published in 1649, is an elaborate vindication of this system, which he had previously expounded in a commentary on the tenth book of Diogenes Laertius. He had already effaced the prejudices against Epicurus himself, whom he seems to have regarded with the affection of a disciple, in a biographical treatise on his life and moral character.

His chief works after 1650. 30. Gassendi died in 1656; the Syntagma Philosophicum, his greatest as well as last work, in which it is natural to seek the whole scheme of his philosophy, was published by his friend Sorbière in 1658. We may, therefore, properly defer the consideration of his metaphysical writings to the next period: but the controversy in which he was involved with Descartes will render it necessary to bring his name forward again before the close of this chapter.

Sect. II.

On the Philosophy of Lord Bacon.

Preparation for the philosophy of. 31. It may be judged from what has been said in a former volume, as well as in our last pages, that at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the higher philosophy which is concerned with general truth, and the means of knowing it, had been little benefitted by the labours of any modern inquirer. It was become indeed no strange thing, at least out of the air of a college, to question the authority of Aristotle; but his disciples pointed with scorn at the endeavours which had as yet been made to supplant it, and asked whether the wisdom so long reverenced was to be set aside for the fanatical reveries of Paracelsus, the unintelligible chimæras of Bruno, or the more plausible, but arbitrary, hypotheses of Telesio.

Lord Bacon. 32. Francis Bacon was born in 1561.[186] He came to years of manhood at the time when England was rapidly emerging from ignorance and obsolete methods of study, in an age of powerful minds, full himself of ambition, confidence and energy. If we think on the public history of Bacon, even during the least public portion of it, philosophy must appear to have been but his amusement; it was by his hours of leisure, by time hardly missed from the laborious study and practice of the law and from the assiduities of a courtier’s life, that he became the father of modern science. This union of an active with a reflecting life had been the boast of some ancients, of Cicero and Antonine; but what comparison, in depth and originality, between their philosophy and that of Bacon?

His plan of philosophy. 33. This wonderful man, in sweeping round the champaign of universal science with his powerful genius, found as little to praise in the recent, as in the ancient methods of investigating truth. He liked as little the empirical presumption of drawing conclusions from a partial experience as the sophistical dogmatism which relied on unwarranted axioms and verbal chicane. All, he thought, was to be constructed anew; the investigation of facts, their arrangement for the purposes of inquiry, the process of eliciting from them the required truth. And for this he saw, that, above all, a thorough purgation of the mind itself would be necessary, by pointing out its familiar errors, their sources, and their remedies.

Time of its conception. 34. It is not exactly known at what age Bacon first conceived the scheme of a comprehensive philosophy, but it was, by his own account, very early in life.[187] Such noble ideas are most congenial to the sanguine spirit of youth, and to its ignorance of the extent of labour it undertakes. In the dedication of the Novum Organum to James in 1620, he says that he had been about some such work near thirty years, “so as I made no haste.” “And the reason,” he adds, “why I have published it now, specially being imperfect, is, to speak plainly, because I number my days, and would have it saved. There is another reason of my so doing, which is to try whether I can get help in one intended part of this work, namely, the compiling of a natural and experimental history, which must be the main foundation of a true and active philosophy.” He may be presumed at least to have made a very considerable progress in his undertaking, before the close of the sixteenth century. But it was first promulgated to the world by the publication of his Treatise on the Advancement of Learning in 1605. In this, indeed, the whole of the Baconian philosophy may be said to be implicitly contained, except perhaps the second book of the Novum Organum. In 1623, he published his more celebrated Latin translation of this work, if it is not rather to be deemed a new one, entitled, De Augmentis Scientiarum. I find, upon comparison, that more than two thirds of this treatise are a version, with slight interpolation or omission, from the Advancement of Learning, the remainder being new matter.

No treatise with this precise title appears. But we find prefixed to some of the short pieces a general title, Temporis Partus Masculus, sive Instauratio Magna Imperii Universi in Humanum. These treatises, however, though earlier than his great works, cannot be referred to so juvenile a period as his letter to Fulgentio intimates, and I should rather incline to suspect that the opusculum to which he there refers, has not been preserved. Mr. Montagu is of a different opinion. See his Note I. to the life of Bacon in vol. xvi. of his edition. The Latin tract De Interpretatione Naturæ Mr. M. supposes to be the germ of the Instauratio, as the Cogitata et Visa are of the Novum Organum. I do not dissent from this; but the former bears marks of having been written after Bacon had been immersed in active life. The most probable conjecture appears to be that he very early perceived the meagreness and imperfection of the academical course of philosophy, and of all others which fell in his way, and formed the scheme of affording something better from his own resources: but that he did not commit much to paper, nor had planned his own method till after he was turned thirty, which his letter to the King intimates.

In a recent and very brilliant sketch of the Baconian philosophy (Edinb. Review, July, 1837), the two leading principles that distinguish it throughout all its parts, are justly denominated utility and progress. To do good to mankind, and do more and more good, are the ethics of its inductive method. We may only regret that the ingenious author of this article has been hurried sometimes into the low and contracted view of the deceitful word utility, which regards rather the enjoyments of physical convenience, than the general well-being of the individual and the species. If Bacon looked more frequently to the former, it was because so large a portion of his writings relates to physical observation and experiment. But it was far enough from his design to set up physics in any sort of opposition to ethics, much less in a superior light. I dissent also from some of the observations in this article, lively as they are, which tend to depreciate the originality and importance of the Baconian methods. The reader may turn to a note on this subject by Dugald Stewart, at the end of the present section.

