Bacon — 16 - Chapter 8B

In the next place, though the prominence which he gave to the doctrine of Induction was one of those novelties which are so obvious after the event, though so strange before it, and was undoubtedly the element in his system which gave it life and power and influence on the course of human thought and discovery, his account of Induction was far from complete and satisfactory.

Without troubling himself about the theory of Induction, as De Rémusat has pointed out, he contented himself with applying to its use the precepts of common-sense and a sagacious perception of the circumstances in which it was to be employed.

But even these precepts, notable as they were, wanted distinctness, and the qualities needed for working rules.

The change is great when in fifty years we pass from the poetical science of Bacon to the mathematical and precise science of Newton.

His own time may well have been struck by the originality and comprehensiveness of such a discriminating arrangement of proofs as the "Prerogative Instances" of the _Novum Organum_, so natural and real, yet never before thus compared and systematized.

But there is a great interval between his method of experimenting, his "_Hunt of Pan_"--the three tables of Instances, "_Presence_," "_Absence_" and "_Degrees, or Comparisons_," leading to a process of sifting and exclusion, and to the _First Vintage_, or beginnings of theory--and say, for instance, Mill's four methods of experimental inquiry: the method of _agreement_, of _differences_, of _residues_, and of _concomitant variations_.

The course which he marked out so laboriously and so ingeniously for Induction to follow was one which was found to be impracticable, and as barren of results as those deductive philosophies on which he lavished his scorn.

He has left precepts and examples of what he meant by his cross-examining and sifting processes.

As admonitions to cross-examine and to sift facts and phenomena they are valuable.

Many of the observations and classifications are subtle and instructive.

But in his hands nothing comes of them.

They lead at the utmost to mere negative conclusions;

they show what a thing is not.

But his attempt to elicit anything positive out of them breaks down, or ends at best in divinations and guesses, sometimes--as in connecting Heat and Motion--very near to later and more carefully-grounded theories, but always unverified.

He had a radically false and mechanical conception, though in words he earnestly disclaims it, of the way to deal with the facts of nature.

He looked on them as things which told their own story, and suggested the questions which ought to be put to them; and with this idea half his time was spent in collecting huge masses of indigested facts of the most various authenticity and value, and he thought he was collecting materials which his method had only to touch in order to bring forth from them light and truth and power.

He thought that, not in certain sciences, but in all, one set of men could do the observing and collecting, and another be set on the work of Induction and the discovery of "axioms."

Doubtless in the arrangement and sorting of them his versatile and ingenious mind gave itself full play; he divides and distinguishes them into their companies and groups, different kinds of Motion, "Prerogative" instances, with their long tale of imaginative titles.

But we look in vain for any use that he was able to make of them, or even to suggest.

Bacon never adequately realised that no promiscuous assemblage of even the most certain facts could ever lead to knowledge, could ever suggest their own interpretation, without the action on them of the living mind, without the initiative of an idea.

In truth he was so afraid of assumptions and "anticipations" and prejudices--his great bugbear was so much the "_intellectus sibi permissus_" the mind given liberty to guess and imagine and theorise, instead of, as it ought, absolutely and servilely submitting itself to the control of facts--that he missed the true place of the rational and formative element in his account of Induction.

He does tell us, indeed, that "truth emerges sooner from error than from confusion."

He indulges the mind, in the course of its investigation of "Instances," with a first "vintage" of provisional generalisations.

But of the way in which the living mind of the discoverer works, with its ideas and insight, and thoughts that come no one knows whence, working hand in hand with what comes before the eye or is tested by the instrument, he gives us no picture.

Compare his elaborate investigation of the "Form of Heat" in the _Novum Organum_, with such a record of real inquiry as Wells's _Treatise on Dew_, or Herschel's analysis of it in his _Introduction to Natural Philosophy_.

And of the difference of genius between a Faraday or a Newton, and the crowd of average men who have used and finished off their work, he takes no account.

