Bacon — 15 - Chapter 8A

CHAPTER VIII. BACON'S PHILOSOPHY.

Bacon was one of those men to whom posterity forgives a great deal for the greatness of what he has done and attempted for posterity.

It is idle, unless all honest judgment is foregone, to disguise the many deplorable shortcomings of his life; it is unjust to have one measure for him, and another for those about him and opposed to him.

But it is not too much to say that in temper, in honesty, in labour, in humility, in reverence, he was the most perfect example that the world had yet seen of the student of nature, the enthusiast for knowledge.

That such a man was tempted and fell, and suffered the Nemesis of his fall, is an instance of the awful truth embodied in the tragedy of _Faust_.

But his genuine devotion, so unwearied and so paramount, to a great idea and a great purpose for the good of all generations to come, must shield him from the insult of Pope's famous and shallow epigram.

Whatever may have been his sins, and they were many, he cannot have been the "meanest of mankind," who lived and died, holding unaltered, amid temptations and falls, so noble a conception of the use and calling of his life: the duty and service of helping his brethren to know as they had never yet learned to know.

That thought never left him; the obligations it imposed were never forgotten in the crush and heat of business; the toils, thankless at the time, which it heaped upon him in addition to the burdens of public life were never refused.

Nothing diverted him, nothing made him despair.

He was not discouraged because he was not understood.

There never was any one in whose life the "_Souveraineté du but_" was more certain and more apparent; and that object was the second greatest that man can have.

To teach men to know is only next to making them good.

The Baconian philosophy, the reforms of the _Novum Organum_, the method of experiment and induction, are commonplaces, and sometimes lead to a misconception of what Bacon did.

Bacon is, and is not, the founder of modern science.

What Bacon believed could be done, what he hoped and divined, for the correction and development of human knowledge, was one thing; what his methods were, and how far they were successful, is another.

It would hardly be untrue to say that though Bacon is the parent of modern science, his methods contributed nothing to its actual discoveries; neither by possibility could they have done so.

The great and wonderful work which the world owes to him was in the idea, and not in the execution.

The idea was that the systematic and wide examination of facts was the first thing to be done in science, and that till this had been done faithfully and impartially, with all the appliances and all the safeguards that experience and forethought could suggest, all generalisations, all anticipations from mere reasoning, must be adjourned and postponed; and further, that sought on these conditions, knowledge, certain and fruitful, beyond all that men then imagined, could be attained.

His was the faith of the discoverer, the imagination of the poet, the voice of the prophet.

But his was not the warrior's arm, the engineer's skill, the architect's creativeness.

"I only sound the clarion," he says, "but I enter not into the battle;" and with a Greek quotation very rare with him, he compares himself to one of Homer's peaceful heralds, [Greek: chairete kêrukes, Dios angeloi êde kai andrôn].

Even he knew not the full greatness of his own enterprise.

He underrated the vastness and the subtlety of nature.

He overrated his own appliances to bring it under his command.

He had not that incommunicable genius and instinct of the investigator which in such men as Faraday close hand to hand with phenomena.

His weapons and instruments wanted precision; they were powerful up to a certain point, but they had the clumsiness of an unpractised time.

Cowley compared him to Moses on Pisgah surveying the promised land; it was but a distant survey, and Newton was the Joshua who began to take possession of it.

The idea of the great enterprise, in its essential outline, and with a full sense of its originality and importance, was early formed, and was even sketched on paper with Bacon's characteristic self-reliance when he was but twenty-five.

Looking back, in a letter written in the last year of his life, on the ardour and constancy with which he had clung to his faith--"in that purpose my mind never waxed old; in that long interval of time it never cooled"--he remarks that it was then "forty years since he put together a youthful essay on these matters, which with vast confidence I called by the high-sounding title, The Greatest Birth of Time."

"The Greatest Birth of Time," whatever it was, has perished, though the name, altered to "Partus Temporis _Masculus_" has survived, attached to some fragments of uncertain date and arrangement.

