THE RELATION OF BACON'S ESSAYS TO HIS PROGRAM FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING

T

RONALD S. CRANE.

Associate Professor of English, Northwestern University.

HE prevailing opinion concerning the relation of Bacon's Essays to the great philosophical enterprise of his middle and later life would still seem to be that formulated, nearly a generation ago, by the late Edward Arber. The Essays, he wrote,1 "formed no essential part" of Bacon's work; "they entered not into his conceptions of the proficiency and advancement of knowledge. Like his History of Henry VII . . . and his intended History of Henry VIII ... these Counsels are by-works of his life, the labours, as it were, of his left hand; his right being occupied in grasping the Instauration."

In spite of the fact that this view is in apparent harmony with Bacon's own opinion, expressed in 1622 to Bishop Andrews, it is, I believe, a demonstrably mistaken one. In particular, it fails to take account of the large number of close resemblances, both of substance and of form, between the Essays-especially those first printed in 1612 and 1625-and certain portions of the Advancement of Learning (1605) and of the De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623). Though some of these resemblances have been noted by earlier students of Bacon, their general significance for the interpretation of the Essays has never, to my knowledge, been ade1A Harmony of the Essays, etc., of Francis Bacon (Westminster, 1895), p. xxvii.

"As for my Essays, and some other particulars of that nature, I count them but as the recreations of my other studies, and in that sort purpose to continue them; though I am not ignorant that those kind of writings would, with less pains and embracement (perhaps), yield more lustre and reputation to my name, than those other which I have in hand." See James Spedding, The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon (London, 1868-90), VII, 374.

Notably by F. G. Selby in the notes to his editions of the Essays (London, 1895) and of the Advancement (London, 1898), and by Pierre Villey in his Montaigne et François Bacon (Paris, 1913), pp. 39-40. By far the most complete list of parallels between the Essays and Bacon's other works a list to which I am much indebted in this paper-is to be found in an unpublished Master's thesis by one of my former students, Mrs. Frank Hawley, of La Grange, Illinois.

quately appreciated. It is the intention of this paper to consider their bearing, first on Bacon's purpose and choice of themes in the Essays, and second on the changes in method and style which distinguished the Essays of 1612 and 1625 from those of 1597.

I

"I will now attempt," Bacon wrote at the beginning of the Second Book of the Advancement of Learning, "to make a general and faithful perambulation of learning, with an inquiry what parts thereof lie fresh and waste, and not improved and converted by the industry of man; to the end that such a plot made and recorded to memory may both minister light to any public designation, and also serve to excite voluntary endeavours.. For the present study, two stages of this "perambulation" are of particular importance those dealing respectively with "moral" and with "civil" knowledge.2

"Moral knowledge" Bacon divided into two parts: "the Exemplar or Platform of Good, and the Regiment or Culture of the Mind; the one describing the nature of good, the other prescribing rules how to subdue, apply, and accommodate the will of man thereunto." " In treating the first of these topics he contented himself largely with a somewhat scholastic analysis of the aspects of good-individual good and good of communion, good active and good passive. When he reached the second, however, his attitude became once more that of the pioneer, intent on setting forth "what ground lieth unmanured." "This part therefore," he wrote, "because of the excellency thereof, I cannot but find exceeding strange that it is not reduced to written inquiry. . . . It is reasonable therefore that we propound it in the more particularity, both for the worthiness, and because we may acquit ourselves for reporting it deficient. We will therefore enumerate some heads or points thereof, that it may appear the better what it is, and whether it be extant." And

4

The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath (New edition, London, 1887-1901), III, 328. Unless otherwise specified, all references to Bacon in this article are to this edition.

'III, 417-45 and 445-76. For the corresponding portions of the De Augmentis, see I, 713-828. Hereafter I shall give page references to the De Augmentis only when its text differs in substance from that of the Advancement.

'III, 419.

*III, 433.

he proceeded to outline at length three principal desiderata: "descriptions of the several characters and tempers of men's natures and dispositions, specially having regard to those differences which are most radical in being the fountains and causes of the rest"; 1 similar descriptions of the passions or "affections"; " and studies of the most appropriate means of reducing the mind "unto virtue and good estate." 3

2

Under "civil knowledge" Bacon included three topics: "wisdom of the behaviour," or conversation; "wisdom of business," or negotiation; and "wisdom of state," or government. The first of these, as it had already been "elegantly handled," he dismissed in a few words, devoting the greater part of an unusually long section to pointing out, with much illustrative detail, the "omissions and deficiencies" of the other two. The subject of negotiation or business, in its two aspects of rules for the handling of particular situations and of precepts for advancement in life, seemed to him especially in need of cultivation; "it is," he remarked," "by learned men for the most part despised, as an inferior to virtue and an enemy to meditation; for wisdom of Government, they acquit themselves well when they are called to it, but that happeneth to few; but for the wisdom of Business, wherein man's life is most conversant, there be no books of it, except some few scattered advertisements, that have no proportion to the magnitude of this subject." As for the. "wisdom of government," his first sketch of the subject, in the Advancement,' was brief and somewhat perfunctory. He made up for this, however, in the De Augmentis by treating at length two main desiderata-the doctrine "de proferendis finibus imperii” and the doctrine "de justitia universali."

