Early in the sixteenth century appeared simultaneously a number of extraordinary geniuses. An age of philosophical inventors seemed to arise; a new generation, who, each in his own way, were emancipating themselves from the dogmas of the ancient dictator. This revolt against the old scholastics broke forth in Italy, in Spain, in France, in Germany, and even reached our shores. These philosophers were the contemporaries of Luther: they had not engaged in his theological reformation, but it is more than probable that they had caught the inspiration of his hardy spirit. We are indeed told that the famous Cornelius Agrippa, though he could not desert the Rome of his patrons, yet saw with satisfaction its great pontiff attacked by Luther; as Erasmus and others equally delighted to satirize all the scholastic monkery.[2] Luther, too, made common cause with them, in the demolition of that ancient edifice of scholastic superstition which, under the supremacy of Aristotle, barred out every free inquiry.
Of these eminent men, an elegant scholar, Ludovicus Vives, by birth a Spaniard, had been invited to the English court by our Henry the Eighth, to be the preceptor of the Princess Mary. Vives too was the friend of Erasmus; but while that facetious sage only expended his raillery on the scholastic madness, Vives formally attacked the chief, whose final authority he declared had hitherto solely rested on the indolence of the human mind. Ramus, in France, advanced with more impetuous fury; he held a public disputation against the paramount authority of the Stagyrite in philosophy; and in his “Aristotelian Animadversions” he profanely shivered into atoms of absurdity the syllogistic method, and substituted for the logic of Aristotle one of his own, which was long received in all the schools of the reformed, for Ramus was a Huguenot. This innovator was denounced to the magistrate; for, by opposing Aristotle, he had committed open hostility against religion and learning! The erudite Abate Andres, probably an Aristotelian at heart, observes, in noticing the continued persecutions of this bold spirit, that, “to tell the truth, Ramus injured himself far more than the Aristotelian doctrine which he had impugned”[3]—and true enough, if it were a rival Aristotelian who cast Ramus out of the window, to be massacred by the mob on St. Bartholomew’s day. Two eminent scholars of Italy contested more successfully the doctrines of Aristotle: Patricius collected everything he could to degrade and depreciate that philosopher, and to elevate the more seductive and imaginative Plato. He asserted that Aristotle was the plagiarist of other writers, whose writings he invariably affected to contemn; and he went so far as to suggest to the Pope to prohibit the teaching of the Aristotelian doctrines in the schools; for the doctrines of Plato more harmoniously accorded with the Christian faith. Less learned, but more original than Patricius, the Neapolitan Telesius struck out a new mode of philosophizing. The study of mathematics had indicated to Telesius a severe process in his investigations of nature, and had taught him to reject those conjectural solutions of the phenomena of the material world—subtleties and fictions which had led Aristotle into many errors, and whose universal authority had swayed opinions through successive ages. “Telesius,” says Lord Bacon, “hath renewed the tenet of Parmenides, and is the best of our novelists.”[4] Lord Bacon considered the Telesian system worthy of his development and his refutation. But, by his physical system, Telesius had broken the spell, and sent forth the naturalist to scrutinize more closely into nature; and possibly this Neapolitan sage may have kindled the first spark in the experimental philosophy of Bacon.
All these were eminent philosophers who had indignantly rejected the eternal babble of the scholastics, and the vain dicta of the peripatetics; and in the same cycle were others more erratic and fantastic. These bold artificers of novel systems of philosophy had not unsuccessfully attacked the dogmas of Aristotle, but to little purpose, while they were substituting their own. The prevalent agitation of the philosophical spirit, now impetuous and disturbed, shot forth mighty impulses in imaginary directions, and created chimeras. Agrippa and Paracelsus, Jordano Bruno, Cardan and Campanella, played their “fantastic tricks,” till the patient genius of the new philosophy arose simultaneously in the Italian Galileo and the founder of the Verulamian method.
Amid the ruins of these systems of philosophies, it was not with their fallen columns that Lord Bacon designed to construct a new philosophy of his own—a system in opposition to other systems. He would hold no controversies: for refutations were useless if the method he invented was a right one. He would not even be the founder of a sect, for he presumed not to establish a philosophy, but to show how we should philosophize. The father of experimental philosophy delivered no “opinions,” but “a work;” patient observation, practical results, or new and enlarged sciences, “not to be found in the space of a single age, but through a succession of generations.” D’Alembert observed, “The Baconian philosophy was too wise to astonish.” His early sagacity had detected the fatal error of all system-makers; each, to give coherence to his hypothesis, had recourse to some occult operation, and sometimes had ventured to give it a name which was nothing more than an abstract notion, and not a reality ascertained to exist in nature. The Platonist had buried his lofty head amid the clouds of theology, beyond the aspirations of man: the Aristotelian, by the syllogistic method of reasoning, had invented a mere instrument of perpetual disputation, without the acquisition of knowledge; and in the law which governed the material world, when Democritus had conceived his atom, and endowed it with a desire or appetency to move with other atoms, or Telesius imagined with cold and heat to find the first beginnings of motion—what had they but contracted nature within the bars of their systems, while she was perpetually escaping from them? The greater philosopher sought to follow nature through her paths, to be “her servant and interpreter;” or, as he has also expressed it, “to subdue nature by yielding to her.”