But in very truth the child was born, and, as Bacon says, for forty years grew and developed, with many changes yet the same.

Bacon was most tenacious, not only of ideas, but even of the phrases, images, and turns of speech in which they had once flashed on him and taken shape in his mind.

The features of his undertaking remained the same from first to last, only expanded and enlarged as time went on and experience widened;

his conviction that the knowledge of nature, and with it the power to command and to employ nature, were within the capacity of mankind and might be restored to them; the certainty that of this knowledge men had as yet acquired but the most insignificant part, and that all existing claims to philosophical truth were as idle and precarious as the guesses and traditions of the vulgar; his belief that no greater object could be aimed at than to sweep away once and for ever all this sham knowledge and all that supported it, and to lay an entirely new and clear foundation to build on for the future; his assurance that, as it was easy to point out with fatal and luminous certainty the rottenness and hollowness of all existing knowledge and philosophy, so it was equally easy to devise and practically apply new and natural methods of investigation and construction, which should replace it by knowledge of infallible truth and boundless fruitfulness.

His object--to gain the key to the interpretation of nature; his method--to gain it, not by the means common to all previous schools of philosophy, by untested reasonings and imposing and high-sounding generalisations, but by a series and scale of rigorously verified inductions, starting from the lowest facts of experience to discoveries which should prove and realise themselves by leading deductively to practical results--these, in one form or another, were the theme of his philosophical writings from the earliest sight of them that we gain.

He had disclosed what was in his mind in the letter to Lord Burghley, written when he was thirty-one (1590/91), in which he announced that he had "taken all knowledge for his province," to "purge it of 'frivolous disputations' and 'blind experiments,' and that whatever happened to him, he meant to be a 'true pioneer in the mine of truth.'

" But the first public step in the opening of his great design was the publication in the autumn of 1605 of the _Advancement of Learning_, a careful and balanced report on the existing stock and deficiencies of human knowledge.

His endeavours, as he says in the _Advancement_ itself, are "but as an image in a cross-way, that may point out the way, but cannot go it."

But from this image of his purpose, his thoughts greatly widened as time went on.

The _Advancement_, in part at least, was probably a hurried work.

It shadowed out, but only shadowed out, the lines of his proposed reform of philosophical thought; it showed his dissatisfaction with much that was held to be sound and complete, and showed the direction of his ideas and hopes.

But it was many years before he took a further step.

Active life intervened.

In 1620, at the height of his prosperity, on the eve of his fall, he published the long meditated _Novum Organum_, the avowed challenge to the old philosophies, the engine and instrument of thought and discovery which was to put to shame and supersede all others, containing, in part at least, the principles of that new method of the use of experience which was to be the key to the interpretation and command of nature, and, together with the method, an elaborate but incomplete exemplification of its leading processes.

Here were summed up, and stated with the most solemn earnestness, the conclusions to which long study and continual familiarity with the matters in question had led him.

And with the _Novum Organum_ was at length disclosed, though only in outline, the whole of the vast scheme in all its parts, object, method, materials, results, for the "Instauration" of human knowledge, the restoration of powers lost, disused, neglected, latent, but recoverable by honesty, patience, courage, and industry.

The _Instauratio_, as he planned the work, "is to be divided," says Mr. Ellis, "into six portions, of which the _first_ is to contain a general survey of the present state of knowledge.

In the _second_, men are to be taught how to use their understanding aright in the investigation of nature.

In the _third_, all the phenomena of the universe are to be stored up as in a treasure-house, as the materials on which the new method is to be employed.

In the _fourth_, examples are to be given of its operation and of the results to which it leads.

The _fifth_ is to contain what Bacon had accomplished in natural philosophy _without_ the aid of his own method, _ex eodem intellectûs usu quem alii in inquirendo et inveniendo adhibere consueverunt_.

It is therefore less important than the rest, and Bacon declares that he will not bind himself to the conclusions which it contains.

Moreover, its value will altogether cease when the _sixth_ part can be completed, wherein will be set forth the new philosophy--the results of the application of the new method to all the phenomena of the universe.

