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Suppose that Justinian, when he closed the schools of Athens, had called on the
last few sages who still haunted the Portico, and lingered round the ancient
plane-trees, to show their title to public veneration: suppose that he had said:
"A thousand years have elapsed since, in this famous city, Socrates posed
Protagoras and Hippias; during those thousand years a large proportion of the
ablest men of every generation has been employed in constant efforts to bring to
perfection the philosophy which you teach, that philosophy has been munificently
patronized by the powerful; its professors have been held in the highest esteem
by the public; it has drawn to itself almost all the sap and vigor of the human
intellect: and what has it effected? What profitable truth has it taught us
which we should not equally have known without it? What has it enabled us to do
which we should not have been equally able to do without it?" Such questions, we
suspect, would have puzzled Simplicius and Isidore. Ask a follower of Bacon what
the new philosophy, as it was called in the time of Charles the Second, has
effected for mankind, and his answer is ready; "It has lengthened life; it has
mitigated pain; it has extinguished diseases; it has increased the fertility of
the soil; it has given new securities to the mariner; it has furnished new arms
to the warrior; it has spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of form
unknown to our fathers; it has guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to
earth; it has lighted up the night with the splendor of the day; it has extended
the range of the human vision; it has multiplied the power of the human muscles;
it has accelerated motion; it has annihilated distance; it has facilitated
intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all dispatch of business; it
has enabled man to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to
penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to traverse the land
in cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean in ships which run ten
knots an hour against the wind. These are but a part of its fruits, and of its
first fruits. For it is a philosophy which never rests, which has never
attained, which is never perfect. Its law is progress. A point which yesterday
was invisible is its goal to-day, and will be its starting-post to-morrow."
Great and various as the powers of Bacon were, he owes his wide and durable fame
chiefly to this, that all those powers received their direction from common
sense. His love of the vulgar useful, his strong sympathy with the popular
notions of good and evil, and the openness with which he avowed that sympathy,
are the secret of his influence. There was in his system no cant, no illusion.
He had no anointing for broken bones, no fine theories de finibus, no arguments
to persuade men out of their senses. He knew that men, and philosophers as well
as other men, do actually love life, health, comfort, honor, security, the
society of friends, and do actually dislike death, sickness, pain, poverty,
disgrace, danger, separation from those to whom they are attached. He knew that
religion, though it often regulates and moderates these feelings, seldom
eradicates them; nor did he think it desirable for mankind that they should be
eradicated. The plan of eradicating them by conceits like those of Seneca, or
syllogisms like those of Chrysippus, was too preposterous to be for a moment
entertained by a mind like his. He did not understand what wisdom there could be
in changing names where it was impossible to change things; in denying that
blindness, hunger, the gout, the rack, were evils, and calling them apoproegmena
in refusing to acknowledge that health, safety, plenty, were good things, and
dubbing them by the name of adiaphora. In his opinions on all these subjects, he
was not a Stoic, nor an Epicurean, nor an Academic, but what would have been
called by Stoics, Epicureans, and Academics a mere idiotes, a mere common man.
And it was precisely because he was so that his name makes so great an era in
the history of the world. It was because he dug deep that he was able to pile
high. It was because, in order to lay his foundations, he went down into those
parts of human nature which lie low, but which are not liable to change, that
the fabric which he reared has risen to so stately an elevation, and stands with
such immovable strength.
We have sometimes thought that an amusing fiction might be written, in which a
disciple of Epictetus and a disciple of Bacon should be introduced as
fellow-travelers. They come to a village where the smallpox has just begun to
rage, and find houses shut up, intercourse suspended, the sick abandoned,
mothers weeping in terror over their children. The Stoic assures the dismayed
population that there is nothing bad in the smallpox, and that to a wise man
disease, deformity, death, the loss of friends, are not evils. The Baconian
takes out a lancet and begins to vaccinate. They find a body of miners in great
dismay. An explosion of noisome vapors has just killed many of those who were at
work; and the survivors are afraid to venture into the cavern. The Stoic assures
them that such an accident is nothing but a mere apoproegmenon. The Baconian,
who has no such fine word at his command, contents himself with devising a
safety-lamp. They find a shipwrecked merchant wringing his hands on the shore.
