Note bb — Chapter V
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How Bacon can have been pictured by his admirers as neither ideal, nor metaphysical, seems to be one of those unintelligible mysteries of idolatry which idol-worshippers cannot themselves explain. How impossible it is on such a supposition to reconcile Bacon with himself will appear evident to any informed reader of Mr. Ellis's Preface to the Philosophical Works.
Bacon's tribute to Plato was just, as well as discriminating, and to our purpose is most appropriate. He says (De Augmentis, III. 4) "For Metaphysic, I have already assigned to it the inquiry of Formal and Final Causes; which assignation, as far as it relates to Forms, may seem nugatory; because of a received and inveterate opinion that the Essential Forms or true differences of things cannot by any human diligence be found out; an opinion which in the meantime implies and admits that the invention of Forms is of all parts of knowledge the worthiest to be sought, if it be possible to be found. And as for the possibility of finding it, they are ill discoverers who think there is no land where they can see nothing but sea. But it is manifest that Plato, a man of sublime wit (and one that surveyed all things as from a lofty cliff), did in his doctrine concerning Ideas descry that Forms were the true object of knowledge; howsoever he lost the fruit of this most true opinion by considering and trying to apprehend Forms as absolutely abstracted from matter." This last path we have endeavoured to avoid; and have ourselves elected to follow the Baconian precept, and to treat the Law or Form of Production not logically, but as seen in operation, and existent in rerum naturâ; not in ordine ad hominem but in ordine ad Universum.
What Bacon himself expected from the investigation, he states plainly enough in continuation. "If we fix our eyes diligently seriously and sincerely upon action and use, it will not be difficult to discern and understand what those Forms are the knowledge whereof may wonderfully enrich and benefit the condition of men.... This part of Metaphysic I find deficient; whereat I marvel not, because I hold it not possible that the Forms of things can be invented by that course of invention hitherto used; the root of the evil, as of all others, being this: that men have used to sever and withdraw their thoughts too soon and too far from experience and particulars, and have given themselves wholly up to their own meditation and arguments.
"But the use of this part of Metaphysic, which I reckon amongst the deficient, is of the rest the most excellent in two respects; the one, because it is the duty and virtue of all knowledge to abridge the circuits and long ways of experience (as much as truth will permit), and to remedy the ancient complaint that 'life is short and art is long.' ... For God is holy in the multitude of his works, holy in the order or connexion of them, and holy in the union of them. And therefore the speculation was excellent in Parmenides and Plato (although in them it was but a bare speculation), 'that all things by a certain scale ascend to unity.'" (Ibid. Ellis and Spedding, IV. 360-362.)