Indeed, he thinks that for the future such difference is to disappear.

"That his method is impracticable," says Mr. Ellis, "cannot, I think, be denied, if we reflect not only that it never has produced any result, but also that the process by which scientific truths have been established cannot be so presented as even to appear to be in accordance with it.

In all cases this process involves an element to which nothing corresponds in the Tables of 'Comparence' and 'Exclusion,' namely, the application to the facts of observation of a principle of arrangement, an idea, existing in the mind of the discoverer antecedently to the act of induction.

It may be said that this idea is precisely one of the _naturæ_ into which the facts of observation ought in Bacon's system to be analysed.

And this is in one sense true; but it must be added that this analysis, if it be thought right so to call it, is of the essence of the discovery which results from it.

In most cases the act of induction follows as a matter of course as soon as the appropriate idea has been introduced."

--Ellis, _General Preface_, i. 38. Lastly, not only was Bacon's conception of philosophy so narrow as to exclude one of its greatest domains; for, says Mr. Ellis, "it cannot be denied that to Bacon all sound philosophy seemed to be included in what we now call the natural sciences," and in all its parts was claimed as the subject of his inductive method; but Bacon's scientific knowledge and scientific conceptions were often very imperfect--more imperfect than they ought to have been for his time.

Of one large part of science, which was just then beginning to be cultivated with high promise of success--the knowledge of the heavens--he speaks with a coldness and suspicion which contrasts remarkably with his eagerness about things belonging to the sphere of the earth and within reach of the senses.

He holds, of course, the unity of the world; the laws of the whole visible universe are one order; but the heavens, wonderful as they are to him, are--compared with other things--out of his track of inquiry.

He had his astronomical theories; he expounded them in his "_Descriptio Globi Intellectualis_" and his _Thema Coeli_ He was not altogether ignorant of what was going on in days when Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were at work.

But he did not know how to deal with it, and there were men in England, before and then, who understood much better than he the problems and the methods of astronomy.

He had one conspicuous and strange defect for a man who undertook what he did.

He was not a mathematician: he did not see the indispensable necessity of mathematics in the great _Instauration_ which he projected; he did not much believe in what they could do.

He cared so little about them that he takes no notice of Napier's invention of Logarithms.

He was not able to trace how the direct information of the senses might be rightly subordinated to the rational, but not self-evident results of geometry and arithmetic.

He was impatient of the subtleties of astronomical calculations; they only attempted to satisfy problems about the motion of bodies in the sky, and told us nothing of physical fact; they gave us, as Prometheus gave to Jove, the outside skin of the offering, which was stuffed inside with straw and rubbish.

He entirely failed to see that before dealing with physical astronomy, it must be dealt with mathematically.

"It is well to remark," as Mr. Ellis says, "that none of Newton's astronomical discoveries could have been made if astronomers had not continued to render themselves liable to Bacon's censure."

Bacon little thought that in navigation the compass itself would become a subordinate instrument compared with the helps given by mathematical astronomy.

In this, and in other ways, Bacon rose above his time in his conceptions of what _might be_, but not of what _was_; the list is a long one, as given by Mr. Spedding (iii.

511), of the instances which show that he was ill-informed about the advances of knowledge in his own time.

And his mind was often not clear when he came to deal with complex phenomena.

Thus, though he constructed a table of specific gravities--"the only collection," says Mr. Ellis, "of quantitative experiments that we find in his works," and "wonderfully accurate considering the manner in which they were obtained;" yet he failed to understand the real nature of the famous experiment of Archimedes.

And so with the larger features of his teaching it is impossible not to feel how imperfectly he had emancipated himself from the power of words and of common prepossessions; how for one reason or another he had failed to call himself to account in the terms he employed, and the assumptions on which he argued.

The caution does not seem to have occurred to him that the statement of a fact may, in nine cases out of ten, involve a theory.