But to complete this, the last part of the _Instauratio_, Bacon does not hope; he speaks of it as a thing, _et supra vires et ultra spes nostras collocata_."

--_Works_, i. 71. The _Novum Organum_, itself imperfect, was the crown of all that he lived to do.

It was followed (1622) by the publication, intended to be periodical, of materials for the new philosophy to work upon, particular sections and classes of observations on phenomena--the _History of the Winds_, the _History of Life and Death_.

Others were partly prepared but not published by him.

And finally, in 1623, he brought out in Latin a greatly enlarged recasting of the _Advancement_; the nine books of the "_De Augmentis_."

But the great scheme was not completed; portions were left more or less finished.

Much that he purposed was left undone, and could not have been yet done at that time.

But the works which he published represent imperfectly the labour spent on the undertaking.

Besides these there remains a vast amount of unused or rejected work, which shows how it was thought out, rearranged, tried first in one fashion and then in another, recast, developed.

Separate chapters, introductions, "experimental essays and discarded beginnings," treatises with picturesque and imaginative titles, succeeded one another in that busy work-shop; and these first drafts and tentative essays have in them some of the freshest and most felicitous forms of his thoughts.

At one time his enterprise, connecting itself with his own life and mission, rose before his imagination and kindled his feelings, and embodied itself in the lofty and stately "Proem" already quoted.

His quick and brilliant imagination saw shadows and figures of his ideas in the ancient mythology, which he worked out with curious ingenuity and often much poetry in his _Wisdom of the Ancients_.

Towards the end of his life he began to embody his thoughts and plans in a philosophical tale, which he did not finish--the _New Atlantis_--a charming example of his graceful fancy and of his power of easy and natural story-telling.

Between the _Advancement_ and the _Novum Organum_ (1605-20) much underground work had been done.

"He had finally (about 1607) settled the plan of the _Great Instauration_, and began to call it by that name."

The plan, first in three or four divisions, had been finally digested into six.

Vague outlines had become definite and clear.

Distinct portions had been worked out.

Various modes of treatment had been tried, abandoned, modified.

Prefaces were written to give the sketch and purpose of chapters not yet composed.

The _Novum Organum_ had been written and rewritten twelve times over.

Bacon kept his papers, and we can trace in the unused portion of those left behind him much of the progress of his work, and the shapes which much of it went through.

The _Advancement_ itself is the filling-out and perfecting of what is found in germ, meagre and rudimentary, in a _Discourse in Praise of Knowledge_, written in the days of Elizabeth, and in some Latin chapters of an early date, the _Cogitationes de Scientia Humana_, on the limits and use of knowledge, and on the relation of natural history to natural philosophy.

These early essays, with much of the same characteristic illustration, and many of the favourite images and maxims and texts and phrases, which continue to appear in his writings to the end, contain the thoughts of a man long accustomed to meditate and to see his way on the new aspects of knowledge opening upon him.

And before the _Advancement_ he had already tried his hand on a work intended to be in two books, which Mr. Ellis describes as a "great work on the Interpretation of Nature," the "earliest type of the _Instauratio_," and which Bacon called by the enigmatical name of _Valerius Terminus_.

In it, as in a second draft, which in its turn was superseded by the _Advancement_, the line of thought of the Latin _Cogitationes_ reappears, expanded and more carefully ordered; it contains also the first sketch of his certain and infallible method for what he calls the "freeing of the direction" in the search after Truth, and the first indications of the four classes of "Idols" which were to be so memorable a portion of Bacon's teaching.

And between the _Advancement_ and the _Novum Organum_ at least one unpublished treatise of great interest intervened, the _Visa et Cogitata_, on which he was long employed, and which he brought to a finished shape, fit to be submitted to his friends and critics, Sir Thomas Bodley and Bishop Andrewes.

It is spoken of as a book to be "imparted _sicut videbitur_," in the review which he made of his life and objects soon after he was made Solicitor in 1608. A

number of fragments also bear witness to the fierce scorn and wrath which possessed him against the older and the received philosophies.