Such, in brief, was the program outlined by Bacon in 1605 and retouched and made more explicit in several particulars in 1623. It was, I believe, in the light of this program and as a partial fulfilment of it that he composed a large number of the essays first published in the editions of 1612 and 1625.

The proof of this assertion lies in the number and closeness of the correspondences between the themes and substance of these essays and the discussions of desiderata in the sections of the Advancement and the De Augmentis which have just been analyzed. Consider, in the first place, the following passage of the Advancement, in which Bacon is urging the value of "sound and true distributions and descriptions of the several characters and tempers of men's natures and dispositions":

Of much like kind are those impressions of nature, which are imposed upon the mind by the sex, by the age, by the region, by health and sickness, by beauty and deformity, and the like, which are inherent and not extern; and again those which are caused by extern fortune; as sovereignty, nobility, obscure birth, riches, want, magistracy, privateness, prosperity, adversity, constant fortune, variable fortune, rising per saltum, per gradus, and the like. . . . These observations and the like I deny not but are touched a little by Aristotle as in passage in his Rhetorics, and are handled in some scattered discourses; but they were never incorporate into Moral Philosophy, to which they do essentially appertain. . . .1

1

Is it fanciful to suppose that in writing the essays "Of Youth and Age," "Of Beauty," "Of Deformity," "Of Nobility," "Of Great Place," "Of Riches," "Of Adversity," and "Of Fortune"-all except "Of Adversity" (1625) first published in the edition of 1612Bacon was attempting to supply a want which he himself had pointed out only a few years before? The very number of the parallels lends support to the supposition. Again, it seems to me altogether probable that in composing such essays as "Of Love" (1612), “Of Envy" (1625), and "Of Anger" (1625) he had consciously in mind the lack, noted in the next paragraph of the Advancement, of "active and ample descriptions and observations" concerning the "diseases and infirmities of the mind, which are no other than the perturbations and distempers of the affections."2 The "best doctors of this knowledge," he remarked, are the poets and historians. In them

we may find painted forth with great life, how affections are kindled and incited; and how pacified and refrained; and how again contained from act and further degree; how they disclose themselves, how they work, how they vary, how they gather and fortify. . . 3

Now, not only did Bacon in these particular essays make abundant use of material drawn from poets and historians, but in one of them "Of Anger" he dealt explicitly with several of the points on which he thought their testimony of most value:

We will first speak [he wrote in the first paragraph of this essay] how the natural inclination and habit to be angry may be attempered and calmed. Secondly, how the particular motions of anger may be repressed, or at least refrained from doing mischief. Thirdly, how to raise anger or appease anger in another.1

Much the same thing, once more, may be said of the essays "Of Custom and Education" (1612), "Of Praise" (1612), “Of Nature in Men" (1612), “Of Studies" (1597; enlarged in 1612 and 1625), "Of Friendship" (1612; rewritten in 1625), and “Of Fame” (published by Rawley in 1657): they all treat subjects which Bacon in 1605 had noted as "deficient":

Now come we to those points which are within our own command, and have force and operation upon the mind to affect the will and appetite and to alter manners: wherein they ought to have handled custom, exercise, habit, education, example, imitation, emulation, company, friends, praise, reproof, exhortation, fame, laws, books, studies. .

In the case of one of these essays, the dependence upon the Advancement is particularly close. After the passage just quoted, Bacon introduced, as "an example of the rest," a page of aphorisms or "precepts" on the subject of "Custom and Habit." Now two of these "precepts" are to be found in the essay "Of Nature in Men" (1612), and what is more, nearly the whole of this essay may be reconstructed out of material given here and in an earlier page of the Advancement.

So much for the essays which seem directly related to Bacon's program for the advancement of "moral knowledge." The list of those which can be connected in a similar way with his proposals for the development of "civil knowledge" is nearly as long. To begin with, while it is not likely that Bacon meant to refer to writings of his own when he remarked, apropos of the "wisdom of conversation," that "this part of civil knowledge hath been elegantly