He seems at first to have been disposed to think that it was neither; but the conclusion to which he finally came, after many years of close thought and arduous study, was, that it was the best mode of cultivating the mind, but the worst mode of discovering the sciences. He did not soon sit down satisfied that he was right, and set up for a dogmatic teacher of his new philosophy. He waited patiently for any new light which years and experience might throw upon it, either bringing out more brightly its beauties or disclosing more satisfactorily its errors. Once in each year he reviewed it and tested it by the new facts which he had gleaned during the year’s studies. Once in each year, for twelve long years, he wrote out with his own hand, altering, condensing and verifying his Novum Organum before he published it.
So much stress has, notwithstanding this illustrious example of the master, been laid, ever since the publication of the Baconian or inductive philosophy, upon the bare accumulation of facts, and so much has been written against generalizing and hypothesizing, that it may be as well, before quitting the subject, to point out wherein the disciples of Bacon have neglected the precepts of their master; and to inquire whether this neglect, and the only partial adoption of his teachings, have not contributed greatly to the advancement of mere Knowledge at the expense of true Wisdom, and thus been very important causes of the degeneracy of modern mind.
Bacon seems to have foreseen this effect of the exclusive adoption of the experimental part of his philosophy—the only part which men have yet had the courage to adopt—when he said, “Our way of discovering the sciences almost levels the capacities of men, and leaves little room for excellence, as it performs all things by sure rules and demonstrations, and therefore these discoveries of ours are, as we have often said, rather owing to felicity than to any great talent, and are rather the production of time than of genius.”[[27]] It was for this reason that he so earnestly, as we shall see hereafter, insisted against its use by young and common minds, or as a means of mental cultivation. And too truly has the prophetic caution been fulfilled! Nevertheless, as it will be loudly denied that modern mind is degenerate, it may be as well to ask how much we are in anything, except physical science (facts, or what Bacon calls “Experience”), in advance of our two hundred years’ dead ancestors. Array the names in our list of Cogitatives, chronologically and analytically, or do so by any list of great thinkers, and you will scarcely find a proportion of one since 1700, to three who lived between 1550 and that date.
Nevertheless, though there is this falling off in Wisdom, how vast has been the accession of Knowledge. Bacon, in his day, complained that the former, (Reason) had gone on without the latter (Experience); so that, while mind had attained the highest flights of which it seemed capable, the arcana of nature were yet unexplored, and little or nothing had been done to advance man’s physical welfare. He said that, hitherto, reason and experience were as new gifts of the gods:—the one laid on the back of a light bird, the other on a dull ass, and that as yet they had not been united. His object was to unite them; to this purpose he devoted his gifted mind and strained his utmost energies. Yet if he were living now he would be compelled to make the same complaint, with this variation however, that men have abandoned the burden of the bird, and have loaded themselves with that of the ass.
While then we admit the rapid advancement of Knowledge, let us pause a moment and inquire if it is not a proof of the degeneracy of mind and the decay of Wisdom, that, in that which is purely mental or dependent on mind, we have no names of equal note with the names of those who lived before the exclusive adoption of the experimental part of the Baconian philosophy. Where is the name in poetry to set against Shakspere and Milton; in metaphysics to match with Locke, Hobbes, &c.; in deduction from facts and generalization with Bacon, Newton, Halley, &c.; in theology, with the hundreds of names which yet eclipse all modern commentators? It may perhaps be said in reply, if we have not such great minds, we have a larger number of thinkers of lesser magnitude. This is doubtful. Time has obliterated the swarms of lesser fry who, like their congeners of the nineteenth century, lived their day and gained a temporary fame in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But further, it is easy to be a triton among minnows. It is as easy now-a-days to set up for a literary character and “write a book” without an idea, as it is for an insolvent man to pass for a rich one and live sumptuously on borrowed capital and paper money. Our thousands of authors are but the minnows which sport in the shallow brooks and live their little day in glorious self-gratulation on the laudations of their brother minnows; but if they happen to get out into the deep strong waters, and a triton turns his stern eye upon them—pop—they turn their tails round, dive to the bottom and are seen no more. Thus it was with our novelists; they shone and blazed away—happy, glorious book-wrights—till the triton Scott came athwart their path, and straightway they were gone. And surely, surely, we now again want another Scott to demolish the rapidly increasing tribe of cachinnators, who appear to deem that the proper end of light literature is just to raise a temporary laugh and be forgotten. Heaven send us salvation from more Jerrolds, à Beckets and the whole tribe of ephemeral laughing-stocks! It is the same in other and more important departments of literature. Our historians are mere compilers of old letters; we fly to Germany for historical criticism and acute generalizations from facts, contenting ourselves with laboriously picking up a few obscure facts for the use of our more deeply-thinking neighbours; who are treading in the paths which our own sages trod two hundred and fifty years ago, because they have not yet placed the exact sciences at the head of intellectual pursuits, and abandoned thought for mechanisms, generalizations from facts for the barren accumulation of facts.
