Extent given it by Bacon. 54. It is here to be remarked, that the sciences of logic and ethics, according to the partitions of Lord Bacon, are far more extensive than we are accustomed to consider them. Whatever concerned the human intellect came under the first; whatever related to the will and affections of the mind fell under the head of ethics. Logica de intellectu et ratione, ethica de voluntate appetitu et affectibus disserit; altera decreta, altera actiones progignit. But it has been usual to confine logic to the methods of guiding the understanding in the search for truth; and some, though, as it seems to me, in a manner not warranted by the best usage of philosophers,[201] have endeavoured to exclude everything but the syllogistic mode of reasoning from the logical province. Whether again the nature and operations of the human mind, in general, ought to be reckoned a part of physics, has already been mentioned as a disputable question.
[201] In altera philosophiæ parte, quæ est quærendi ac disserendi, quæ λογικη dicitur. Cic. de Fin. i. 14.
Grammar and Rhetoric. 55. The science of delivering our own thoughts to others, branching into grammar and rhetoric, and including poetry, so far as its proper vehicles, metre and diction, are concerned, occupies the sixth book. In all this he finds more desiderata than from the great attention paid to these subjects by the ancients could have been expected. Thus, his ingenious collection of antitheta, or common places in rhetoric, though mentioned by Cicero as to the judicial species of eloquence, is first extended by Bacon himself to the deliberative or political orations. I do not, however, think it probable that this branch of topics could have been neglected by antiquity, though the writings relating to it may not have descended to us; nor can we by any means say there is nothing of the kind in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Whether the utility of these common places, when collected in books, be very great, is another question. And a similar doubt might be suggested with respect to the elenchs, or refutations, of rhetorical sophisms, “colores boni et mali,” which he reports as equally deficient, though a commencement had been made by Aristotle.
Ethics. 56. In the seventh book we come to ethical science. This he deems to have been insufficiently treated. He would have the different tempers and characters of mankind first considered, then their passions and affections (neither of which, as he justly observes, finds a place in the Ethics of Aristotle, though they are sometimes treated, not so appositely, in his Rhetoric); lastly, the methods of altering and affecting the will and appetite, such as custom, education, imitation, or society. “The main and primitive division of moral knowledge seemeth to be into the exemplar or platform of good, and the regiment or culture of the mind; the one describing the nature of good, the other presenting rules how to subdue, apply and accommodate the will of man thereunto.” This latter he also calls “the Georgics of the mind.” He seems to place “the platform or essence of good” in seeking the good of the whole, rather than that of the individual, applying this to refute the ancient theories as to the summum bonum. But perhaps Bacon had not thoroughly disentangled this question, and confounds, as is not unusual, the summum bonum, or personal felicity, with the object of moral action, or commune bonum. He is right, however, in preferring, morally speaking, the active to the contemplative life against Aristotle and other philosophers. This part is translated in De Augmentis, with little variation, from the Advancement of Learning; as is also what follows on the Georgics, or culture, of the mind. The philosophy of civil life, as it relates both to the conduct of men in their mutual intercourse, which is properly termed prudence, and to that higher prudence, which is concerned with the administration of communities, fills up the chart of the Baconian ethics. In the eighth book, admirable reflections on the former of these subjects occur at almost every sentence. Many, perhaps most of these, will be found in the Advancement of Learning. But in this, he had been, for a reason sufficiently obvious and almost avowed, cautiously silent upon the art of government—the craft of his king. |Politics.| The motives for silence were still so powerful, that he treats only in the De Augmentis, of two heads in political science; the methods of enlarging the boundaries of the state, which James I. could hardly resent as an interference with his own monopoly, and one of far more importance to the well-being of mankind, the principles of universal jurisprudence, or rather of universal legislation, according to which standard all laws ought to be framed. These he has sketched in ninety-seven aphorisms, or short rules, which, from the great experience of Bacon in the laws, as his peculiar vocation towards that part of philosophy, deserve to be studied at this day. Upon such topics, the progressive and innovating spirit of his genius was less likely to be perceived; but he is, perhaps, equally free from what he has happily called in one of his essays, the “froward retention of custom,” the prejudice of mankind, like that of perverse children, against what is advised to them for their real good, and what they cannot deny to be conducive to it. This whole eighth book is pregnant with profound and original thinking. |Theology.| The ninth and last, which is short, glances only at some desiderata in theological science, and is chiefly remarkable as it displays a more liberal and catholic spirit than was often to be met with in a period signalized by bigotry and ecclesiastical pride. But as the abjuration of human authority is the first principle of Lord Bacon’s philosophy, and the preparation for his logic, it was not expedient to say too much of its usefulness in the theological pursuits.
