II. THE 'INSTAURATIO MAGNA.'

CHAPTER I.

THE DESIGN, PLAN, AND PROGRESS OF BACON'S WORK.

HOMER, it has been said, was an exaltation of the Cyclic romancers. Dante gathered to a centre all the poetry latent in the early ages of the Church: Chaucer, by his own confession, fed on the fields of the Trouvères; Shakespeare glorified the previous traditions of the English Drama. But our interest in their ancestors is mainly due to what these men have done. Similarly, if in a less degree, Bacon has sent his readers to search the past, with which half his writing is engaged. He must have been aware that he had been to a great extent forestalled by his predecessors; that he formulised rather than invented, condensed rather than devised, the assault on the methods of the Scholasticism which, in his day, haunted men's minds only in the guise of an unlaid ghost but he was probably unconscious of the extent of his debts, and the disingenuousness with which he

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strove to minimise them is frequent in ages of revolt. With him and with Descartes1 Modern Philosophy begins, under forms so different that the application to their work of the same name has been questioned; but between the two writers there is, in several respects, an affinity. Both felt the need of a reform, and had an overweening assurance of having accomplished it. Descartes says, "I do not recommend the study of my method as an aid to the study of mathematics, but the study of mathematics as an illustration of my method;" and Bacon declares, "I believe that I have, for ever and legitimately, united the empirical method and the rational method, the divorce of which is fatal to science and to humanity." Both were laymen-the one a lawyer, bent on natural philosophy, the other a soldier and geometrician-inspired with a contempt for authority in the domain of thought. "The most general feature," says M. Cousin," of the philosophical revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is independence, both of ecclesiasticism and the admiration of ancient genius. Comparative disdain and ignorance of the greatest thinkers of Greece were the ransom of its independence. Leibnitz excepted, none of the leading philosophers of the new era had much real knowledge of antiquity. Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke hardly read anything else than is found in nature and in consciousness." Bacon, though more learned than those writers, was the protagonist of their revolutionary spirit. That which

1 Born 1596, Descartes was a generation younger than Bacon; but the dates of the publication of the 'Novum Organum' (1620) and of the 'Discourse on Method' (1637) may be compared as indicating the starting-points of their philosophic influence.

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had turned away from the phenomenal world was dead : men were reawakened to the diversity of life: it was time for their minds to assume confidence, and force their way through new labyrinths. This confidence

Bacon's work was, more than that of his forerunners, by the larger utterance it gave to a more fully rounded design, fitted to instil. He had been anticipated in fragments, which he first brought together in a connected and apparently conclusive form. After the suns and showers of three centuries had been ripening the grain, he announced the harvest.

In dealing with his philosophy, we shall first endeavour to state his central idea, then to illustrate its development, finally to exhibit the causes of his failure-for he did fail in what he cared for most, and his permanent achievements have been collateral. Bacon has been accepted as an unreliable though often incisive critic, a frequently inaccurate though zealous observer, and a one-sided though suggestive logician. His own idea of his position was that of a discoverer of a "mundus alter et idem," a new world, of more moment to mankind than the Indies of Columbus. He would have received with indignation the verdict that his work was mainly negative; that he would be known to the future by his incidental wisdom, his warnings against the "ignes. fatui" of the schools, or the errors, "more to be feared than they," which are "always with us"; that he would be commended by popular rhetoricians for his practical aims, or that, mutatis mutandis, his verdict on the alchemists would be pronounced on himself. He arraigned the thinkers of the past because he fancied himself to have found what they had missed; he assailed

their love of system because he had a supplanting system; he despised their à priori imaginations because, by the excuse of an imagination almost Shakespearian in its daring in another field, he conceived himself to have banished from the future of the physical drama the need for further imaginings. Nowhere do we find a more exalted conception of the majesty of Nature than in Bacon's work; but he holds it as a cardinal doctrine that she is finite, that the time is at hand when all essential knowledge may be grasped, the world well won, and the age of the Garden before the Fall restored. Bacon constantly insists that we must enter the kingdom of Nature "sub personâ infantis," but he has himself the air of one taking possession of a throne. He had little of the submissive or reverential spirit which led Newton, amid the acclaim of his great discovery, to confess himself still "a child gathering pebbles on the shore of the infinite sea," or that of the modern poet "moving about in worlds not realised." His always proud humility lay in his acceptance of the dictum of the "Parmenides," that the least of Nature's manifestations is worthy of our note, that "he who feels contempt for any living thing hath faculties which he has never used;" but his aspirations as a thinker dwarfed his ambition as a statesman. By every image at command of a fancy among the masters of prose equalled by Plato alone, he impresses us with his belief in his possession of a clue, a key, a secret, that had come to him by a sort of inspiration. He had threaded the recesses of a labyrinth unknown to Theseus, unlocked the door barred alike to Aristotle and Aquinas, learned the " open sesame "where Paracelsus had been calling "wheat" and "rye." He had grazed the

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beach of the New Atlantis,' though he might only live to blow the clarion for the colonising generations; he had realised the magic of which the magi only dreamt. The gods had answered his prayer, as that of Pygmalion; for he knew the tune of "The Winter's Tale," to call the marble statues of the old philosophy down from their pedestals to take life and colour, and move, fostering, gladdening, and restoring, among men.

Bacon's idea of the Interpretation of Nature' receives some light from the crude pre-Socratic speculations on the one side, and on the other from the more defined though still unproved conjectures, as those of Boscowitch, on the border land where physics seem to merge into metaphysic. Like the earliest recorded thinkers of Greece Bacon found his unity in an examination. of the external world rather than in a mental analysis. He will accept none of their conclusions, and is alive to the inadequacy of the generalisations by which they were reached; but he holds that—in looking behind appearances to some physical bases, into which the shows of the universe may be resolved-they were on a path more fruitful of discovery than the impossible attempt to separate non-existent substances from attributes, or ideal paradigms from real things. His alienation from purely metaphysical modes of thought is conspicuous in all his criticisms. He replaces the opposition of phenomena and noumena by his analogies, sometimes fanciful, always suggestive, between all the spheres in which life and order are manifest. He is ready as any Greek or German to admit that "things are not what they seem;" but, setting aside the inscrutable truths of religion, he has no faith in anything that is not physical. His