The complaint of Lord Bacon is truer now than it was in his time: “If a man turn his eyes to libraries, he may perhaps be surprised at the immense variety of books he finds; but upon examining and diligently weighing their matters and contents, he will be struck with amazement on the other side; and after finding no end of repetitions, but that men continually treat and speak the same things over and over again, fall from admiration of the variety into a wonder at the want and scantiness of those things which have hitherto detained and possessed the minds of men.” Unhappily his system, by the universal and indiscriminate adoption of only its lower and material offices to the exclusion of those higher ends which he contemplated from it, and by its being used as a mode of cultivating the mind, as well as a means of discovering the sciences, has rather strengthened than weakened the justice of these censures. Our Augustan age of thought is still that of Elizabeth and James I.; the latter part of the sixteenth, and the early part of the seventeenth centuries still outshine the nineteenth in loftiness of thought and solidity of learning; yet we complacently boast of our progress, because we rattle through the fields of learning at ten times the speed of our ancestors, as we do over our railway-sected country, gleaning about as little information of the one as of the other. We dash through the deep cuttings and dark tunnels of literature at railway speed, taking assertions for facts, and empty declamation and tawdry immorality for sense and religion; and then, like the nervous lady who rides through a railway tunnel without fainting, congratulate ourselves on having accomplished some gigantic feat; though we have learnt just as much about the subject of our studies as she has of the construction of the tunnel; but having, like her, fretted and fumed for a few minutes at some dark difficulty, we unite with her in thinking ourselves very valiant and clever people.
We avail ourselves of the roads and paths which others have made, and never stop to examine their solidity or foundations, or the principles on which they are constructed. We lose the habits of deep investigation and close thinking by a long and entire reliance on others, and our minds become dissipated, and a prey to all the silly novelties which spring like ephemera from the almost stagnant pools of modern brains.
This mental dissipation and its concomitant evil, reading for the purpose of killing time,—with far more baneful effects than never reading at all, but relying merely on our own serious excogitations,—are curses from which we ought earnestly to endeavour to save ourselves. This we can only do by sternly exercising the mind in settled definite habits of thought, by placing before it a determinate aim and end to its cogitations. It must know beforehand whither it is tending, so that, as it proceeds, it may note its progress, and be able to judge whether it is advancing or receding. It would be as absurd for a man to start on a journey without knowing whither he was going, but to be continually trying first one road and then another, in hopes it would bring him somewhere, as it is for a student to sit down to study without any definite purpose or view before him. True, the traveller might pick up many facts and get some knowledge in his desultory course, and so might the student; but neither would be advanced on his journey or have gained any true wisdom. Yet this is the course of modern study. Loose, desultory reading: a vague acquisition of unconnected facts is alone aimed at. “Witness the transactions of our scientific bodies—a huge undigestive mass of valuable facts; mere raw materials, knowledge-bricks, which no one has dared yet to generalize or build up into a harmonious and well-proportioned temple of wisdom.”
Run your memory over the records of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and what do you find? Is it not exactly the same as that which the witty author of “Hudibras” castigated two hundred years ago, in his satire on the Royal Society,—a mere chronicle of the feats of butterfly-hunters and fly-catchers? Is there to be found in the eighteen years’ “Transactions” of the hundreds of scientific men, whose combined knowledge is many hundred times more extensive than that of the savans of any past age, a single attempt at a generalization of their immense field of facts? Is there any effort at what Solomon calls the “interpretation of things?”—at gathering the “fruits” of the Baconian system? Are they not only a barren addition to the mountain of facts already accumulated? Alas! it is too true.
Modern savans shrink from using the materials which, for several centuries, thousands of laborious literary ants have been collecting. Like the unhappy Psyche, doomed by the inexorable Venus to arrange and sort into respective heaps a confused mass of wheat, barley, rye, millet and other kinds of grain, they sit down in despair of accomplishing the apparently hopeless task. Frightened at the gigantic labour, they not only fly from it themselves but condemn every one who attempts to arrange systematically the grains which, assorted, would afford valuable seed for fresh crops of food, but which, while thus intermingled, are utterly useless and unproductive. With an insane determination not to see the work which it is the duty imposed on the soul (Psyche) by the prolific powers of nature (Venus) to accomplish, they go on adding to the heterogeneous heap, and endeavour, by loud and clamorous applauses of those who are mere collectors like themselves, to drown the voice of those who would incite them to the enjoined and higher duty of assorting and arranging.