Bacon's Essays, and Wisdom of the Ancients
nature. The second section is composed of _tables_ illustrative of the
inductive method, and the third and last is styled the _doctrine of
instances_, i. e. facts regarding the discovery of causes.
Part the third of the _Instauratio Magna_ was to be a Natural History,
as he termed it, or rather a history of natural substances, in which
the art of man had been employed, which would have been a history of
universal nature.
Part 4, to be called _Scala intellectus_, or _Intellectual Ladder_, was
intended to be, to use his own words, “types and models which place
before our eyes the entire process of the mind in the discovery of
truth, selecting various and remarkable instances.”
He had designed in the fifth part to give specimens of the new
philosophy; a few fragments only of this have been published. It was to
be “the fragment of interest till the principal could be raised.”
The sixth and last part was “to display a perfect system of philosophy
deduced and confirmed by a legitimate, sober, and exact inquiry
according to the method he had laid down and invented.” “To perfect
this last part,” says Bacon, “is above our powers and beyond our hopes.”
Let us return, however, for a moment to the commencement, to remark
that he concludes the introduction by an eloquent prayer that his
exertions may be rendered effectual to the attainment of truth and
happiness. But he feels his own inability, for “his days are numbered,”
to conduct mankind to the hoped for goal. It was given to him to point
out the road to the promised land; but, like Moses, after having
descried it from afar, it was denied him to enter the land to which he
had led the way.
LIFE OF HENRY VII.
The _Life of Henry VII._, published in 1622, is, in the opinion of
Hallam, “the first instance in our language of the application of
philosophy to reasoning on public events in the manner of the ancients
and the Italians. Praise upon Henry is too largely bestowed; but it was
in the nature of Bacon to admire too much a crafty and selfish policy;
and he thought also, no doubt, that so near an ancestor of his own
sovereign should not be treated with severe impartiality.”[39]
LETTERS.
His _Letters_ published in his works are numerous; they are written
in a stiff, ungraceful, formal style; but still, they frequently bear
the impress of the writer’s greatness and genius. Fragments of them
have been frequently quoted in the course of this notice; they have,
perhaps, best served to exhibit more fully the man in all the relations
of his public and private life.
MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS.
Amongst his miscellaneous papers there was found after his death a
remarkable prayer, which Addison deemed sufficiently beautiful to be
published in the _Tatler_[40] for Christmas, 1710. We extract a passage
or two, that may serve to illustrate Bacon’s position or his character.
“I have, though in a despised weed, procured the good of all
men. If any have been my enemies, I thought not of them, neither
hath the sun almost set upon my displeasure; but I have been as
a dove, free from superfluity of maliciousness.”
“Just are thy judgments upon me for my sins, which are more in
number than the sands of the sea, but have no proportion to
thy mercies; for what are the sands of the sea? Earth, heaven,
and all these are nothing to thy mercies.”
Addison observes of this prayer, that for elevation of thought and
greatness of expression, “it seems—rather the devotion of an angel than
a man.”
In taking leave of the life and the works of the greatest of
philosophers, and alas! the least of men, we have endeavored to present
a succinct but faithful narrative—“his glory not extenuated wherein he
was worthy, nor his offences enforced, for which he suffered” merited
obloquy with his own contemporaries and all posterity. Our endeavor has
been
Verba animi proferre et vitam impendere vero.
But his failings, great as they were, are forgotten through his
transcendent merit; his faults injured but few, and in his own time
alone; his genius has benefited all mankind. The new direction he gave
to philosophy was the indirect cause of all the modern conquests
of science over matter, or, as it were, over nature. What it has
already accomplished, and may yet effect for the whole human race, is
incalculable. Macaulay, the historian of England, has been likewise the
eloquent narrator of the progress, that owes its origin to the genius
of Francis Bacon.
“Ask a follower of Bacon,” says Macaulay, “what the new
philosophy, as it was called in the time of Charles the Second,
has effected for mankind, and his answer is ready: ‘It hath
lengthened life; it has mitigated pain; it has extinguished
diseases; it has increased the fertility of the soil; it has
given new securities to the mariner; it has furnished new arms
to the warrior; it has spanned great rivers and estuaries with
bridges of form unknown to our fathers; it has guided the
thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth; it has lighted up
the night with the splendor of the day; it has extended the range
of the human vision; it has multiplied the power of the human
muscle; it has accelerated motion; it has annihilated distance;
it has facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly
offices, all dispatch of business; it has enabled man to descend
to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to penetrate
securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to traverse the
land on cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean in
ships which sail against the wind. These are but a part of its
fruits, and of its first-fruits. For it is a philosophy which
never rests, which has never attained, which is never perfect.