Instauratio Magna. 35. The Instauratio Magna had been already published in 1620, while Lord Bacon was still chancellor. Fifteen years had elapsed since he gave to the world his Advancement of Learning, the first fruits of such astonishing vigour of philosophical genius, that, inconceivable as the completion of the scheme he had even then laid down in prospect for his new philosophy by any single effort must appear, we may be disappointed at the great deficiencies which this latter work exhibits, and which he was not destined to fill up. But he had passed the interval in active life, and in dangerous paths, deserting, as in truth he had all along been prone enough to do, the “shady spaces of philosophy,” as Milton calls them, for the court of a sovereign, who with some real learning, was totally incapable of sounding the depths of Lord Bacon’s mind, or even of estimating his genius.

First Part: Partitiones Scientiarum. 36. The Instauratio Magna, dedicated to James, is divided, according to the magnificent groundplot of its author, into six parts. The first of these he entitles Partitiones Scientiarum, comprehending a general summary of that knowledge which mankind already possess; yet not merely treating this affirmatively, but taking special notice of whatever should seem deficient or imperfect; sometimes even supplying, by illustration or precept, these vacant spaces of science. This first part he declares to be wanting in the Instauratio. It has been chiefly supplied by the treatise De Augmentis Scientiarum; yet perhaps even that does not fully come up to the amplitude of his design.

Second part: Novum Organum. 37. The second part of the Instauratio was to be, as he expresses it “the science of a better and more perfect use of reason in the investigation of things, and of the true aids of the understanding,” the new logic, or inductive method, in which what is eminently styled the Baconian philosophy consists. This, as far as he completed it, is known to all by the name of the Novum Organum. But he seems to have designed a fuller treatise in place of this; the aphorisms into which he has digested it being rather the heads or theses of chapters, at least in many places, that would have been further expanded.[188] And it is still more important to observe, that he did not achieve the whole of this summary that he had promised; but out of nine divisions of his method we only possess the first, which he denominates prærogative instantiarum. Eight others, of exceeding importance in logic, he has not touched at all, except to describe them by name and to promise more. “We will speak,” he says, “in the first place, of prerogative instances; secondly, of the aids of induction; thirdly, of the rectification of induction; fourthly, of varying the investigation according to the nature of the subject; fifthly, of prerogative natures (or objects), as to investigation, or the choice of what shall be first inquired into; sixthly, of the boundaries of inquiry, or the synoptical view of all natures in the world; seventhly, on the application of inquiry to practice, and what relates to man; eighthly, on the preparations (parascevis) for inquiry; lastly, on the ascending and descending scale of axioms.”[189] All these, after the first, are wanting, with the exception of some slightly handled in separate parts of Bacon’s writings; and the deficiency, which is so important, seems to have been sometimes overlooked by those who have written about the Novum Organum.

Third part: Natural History. 38. The third part of the Instauratio Magna was to comprise an entire natural history, diligently and scrupulously collected from experience of every kind; including under that name of natural history everything wherein the art of man has been employed on natural substances either for practice or experiment; no method of reasoning being sufficient to guide us to truth as to natural things, if they are not themselves clearly and exactly apprehended. It is unnecessary to observe that very little of this immense chart of nature could be traced by the hand of Bacon, or in his time. His Centuries of Natural History, containing about one thousand observed facts and experiments, are a very slender contribution towards such a description of universal nature as he contemplated; these form no part of the Instauratio Magna, and had been compiled before. But he enumerates one hundred and thirty particular histories which ought to be drawn up for his great work. A few of these he has given in a sort of skeleton, as samples rather of the method of collecting facts, than of the facts themselves; namely, the History of Winds, of Life and Death, of Density and Rarity, of Sound and Hearing.

Fourth part: Scala Intellectûs. 39. The fourth part, called Scala Intellectûs, is also wanting with the exception of a very few introductory pages. “By these tables,” says Bacon, “we mean not such examples as we subjoin to the several rules of our method, but types and models, which place before our eyes the entire process of the mind in the discovery of truth, selecting various and remarkable instances.”[190] These he compares to the diagrams of geometry, by attending to which the steps of the demonstration become perspicuous. Though the great brevity of his language in this place renders it rather difficult to see clearly what he understood by these models, some light appears to be thrown on this passage by one in the treatise De Augmentis, where he enumerates among the desiderata of logic what he calls traditio lampadis, or a delivery of any science or particular truth according to the order wherein it was discovered.[191] “The methods of geometers,” he there says, “have some resemblance to this art;” which is not, however, the case as to the synthetical geometry with which we are generally conversant. It is the history of analytical investigation, and many beautiful illustrations of it have been given since the days of Bacon in all subjects to which that method of inquiry has been applied.

