Bacon's Essays, and Wisdom of the Ancients
behest; foreign nations and all ages will not refuse a tribute of
homage to his genius! Gassendi presents an analysis of his labors, and
pays a tribute of admiration to their author; Descartes has mentioned
him with encomium; Malebranche quotes him as an authority; Puffendorff
expressed admiration of him; the University of Oxford presented to him,
after his fall, an address, in which he is termed “a mighty Hercules,
who had by his own hand greatly advanced those pillars in the learned
world which by the rest of the world were supposed immovable.” Leibnitz
ascribed to him the revival of true philosophy; Newton had studied
him so closely that he adopted even his phraseology; Voltaire and
D’Alembert have rendered him popular in France. The modern philosophers
of all Europe regard him reverentially as the father of experimental
philosophy.
He attempted at this late period of his life a metrical translation
into English of the Psalms of David; although his prose is full of
poetry, his verse has but little of the divine art.
He again declined to take his seat as a peer in Charles’s second
Parliament; but the last stage of his life displayed more dignity and
real greatness than the “pride, pomp, and circumstance” of his high
offices and honors. The public of England and of “foreign nations”
forgot the necessity of “charitable speeches” and anticipated “the
next ages.” The most distinguished foreigners repaired to Gray’s Inn
to pay their respects to him. The Marquis d’Effiat, who brought over
to England the Princess Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles the
First, went to see him. Bacon, confined to his bed, but unwilling to
decline the visit, received him with the curtains drawn. “You resemble
the angels,” said the French minister to him, “we hear those beings
continually talked of; we believe them superior to mankind; and we
never have the consolation to see them.”
But in ill health and infirmity he continued his studies and
experiments; as it occurred to him that snow might preserve animal
substances from putrefaction as well as salt, he tried the experiment,
and stuffed a fowl with snow with his own hands. “The great apostle of
experimental philosophy was destined to become its martyr;” he took
cold. From his bed he dictated a letter to the Earl of Arundel, to
whose house he had been conveyed. “I was likely to have had the fortune
of Caïus Plinius the Elder, who lost his life by trying an experiment
about the burning of the Mount Vesuvius. For I was also desirous to
try an experiment or two touching the conservation and induration of
bodies. As for the experiment itself, it succeeded excellently well.”
He had, indeed, the fortune of Pliny the Elder; for he never recovered
from the effects of his cold, which brought on fever and a complaint of
the chest; and he expired on the 9th of April, 1626, in the sixty-sixth
year of his age. Thus died, a victim to his devotion to science,
Francis Bacon, whose noble death is an expiation of the errors of his
life, and who was, as has been justly observed, notwithstanding all his
faults, one of the greatest ornaments and benefactors of the human race.
No account has been preserved of his funeral; but probably it was
private. Sir Thomas Meautys, his faithful secretary, erected at his own
expense a monument to Bacon’s memory. Bacon is represented sitting,
reclining on his hand, and absorbed in meditation. The effigy bears the
inscription: _sic sedebat_.
The singular fact ought not to be omitted, that notwithstanding the
immense sums that had been received by him, legitimately or otherwise,
he died insolvent. The fault of his life had been that he never adapted
his expenses to his income; perhaps even he never calculated them.
To what irretrievable ruin did not this lead him? To disgrace and
dishonor, in the midst of his career; to insolvency at its end. His
love of worldly grandeur was uncontrollable, or at least uncontrolled.
“The virtue of prosperity is temperance,” says he himself; but this
virtue he did not possess. His stately bark rode proudly over the
waves, unmindful of the rocks; on one of these, alas! it split and
foundered.
Bacon was very prepossessing in his person; he was in stature above
the middle size; his forehead was broad and high, of an intellectual
appearance; his eye was lively and expressive; and his countenance bore
early the marks of deep thought.
It might be mentioned here with instruction to the reader, that few
men were more impressed than Bacon with the value of time, the most
precious element of life. He assiduously employed the smallest portions
of it; considering justly that the days, the hours, nay minutes of
existence require the greatest care at our hands; the weeks, months,
and years have been wisely said to take care of themselves. His
chaplain, Rawley, remarks: “_Nullum momentum aut temporis segmentum
perire et intercidere passus est_,” he suffered no moment nor fragment
of time to pass away unprofitably. It is this circumstance that
explains to us the great things he accomplished even in the most busy
part of his life.
