On his entrance into active life, study was not however his prime object. With his fortune to make, his court connexions and his father’s example opened a path for ambition. He chose the practice of common law as his means, while his inclinations were looking upwards to political affairs as his end. A passion for study, however, had strongly marked him; he had read much more than was required in his professional character, and this circumstance excited the mean jealousies of the minister Cecil, and the Attorney-General Coke. Both were mere practical men of business, whose narrow conceptions and whose stubborn habits assume that whenever a man acquires much knowledge foreign to his profession, he will know less of professional knowledge than he ought. These men of strong minds, yet limited capacities, hold in contempt all studies alien to their habits.
Bacon early aspired to the situation of Solicitor-General; the court of Elizabeth was divided into factions; Bacon adopted the interests of the generous Essex, which were inimical to the party of Cecil. The queen, from his boyhood, was delighted by conversing with her “young lord-keeper,” as she early distinguished the precocious gravity and the ingenious turn of mind of the future philosopher. It was unquestionably to attract her favour, that Bacon presented to the queen his “Maxims and Elements of the Common Law,” not published till after his death. Elizabeth suffered her minister to form her opinions on the legal character of Bacon. It was alleged that Bacon was addicted to more general pursuits than law, and the miscellaneous books which he was known to have read confirmed the accusation. This was urged as a reason why the post of Solicitor-General should not be conferred on a man of speculation, more likely to distract than to direct her affairs. Elizabeth, in the height of that political prudence which marked her character, was swayed by the vulgar notion of Cecil, and believed that Bacon, who afterwards filled the situation both of Solicitor-General and Lord Chancellor, was “a man rather of show than of depth.” We have recently been told by a great lawyer that “Bacon was a master.”
On the accession of James the First, when Bacon still found the same party obstructing his political advancement, he appears, in some momentary fit of disgust, to have meditated on a retreat into a foreign country; a circumstance which has happened to several of our men of genius, during a fever of solitary indignation. He was for some time thrown out of the sunshine of life, but he found its shade more fitted for contemplation; and, unquestionably, philosophy was benefited by his solitude at Gray’s Inn. His hand was always on his work, and better thoughts will find an easy entrance into the mind of those who feed on their thoughts, and live amidst their reveries. In a letter on this occasion, he writes, “My ambition now I shall only put upon my pen, whereby I shall be able to maintain memory and merit, of the times succeeding.” And many years after, when he had finally quitted public life, he told the king, “I would live to study, and not study to live: yet I am prepared for date obolum Belisario; and, I that have borne a bag, can bear a wallet.”
Ever were the times succeeding in his mind. In that delightful Latin letter to Father Fulgentio, where, with the simplicity of true grandeur, he takes a view of all his works, and in which he describes himself as “one who served posterity,” in communicating his past and his future designs, he adds that ”they require some ages for the ripening of them.” There, while he despairs of finishing what was intended for the sixth part of his Instauration, how nobly he despairs! “Of the perfecting this I have cast away all hopes; but in future ages, perhaps, the design may bud again.” And he concludes by avowing, that the zeal and constancy of his mind in the great design, after so many years, had never become cold and indifferent. He remembers how, forty years ago, he had composed a juvenile work about those things, which with confidence, but with too pompous a title, he had called Temporis Partus Maximus; the great birth of time! Besides the public dedication of his Novum Organum to James the First, he accompanied it with a private letter. He wishes the king’s favour to the work, which he accounts as much as a hundred years’ time; for he adds, “I am persuaded the work will gain upon men’s minds in ages.”
In his last will appears his remarkable legacy of fame. “My name and memory I leave to foreign nations, and to mine own countrymen, after some time be past over.” Time seemed always personated in the imagination of our philosopher, and with time he wrestled with a consciousness of triumph.
I shall now bring forward sufficient evidence to prove how little Bacon was understood, and how much he was even despised, in his philosophical character.
In those prescient views by which the genius of Verulam has often anticipated the institutions and the discoveries of succeeding times, there was one important object which even his foresight does not appear to have contemplated. Lord Bacon did not foresee that the English language would one day be capable of embalming all that philosophy can discover, or poetry can invent; that his country would at length possess a national literature of its own, and that it would exult in classical compositions which might be appreciated with the finest models of antiquity. His taste was far unequal to his invention. So little did he esteem the language of his country, that his favourite works are composed in Latin; and he was anxious to have what he had written in English preserved in that “universal language which may last as long as books last.” It would have surprised Bacon to have been told, that the most learned men in Europe have studied English authors to learn to think and to write. Our philosopher was surely somewhat mortified, when in his dedication of the Essays he observed, that “of all my other works my Essays have been most current; for that, as it seems, they come home to men’s business and bosoms.” It is too much to hope to find in a vast and profound inventor a writer also who bestows immortality on his language. The English language is the only object in his great survey of art and of nature, which owes nothing of its excellence to the genius of Bacon.
He had reason indeed to be mortified at the reception of his philosophical works; and Dr. Rawley, even some years after the death of his illustrious master, had occasion to observe, that “His fame is greater and sounds louder in foreign parts abroad than at home in his own nation”; thereby verifying that divine sentence, a prophet is not without honour, save in his own country and in his own house. Even the men of genius, who ought to have comprehended this new source of knowledge thus opened to them, reluctantly entered into it; so repugnant are we suddenly to give up ancient errors which time and habit have made a part of ourselves. Harvey, who himself experienced the sluggish obstinacy of the learned, which repelled a great but a novel discovery, could, however, in his turn deride the amazing novelty of Bacon’s Novum Organum. Harvey said to Aubrey, that “Bacon was no great philosopher; he writes philosophy like a lord chancellor.” It has been suggested to me that Bacon’s philosophical writings have been much overrated.—His experimental philosophy from the era in which they were produced must be necessarily defective: the time he gave to them could only have been had at spare hours; but like the great prophet on the mount, Bacon was doomed to view the land afar, which he himself could never enter.
Bacon found but small encouragement for his new learning among the most eminent scholars, to whom he submitted his early discoveries. A very copious letter by Sir Thomas Bodley on Bacon’s desiring him to return the manuscript of the Cogitata et Visa, some portion of the Novum Organum, has come down to us; it is replete with objections to the new philosophy. “I am one of that crew,” says Sir Thomas, “that say we possess a far greater holdfast of certainty in the sciences than you will seem to acknowledge.” He gives a hint too that Solomon complained “of the infinite making of books in his time;” that all Bacon delivers is only “by averment without other force of argument, to disclaim all our axioms, maxims, &c., left by tradition from our elders unto us, which have passed all probations of the sharpest wits that ever were;” and he concludes that the end of all Bacon’s philosophy, by “a fresh creating new principles of sciences, would be to be dispossessed of the learning we have;” and he fears that it would require as many ages as have marched before us that knowledge should be perfectly achieved. Bodley truly compares himself to “the carrier’s horse which cannot blanch the beaten way in which I was trained.”[225]
Bacon did not lose heart by the timidity of the “carrier’s horse:” a smart vivacious note in return shows his quick apprehension.