Desiderata enumerated by him. 57. At the conclusion of the whole, we may find a summary catalogue of the deficiencies which, in the course of this ample review, Lord Bacon had found worthy of being supplied by patient and philosophical inquiry. Of these desiderata, few, I fear, have since been filled up, at least in a collective and systematic manner, according to his suggestions. Great materials, useful intimations, and even partial delineations, are certainly to be found, as so many of the rest, in the writings of those who have done honour to the last two centuries. But with all our pride in modern science, very much even of what, in Bacon’s time, was perceived to be wanting, remains for the diligence and sagacity of those who are yet to come.
Novum Organum: first book. 58. The first book of the Novum Organum, if it is not better known than any other part of Bacon’s philosophical writings, has at least furnished more of those striking passages which shine in quotation. It is written in detached aphorisms; the sentences, even where these aphorisms are longest, not flowing much into one another, so as to create a suspicion, that he had formed adversaria, to which he committed his thoughts as they arose. It is full of repetitions; and indeed this is so usual with Lord Bacon, that whenever we find an acute reflection or brilliant analogy, it is more than an even chance that it will recur in some other place. I have already observed that he has hinted the Novum Organum to be a digested summary of his method, but not the entire system as he designed to develop it, even in that small portion which he has handled at all.
Fallacies. Idola. 59. Of the splendid passages in the Novum Organum none are perhaps so remarkable as his celebrated division of fallacies, not such as the dialecticians had been accustomed to refute, depending upon equivocal words, or faulty disposition of premises, but lying far deeper in the natural or incidental prejudices of the mind itself. These are four in number: idola tribûs, to which from certain common weaknesses of human nature we are universally liable; idola specûs, which from peculiar dispositions and circumstances of individuals mislead them in different manners; idola fori, arising from the current usage of words which represent things much otherwise than as they really are; and idola theatri, which false systems of philosophy and erroneous methods of reasoning have introduced. Hence, as the refracted ray gives us a false notion as to the place of the object whose image it transmits, so our own minds are a refracting medium to the objects of their own contemplation, and require all the aid of a well-directed philosophy either to rectify the perception, or to make allowances for its errors.
Confounded with idols. 60. These idola, ειδωλα, images, illusions, fallacies, or, as Lord Bacon calls them in the Advancement of Learning, false appearances, have been often named in English idols of the tribe, of the den, of the market place. But it seems better, unless we retain the Latin name, to employ one of the synonymous terms given above. For the use of idol in this sense is unwarranted by the practice of the language, nor is it found in Bacon himself; but it has misled a host of writers, whoever might be the first that applied it, even among such as are conversant with the Novum Organum. “Bacon proceeds,” says Playfair, “to enumerate the causes of error, the idols as he calls them, or false divinities to which the mind had so long been accustomed to bow.” And with a similar misapprehension of the meaning of the word, in speaking of the idola specûs, he says: “besides the causes of error which are common to all mankind, each individual, according to Bacon, has his own dark cavern or den, into which the light is imperfectly admitted, and obscurity of which a tutelary idol lurks, at whose shrine the truth is often sacrificed.”[202] Thus also Dr. Thomas Brown; “in the inmost sanctuaries of the mind were all the idols which he overthrew;” and a later author on the Novum Organum fancies that Bacon “strikingly, though in his usual quaint style, calls the prejudices that check the progress of the mind by the name of idols, because mankind are apt to pay homage to these instead of regarding truth.”[203] Thus too in the translation of the Novum Organum, published in Mr. Basil Montagu’s edition, we find idola rendered by idols, without explanation. We may in fact say that this meaning has been almost universally given by the later writers. By whom it was introduced, I am not able to say. Cudworth, in a passage where he glances at Bacon, has said, “it is no idol of the den, to use that affected language.” But, in the pedantic style of the seventeenth century, it is not impossible that idol may here have been put as a mere translation of the Greek ειδωλον, and in the same general sense of an idea or intellectual image.[204] Although the popular sense would not be inapposite to the general purpose of Bacon in this first part of the Novum Organum, it cannot be reckoned so exact and philosophical an illustration of the sources of human error as the unfaithful image, the shadow of reality, seen through a refracting surface, or reflected from an unequal mirror, as in the Platonic hypothesis of the cave, wherein we are placed with our backs to the light, to which he seems to allude in his idola specûs.[205] And as this is also plainly the true meaning, as a comparison with the parallel passages in the Advancement of Learning demonstrates, there can be no pretence for continuing to employ a word which has served to mislead such men as Brown and Playfair.
[202] Preliminary Dissertation to Encyclopædia.
[203] Introduction to the Novum Organum, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Even Stewart seems to have fallen into the same error. “While these idols of the den maintain their authority, the cultivation of the philosophical spirit is impossible; or rather it is in a renunciation of his idolatry that the philosophical spirit essentially consists.” Dissertation, &c.—The observation is equally true, whatever sense we may give to idol.