Lord Bacon was conscious of the slow progress of truth; he has himself appealed to distant ages. So progressive is human reason, that a novel system, at its first announcement, has been resisted as the most dangerous innovation, or rejected as utterly false; yet at a subsequent period the first promulgator who had struck into the right road is censured, not for his temerity, but for his timidity, in not having advanced to its termination, and laying the burden on posterity to demonstrate that which he had only surmised or assumed. It is left to another generation to shoot their arrow forth a truer aim, far more distantly. Some of the most important results in philosophical inquiries by men who have advanced beyond their own age, have been subjected to this inconvenience; and we now are familiarized to axioms and principles, requiring no further demonstration, which in their original discovery were condemned as dangerous and erroneous; for the most novel principles must be disputed before they can be demonstrated, till time in silence seals its decree with authority.
Some discoveries have required almost a century to be received, while some truths remain still problematical, and, like the ether of Newton, but a mere hypothesis. What is the wisdom of the wise but a state of progression? and the inventor has to encounter even the hostility of his brothers in science; even Lord Bacon himself was the victim of his own idols of the den—those fallacies that originate from the peculiar character of the man; for by undervaluing the science of mathematics, he refused his assent to the Copernican system.
The celebrity of Lord Bacon was often distinct from the Baconian philosophy at home—a circumstance which concerns the history of our vernacular literature. The lofty pretensions of a new way to “The Advancement of Learning,” and the “Novum Organum” of an art of invention, to invent arts, were long a veiled mystery to the English public, who were deterred from its study by the most offuscating translations of the Latin originals. English readers recognised in Lord Bacon, not the interpreter of Nature through all her works, but the interpreter of man to man, of their motives and their actions, in his “Sermones Fideles,” those “Essaies” which “come home to our business and to our bosoms.” Such readers were left to wonder how the historian of “The Winds,” and of “Life and Death”—the gatherer of medical receipts and of masses of natural history, amid all such minute processes of experiments and inductions, groping in tangible matter, as it seemed to ordinary eyes, could in the mere naturalist be the creator of a new philosophy of intellectual energy. The ethical sage who had unfolded the volume of the heart they delightfully comprehended, but how the mind itself stood connected with the outward phenomena of nature remained long an enigma for the men of the world. Lord Bacon, in his dread to trust the mutability of our language placed by the side of the universal language of the learned which fifteen centuries had fixed sacred from innovation, had concluded that the modern languages will “at one time or another play the bankrupt with books.” The sage who, in his sanguine confidence in futurity, had predicted that “third period of time which will far surpass that of the Grecian and Roman learning,” had not, however, contemplated on a national idiom; nor in that noble prospect of time had he anticipated a race of the European learned whose vernacular prose would create words beyond the reach of the languages of antiquity. No work in our native idiom had yet taken a station. The volume of Hooker we know not how he read; but the copiousness of the diction little accorded with the English of the learned Lord Chancellor, who had pressed the compactness of his aphoristic sentences into the brevity of Seneca, but with a weight of thought no Roman, if we except Tacitus, has attained. Rawleigh and Jonson were but contemporaries, unsanctioned by time; nor could he have looked even on them as modellers for him whose own genius was still more prodigally opulent, though not always with the most difficult taste.
Lord Bacon, therefore, decided to compose his “Instauratio Magna” in Latin. Dedicating the Latin version of the “Advancement of Learning” to the Prince, he observed—“It is a work I think will live, and be a citizen of the world, as English books are not.” Lord Bacon saw “bankruptcy in our language,” and houseless wanderers in our books. The commonwealth of letters had yet no existence. Haunted by this desolating notion that there was no perpetuity in English writings, he rested not till his own were translated by himself and his friends, Jonson, and Hobbes, and Herbert; and often enlarging these Latin versions, some of his English compositions remain, in some respect, imperfect, when compared with those subsequent revisions in the Latin translations.
By trusting his genius to a foreign tongue, Lord Bacon has dimmed its lustre; the vitality of his thoughts in their original force, the spontaneity of his mind in all its raciness, all those fortuitous strokes which are the felicities of genius, were lost to him who had condemned himself to the Roman yoke. Professor Playfair always preferred quoting the original English of those passages of the treatise “De Augmentis Scientiarum,” which had first appeared in “The Advancement of Learning.” The felicity of many of those fine or forcible conceptions is emasculated in a foreign and artificial idiom; and the invention of novel terms in an ancient language left it often in a clouded obscurity.