His vessel with an inestimable cargo has just gone down, and he is reduced in a
moment from opulence to beggary. The Stoic exhorts him not to seek happiness in
things which lie without himself, and repeats the whole chapter of Epictetus
pros tous ten aporian dediokotas. The Baconian constructs a diving-bell, goes
down in it, and returns with the most precious effects from the wreck. It would
be easy to multiply illustrations of the difference between the philosophy of
thorns and the philosophy of fruit, the philosophy of words and the philosophy
of works.
Bacon has been accused of overrating the importance of those sciences which
minister to the physical well-being of man, and of underrating the importance of
moral philosophy; and it cannot be denied that persons who read the Novum
Organum and the De Augmentis, without adverting to the circumstances under which
those works were written, will find much that may seem to countenance the
accusation. It is certain, however, that, though in practice he often went very
wrong, and though, as his historical work and his essays prove, he did not hold,
even in theory, very strict opinions on points of political morality, he was far
too wise a man not to know how much our well-being depends on the regulation of
our minds. The world for which he wished was not, as some people seem to
imagine, a world of water-wheels, power-looms, steam-carriages, sensualists, and
knaves. He would have been as ready as Zeno himself to maintain that no bodily
comforts which could be devised by the skill and labor of a hundred generations
would give happiness to a man whose mind was under the tyranny of licentious
appetite, of envy, of hatred, or of fear. If he sometimes appeared to ascribe
importance too exclusively to the arts which increase the outward comforts of
our species, the reason is plain. Those arts had been most unduly depreciated.
They had been represented as unworthy of the attention of a man of liberal
education. " Cogitavit," says Bacon of himself, "eam esse opinionem sive
aestimationem humidam et damnosam, minui nempe majestatem mentis humanae, si in
experimentis et rebus particularibus, sensui subjectis, et in materia
terminatis, diu ac multum versetur: praesertim cum hujusmodi res ad inquirendum
laboriosae, ad meditandum ignobiles, ad discendum asperae, ad practicam
illiberales, numero infinitae, et subtilitate pusillae videri soleant, et ob
hujusmodi conditiones, gloriae artium minus sint accommodatae."1 This opinion
seemed to him "omnia in familia humana turbasse." It had undoubtedly caused many
arts which were of the greatest utility, and which were susceptible of the
greatest improvements, to be neglected by speculators, and abandoned to joiners,
masons, smiths, weavers, apothecaries. It was necessary to assert the dignity of
those arts, to bring them prominently forward, to proclaim that, as they have a
most serious effect on human happiness, they are not unworthy of the attention
of the highest human intellects. Again, it was by illustrations drawn from these
arts that Bacon could most easily illustrate his principles. It was by
improvements effected in these arts that the soundness of his principles could
be most speedily and decisively brought to the test, and made manifest to common
understandings. He acted like a wise commander who thins every other part of his
line to strengthen a point where the enemy is attacking with peculiar fury, and
on the fate of which the event of the battle seems likely to depend. In the
Novum Organum, however, he distinctly and most truly declares that his
philosophy is no less a Moral than a Natural Philosophy, that, though his
illustrations are drawn from physical science, the principles which those
illustrations are intended to explain are just as applicable to ethical and
political inquiries as to inquiries into the nature of heat and vegetation.2
He frequently treated of moral subjects; and he brought to those subjects that
spirit which was the essence of his whole system. He has left us many admirable
practicable observations on what he somewhat quaintly called the Georgics of the
mind, on the mental culture which tends to produce good dispositions. Some
persons, he said, might accuse him of spending labor on a matter so simple that
his predecessors had passed it by with contempt. He desired such persons to
remember that he had from the first announced the objects of his search to be
not the splendid and the surprising, but the useful and the true, not the
deluding dreams which go forth through the shining portal of ivory, but the
humbler realities of the gate of horn.3
True to this principle, he indulged in no rants about the fitness of things, the
all-sufficiency of virtue, and the dignity of human nature. He dealt not at all
in resounding nothings, such as those with which Bolingbroke pretended to
comfort himself in exile, and in which Cicero vainly sought consolation after
the loss of Tullia. The casuistical subtleties which occupied the attention of
the keenest spirits of his age had, it should seem, no attractions for him. The