Fifth part: Anticipationes Philosophiæ. 40. In the fifth part of the Instauratio Magna, Bacon had designed to give a specimen of the new philosophy which he hoped to raise after a due use of his natural history and inductive method, by way of anticipation or sample of the whole. He calls it Prodromi, sive Anticipationes Philosophiæ Secundæ. And some fragments of this part are published by the names Cogitata et Visa, Cogitationes de Natura Rerum, Filum Labyrinthi, and a few more, being as much, in all probability, as he had reduced to writing. In his own metaphor, it was to be like the payment of interest, till the principal could be raised; tanquam fœnus reddatur, donec sors haberi possit. |Sixth part: Philosophia Secunda.| For he despaired of ever completing the work by a sixth and last portion, which was to display a perfect system of philosophy, deduced and confirmed by a legitimate, sober, and exact inquiry according to the method which he had invented and laid down. “To perfect this last part is above our powers and beyond our hopes. We may, as we trust, make no despicable beginnings, the destinies of the human race must complete 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.” And with an eloquent prayer that his exertions may be rendered effectual to the attainment of truth and happiness, this introductory chapter of the Instauratio, which announces the distribution of its portions, concludes. Such was the temple, of which Bacon saw in vision before him the stately front and decorated pediments, in all their breadth of light and harmony of proportion, while long vistas of receding columns and glimpses of internal splendour revealed a glory that it was not permitted him to comprehend. 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.

Course of studying Lord Bacon. 41. The best order of studying the Baconian philosophy would be to read attentively the Advancement of Learning; next, to take the treatise De Augmentis, comparing it all along with the former, and afterwards to proceed to the Novum Organum. A less degree of regard has usually been paid to the Centuries of Natural History, which are the least important of his writings, or even to the other philosophical fragments, some of which contain very excellent passages; yet such, in great measure, as will be found substantially in other parts of his works. The most remarkable are the Cogitata et Visa. It must be said, that one who thoroughly venerates Lord Bacon will not disdain his repetitions, which sometimes, by variations of phrase, throw light upon each other. It is generally supposed that the Latin works were translated by several assistants, among whom Herbert and Hobbes have been named, under the author’s superintendence.[192] The Latin style of these writings is singularly concise, energetic and impressive, but frequently crabbed, uncouth and obscure; so that we read with more admiration of the sense than delight in the manner of delivering it. But Rawley, in his Life of Bacon, informs us that he had seen about twelve autographs of the Novum Organum, wrought up and improved year by year, till it reached the shape in which it was published, and he does not intimate that these were in English, unless the praise he immediately afterwards bestows on his English style may be thought to warrant that supposition.[193] I do not know that we have evidence as to any of the Latin works being translations from English, except the treatise De Augmentis.

42. The leading principles of the Baconian philosophy are contained in the Advancement of Learning. These are amplified, corrected, illustrated, and developed in the treatise De Augmentis Scientiarum, from the fifth book of which, with some help from other parts, is taken the first book of the Novum Organum, and even a part of the second. I use this phrase, because, though earlier in publication, I conceive that the Novum Organum was later in composition. All the very important part of this fifth book which relates to Experientia Litterata, or Venatio Panis, as he calls it, and contains excellent rules for conducting experiments in natural philosophy, is new, and does not appear in the Advancement of Learning, except by way of promise of what should be done in it. Nor is this, at least so fully and clearly, to be found in the Novum Organum. The second book of this latter treatise he professes not to anticipate. De Novo Organo silemus, he says, neque de eo quicquam prælibamus. This can only apply to the second book, which he considered as the real exposition of his method, after clearing away the fallacies which form the chief subject of the first. Yet what is said of Topica particularis, in this fifth book De Augmentis (illustrated by “articles of inquiry concerning gravity and levity”), goes entirely on the principles of the second book of the Novum Organum.

Nature of the Baconian Induction. 43. Let us now see what Lord Bacon’s method really was. He has given it the name of induction, but carefully distinguishes it from what bore that name in the old logic, that is, an inference from a perfect enumeration of particulars to a general law of the whole. For such an enumeration, though of course conclusive, is rarely practicable in nature, where the particulars exceed our powers of numbering.[194] Nor again is the Baconian method to be confounded with the less complete form of the inductive process, namely, inferences from partial experience in similar circumstances; though this may be a very sufficient ground for practical, which is probable knowledge. His own method rests on the same general principle, namely, the uniformity of the laws of nature, so that in certain conditions of phænomena the same effects or the same causes may be assumed; but it endeavours to establish these laws on a more exact and finer process of reasoning than partial experience can effect. For the recurrence of antecedents, and consequents does not prove a necessary connection between them, unless we can exclude the presence of all other conditions which may determine the event. Long and continued experience of such a recurrence, indeed, raises a high probability of a necessary connexion; but the aim of Bacon was to supersede experience in this sense, and to find a shorter road to the result; and for this his methods of exclusion are devised. As complete and accurate a collection of facts, connected with the subject of inquiry, as possible is to be made out by means of that copious natural history which he contemplated, or from any other good sources. These are to be selected, compared, and scrutinized, according to the rules of natural interpretation delivered in the second book of the Novum Organum, or such others as he designed to add to them; and if experiments are admissible, these are to be conducted according to the same rules. Experience and observation are the guides through the Baconian philosophy, which is the handmaid and interpreter of nature. When Lord Bacon seems to decry experience, which in certain passages he might be thought to do, it is the particular and empirical observation of individuals, from which many rash generalisations had been drawn, as opposed to that founded on an accurate natural history. Such hasty inferences he reckoned still more pernicious to true knowledge than the sophistical methods of the current philosophy; and, in a remarkable passage, after censuring this precipitancy of empirical conclusions in the chemists, and in Gilbert’s Treatise on the Magnet, utters a prediction that if ever mankind, excited by his counsels, should seriously betake themselves to seek the guidance of experience instead of relying on the dogmatic schools of the sophists, the proneness of the human mind to snatch at general axioms would expose them to much risk of error from the theories of this superficial class of philosophers.[195]