He tried his hand at declamatory onslaughts on the leaders of human wisdom, from the early Greeks and Aristotle down to the latest "novellists;" and he certainly succeeded in being magnificently abusive.

But he thought wisely that this was not the best way of doing what in the _Commentarius Solutus_ he calls on himself to do--"taking a greater confidence and authority in discourses of this nature, _tanquam sui certus et de alto despiciens_;" and the rhetorical _Redargutio Philosophiarum_ and writings of kindred nature were laid aside by his more serious judgment.

But all these fragments witness to the immense and unwearied labour bestowed in the midst of a busy life on his undertaking; they suggest, too, the suspicion that there was much waste from interruption, and the doubt whether his work would not have been better if it could have been more steadily continuous.

But if ever a man had a great object in life, and pursued it through good and evil report, through ardent hope and keen disappointment, to the end, with unwearied patience and unshaken faith, it was Bacon, when he sought the improvement of human knowledge "for the glory of God and the relief of man's estate."

It is not the least part of the pathetic fortune of his life that his own success was so imperfect.

When a reader first comes from the vague, popular notions of Bacon's work to his definite proposals the effect is startling.

Every one has heard that he contemplated a complete reform of the existing conceptions of human knowledge, and of the methods by which knowledge was to be sought; that rejecting them as vitiated, by the loose and untested way in which they had been formed, he called men from verbal generalisations and unproved assumptions to come down face to face with the realities of experience; that he substituted for formal reasoning, from baseless premises and unmeaning principles, a methodical system of cautious and sifting inference from wide observation and experiment; and that he thus opened the path which modern science thenceforth followed, with its amazing and unexhausted discoveries, and its vast and beneficent practical results.

We credit all this to Bacon, and assuredly not without reason.

All this is what was embraced in his vision of a changed world of thought and achievement.

All this is what was meant by that _Regnum Hominis_, which, with a play on sacred words which his age did not shrink from, and which he especially pleased himself with, marked the coming of that hitherto unimagined empire of man over the powers and forces which encompassed him.

But the detail of all this is multifarious and complicated, and is not always what we expect; and when we come to see how his work is estimated by those who, by greatest familiarity with scientific ideas and the history of scientific inquiries, are best fitted to judge of it, many a surprise awaits us.

For we find that the greatest differences of opinion exist on the value of what he did.

Not only very unfavourable judgments have been passed upon it, on general grounds--as an irreligious, or a shallow and one-sided, or a poor and "utilitarian" philosophy, and on a definite comparison of it with the actual methods and processes which as a matter of history have been the real means of scientific discovery--but also some of those who have most admired his genius, and with the deepest love and reverence have spared no pains to do it full justice, have yet come to the conclusion that as an instrument and real method of work Bacon's attempt was a failure.

It is not only De Maistre and Lord Macaulay who dispute his philosophical eminence.

It is not only the depreciating opinion of a contemporary like Harvey, who was actually doing what Bacon was writing about.

It is not only that men who after the long history of modern science have won their place among its leaders, and are familiar by daily experience with the ways in which it works--a chemist like Liebig, a physiologist like Claude Bernard--say that they can find nothing to help them in Bacon's methods.

It is not only that a clear and exact critic like M. de Rémusat looks at his attempt, with its success and failure, as characteristic of English, massive, practical good sense rather than as marked by real philosophical depth and refinement, such as Continental thinkers point to and are proud of in Descartes and Leibnitz.

It is not even that a competent master of the whole domain of knowledge, Whewell, filled with the deepest sense of all that the world owes to Bacon, takes for granted that "though Bacon's general maxims are sagacious and animating, his particular precepts failed in his hands, and are now practically useless;" and assuming that Bacon's method is not the right one, and not complete as far as the progress of science up to his time could direct it, proceeds to construct a _Novum Organum Renovatum_.

But Bacon's writings have recently undergone the closest examination by two editors, whose care for his memory is as loyal and affectionate as their capacity is undoubted, and their willingness to take trouble boundless.