doctors whom Escobar afterwards compared to the four beasts and the
four-and-twenty elders in the Apocalypse Bacon dismissed with most contemptuous
brevity. "Inanes plerumque evadunt et futiles."4 Nor
did he ever meddle with those enigmas which have puzzled hundreds of
generations, and will puzzle hundreds more. He said nothing about the grounds of
moral obligation, or the freedom of the human will. He had no inclination to
employ himself in labors resembling those of the damned in the Grecian Tartarus,
to spin for ever on the same wheel round the same pivot, to gape for ever after
the same deluding clusters, to pour water for ever into the same bottomless
buckets, to pace for ever to and fro on the same wearisome path after the same
recoiling stone. He exhorted his disciples to prosecute researches of a very
different description, to consider moral science as a practical science, a
science of which the object was to cure the diseases and perturbations of the
mind, and which could be improved only by a method analogous to that which has
improved medicine and surgery. Moral philosophers ought, he said, to set
themselves vigorously to work for the purpose of discovering what are the actual
effects produced on the human character by particular modes of education, by the
indulgence of particular habits, by the study of particular books, by society,
by emulation, by imitation. Then we might hope to find out what mode of training
was most likely to preserve and restore moral health.5
What he was as a natural philosopher and a moral philosopher, that he was also
as a theologian. He was, we are convinced, a sincere believer in the divine
authority of the Christian revelation. Nothing can be found in his writings, or
in any other writings, more eloquent and pathetic than some passages which were
apparently written under the influence of strong devotional feeling. He loved to
dwell on the power of the Christian religion to effect much that the ancient
philosophers could only promise. He loved to consider that religion as the bond
of charity, the curb of evil passions, the consolation of the wretched, the
support of the timid, the hope of the dying. But controversies on speculative
points of theology seem to have engaged scarcely any portion of his attention.
In what he wrote on Church Government he showed, as far as he dared, a tolerant
and charitable spirit. He troubled himself not at all about Homoousians and
Homoiousians, Monothelites and Nestorians. He lived in an age in which disputes
on the most subtle points of divinity excited an intense interest throughout
Europe, and nowhere more than in England. He was placed in the very thick of the
conflict. He was in power at the time of the Synod of Dort, and must for months
have been daily deafened with talk about election, reprobation, and final
perseverance. Yet we do not remember a line in his works from which it can be
inferred that he was either a Calvinist or an Arminian. While the world was
resounding with the noise of a disputatious philosophy and a disputatious
theology, the Baconian school, like Allworthy seated between Square and
Thwackum, preserved a calm neutrality, half scornful, half benevolent, and
content with adding to the sum of practical good, left the war of words to those
who liked it.
We have dwelt long on the end of the Baconian philosophy, because from this
peculiarity all the other peculiarities of that philosophy necessary arose.
Indeed, scarcely any person who proposed to himself the same end with Bacon
could fail to hit upon the same means.
The vulgar notion about Bacon we take to be this, that he invented a new method
of arriving at truth, which method is called Induction, and that he detected
some fallacy in the syllogistic reasoning which had been in vogue before his
time. This notion is about as well founded as that of the people who, in the
middle ages, imagined that Virgil was a great conjurer. Many who are far too
well-informed to talk such extravagant nonsense entertain what we think
incorrect notions as to what Bacon really effected in this matter.
The inductive method has been practiced ever since the beginning of the world by
every human being. It is constantly practiced by the most ignorant clown, by the
most thoughtless schoolboy, by the very child at the breast. That method leads
the clown to the conclusion that if he sows barley he shall not reap wheat. By
that method the schoolboy learns that a cloudy day is the best for catching
trout. The very infant, we imagine, is led by induction to expect milk from his
mother or nurse, and none from his father.
Not only is it not true that Bacon invented the inductive method; but it is not
true that he was the first person who correctly analyzed that method and
explained its uses. Aristotle had long before pointed out the absurdity of
supposing that syllogistic reasoning could ever conduct men to the discovery of
any new principle, had shown that such discoveries must be made by induction,
and by induction alone, and had given the history of the inductive process,
concisely indeed, but with great perspicuity and precision.
