clerks. His office was that of Secretary of State for the interpretation of Nature; Lord Chancellor of the laws of existence, and legislator of science; Lord Treasurer of the riches of the universe; the intellectual potentate equally of science and art, with no aristocracy round his throne, but with a bureauocracy in its stead, taken from the middle class of intellect and character. There was no place for Harvey and Newton and Halley and Dalton and La Place and Cuvier and Agassiz, for genius was unnecessary; the new logic, the Novum Organum, Bacon himself, mentally alive in the brains which applied his method, was all in all. Splendid discoveries would be made, those discoveries would be beneficently applied, but they would be made by clerks and applied by clerks. All were latent in the Baconian method, and over all the completed intellectual globe of science, as in the commencement of the Novum Organum, would be written, "Francis of Verulam thought thus!" And if Bacon's method had been really followed by succeeding men of science, this magnificent autocracy of understanding and imagination would have been justified; and round the necks of each of them would be a collar, on which would be written, "This person is so and so, born thrall of Francis of Verulam.'" That this feeling of serene spiritual superiority, and consciousness of being the founder of a new empire in the world of mind, was in Bacon, we know by the general tone of his writings, and the politic contempt with which he speaks of the old autocrats, Aristotle and Plato; and Harvey, who knew him well, probably intended to hit this imperial loftiness, when he described him as "writing philosophy like a Lord Chancellor." "The guillotine governs!" said Barrère, gayly, when some friend compassionated his perplexities as a practical statesman during the Reign of Terror. "The Method governs!" would have been the reply of a Baconian underling, had the difficulties of his attempts to penetrate the inmost mysteries of nature been suggested to him.

Thus by the use of Bacon's own method of exclusion we exclude him from the position due of right to Galileo and Kepler. In the inquiry respecting the father of the inductive sciences, he is not "the nature sought." What, then, is the cause of his fame among the scientific men of England and France? They certainly have not spent their time in investigating the forms of simple natures; they certainly have not used his method; why have they used his name?

In answer to this question, it may be said that Bacon, participating in the intellectual movement of the higher minds of his age, recognized the paramount importance of observation and experiment in the investigation of Nature; and it has since been found convenient to adopt, as the father and founder of the physical sciences, one whose name lends to them so much dignity, and who was undoubtedly one of the broadest, richest, and most imperial of human intellects, if he were not one of the most scientific. Then he is the most eloquent of all discoursers on the philosophy of science, and the general greatness of his mind is evident even in the demonstrable errors of his system. No other writer on the subject is a classic, and Bacon is thus a link connecting men of science with men of letters and men of the world. Whewell, Comte, Mill, Herschel, with more abundant material, with the advantage of generalizing the philosophy of the sciences from their history, are instinctively felt by every reader to be smaller men than Bacon. As thinkers, they appear thin and unfruitful as compared with his fulness of suggestive thought; as writers, they have no pretension to the massiveness, splendor, condensation, and regal dignity of his rhetoric. The Advancement of Learning, and the first book of the Novum Organum, are full of quotable sentences, in which solid wisdom is clothed in the aptest, most vivid, most imaginative, and most executive expression. If a man of science at the present day wishes for a compact state

ment in which to embody his scorn of bigotry, of dogmatism, of intellectual conceit, of any of the idols of the human understanding which obstruct its perception of natural truth, it is to Bacon that he goes for an aphorism.