Its law is progress. A point which yesterday was invisible is its
goal to-day, and will be its starting-post to-morrow.’”[41]
ESSAYS.
I.—OF TRUTH.
What is truth? said jesting Pilate;[42] and would not stay for an
answer. Certainly, there be that delight in giddiness; and count it
a bondage to fix a belief; affecting freewill in thinking as well as
in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone,
yet there remain certain discoursing wits which are of the same veins,
though there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the
ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in
finding out of truth: nor again, that, when it is found, it imposeth
upon men’s thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural
though corrupt love of the lie itself. One of the later schools[43] of
the Grecians examineth the matter, and is at a stand to think what
should be in it that men should love lies; where neither they make
for pleasure, as with poets; nor for advantage, as with the merchant,
but for the lie’s sake. But I cannot tell; this same truth is a naked
and open daylight, that doth not show the masks, and mummeries, and
triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights.
Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by
day, but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle,
that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add
pleasure. Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men’s
minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations
as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number
of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and
unpleasing to themselves? One of the fathers,[44] in great severity,
called poesy “vinum dæmonum,”[45] because it filleth the imagination,
and yet it is but with the shadow of a lie. But it is not the lie that
passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in, and settleth
in it, that doth the hurt, such as we spake of before. But howsoever
these things are thus in men’s depraved judgments and affections, yet
truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of
truth, which is the love-making, or wooing of it, the knowledge of
truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which
is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature. The
first creature of God, in the works of the days, was the light of the
sense;[46] the last was the light of reason;[47] and his sabbath work,
ever since, is the illumination of his Spirit. First, he breathed light
upon the face of the matter, or chaos; then he breathed light into
the face of man; and still he breatheth and inspireth light into the
face of his chosen. The poet[48] that beautified the sect,[49] that
was otherwise inferior to the rest, saith yet excellently well: “It
is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed upon
the sea; a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a
battle, and the adventures thereof below; but no pleasure is comparable
to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth” (a hill not to be
commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene), “and to
see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale
below;”[50] so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with
swelling or pride. Certainly it is heaven upon earth, to have a man’s
mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of
truth.
To pass from theological and philosophical truth to the truth of civil
business; it will be acknowledged, even by those that practise it not,
that clear and round dealing is the honor of man’s nature, and that
mixture of falsehood is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which
may make the metal work the better, but it embaseth it. For these
winding and crooked courses are the goings of the serpent; which goeth
basely upon the belly, and not upon the feet. There is no vice that
doth so cover a man with shame, as to be found false and perfidious;
and therefore Montaigne[51] saith prettily, when he inquired the
reason why the word of the lie should be such a disgrace, and such an
odious charge: saith he, “If it be well weighed, to say that a man
lieth, is as much as to say that he is brave towards God and a coward
towards men. For a lie faces God, and shrinks from man;” surely, the
wickedness of falsehood and breach of faith cannot possibly be so
highly expressed, as in that it shall be the last peal to call the
judgments of God upon the generations of men: it being foretold, that,
when “Christ cometh,” he shall not “find faith upon the earth.”[52]
II.—OF DEATH.[53]
Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural
fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other. Certainly,
the contemplation of death, as the wages of sin, and passage to another
world, is holy and religious; but the fear of it, as a tribute due
unto nature, is weak. Yet in religious meditations there is sometimes
mixture of vanity and of superstition. You shall read in some of the
friars’ books of mortification, that a man should think with himself,
what the pain is, if he have but his finger’s end pressed or tortured;
and thereby imagine what the pains of death are, when the whole body
is corrupted and dissolved; when many times death passeth with less
pain than the torture of a limb, for the most vital parts are not
the quickest of sense. And by him that spake only as a philosopher
and natural man, it was well said, “Pompa mortis magis terret, quam
mors ipsa.”[54] Groans and convulsions, and a discolored face, and
friends weeping, and blacks[55] and obsequies, and the like, show death
terrible. It is worthy the observing, that there is no passion in
the mind of man so weak, but it mates and masters the fear of death;
and therefore death is no such terrible enemy when a man hath so many