And Mr. Ellis and Mr. Spedding, with all their interest in every detail of Bacon's work, and admiration of the way in which he performed it, make no secret of their conclusion that he failed in the very thing on which he was most bent--the discovery of practical and fruitful ways of scientific inquiry.

"Bacon," says Mr. Spedding, "failed to devise a practicable method for the discovery of the Forms of Nature, because he misconceived the conditions of the case....

For the same reason he failed to make any single discovery which holds its place as one of the steps by which science has in any direction really advanced.

The clew with which he entered the labyrinth did not reach far enough; before he had nearly attained his end he was obliged either to come back or to go on without it."

"His peculiar system of philosophy," says Mr. Spedding in another preface, "that is to say, the peculiar method of investigation, the "_organum_," the "_formula_," the "_clavis_," the "_ars ipsa interpretandi naturam_," the "_filum Labyrinthi_," or by whatever of its many names we choose to call that artificial process by which alone he believed man could attain a knowledge of the laws and a command over the powers of nature--_of this philosophy we can make nothing_.

If we have not tried it, it is because we feel confident that it would not answer.

We regard it as a curious piece of machinery, very subtle, elaborate, and ingenious, but not worth constructing, because all the work it could do may be done more easily another way."

--_Works_, iii.

171. What his method really was is itself a matter of question.

Mr. Ellis speaks of it as a matter "but imperfectly apprehended."

He differs from his fellow-labourer Mr. Spedding, in what he supposes to be its central and characteristic innovation.

Mr. Ellis finds it in an improvement and perfection of logical machinery.

Mr. Spedding finds it in the formation of a great "natural and experimental history," a vast collection of facts in every department of nature, which was to be a more important part of his philosophy than the _Novum Organum_ itself.

Both of them think that as he went on, the difficulties of the work grew upon him, and caused alterations in his plans, and we are reminded that "there is no didactic exposition of his method in the whole of his writings," and that "this has not been sufficiently remarked by those who have spoken of his philosophy."

In the first place, the kind of intellectual instrument which he proposed to construct was a mistake.

His great object was to place the human mind "on a level with things and nature" (_ut faciamus intellectum humanum rebus et naturæ parem_), and this could only be done by a revolution in methods.

The ancients had all that genius could do for man; but it was a matter, he said, not of the strength and fleetness of the running, but of the rightness of the way.

It was a new method, absolutely different from anything known, which he proposed to the world, and which should lead men to knowledge, with the certainty and with the impartial facility of a high-road.

The Induction which he imagined to himself as the contrast to all that had yet been tried was to have two qualities.

It was to end, by no very prolonged or difficult processes, in absolute certainty.

And next, it was to leave very little to the differences of intellectual power: it was to level minds and capacities.

It was to give all men the same sort of power which a pair of compasses gives the hand in drawing a circle.

"_Absolute certainty, and a mechanical mode of procedure_" says Mr. Ellis, "_such that all men should be capable of employing it, are the two great features of the Baconian system_."

This he thought possible, and this he set himself to expound--"a method universally applicable, and in all cases infallible."

In this he saw the novelty and the vast importance of his discovery.

"By this method all the knowledge which the human mind was capable of receiving might be attained, and attained without unnecessary labour."

It was a method of "a demonstrative character, with the power of reducing all minds to nearly the same level."

The conception, indeed, of a "great Art of knowledge," of an "Instauration" of the sciences, of a "Clavis" which should unlock the difficulties which had hindered discovery, was not a new one.

This attempt at a method which should be certain, which should level capacities, which should do its work in a short time, had a special attraction for the imagination of the wild spirits of the South, from Raimond Lulli in the thirteenth century to the audacious Calabrians of the sixteenth.

With Bacon it was something much more serious and reasonable and business-like.

But such a claim has never yet been verified; there is no reason to think that it ever can be; and to have made it shows a fundamental defect in Bacon's conception of the possibilities of the human mind and the field it has to work in.