[6] “Lord Bacon’s Natural History,” Cent. x. 998.—“In this experiment, upon the relation of men of credit, though myself as yet am not fully inclined to believe it,” his lordship gives ten notes or points as extraordinary as “the ointment” itself.
[7] This list appeared in some Commentaries on Genesis, but was suppressed in most of the copies; the whole has, however, been recovered by Chauffepié in his Dictionary.
BACON.
In the age of Elizabeth, the English mind took its first bent; a new-born impulse in the nation everywhere was working out its religion, its legislation, and its literature. In every class of genius there existed nothing to copy; everything that was to be great was to find a beginning. Those maritime adventurers in this reign who sailed to discover new regions, and those heroes whose chivalric spirit was errant in the marshes of Holland, were not more enterprising than the creators of our peaceful literature.
Among these first Inventors—our epical Spenser, our dramatic Shakespeare and Jonson, our Hooker, who sounded the depths of the origin of law, and our Rawleigh, who first opened the history of mankind—at length appeared the philosopher who proclaimed a new philosophy, emancipating the human mind by breaking the chains of scholastic antiquity. He was a singular being who is recognised without his name.
Aristotle, in taking possession of all the regions of knowledge, from the first had assumed a universal monarchy, more real than that of his regal pupil, for he had subjugated the minds of generation after generation. Through a long succession of ages, and amid both extinct and new religions, the writings of the mighty Stagyrite, however long known by mutilated and unfaithful versions, were equally studied by the Mahometan Arabian and the Rabbinical Hebrew, and, during the scholastic ages, were even placed by the side, and sometimes above, the Gospel; and the ten categories, which pretended to classify every object of human apprehension, were held as another revelation. Centuries succeeded to centuries, and the learned went on translating, commenting, and interpreting, the sacred obscurity of the autocratical edict of a genius whose lofty omniscience seemed to partake in some degree of divinity itself.
But from this passive obedience to a single encyclopædic mind, a fatal consequence ensued for mankind. The schoolmen had formed, as Lord Bacon has nobly expressed himself, “an unhallowed conjunction of divine with human matters;” theology itself was turned into a system, drawn out of the artificial arrangements of Aristotle; they made their orthodoxy dependent on “the scholastic gibberish;”[1] and to doubt any doctrine of “the philosopher,” as Aristotle was paramountly called, might be to sin by a syllogism—heretical, if not atheistical. In reality it was to contend, without any possibility of escape, with the ecclesiastical establishment, whose integrity was based on the immoveable conformity of all human opinions. Every university in Europe, whose honours and emoluments arose from their Aristotelian chairs, stood as the sentinels of each intellectual fortress. Speculative philosophy could therefore no further advance; it could not pass that inviolable circle which had circumscribed the universal knowledge of the human race. No one dared to think his own thoughts, to observe his own observations, lest by some fortuitous discovery, in differing from the Aristotelian dialectic, he might lapse from his Christianity. The scholastical sects were still agitating the same topics; for the same barbarous terms supplied, on all occasions, verbal disputations, which even bloody frays could never terminate.
If we imagine that this awful fabric of the Aristotelian or scholastic philosophy was first shaken by the Verulamian, we should be conferring on a single individual a sudden influence which was far more progressive. In a great revolution, whence we date a new era, we are apt to lose sight of those devious paths and those marking incidents which in all human affairs are the prognostics and the preparations; the history of the human mind would be imperfectly revealed, should we not trace the great inventors in their precursors.