Again, we are not inclined to ascribe much practical value to that analysis of
the inductive method which Bacon has given, in the second book of the Novum
Organum. It is indeed an elaborate and correct analysis. But it is an analysis
of that which we are all doing from morning to night, and which we continue to
do even in our dreams. A plain man finds his stomach out of order. He never
heard Lord Bacon's name. But he proceeds in the strictest conformity with the
rules laid down in the second book of the Novum Organum, and satisfies himself
that minced pies have done the mischief. "I ate minced pies on Monday and
Wednesday, and I was kept awake by indigestion all night." This is the
comparentia ad intellectum instantiarum convenientium. "I did not eat any on
Tuesday and Friday, and I was quite well." This is the comparentia instantiarum
in proximo quae natura data privantur. "I ate very sparingly of them on Sunday,
and was very slightly indisposed in the evening. But on Christmas-day I almost
dined on them, and was so ill that I was in great danger." This is the
comparentia instantiarum secundum magis et minus. "It cannot have been the
brandy which I took with them. For I have drunk brandy daily for years without
being the worse for it." This is the rejectio naturarum. Our invalid then
proceeds to what is termed by Bacon the Vindemiatio, and pronounces that minced
pies do not agree with him.
We repeat that we dispute neither the ingenuity nor the accuracy of the theory
contained in the second book of the Novum Organum; but we think that Bacon
greatly overrated its utility. We conceive that the inductive process, like many
other processes, is not likely to be better performed merely because men know
how they perform it. William Tell would not have been one whit more likely to
cleave the apple if he had known that his arrow would describe a parabola under
the influence of the attraction of the earth. Captain Barclay would not have
been more likely to walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours, if he had known
the place and name of every muscle in his legs. Monsieur Jourdain probably did
not pronounce D and F more correctly after he had been apprised that D is
pronounced by touching the teeth with the end of the tongue, and F by putting
the upper teeth on the lower lip. We cannot perceive that the study of grammar
makes the smallest difference in the speech of people who have always lived in
good society. Not one Londoner in ten thousand can lay down the rules for the
proper use of will and shall. Yet not one Londoner in a million ever misplaces
his will and shall. Dr. Robertson could, undoubtedly, have written a luminous
dissertation on the use of those words. Yet, even in his latest work, he
sometimes misplaced them ludicrously. No man uses figures of speech with more
propriety because he knows that one figure is called a metonymy and another a
synecdoche. A drayman in a passion calls out, "You are a pretty fellow.",
without suspecting that he is uttering irony, and that irony is one of the four
primary tropes. The old systems of rhetoric were never regarded by the most
experienced and discerning judges as of any use for the purpose of forming an
orator. "Ego hanc vim intelligo," said Cicero, "esse in praeceptis omnibus, non
ut ea secuti oratores eloquentiae laudem sint adepti, sed quae sua sponte
homines eloquentes facerent, ea quosdam observasse, atque id egisse; sic esse
non eloquentiam ex artificio, sed artificium ex eloquentia natum." We must own
that we entertain the same opinion concerning the study of Logic which Cicero
entertained concerning the study of Rhetoric. A man of sense syllogises in
celarent and cesare all day long without suspecting it; and, though he may not
know what an ignoratio elenchi is, has no difficulty in exposing it whenever he
falls in with it; which is likely to be as often as he falls in with a Reverend
Master of Arts nourished on mode and figure in the cloisters of Oxford.
Considered merely as an intellectual feat, the Organum of Aristotle can scarcely
be admired too highly. But the more we compare individual with individual,
school with school, nation with nation, generation with generation, the more do
we lean to the opinion that the knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency
whatever to make men good reasoners.
What Aristotle did for the syllogistic process Bacon has, in the second book of
the Novum Organum, done for the inductive process; that is to say, he has
analyzed it well. His rules are quite proper, but we do not need them, because
they are drawn from our own constant practice.
But, though everybody is constantly performing the process described in the
second book of the Novum Organum, some men perform it well and some perform it
ill. Some are led by it to truth, and some to error. It led Franklin to discover
the nature of lightning. It led thousands, who had less brains than Franklin, to
believe in animal magnetism. But this was not because Franklin went through the
process described by Bacon, and the dupes of Mesmer through a different process.