His whole doctrine of "Forms" and "Simple natures," which is so prominent in his method of investigation, is an example of loose and slovenly use of unexamined and untested ideas.

He allowed himself to think that it would be possible to arrive at an alphabet of nature, which, once attained, would suffice to spell out and constitute all its infinite combinations.

He accepted, without thinking it worth a doubt, the doctrine of appetites and passions and inclinations and dislikes and horrors in inorganic nature.

His whole physiology of life and death depends on a doctrine of animal spirits, of which he traces the operations and qualities as if they were as certain as the nerves or the blood, and of which he gives this account--"that in every tangible body there is a spirit covered and enveloped in the grosser body;" "not a virtue, not an energy, not an actuality, nor any such idle matter, but a body thin and invisible, and yet having place and dimension, and real."

...

"a middle nature between flame, which is momentary, and air which is permanent."

Yet these are the very things for which he holds up Aristotle and the Scholastics and the Italian speculators to reprobation and scorn.

The clearness of his thinking was often overlaid by the immense profusion of decorative material which his meditation brought along with it.

The defect was greater than that which even his ablest defenders admit.

It was more than that in that "greatest and radical difference, which he himself observes" between minds, the difference between minds which were apt to note _distinctions_, and those which were apt to note _likenesses_, he was, without knowing it, defective in the first.

It was that in many instances he exemplified in his own work the very faults which he charged on the older philosophies: haste, carelessness, precipitancy, using words without thinking them out, assuming to know when he ought to have perceived his real ignorance.

What, then, with all these mistakes and failures, not always creditable or pardonable, has given Bacon his preeminent place in the history of science?

1. The answer is that with all his mistakes and failures, the principles on which his mode of attaining a knowledge of nature was based were the only true ones; and they had never before been propounded so systematically, so fully, and so earnestly.

His was not the first mind on whom these principles had broken.

Men were, and had been for some time, pursuing their inquiries into various departments of nature precisely on the general plan of careful and honest observation of real things which he enjoined.

They had seen, as he saw, the futility of all attempts at natural philosophy by mere thinking and arguing, without coming into contact with the contradictions or corrections or verifications of experience.

In Italy, in Germany, in England there were laborious and successful workers, who had long felt that to be in touch with nature was the only way to know.

But no one had yet come before the world to proclaim this on the house-tops, as the key of the only certain path to the secrets of nature, the watchword of a revolution in the methods of interpreting her; and this Bacon did with an imposing authority and power which enforced attention.

He spoke the thoughts of patient toilers like Harvey with a largeness and richness which they could not command, and which they perhaps smiled at.

He disentangled and spoke the vague thoughts of his age, which other men had not the courage and clearness of mind to formulate.

What Bacon _did_, indeed, and what he _meant_, are separate matters.

He _meant_ an infallible method by which man should be fully equipped for a struggle with nature; he meant an irresistible and immediate conquest, within a definite and not distant time.

It was too much.

He himself saw no more of what he _meant_ than Columbus did of America.

But what he _did_ was to persuade men for the future that the intelligent, patient, persevering cross-examination of things, and the thoughts about them, was the only, and was the successful road to know.

No one had yet done this, and he did it.

His writings were a public recognition of real science, in its humblest tasks about the commonplace facts before our feet, as well as in its loftiest achievements.

"The man who is growing great and happy by electrifying a bottle," says Dr. Johnson, "wonders to see the world engaged in the prattle about peace and war," and the world was ready to smile at the simplicity or the impertinence of his enthusiasm.

Bacon impressed upon the world for good, with every resource of subtle observation and forcible statement, that "the man who is growing great by electrifying a bottle" is as important a person in the world's affairs as the arbiter of peace and war.

2. Yet this is not all.

An inferior man might have made himself the mouthpiece of the hopes and aspirations of his generation after a larger science.