It may be observed, that this imperfect induction may be put in a regular logical form, and is only vicious in syllogistic reasoning when the conclusion asserts a higher probability than the premises. If, for example, we reason thus: Some serpents are venomous—This unknown animal is a serpent-Therefore, this is venomous; we are guilty of an obvious paralogism. If we infer only, This may be venomous, our reasoning is perfectly valid in itself, at least in the common apprehension of all mankind, except dialecticians, but not regular in form. The only means that I perceive of making it so, is to put it in some such phrase as the following: All unknown serpents are affected by a certain probability of being venomous: This animal, &c. It is not necessary, of course, that the probability should be capable of being estimated, provided we mentally conceive it to be no other in the conclusion than in the major term. In the best treatises on the strict or syllogistic method, as far as I have seen, there seems a deficiency in respect to probable conclusions, which may have arisen from the practice of taking instances from universal or necessary, rather than contingent truths, as well as from the contracted views of reasoning which the Aristotelian school have always inculcated. No sophisms are so frequent in practice as the concluding generally from a partial induction, or assuming (most commonly tacitly) by what Archbishop Whateley calls “a kind of logical fiction,” that a few individuals are “adequate samples or representations of the class they belong to.” These sophisms cannot, in the present state of things, be practised largely in physical science or natural history; but in reasonings on matter of fact they are of incessant occurrence. The “logical fiction” may indeed frequently be employed, even on subjects unconnected with the physical laws of nature; but to know when this may be, and to what extent, is just that which, far more than any other skill, distinguishes what is called a good reasoner from a bad one. This note will not, by an attentive reader, be thought inapposite to the text, or to some passages that will follow in the present chapter.

His dislike of Aristotle. 44. The indignation, however, of Lord Bacon is more frequently directed against the predominant philosophy of his age, that of Aristotle and the schoolmen. Though he does justice to the great abilities of the former, and acknowledges the exact attention to facts displayed in his History of Animals, he deems him one of the most eminent adversaries to the only method that can guide us to the real laws of nature. The old Greek philosophers, Empedocles, Leucippus, Anaxagoras, and others of their age, who had been in the right track of investigation, stood much higher in his esteem than their successors, Plato, Zeno, Aristotle, by whose lustre they had been so much superseded, that both their works have perished and their tenets are with difficulty collected. These more distinguished leaders of the Grecian schools were in his eyes little else than disputatious professors (it must be remembered that Bacon had in general only physical science in his view) who seemed to have it in common with children, “ut ad garriendum prompti sint, generare non possint;” so wordy and barren was their miscalled wisdom.

His method much required. 45. Those who object to the importance of Lord Bacon’s precepts in philosophy that mankind have practised, many of them immemorially, are rather confirming their utility than taking off much from their originality in any fair sense of that term. Every logical method is built on the common faculties of human nature, which have been exercised since the creation in discerning, better or worse, truth from falsehood, and inferring the unknown from the known. That men might have done this more correctly, is manifest from the quantity of error into which, from want of reasoning well on what came before them, they have habitually fallen. In experimental philosophy, to which the more special rules of Lord Bacon are generally referred, there was a notorious want of that very process of reasoning which he has supplied. It is probable, indeed, that the great physical philosophers of the seventeenth century would have been led to employ some of his rules, had he never promulgated them; but I believe they had been little regarded in the earlier period of science.[196] It is also a very defective view of the Baconian method to look only at the experimental rules given in the Novum Organum. The preparatory steps of completely exhausting the natural history of the subject of inquiry by a patient and sagacious consideration of it in every light, are at least of equal importance, and equally prominent in the inductive philosophy.

Its objects. 46. The first object of Lord Bacon’s philosophical writings is to prove their own necessity, by giving an unfavourable impression as to the actual state of most sciences, in consequence of the prejudices of the human mind, and of the mistaken methods pursued in their cultivation. The second was to point out a better prospect for the future. One of these occupies the treatise De Augmentis, and the first book of the Novum Organum. The other, besides many anticipations in these, is partially detailed in the second book, and would have been more thoroughly developed in those remaining portions which the author did not complete. We shall now give a very short sketch of these two famous works, which comprise the greater part of the Baconian philosophy.