The comparentiae and rejectiones of which we have given examples will be found
in the most unsound inductions. We have heard that an eminent judge of the last
generation was in the habit of jocosely propounding after dinner a theory, that
the cause of the prevalence of Jacobinism was the practice of bearing three
names. He quoted on the one side Charles James Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan,
John Horne Tooke, John Philpot Curran, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Theobald Wolfe
Tone. These were instantiae convenientes. He then proceeded to cite instances
absentiae in proximo, William Pitt, John Scott, William Windham, Samuel Horsley,
Henry Dundas, Edmund Burke. He might have gone on to instances secundum magis et
minus. The practice of giving children three names has been for some time a
growing practice, and Jacobinism has also been growing. The practice of giving
children three names is more common in America than in England. In England we
still have a King and a House of Lords; but the Americans are Republicans. The
rejectiones are obvious. Burke and Theobald Wolfe Tone are both Irishmen:
therefore the being an Irishman is not the cause of Jacobinism. Horsley and
Horne Tooke are both clergymen; therefore the being a clergyman is not the cause
of Jacobinism. Fox and Windham were both educated at Oxford; therefore the being
educated at Oxford is not the cause of Jacobinism. Pitt and Horne Tooke were
both educated at Cambridge; therefore the being educated at Cambridge is not the
cause of Jacobinism. In this way, our inductive philosopher arrives at what
Bacon calls the Vintage, and pronounces that the having three names is the cause
of Jacobinism.
Here is an induction corresponding with Bacon's analysis and ending in a
monstrous absurdity. In what then does this induction differ from the induction
which leads us to the conclusion that the presence of the sun is the cause of
our having more light by day than by night? The difference evidently is not in
the kind of instances, but in the number of instances; that is to say, the
difference is not in that part of the process for which Bacon has given precise
rules, but in a circumstance for which no precise rule can possibly be given. If
the learned author of the theory about Jacobinism had enlarged either of his
tables a little, his system would have been destroyed. The names of Tom Paine
and William Wyndham Grenville would have been sufficient to do the work.
It appears to us, then, that the difference between a sound and unsound
induction does not lie in this, that the author of the sound induction goes
through the process analyzed in the second book of the Novum Organum, and the
author of the unsound induction through a different process. They both perform
the same process. But one performs it foolishly or carelessly; the other
performs it with patience, attention, sagacity, and judgment. Now precepts can
do little towards making men patient and attentive, and still less towards
making them sagacious and judicious. It is very well to tell men to be on their
guard against prejudices, not to believe facts on slight evidence, not to be
content with a scanty collection of facts, to put out of their minds the idola
which Bacon has so finely described. But these rules are too general to be of
much practical use. The question is, What is a prejudice? How long does the
incredulity with which I hear a new theory propounded continue to be a wise and
salutary incredulity? When does it become an idolum specus, the unreasonable
pertinacity of a too skeptical mind? What is slight evidence? What collection of
facts is scanty? Will ten instances do, or fifty, or a hundred? In how many
months would the first human beings who settled on the shores of the ocean have
been justified in believing that the moon had an influence on the tides? After
how many experiments would Jenner have been justified in believing that he had
discovered a safeguard against the small-pox? These are questions to which it
would be most desirable to have a precise answer; but, unhappily, they are
questions to which no precise answer can be returned.
We think, then, that it is possible to lay down accurate rules, as Bacon has
done, for the performing of that part of the inductive process which all men
perform alike; but that these rules, though accurate, are not wanted, because in
truth they only tell us to do what we are all doing. We think that it is
impossible to lay down any precise rule for the performing of that part of the
inductive process which a great experimental philosopher performs in one way,
and a superstitious old woman in another.