And it is doubtless true that the spirit which animates Bacon's philosophical works is a spirit which inspires effort and infuses cheer. It is impossible to say how far this spirit has animated inventors and discoverers. But we know from the enthusiastic admiration expressed for him by men of science, who could not have been blind to the impotence of his method, that all minds his spirit touched it must have influenced. One principle stands plainly out in his writings, that the intellect of man, purified from its idols, is competent for the conquest of nature; and to this glorious task he, above all other men, gave an epical dignity and loftiness. His superb rhetoric is the poetry of physical science. The humblest laborer in that field feels, in reading Bacon, that he is one of a band of heroes, wielding weapons mightier than those of Achilles and Agamemnon, engaged in a siege nobler than that of Troy; for, in so far as he is honest and capable, he is "Man, the minister and interpreter of Nature," engaged, "not in the amplification of the power of one man over his country, nor in the amplification of the power of that country over other countries, but in the amplification of the power and kingdom of mankind over the universe." And, while Bacon has thus given an ideal elevation to the pursuits of science, he has at the same time pointed out most distinctly those diseases of the mind which check or mislead it in the task of interpretation. As a student of nature, his fame is greater than his deserts; as a student of human nature, he is hardly yet appreciated; and it is to the greater part of the first book of the Novum Organum, where he deals in general reflections on those mental habits and dispositions which interfere with pure intellectual conscientiousness, and where his beneficent spirit and rich imagination lend

sweetness and beauty to the homeliest practical wisdom, that the reader impatiently returns, after being wearied with the details of his method given in the second book. His method was antiquated in his own lifetime; but it is to be feared that centuries hence his analysis of the idols of the human understanding will be as fresh and new as human vanity and pride.

It was not, then, in the knowledge of Nature, but in the knowledge of human nature, that Bacon pre-eminently excelled. By this it is not meant that he was a metaphysician in the usual sense of the term, though his works contain as valuable hints to metaphysicians as to naturalists; but these hints are on matters at one remove from the central problems of metaphysics. Indeed, for all those questions which relate to the nature of the mind and the mode by which it obtains its ideas, for all questions which are addressed to the speculative reason alone, he seems to have felt an aversion almost irrational. They appeared to him to minister to the delight and vain-glory of the thinker, without yielding any fruit of wisdom which could be applied to human affairs. "Pragmatical man," he says, "should not go away with an opinion that learning is like a lark, that can mount, and sing, and please herself, and nothing else; but may know that she holdeth as well of the hawk, that can soar aloft, and can also descend and strike upon the prey." Not, then, the abstract qualities and powers of the human mind, considered as special objects of investigation independent of individuals, but the combination of these into concrete character, interested Bacon. He regarded the machinery in motion, the human being as he thinks, feels, and lives, men in their relations with men; and the phenomena presented in history and life he aimed to investigate as he would investigate the phenomena of the natural world. This practical science of human nature, in which the discovery of general laws seems hopeless to every mind not ample enough to resist being over

whelmed by the confusion, complication, and immense variety of the details, and which it will probably take ages to complete, this science Bacon palpably advanced. His eminence here is demonstrable from his undisputed superiority to other prominent thinkers in the same department. Hallam justly remarks, that "if we compare what may be found in the sixth, seventh, and eighth books De Augmentis; in the Essays, the History of Henry VII., and the various short treatises contained in his works on moral and political wisdom, and on human nature, from experience of which all such wisdom is drawn,-if we compare these works of Bacon with the rhetoric, ethics, and politics of Aristotle, or with the histories most celebrated for their deep insight into civil society and human character, — with Thucydides, Tacitus, Philip de Comines, Machiavel, Davila, Hume, we shall, I think, find that one man may be compared with all these together."

The most valuable peculiarity of this wisdom is, that it not merely points out what should be done, but it points out how it can be done. This is especially true in all his directions for the culture of the individual mind; the mode by which the passions may be disciplined, and the intellect enriched, enlarged, and strengthened. So with the relations of the individual to his household, to society, to government, he indicates the method by which these relations may be known and the duties they imply performed. In his larger speculations regarding the philosophy of law, the principles of universal justice, and the organic character of national institutions, he anticipates, in the sweep of his intellect, the ideas of the jurists and historians of the present century. Volumes have been written which are merely expansions of this statement of Bacon, that "there are in nature certain fountains of justice, whence all civil laws are derived but as streams; and like as waters do take tinctures and tastes from the soils through which they run, so do civil laws vary accord

ing to the regions and governments where they are planted, though they proceed from the same fountain." The Advancement of Learning, afterwards translated and expanded into the Latin treatise De Augmentis, is an inexhaustible storehouse of such thoughts, - thoughts which have constituted the capital of later thinkers, but which never appear to so much advantage as in the compact imaginative form in which they were originally expressed.