Sketch of the treatise De Augmentis. 47. The Advancement of Learning is divided into two books only; the treatise De Augmentis into nine. The first of these, in the latter, is introductory, and designed to remove prejudices against the search for truth, by indicating the causes which had hitherto obstructed it. In the second book, he lays down his celebrated partition of human learning into history, poetry, and philosophy, according to the faculties of the mind respectively concerned in them, the memory, imagination and reason. |History.| History is natural or civil, under the latter of which ecclesiastical and literary histories are comprised. These again fall into regular subdivisions; all of which he treats in summary manner, and points out the deficiencies which ought to be supplied in many departments of history. |Poetry.| Poetry succeeds in the last chapter of the same book, but by confining that name to fictitious narrative, except as to the ornaments of style, which he refers to a different part of his subject, he much limited his views of that literature; even if it were true, as it certainly is not, that the imagination alone, in any ordinary use of the word, is the medium of poetical emotion. The word emotion indeed is sufficient to show that Bacon should either have excluded poetry altogether from his enumeration of sciences and learning, or taken into consideration other faculties of the soul than those which are merely intellectual.

Fine passage on poetry. 48. Stewart has praised with justice a short but beautiful paragraph concerning poetry (under which title may be comprehended all the various creations of the faculty of imagination) wherein Bacon “has exhausted everything that philosophy and good sense have yet had to offer on the subject of what has since been called the beau idéal.” The same eminent writer and ardent admirer of Bacon observes that D’Alembert improved on the Baconian arrangement by classing the fine arts with poetry. Injustice had been done to painting and music, especially the former, when, in the fourth book De Augmentis, they were counted as mere “artes voluptariæ,” subordinate to a sort of Epicurean gratification of the senses, and only somewhat more liberal than cookery or cosmetics.

Natural Theology and Metaphysics. 49. In the third book, science having been divided into theological and philosophical, and the former, or what regards revealed religion, being postponed for the present, he lays it down that all philosophy relates to God, to nature, or to man. Under natural theology, as a sort of appendix, he reckons the doctrine of angels and superhuman spirits; a more favourite theme, especially as treated independently of revelation, in the ages that preceded Lord Bacon, than it has been since. Natural philosophy is speculative or practical; the former divided into physics, in a particular sense, and metaphysics; “one of which enquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; the other handleth the formal and final causes.” Hence, physics dealing with particular instances, and regarding only the effects produced, is precarious in its conclusions, and does not reach the stable principles of causation.

Metaphysics, to which word he gave a sense as remote from that which it bore in the Aristotelian schools, as from that in which it is commonly employed at present, had for its proper object the investigation of forms. It was “a generally received and inveterate opinion, that the inquisition of man is not competent to find out essential forms or true differences.” Formæ inventio, he says in another place, habetur pro desperata. The word form itself, being borrowed from the old philosophy, is not immediately intelligible to every reader. |Form of bodies.| “In the Baconian sense,” says Playfair, “form differs only from cause in being permanent, whereas, we apply cause to that which exists in order of time.” Form (natura naturans, as it was barbarously called) is the general law, or condition of existence, in any substance or quality (natura naturata), which is wherever its form is.[197] The conditions of a mathematical figure, prescribed in its definition, might in this sense be called its form, if it did not seem to be Lord Bacon’s intention to confine the word to the laws of particular sensible existences. In modern philosophy, it might be defined to be that particular combination of forces, which impresses a certain modification upon matter subjected to their influence.

Might sometimes be inquired into. 50. To a knowledge of such forms, or laws of essence and existence, at least in a certain degree, it might be possible, in Bacon’s sanguine estimation of his own logic, for man to attain. Not that we could hope to understand the forms of complex beings, which are almost infinite in variety, but the simple and primary natures, which are combined in them. “To inquire the form of a lion, of an oak, of gold, nay of water, of air, is a vain pursuit; but to inquire the forms of sense, of voluntary motion, of vegetation, of colours, of gravity and levity, of density and tenuity, of heat, of 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, I say, the true forms of these is that part of metaphysic which we now define of.”[198] Thus, in the words he soon afterwards uses, “of natural philosophy, the basis is natural history; the stage next the basis is physic; the stage next the vertical point is metaphysic. As for the vertical point, ‘Opus quod operatur Deos a principio usque ad finem,’ the summary law of nature, we know not whether man’s inquiry can attain unto it.”[199]

Final causes too much slighted. 51. The second object of metaphysics, according to Lord Bacon’s notion of the word, was the investigation of final causes. It is well known that he has spoken of this with unguarded disparagement.[200] “Like a virgin consecrated to God, it bears nothing;” one of those witty conceits that sparkle over his writings, but will not bear a severe examination. It has been well remarked that almost at the moment he published this, one of the most important discoveries of his age, the circulation of the blood, had rewarded the acuteness of Harvey in reasoning on the final cause of the valves in the veins.

Man not included by him in physics. 52. Nature, or physical philosophy, according to Lord Bacon’s partition, did not comprehend the human species. Whether this be not more consonant to popular language, adopted by preceding systems of philosophy, than to a strict and perspicuous arrangement, may by some be doubted; though a very respectable authority, that of Dugald Stewart, is opposed to including man in the province of physics. For it is surely strange to separate the physiology of the human body, as quite a science of another class, from that of inferior animals; and if we place this part of our being under the department of physical philosophy, we shall soon be embarrassed by what Bacon has called the “doctrina de fœdere,” the science of the connection between the soul of man and his bodily frame, a vast and interesting field, even yet very imperfectly explored.