The whole of Bacon’s biography has been admirably recapitulated by Lord
Campbell[23] in the following paragraph:—
“We have seen him taught his alphabet by his mother; patted
on the head by Queen Elizabeth; mocking the worshippers of
Aristotle at Cambridge; catching the first glimpses of his great
discoveries, and yet uncertain whether the light was from heaven;
associating with the learned and the gay at the court of France;
devoting himself to Bracton[24] and the Year Books in Gray’s
Inn; throwing aside the musty folios of the law to write a moral
Essay, to make an experiment in natural philosophy, or to detect
the fallacies which had hitherto obstructed the progress of
useful truth; contented for a time with taking “all knowledge for
his province;” roused from these speculations by the stings of
vulgar ambition; plying all the arts of flattery to gain official
advancement by royal and courtly favor; entering the House of
Commons, and displaying powers of oratory of which he had been
unconscious; being seduced by the love of popular applause, for
a brief space becoming a patriot; making amends, by defending
all the worst excesses of prerogative; publishing to the world
lucubrations on morals, which show the nicest perception of what
is honorable and beautiful as well as prudent, in the conduct
of life; yet the son of a Lord Keeper, the nephew of the prime
minister, a Queen’s counsel, with the first practice at the
bar, arrested for debt, and languishing in a spunging-house;
tired with vain solicitations to his own kindred for promotion,
joining the party of their opponent, and after experiencing the
most generous kindness from the young and chivalrous head of
it, assisting to bring him to the scaffold, and to blacken his
memory; seeking, by a mercenary marriage to repair his broken
fortunes; on the accession of a new sovereign offering up the
most servile adulation to a pedant whom he utterly despised;
infinitely gratified by being permitted to kneel down, with three
hundred others, to receive the honor of knighthood; truckling
to a worthless favorite with the most slavish subserviency that
he might be appointed a law-officer of the Crown; then giving
the most admirable advice for the compilation and emendation
of the laws of England, and helping to inflict torture on a
poor parson whom he wished to hang as a traitor for writing an
unpublished and unpreached sermon; attracting the notice of all
Europe by his philosophical works, which established a new era
in the mode of investigating the phenomena both of matter and
mind; basely intriguing in the meanwhile for further promotion,
and writing secret letters to his sovereign to disparage his
rivals; riding proudly between the Lord High Treasurer and Lord
Privy Seal, preceded by his mace-bearer and purse-bearer, and
followed by a long line of nobles and judges, to be installed
in the office of Lord High Chancellor; by and by, settling with
his servants the account of the bribes they had received for
him; a little embarrassed by being obliged, out of decency, the
case being so clear, to decide against the party whose money
he had pocketed, but stifling the misgivings of conscience by
the splendor and flattery which he now commanded; struck to the
earth by the discovery of his corruption; taking to his bed,
and refusing sustenance; confessing the truth of the charges
brought against him, and abjectly imploring mercy; nobly rallying
from his disgrace, and engaging in new literary undertakings,
which have added to the splendor of his name; still exhibiting
a touch of his ancient vanity, and, in the midst of pecuniary
embarrassment, refusing to ‘be stripped of his feathers;’[25]
inspired, nevertheless, with all his youthful zeal for science,
in conducting his last experiment of ‘stuffing a fowl with snow
to preserve it,’ which succeeded ‘excellently well,’ but brought
him to his grave; and, as the closing act of a life so checkered,
making his will, whereby, conscious of the shame he had incurred
among his contemporaries, but impressed with a swelling
conviction of what he had achieved for mankind, he bequeathed
his ‘name and memory to men’s charitable speeches, to foreign
nations, and the next ages.’”
After this brilliant recapitulation of the principal facts of Bacon’s
eventful life, there remains the difficult task of examining his
character as a writer and philosopher; and then of presenting some
observations on his principal works. As these subjects have occupied
the attention of the master minds and most elegant writers of England,
we shall unhesitatingly present the reader with the opinions of these,
the most competent judges in each special department.
But first, let the philosopher speak for himself.
The end and aim of the writings of Bacon are best described by himself,
as these descriptions may be gleaned from his various works. He taught,
to use his own language, the means, not of the “amplification of the
power of one man over his country, nor of the amplification of the
power of that country over other nations; but the amplification of the
power and kingdom of mankind over the world.”[26] “A restitution of
man to the sovereignty of nature.”[27] “The enlarging the bounds of
human empire to the effecting of all things possible.”[28] From the
enlargement of reason, he did not separate the growth of virtue; for he
thought that “truth and goodness were one, differing but as the seal
and the print, for truth prints goodness.”[29]
The art which Bacon taught, has been well said to be “the art of
inventing arts.”
The great qualities of his mind, as they are exhibited in his works,
have been well portrayed by the pen of Sir James Mackintosh. We
subjoin the opinion of this elegant writer in his own words:
“It is easy to describe his transcendent merit in general terms
of commendation: for some of his great qualities lie on the
surface of his writings. But that in which he most excelled all
other men, was in the range and compass of his intellectual
view—the power of contemplating many and distant objects
together, without indistinctness or confusion—which he himself
has called the discursive or comprehensive understanding. This
wide-ranging intellect was illuminated by the brightest Fancy
that ever contented itself with the office of only ministering
to Reason: and from this singular relation of the two grand
faculties of man, it has resulted, that his philosophy, though
illustrated still more than adorned by the utmost splendor of