It is important, however, that, in admitting to the full Bacon's just claims as a philosopher of human nature, we should avoid the mistake of supposing him to have possessed acuteness in the same degree in which he possessed comprehensiveness. Mackintosh says that he is "probably a single instance of a mind which in philosophizing always reaches the point of elevation whence the whole prospect is commanded, without ever rising to that distance which prevents a distinct perception of every part of it." This judgment is accurate as far as regards parts considered as elements of a general view, but in the special view of single parts he has been repeatedly excelled by men whom it would be absurd to compare to him in general wisdom. His mind was contracted to details by effort; it dilated by instinct. It was telescopic rather than microscopic; its observation of men was extensive rather than minute. "Were it not better," he says, "for a man in a fair room to set up one great light, or branching candlestick of lights, than to go about with a small watch-candle into every corner?" Certainly, but the small watch-candle in some investigations is better than the great central lamp; and his genius accordingly does not include the special genius of such observers as La Bruyère, Rochefoucauld, Saint-Simon, Balsac, and Shaftesbury, — the detective police of society, politics, and letters, men whose intellects were all contracted into a sharp, sure, cat-like insight into the darkest crevices of individual natures, - whose eyes dissected what they

---

looked upon, and to whom the slightest circumstance was a key that opened the whole character to their glance. For example: Saint-Simon sees a lady, whose seemingly ingenuous diffidence makes her charming to everybody. He peers into her soul, and declares, as the result of his vision, that "modesty is one of her arts." Again, after the death of the son of Louis XIV., the court was of course overwhelmed with decorous grief; the new dauphin and dauphiness were especially inconsolable for the loss; and, to all witnesses but one, were weeping copiously. SaintSimon simply says, "Their eyes were wonderfully dry, but well managed." Bacon might have inferred hypocrisy; but he would not have observed the lack of moisture in the eyes amid all the convulsive sobbing and the agonized dips and waves of the handkerchief. Take another instance: The Duke of Orleans amazed the court by the diabolical recklessness of his conduct. St. Simon alone saw that ordinary vices had no pungency for him; that he must spice licentiousness with atheism and blasphemy in order to derive any pleasure from it; and solves the problem by saying that he was "born bored," that he took up vice at the point at which his ancestors had left it, and had no choice but to carry it to new heights of impudence or to reject it altogether. Again, to take an example from a practical politician : Shaftesbury, who played the game of faction with such exquisite subtlety in the reign of Charles II., detected the fact of the secret marriage between the king's brother and Anne Hyde by noticing at dinner that her mother, Lady Clarendon, could not resist expressing a faint deference in her manner when she helped her daughter to the meat; and on this slight indication he acted as confidently as if he had learned the fact by being present at the wedding.

--

Now neither in his life nor in his writings does Bacon indicate that he had studied individuals with this keen attentiveness. His knowledge of human nature was the result of the tran

quil deposit, year after year, into his receptive and capacious intellect, of the facts of history and of his own wide experience of various kinds of life. These he pondered, classified, reduced to principles, and embodied in sentences which have ever since been quotable texts for jurists, moralists, historians, and statesmen; and all the while his own servants were deceiving and plundering him, and his followers enriching themselves with bribes taken in his name. The "small watch-candle" of the brain would have been valuable to him here.