But to Bacon these aspirations embodied themselves in the form of a great and absorbing idea; an idea which took possession of the whole man, kindling in him a faith which nothing could quench, and a passion which nothing could dull; an idea which, for forty years, was his daily companion, his daily delight, his daily business; an idea which he was never tired of placing in ever fresh and more attractive lights, from which no trouble could wean him, about which no disaster could make him despair; an idea round which the instincts and intuitions and obstinate convictions of genius gathered, which kindled his rich imagination and was invested by it with a splendour and magnificence like the dreams of fable.

It is this idea which finds its fitting expression in the grand and stately aphorisms of the _Novum Organum_, in the varied fields of interest in the _De Augmentis_, in the romance of the _New Atlantis_.

It is this idea, this certainty of a new unexplored Kingdom of Knowledge within the reach and grasp of man, if he will be humble enough and patient enough and truthful enough to occupy it--this announcement not only of a new system of thought, but of a change in the condition of the world--a prize and possession such as man had not yet imagined; this belief in the fortunes of the human race and its issue, "such an issue, it may be, as in the present condition of things and men's minds cannot easily be conceived or imagined," yet more than verified in the wonders which our eyes have seen--it is this which gives its prerogative to Bacon's work.

That he bungled about the processes of Induction, that he talked about an unintelligible doctrine of _Forms_, did not affect the weight and solemnity of his call to learn, so full of wisdom and good-sense, so sober and so solid, yet so audaciously confident.

There had been nothing like it in its ardour of hope, in the glory which it threw around the investigation of nature.

It was the presence and the power of a great idea--long become a commonplace to us, but strange and perplexing at first to his own generation, which probably shared Coke's opinion that it qualified its champion for a place in the company of the "Ship of Fools," which expressed its opinion of the man who wrote the _Novum Organum_, in the sentiment that "a fool _could_ not have written it, and a wise man _would_ not"--it is this which has placed Bacon among the great discoverers of the human race.

It is this imaginative yet serious assertion of the vast range and possibilities of human knowledge which, as M. de Rémusat remarks--the keenest and fairest of Bacon's judges--gives Bacon his claim to the undefinable but very real character of greatness.

Two men stand out, "the masters of those who know," without equals up to their time, among men--the Greek Aristotle and the Englishman Bacon.

They agree in the universality and comprehensiveness of their conception of human knowledge; and they were absolutely alone in their serious practical ambition to work out this conception.

In the separate departments of thought, of investigation, of art, each is left far behind by numbers of men, who in these separate departments have gone far deeper than they, have soared higher, have been more successful in what they attempted.

But Aristotle first, and for his time more successfully, and Bacon after him, ventured on the daring enterprise of "taking all knowledge for their province;" and in this they stood alone.

This present scene of man's existence, this that we call nature, the stage on which mortal life begins and goes on and ends, the faculties with which man is equipped to act, to enjoy, to create, to hold his way amid or against the circumstances and forces round him--this is what each wants to know, as thoroughly and really as can be.

It is not to reduce things to a theory or a system that they look around them on the place where they find themselves with life and thought and power; that were easily done, and has been done over and over again, only to prove its futility.

It is to know, as to the whole and its parts, as men understand _knowing_ in some one subject of successful handling, whether art or science or practical craft.

This idea, this effort, distinguishes these two men.

The Greeks--predecessors, contemporaries, successors of Aristotle--were speculators, full of clever and ingenious guesses, in which the amount of clear and certain fact was in lamentable disproportion to the schemes blown up from it; or they devoted themselves more profitably to some one or two subjects of inquiry, moral or purely intellectual, with absolute indifference to what might be asked, or what might be known, of the real conditions under which they were passing their existence.

Some of the Romans, Cicero and Pliny, had encyclopædic minds; but the Roman mind was the slave of precedent, and was more than satisfied with partially understanding and neatly arranging what the Greeks had left.

The Arabians looked more widely about them; but the Arabians were essentially sceptics, and resigned subjects to the inevitable and the inexplicable; there was an irony, open or covert, in their philosophy, their terminology, their transcendental mysticism, which showed how little they believed that they really knew.