Man, in body and mind. 53. It has pleased, however, the author to follow his own arrangement. The fourth book relates to the constitution, bodily and mental, of mankind. In this book he has introduced several subdivisions which, considered merely as such, do not always appear the most philosophical; but the pregnancy and acuteness of his observations under each head silences all criticism of this kind. This book has nearly double the extent of the corresponding pages in the Advancement of Learning. The doctrine as to the substance of the thinking principle having been very slightly touched, or rather passed over, with two curious disquisitions on divination and fascination, he advances in four ensuing books to the intellectual and moral faculties, and those sciences which immediately depend upon them. Logic and Ethics are the grand divisions, co-relative to the reason and the will of man. |Logic.| Logic, according to Lord Bacon, comprizes the sciences of inventing, judging, retaining, and delivering the conceptions of the mind. We invent, that is, discover new arts or new arguments; we judge by induction or by syllogism; the memory is capable of being aided by artificial methods. All these processes of the mind are the subjects of several sciences, which it was the peculiar aim of Bacon, by his own logic, to place on solid foundations.

Extent given it by Bacon. 54. It is here to be remarked, that the sciences of logic and ethics, according to the partitions of Lord Bacon, are far more extensive than we are accustomed to consider them. Whatever concerned the human intellect came under the first; whatever related to the will and affections of the mind fell under the head of ethics. Logica de intellectu et ratione, ethica de voluntate appetitu et affectibus disserit; altera decreta, altera actiones progignit. But it has been usual to confine logic to the methods of guiding the understanding in the search for truth; and some, though, as it seems to me, in a manner not warranted by the best usage of philosophers,[201] have endeavoured to exclude everything but the syllogistic mode of reasoning from the logical province. Whether again the nature and operations of the human mind, in general, ought to be reckoned a part of physics, has already been mentioned as a disputable question.

Grammar and Rhetoric. 55. The science of delivering our own thoughts to others, branching into grammar and rhetoric, and including poetry, so far as its proper vehicles, metre and diction, are concerned, occupies the sixth book. In all this he finds more desiderata than from the great attention paid to these subjects by the ancients could have been expected. Thus, his ingenious collection of antitheta, or common places in rhetoric, though mentioned by Cicero as to the judicial species of eloquence, is first extended by Bacon himself to the deliberative or political orations. I do not, however, think it probable that this branch of topics could have been neglected by antiquity, though the writings relating to it may not have descended to us; nor can we by any means say there is nothing of the kind in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Whether the utility of these common places, when collected in books, be very great, is another question. And a similar doubt might be suggested with respect to the elenchs, or refutations, of rhetorical sophisms, “colores boni et mali,” which he reports as equally deficient, though a commencement had been made by Aristotle.

Ethics. 56. In the seventh book we come to ethical science. This he deems to have been insufficiently treated. He would have the different tempers and characters of mankind first considered, then their passions and affections (neither of which, as he justly observes, finds a place in the Ethics of Aristotle, though they are sometimes treated, not so appositely, in his Rhetoric); lastly, the methods of altering and affecting the will and appetite, such as custom, education, imitation, or society. “The main and primitive division of moral knowledge seemeth to be into the exemplar or platform of good, and the regiment or culture of the mind; the one describing the nature of good, the other presenting rules how to subdue, apply and accommodate the will of man thereunto.” This latter he also calls “the Georgics of the mind.” He seems to place “the platform or essence of good” in seeking the good of the whole, rather than that of the individual, applying this to refute the ancient theories as to the summum bonum. But perhaps Bacon had not thoroughly disentangled this question, and confounds, as is not unusual, the summum bonum, or personal felicity, with the object of moral action, or commune bonum. He is right, however, in preferring, morally speaking, the active to the contemplative life against Aristotle and other philosophers. This part is translated in De Augmentis, with little variation, from the Advancement of Learning; as is also what follows on the Georgics, or culture, of the mind. The philosophy of civil life, as it relates both to the conduct of men in their mutual intercourse, which is properly termed prudence, and to that higher prudence, which is concerned with the administration of communities, fills up the chart of the Baconian ethics. In the eighth book, admirable reflections on the former of these subjects occur at almost every sentence. Many, perhaps most of these, will be found in the Advancement of Learning. But in this, he had been, for a reason sufficiently obvious and almost avowed, cautiously silent upon the art of government—the craft of his king. |Politics.| The motives for silence were still so powerful, that he treats only in the De Augmentis, of two heads in political science; the methods of enlarging the boundaries of the state, which James I. could hardly resent as an interference with his own monopoly, and one of far more importance to the well-being of mankind, the principles of universal jurisprudence, or rather of universal legislation, according to which standard all laws ought to be framed. These he has sketched in ninety-seven aphorisms, or short rules, which, from the great experience of Bacon in the laws, as his peculiar vocation towards that part of philosophy, deserve to be studied at this day. Upon such topics, the progressive and innovating spirit of his genius was less likely to be perceived; but he is, perhaps, equally free from what he has happily called in one of his essays, the “froward retention of custom,” the prejudice of mankind, like that of perverse children, against what is advised to them for their real good, and what they cannot deny to be conducive to it. This whole eighth book is pregnant with profound and original thinking. |Theology.| The ninth and last, which is short, glances only at some desiderata in theological science, and is chiefly remarkable as it displays a more liberal and catholic spirit than was often to be met with in a period signalized by bigotry and ecclesiastical pride. But as the abjuration of human authority is the first principle of Lord Bacon’s philosophy, and the preparation for his logic, it was not expedient to say too much of its usefulness in the theological pursuits.

