The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

by Delia Salter Bacon

That is the use which the History and Fables of the New Philosophy have already had with us. We have been feeding without knowing it, on the 'principal and supreme sciences'—the 'Prima Philosophia' and its noblest branches. We have been taking the application of the Inductive Philosophy to the principal concerns of our human life, and to the phenomena of of the human nature itself, as mere sport and pastime; though the precepts concluded, the practical axioms inclosed with it have already forced their way into our learning, for all our learning is, even now, inlaid and glittering with those 'dispersed directions.'

We have profited by this use of them. It has not been pastime merely with us. We have not spent our time in vain on this first stage of an Advancing Learning, a learning that will not cease to advance until it has invaded all our empiricisms, and conquered all our practice; a learning that will recompence the diligence, the exactitude, the severity of observance which it will require here also (when it comes to put in its claim here, as Learning and not Amusement merely), with that same magnitude of effects that, in other departments, has already justified the name which its Inventor gave it—a Learning which will give us here, also, in return for the severity of observance it will require, what no ceremonial, however exacting can give us, that control of effects, with which, even in its humblest departments, it has already fulfilled, in the eyes of all the world, the prophecy which its Inventors uttered when they called it the NEW MAGIC.

That first use of the Histories and Fables of the Modern Learning, we have had already; and it is not yet exhausted. But in that rapid development of a common intelligence, to which the new science of practice has itself so largely contributed, even in its lower and limited developments, we come now to that other and so important use of these Fables, which the philosophic Innovator proposed to drop for the time, in his argument—that use of them, in which they serve 'to wrap up and conceal' for the time, or to limit to the few, who are able to receive them, those new discoveries which are as yet too far in advance of the common beliefs and opinions of men, and too far above the mental habits and capacities of the masses of men, to be safely or profitably communicated to the many in the abstract.

But in order to arrive at this second and nobler use of them, it will be necessary to bestow on them a very different kind of study from any that we have naturally thought it worth while to spend on them, so long as we regarded them as works of pastime merely; and especially while that insuperable obstacle to any adequate examination of them, which the received history of the works themselves created, was still operating on the criticism. The truths which these Parabolic and Allusive Poems wrap up and conceal, have been safely concealed hitherto, because they are not those common-place truths which we usually look for as the point and moral of a tale which is supposed to have a moral or politic intention,—truths which we are understood to be in possession of beforehand, while the parable or instance is only designed to impress the sensibility with them anew, and to reach the will that would not take them from the reason, by means of the senses or the imagination. It is not that spontaneous, intuitive knowledge, or those conventional opinions, those unanalysed popular beliefs, which we usually expect to find without any trouble at all, on the very surface of any work that has morality for its object, it is not any such coarse, lazy performance as that, that we need trouble ourselves to look for here. This higher intention in these works 'their real import, genuine interpretation, and full depth,' has not yet been found, because the science which is wrapped in them, though it is the principal science in the plan of the Advancement of Learning, has hitherto escaped our notice, and because of the exceeding subtlety of it,—because the truths thus conveyed or concealed are new, and recondite, and out of the way of any casual observation,—because in this scientific collection of the phenomena of the human life, designed to serve as the basis of new social arts and rules of practice, the author has had occasion to go behind the vague, popular, unscientific terms which serve well enough for purposes of discourse, and mere oratory, to those principles which are actual and historical, those simple radical forms and differences on which the doctrine of power and practice must be based.

It is pastime no longer. It is a study, the most patient, the most profoundly earnest to which these works now invite us. Let those who will, stay in the playground still, and make such sport and pastime of it there, as they may; and let those who feel the need of inductive rules here also,—here on the ground which this pastime covers—let those who perceive that we have as yet, set our feet only on the threshold of the Great Instauration, find here with diligent research, the ascent to the axioms of practice,—that ascent which the author of the science of practice in general, made it his labour to hew out here, for he undertook 'to collect here into an art or science, that which had been pretermitted by others as matters of common sense and experience.'

It does not consist with the design of the present work to track that draught of a new science of morality and policy, that 'table' of an inductive science of human nature, and human life, which the plan of the Advancement of Learning contains, with all the lettering of its compartments put down, into these systematic scientific collections, which the Fables of the Modern Learning,—which these magnificent Parabolical Poems have been able hitherto to wrap up and conceal.

This work is merely introductory, and the design of it is to remove that primary obstacle to the diligent study of these works, which the present theory of them contains; since that concealment of their true intention and history, which was inevitable at the time, no longer serves the author's purpose, and now that the times are ripe for the learning which they contain, only serves indeed to hinder it. And the illustrations which are here produced, are produced with reference to that object, and are limited strictly to the unfolding of those 'secrets of policy,' which are the necessary introduction to that which follows.

CHAPTER II.

THE MISSING BOOKS OF THE GREAT INSTAURATION; OR, PHILOSOPHY ITSELF.

Did it never occur to the student of the Novum Organum that the constant application of that 'New Machine' by the inventor of it himself, to one particular class of subjects, so constant as to produce on the mind of the careless reader the common impression, that it was intended to be applied to that class only, and that the relief of the human estate, in that one department of the human want, constituted its whole design: did it never occur to the curious inquirer, or to the active experimenter in this new rule of learning, that this apparently so rigorous limitation of its applications in the hands of its author is—under all the circumstances—a thing worthy of being inquired into? Considering who the author of it is, and that it is on the face of it, a new method of dealing with facts in general, a new method of obtaining axioms of practice from history in general, and not a specific method of obtaining them from that particular department of history from which his instances are taken; and, considering, too, that the author was himself aware of the whole sweep of its applications, and that he has taken pains to include in his description of its powers, the assertion,—the distinct, deliberate assertion—that it is capable of being applied as efficiently, to those nobler departments of the human need, which are marked out for it in the Great Instauration—those very departments in which he was known himself to be so deeply interested, and in which he had been all his life such a diligent explorer and experimenter. Did it never occur to the scholar, to inquire why he did not apply it, then, himself to those very subjects, instead of keeping so stedfastly to the physical forces in his illustration of its powers? And has any one ever read the plan of this man's works? Has any one seen the scheme of that great enterprise, for which he was the responsible person in his own time—that scheme which he wrote out, and put in among these published acknowledged works of his, which he dared to produce in his own name, to show what parts of his 'labor,'—what part of chief consequence was not thus produced? Has any one seen that plan of a new system of Universal Science, which was published in the reign of James the First, under the patronage of that monarch? And if it has been seen, what is the reason there has been no enquiry made for those works, in which the author openly proposes to apply his new organum in person to these very subjects; and that, too, when he takes pains to tell us, in reference to that undertaking, that he is not a vain promiser.