The vast and mighty intellects of the schoolmen never came into a real grapple with the immensity of the facts of the natural or even of the moral world; within the world of abstract thought, the world of language, with its infinite growths and consequences, they have never had their match for keenness, for patience, for courage, for inexhaustible toil; but they were as much disconnected from the natural world, which was their stage of life, as if they had been disembodied spirits.

The Renaissance brought with it not only the desire to know, but to know comprehensively and in all possible directions; it brought with it temptations to the awakened Italian genius, renewed, enlarged, refined, if not strengthened by its passage through the Middle Ages, to make thought deal with the real, and to understand the scene in which men were doing such strange and wonderful things; but Giordano Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, and their fellows, were not men capable of more than short flights, though they might be daring and eager ones.

It required more thoroughness, more humble-minded industry, to match the magnitude of the task.

And there have been men of universal minds and comprehensive knowledge since Bacon, Leibnitz, Goethe, Humboldt, men whose thoughts were at home everywhere, where there was something to be known.

But even for them the world of knowledge has grown too large.

We shall never again see an Aristotle or a Bacon, because the conditions of knowledge have altered.

Bacon, like Aristotle, belonged to an age of adventure, which went to sea little knowing whither it went, and ill furnished with knowledge and instruments.

He entered with a vast and vague scheme of discovery on these unknown seas and new worlds which to us are familiar, and daily traversed in every direction.

This new world of knowledge has turned out in many ways very different from what Aristotle or Bacon supposed, and has been conquered by implements and weapons very different in precision and power from what they purposed to rely on.

But the combination of patient and careful industry, with the courage and divination of genius, in doing what none had done before, makes it equally stupid and idle to impeach their greatness.

3. Bacon has been charged with bringing philosophy down from the heights, not as of old to make men know themselves, and to be the teacher of the highest form of truth, but to be the purveyor of material utility.

It contemplates only, it is said, the "_commoda vitæ_;" about the deeper and more elevating problems of thought it does not trouble itself.

It concerns itself only about external and sensible nature, about what is "of the earth, earthy."

But when it comes to the questions which have attracted the keenest and hardiest thinkers, the question, what it is that thinks and wills--what is the origin and guarantee of the faculties by which men know anything at all and form rational and true conceptions about nature and themselves, whence it is that reason draws its powers and materials and rules--what is the meaning of words which all use but few can explain--Time and Space, and Being and Cause, and consciousness and choice, and the moral law--Bacon is content with a loose and superficial treatment of them.

Bacon certainly was not a metaphysician, nor an exact and lucid reasoner.

With wonderful flashes of sure intuition or happy anticipation, his mind was deficient in the powers which deal with the deeper problems of thought, just as it was deficient in the mathematical faculty.

The subtlety, the intuition, the penetration, the severe precision, even the force of imagination, which make a man a great thinker on any abstract subject were not his; the interest of questions which had interested metaphysicians had no interest for him: he distrusted and undervalued them.

When he touches the "ultimities" of knowledge he is as obscure and hard to be understood as any of those restless Southern Italians of his own age, who shared with him the ambition of reconstructing science.

Certainly the science which most interested Bacon, the science which he found, as he thought, in so desperate a condition, and to which he gave so great an impulse, was physical science.

But physical science may be looked at and pursued in different ways, in different tempers, with different objects.

It may be followed in the spirit of Newton, of Boyle, of Herschel, of Faraday;

or with a confined and low horizon it may be dwarfed and shrivelled into a mean utilitarianism.

But Bacon's horizon was not a narrow one.

He believed in God and immortality and the Christian creed and hope.

To him the restoration of the Reign of Man was a noble enterprise, because man was so great and belonged to so great an order of things, because the things which he was bid to search into with honesty and truthfulness were the works and laws of God, because it was so shameful and so miserable that from an ignorance which industry and good-sense could remedy, the tribes of mankind passed their days in self-imposed darkness and helplessness.