Desiderata enumerated by him. 57. At the conclusion of the whole, we may find a summary catalogue of the deficiencies which, in the course of this ample review, Lord Bacon had found worthy of being supplied by patient and philosophical inquiry. Of these desiderata, few, I fear, have since been filled up, at least in a collective and systematic manner, according to his suggestions. Great materials, useful intimations, and even partial delineations, are certainly to be found, as so many of the rest, in the writings of those who have done honour to the last two centuries. But with all our pride in modern science, very much even of what, in Bacon’s time, was perceived to be wanting, remains for the diligence and sagacity of those who are yet to come.

Novum Organum: first book. 58. The first book of the Novum Organum, if it is not better known than any other part of Bacon’s philosophical writings, has at least furnished more of those striking passages which shine in quotation. It is written in detached aphorisms; the sentences, even where these aphorisms are longest, not flowing much into one another, so as to create a suspicion, that he had formed adversaria, to which he committed his thoughts as they arose. It is full of repetitions; and indeed this is so usual with Lord Bacon, that whenever we find an acute reflection or brilliant analogy, it is more than an even chance that it will recur in some other place. I have already observed that he has hinted the Novum Organum to be a digested summary of his method, but not the entire system as he designed to develop it, even in that small portion which he has handled at all.

Fallacies. Idola. 59. Of the splendid passages in the Novum Organum none are perhaps so remarkable as his celebrated division of fallacies, not such as the dialecticians had been accustomed to refute, depending upon equivocal words, or faulty disposition of premises, but lying far deeper in the natural or incidental prejudices of the mind itself. These are four in number: idola tribûs, to which from certain common weaknesses of human nature we are universally liable; idola specûs, which from peculiar dispositions and circumstances of individuals mislead them in different manners; idola fori, arising from the current usage of words which represent things much otherwise than as they really are; and idola theatri, which false systems of philosophy and erroneous methods of reasoning have introduced. Hence, as the refracted ray gives us a false notion as to the place of the object whose image it transmits, so our own minds are a refracting medium to the objects of their own contemplation, and require all the aid of a well-directed philosophy either to rectify the perception, or to make allowances for its errors.

Confounded with idols. 60. These idola, ειδωλα, images, illusions, fallacies, or, as Lord Bacon calls them in the Advancement of Learning, false appearances, have been often named in English idols of the tribe, of the den, of the market place. But it seems better, unless we retain the Latin name, to employ one of the synonymous terms given above. For the use of idol in this sense is unwarranted by the practice of the language, nor is it found in Bacon himself; but it has misled a host of writers, whoever might be the first that applied it, even among such as are conversant with the Novum Organum. “Bacon proceeds,” says Playfair, “to enumerate the causes of error, the idols as he calls them, or false divinities to which the mind had so long been accustomed to bow.” And with a similar misapprehension of the meaning of the word, in speaking of the idola specûs, he says: “besides the causes of error which are common to all mankind, each individual, according to Bacon, has his own dark cavern or den, into which the light is imperfectly admitted, and obscurity of which a tutelary idol lurks, at whose shrine the truth is often sacrificed.”[202] Thus also Dr. Thomas Brown; “in the inmost sanctuaries of the mind were all the idols which he overthrew;” and a later author on the Novum Organum fancies that Bacon “strikingly, though in his usual quaint style, calls the prejudices that check the progress of the mind by the name of idols, because mankind are apt to pay homage to these instead of regarding truth.”[203] Thus too in the translation of the Novum Organum, published in Mr. Basil Montagu’s edition, we find idola rendered by idols, without explanation. We may in fact say that this meaning has been almost universally given by the later writers. By whom it was introduced, I am not able to say. Cudworth, in a passage where he glances at Bacon, has said, “it is no idol of the den, to use that affected language.” But, in the pedantic style of the seventeenth century, it is not impossible that idol may here have been put as a mere translation of the Greek ειδωλον, and in the same general sense of an idea or intellectual image.[204] Although the popular sense would not be inapposite to the general purpose of Bacon in this first part of the Novum Organum, it cannot be reckoned so exact and philosophical an illustration of the sources of human error as the unfaithful image, the shadow of reality, seen through a refracting surface, or reflected from an unequal mirror, as in the Platonic hypothesis of the cave, wherein we are placed with our backs to the light, to which he seems to allude in his idola specûs.[205] And as this is also plainly the true meaning, as a comparison with the parallel passages in the Advancement of Learning demonstrates, there can be no pretence for continuing to employ a word which has served to mislead such men as Brown and Playfair.