The work by which his wisdom has reached the popular mind is his collection of Essays. As originally published in 1597, it contained only ten; in the last edition published in his lifetime, the number was increased to fiftyseven. The sifted result of much observation and meditation on public and private life, he truly could say of their matter, that "it could not be found in books." Their originality can hardly be appreciated at present, for most of their thoughts have been incorporated with the minds which have fed on them, and have been continually reproduced in other volumes. Yet it is probable that these short treatises are rarely thoroughly mastered, even by the most careful reader. Dugald Stewart testifies that after reading them for the twentieth time he observed something which had escaped his attention in the nineteenth. They combine the greatest brevity with the greatest beauty of expression. The thoughts follow each other with such rapid ease; each thought is so truly an addition, and not an expansion of the preceding; the point of view is so continually changed, in order that in one little essay the subject may be considered on all its sides and in all its bearings; and each sentence is so capable of being developed into an essay, that the work requires long pauses of reflection, and frequent reperusal, to be estimated at its full worth. It not merely enriches the mind, it enlarges it, and teaches it comprehensive habits of reflection. The

It was one of Bacon's mistakes to believe that he would outlive the English language. Those of his works, therefore, which were not written in Latin he was eager to have translated into that tongue. The "Essays," coming home as they did to "men's business and bosoms," he was persuaded would "last as long as books should last"; and as he thought, to use his own words, "that these modern languages would at some time or other play the bankrupt with books," he employed Ben Jonson and others to translate the Essays into Latin. A Dr. Willmott published, in 1720, a translation of this Latin edition into what he called reformed and fashionable English. We will give a specimen. Bacon, in his Essay on Adversity, says: "Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament, adversity is the blessing of the New..... Yet even in the Old Testament, if you listen to David's harp, you shall hear as many hearse-like airs as carols." Dr. Willmott Englishes the Latin in this wise: "Prosperity belongs to the blessings of the Old Testament, adversity to the beatitudes of the New..... Yet even in the Old Testament, if you listen to David's harp, you'll find more lamentable airs than triumphant ones." This is translation with a vengeance!

Next to the Essays and the Advancement of Learning, the most attractive of Bacon's works is his Wisdom of the Ancients. Here his reason and imagination, intermingling or interchanging their processes, work conjointly, and produce a magnificent series of poems, while remorselessly analyzing imaginations into thoughts. He supposes that, anterior to the Greeks, there were thinkers as wise as Bacon; that the heathen fables are poetical embodi

The

ments of secrets and mysteries of policy, philosophy, and religion; truths folded up in mythological personifications; "sacred relics," indeed, or "abstracted, rarefied airs of better times, which by tradition from more ancient nations fell into the trumpets and flutes of the Grecians." He, of course, finds in these fables what he brings to them, the inductive philosophy and all. book is a marvel of ingenuity, and exhibits the astounding analogical power of his mind, both as respects analogies of reason and analogies of fancy. Had Bacon lived in the age of Plato and Aristotle, and written this work, he would have fairly triumphed over those philosophers; for he would have reconciled ancient philosophy with ancient religion, and made faith in Jupiter and Pan consistent with reason.

But the work in which Bacon is most pleasingly exhibited is his philosophical romance, The New Atlantis. This happy island is a Baconian Utopia, a philosopher's paradise, where the Novum Organum is, in imagination, realized, and utility is carried to its loftiest idealization. In this country the king is good, and the people are good, because everything, even commerce, is subordinated to knowledge. "Truth" here "prints goodness." All sensual and malignant passions, all the ugly deformities of actual life, are sedately expelled from this glorious dream of a kingdom where men live in harmony with each other and with nature, and where observers, discoverers, and inventors are invested with an external pomp and dignity and high place corresponding to their intellectual elevation. Here is a college worthy of the name, Solomon's House, "the end of whose foundation is the knowledge of causes and the secret motions of things, and the enlarging the bounds of human empire to the effecting of all things possible"; and in Solomon's House Bacon's ideas are carried out, and man is in the process of "being restored to the sovereignty of nature." In this fiction, too, the peculiar beneficence of Bacon's spirit is displayed; and perhaps the