It was God's appointment that men should go through this earthly stage of their being.

Each stage of man's mysterious existence had to be dealt with, not according to his own fancies, but according to the conditions imposed on it; and it was one of man's first duties to arrange for his stay on earth according to the real laws which he could find out if he only sought for them.

Doubtless it was one of Bacon's highest hopes that from the growth of true knowledge would follow in surprising ways the relief of man's estate; this, as an end, runs through all his yearning after a fuller and surer method of interpreting nature.

The desire to be a great benefactor, the spirit of sympathy and pity for mankind, reign through this portion of his work--pity for confidence so greatly abused by the teachers of man, pity for ignorance which might be dispelled, pity for pain and misery which might be relieved.

In the quaint but beautiful picture of courtesy, kindness, and wisdom, which he imagines in the _New Atlantis_, the representative of true philosophy, the "Father of Solomon's House," is introduced as one who "had an aspect as if he pitied men."

But unless it is utilitarianism to be keenly alive to the needs and pains of life, and to be eager and busy to lighten and assuage them, Bacon's philosophy was not utilitarian.

It may deserve many reproaches, but not this one.

Such a passage as the following--in which are combined the highest motives and graces and passions of the soul, love of truth, humility of mind, purity of purpose, reverence for God, sympathy for man, compassion for the sorrows of the world and longing to heal them, depth of conviction and faith--fairly represents the spirit which runs through his works.

After urging the mistaken use of imagination and authority in science, he goes on-- "There is not and never will be an end or limit to this; one catches at one thing, another at another; each has his favourite fancy; pure and open light there is none; every one philosophises out of the cells of his own imagination, as out of Plato's cave;

the higher wits with more acuteness and felicity, the duller, less happily, but with equal pertinacity.

And now of late, by the regulation of some learned and (as things now are) excellent men (the former license having, I suppose, become wearisome), the sciences are confined to certain and prescribed authors, and thus restrained are imposed upon the old and instilled into the young;

so that now (to use the sarcasm of Cicero concerning Cæsar's year) the constellation of Lyra rises by edict, and authority is taken for truth, not truth for authority.

Which kind of institution and discipline is excellent for present use, but precludes all prospect of improvement.

For we copy the sin of our first parents while we suffer for it.

They wished to be like God, but their posterity wish to be even greater.

For we create worlds, we direct and domineer over nature, we will have it that all things _are_ as in our folly we think they should be, not as seems fittest to the Divine wisdom, or as they are found to be in fact; and I know not whether we more distort the facts of nature or of our own wits; but we clearly impress the stamp of our own image on the creatures and works of God, instead of carefully examining and recognising in them the stamp of the Creator himself.

Wherefore our dominion over creatures is a second time forfeited, not undeservedly; and whereas after the fall of man some power over the resistance of creatures was still left to him--the power of subduing and managing them by true and solid arts--yet this too through our insolence, and because we desire to be like God and to follow the dictates of our own reason, we in great part lose.

If, therefore, there be any humility towards the Creator, any reverence for or disposition to magnify His works, any charity for man and anxiety to relieve his sorrows and necessities, any love of truth in nature, any hatred of darkness, any desire for the purification of the understanding, we must entreat men again and again to discard, or at least set apart for a while, these volatile and preposterous philosophies which have preferred theses to hypotheses, led experience captive, and triumphed over the works of God; and to approach with humility and veneration to unroll the volume of Creation, to linger and meditate therein, and with minds washed clean from opinions to study it in purity and integrity.

For this is that sound and language which "went forth into all lands," and did not incur the confusion of Babel; this should men study to be perfect in, and becoming again as little children condescend to take the alphabet of it into their hands, and spare no pains to search and unravel the interpretation thereof, but pursue it strenuously and persevere even unto death."

--Preface to _Historia Naturalis_: translated, _Works_, v. 132-3. CHAPTER IX.