Second book of Novum Organum. 61. In the second book of the Novum Organum, we come at length to the new logic, the interpretation of nature, as he calls it, or the rules for conducting inquiries in natural philosophy according to his inductive method. It is, as we have said, a fragment of his entire system, and is chiefly confined to the “prerogative instances,”[206] or phænomena which are to be selected, for various reasons, as most likely to aid our investigations of nature. Fifteen of these are used to guide the intellect, five to assist the senses, seven to correct the practice. This second book is written with more than usual want of perspicuity, and though it is intrinsically the Baconian philosophy in a pre-eminent sense, I much doubt whether it is very extensively read, though far more so than it was fifty years since. Playfair, however, has given an excellent abstract of it in his Preliminary Dissertation to the Encyclopædia Britannica, with abundant and judicious illustrations from modern science. Sir John Herschel, in his admirable Discourse on Natural Philosophy, has added a greater number from still more recent discoveries, and has also furnished such a luminous development of the difficulties of the Novum Organum, as had been vainly hoped in former times. The commentator of Bacon should be himself of an original genius in philosophy. These novel illustrations are the more useful, because Bacon himself, from defective knowledge of natural phænomena, and from what, though contrary to his precepts, his ardent fancy could not avoid, a premature hastening to explain the essences of things instead of their proximate causes, has frequently given erroneous examples. It is to be observed on the other hand, that he often anticipates with marvellous sagacity the discoveries of posterity, and that his patient and acute analysis of the phænomena of heat has been deemed a model of his own inductive reasoning. “No one,” observes Playfair, “has done so much in such circumstances.” He was even ignorant of some things that he might have known; he wanted every branch of mathematics; and placed in this remote corner of Europe, without many kindred minds to animate his zeal for physical science, seems hardly to have believed the discoveries of Galileo.

Confidence of Bacon. 62. It has happened to Lord Bacon, as it has to many other writers, that he has been extolled for qualities by no means characteristic of his mind. The first aphorism of the Novum Organum, so frequently quoted, “Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, performs and understands so much as he has collected concerning the order of nature by observation or reason, nor do his power or his knowledge extend farther,” has seemed to bespeak an extreme sobriety of imagination, a willingness to acquiesce in registering the phænomena of nature without seeking a revelation of her secrets. And nothing is more true than that such was the cautious and patient course of inquiry prescribed by him to all the genuine disciples of his inductive method. But he was far from being one of those humble philosophers who would limit human science to the enumeration of particular facts. He had, on the contrary, vast hopes of the human intellect under the guidance of his new logic. The Latens Schematismus, or intrinsic configuration of bodies, the Latens processus ad formam, or transitional operation through which they pass from one form, or condition of nature, to another, would one day, as he hoped, be brought to light; and this not, of course, by simple observation of the senses, nor even by assistance of instruments, concerning the utility of which he was rather sceptical, but by a rigorous application of exclusive and affirmative propositions to the actual phænomena by the inductive method. “It appears,” says Playfair, “that Bacon placed the ultimate object of philosophy too high, and too much out of the reach of man, even when his exertions are most skilfully conducted. He seems to have thought, that by giving a proper direction to our researches, and carrying them on according to the inductive method, we should arrive at the knowledge of the essences of the powers and qualities residing in bodies; that we should, for instance, become acquainted with the essence of heat, of cold, of colour, of transparency. The fact however is that, in as far as science has yet advanced, no one essence has been discovered, either as to matter in general, or as to any of its more extensive modifications. We are yet in doubt whether heat is a peculiar motion of the minute parts of bodies, as Bacon himself conceived it to be, or something emitted or radiated from their surfaces, or, lastly, the vibrations of an elastic medium by which they are penetrated and surrounded.”

Almost justified of late. 63. It requires a very extensive survey of the actual dominion of science, and a great sagacity to judge, even in the loosest manner, what is beyond the possible limits of human knowledge. Certainly, since the time when this passage was written by Playfair, more steps have been made towards realising the sanguine anticipations of Bacon than in the two centuries that had elapsed since the publication of the Novum Organum. We do not yet know the real nature of heat, but few would pronounce it impossible or even unlikely that we may know it, in the same sense that we know other physical realities not immediately perceptible, before many years shall have expired. The atomic theory of Dalton, the laws of crystalline substances discovered by Häuy, the development of others still subtler by Mitscherlich, instead of exhibiting, as the older philosophy had done, the idola rerum, the sensible appearances of concrete substance, radiations from the internal glory, admit us, as it were, to stand within the vestibule of nature’s temple, and to gaze on the very curtain of the shrine. If indeed we could know the internal structure of one primary atom, and could tell, not of course by immediate testimony of sense, but by legitimate inference from it, through what constant laws its component molecules, the atoms of atoms, attract, retain, and repel each other, we should have before our mental vision not only the Latens Schematismus, the real configuration of substances, but their form, or efficient nature, and could give as perfect a definition of any one of them, of gold for example, as we can of a cone or parallelogram. The recent discoveries of animal and vegetable development, and especially the happy application of the microscope to observing chemical and organic changes in their actual course, are equally remarkable advances towards a knowledge of the Latens processus ad formam, the corpuscular motions by which all change must be accomplished, and are in fact a great deal more than Bacon himself would have deemed possible.[207]