On this subject, we think, Bacon was in an error. He certainly attributed to his
rules a value which did not belong to them. He went so far as to say, that, if
his method of making discoveries were adopted, little would depend on the degree
of force or acuteness of any intellect; that all minds would be reduced to one
level, that his philosophy resembled a compass or a rule which equalizes all
hands, and enables the most unpracticed person to draw a more correct circle or
line than the best draftsmen can produce without such aid.6 This really seems to us as extravagant as it would
have been in Lindley Murray to announce that everybody who should learn his
Grammar would write as good English as Dryden, or in that very able writer, the
Archbishop of Dublin, to promise that all the readers of his Logic would reason
like Chillingworth, and that all the readers of his Rhetoric would speak like
Burke. That Bacon was altogether mistaken as to this point will now hardly be
disputed. His philosophy has flourished during two hundred years, and has
produced none of this leveling. The interval between a man of talents and a
dunce is as wide as ever; and is never more clearly discernible than when they
engage in researches which require the constant use of induction.
It will be seen that we do not consider Bacon's ingenious analysis of the
inductive method as a very useful performance. Bacon was not, as we have already
said, the inventor of the inductive method. He was not even the person who first
analyzed the inductive method correctly, though he undoubtedly analyzed it more
minutely than any who preceded him. He was not the person who first showed that
by the inductive method alone new truth could be discovered. But he was the
person who first turned the minds of speculative men, long occupied in verbal
disputes, to the discovery of new and useful truth; and, by doing so, he at once
gave to the inductive method an importance and dignity which had never before
belonged to it. He was not the maker of that road; he was not the discoverer of
that road; he was not the person who first surveyed and mapped that road. But he
was the person who first called the public attention to an inexhaustible mine of
wealth, which had been utterly neglected, and which was accessible by that road
alone. By doing so he caused that road, which had previously been trodden only
by peasants and hagglers, to be frequented by a higher class of travelers.
That which was eminently his own in his system was the end which he proposed to
himself. The end being given, the means, as it appears to us, could not well be
mistaken. If others had aimed at the same object with Bacon, we hold it to be
certain that they would have employed the same method with Bacon. It would have
been hard to convince Seneca that the inventing of a safety-lamp was an
employment worthy of a philosopher. It would have been hard to persuade Thomas
Aquinas to descend from the making of syllogisms to the making of gunpowder. But
Seneca would never have doubted for a moment that it was only by means of a
series of experiments that a safety-lamp could be invented. Thomas Aquinas would
never have thought that his barbara and baralipton would enable him to ascertain
the proportion which charcoal ought to bear to saltpetre in a pound of
gunpowder. Neither common sense nor Aristotle would have suffered him to fall
into such an absurdity.
By stimulating men to the discovery of new truth, Bacon stimulated them to
employ the inductive method, the only method, even the ancient philosophers and
the schoolmen themselves being judges, by which new truth can be discovered. By
stimulating men to the discovery of useful truth, he furnished them with a
motive to perform the inductive process well and carefully. His predecessors had
been, in his phrase, not interpreters, but anticipators of nature. They had been
content with the first principles at which they had arrived by the most scanty
and slovenly induction. And why was this? It was, we conceive, because their
philosophy proposed to itself no practical end, because it was merely an
exercise of the mind. A man who wants to contrive a new machine or a new
medicine has a strong motive to observe accurately and patiently, and to try
experiment after experiment. But a man who merely wants a theme for disputation
or declamation has no such motive. He is therefore content with premises
grounded on assumption, or on the most scanty and hasty induction. Thus, we
conceive, the schoolmen acted. On their foolish premises they often argued with
great ability; and as their object was "assensum subjugare, non res,"7 to be victorious in controversy not to be victorious
over nature, they were consistent. For just as much logical skill could be shown
in reasoning on false as on true premises. But the followers of the new
philosophy, proposing to themselves the discovery of useful truth as their
object, must have altogether failed of attaining that object if they had been
content to build theories on superficial induction.
1 Cogitata et
visa. The expression opinio humida may surprise a reader not accustomed to
Bacon's style. The allusion is to the maxim of Heraclitus the obscure: "Dry
light is the best." By dry light, Bacon understood the light of the intellect,
not obscured by the mists of passion, interest, or prejudice.
2 Novum Organum, Lib, I. Aph 127.
3 De Augmentis, Lib. vii. Cap. 3.
4 Ibid. Lib. vii. Cap. 2.
5 Ibid.: Lib. vii. Cap. 3.
6 Novum 0rganum,
Praef. and Lib. I Aph. 122.
7 Novum
Organum, Lib. i. Aph. 29.
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