Poetry. all of which he treats in a summary manner, and points out the deficiencies which ought to be supplied in many departments of history. Poetry succeeds in the last chapter of the same book, but by confining the name to fictitious narrative, except as to ornaments of style, which he refers to a different part of his subject, he much limited his views of that literature; even if it were true, as it certainly is not, that the imagination alone, in any ordinary use of the word, is the medium of poetical emotion. The word emotion, indeed, is sufficient to show that Bacon should either have excluded poetry altogether from his enumeration of sciences and learning, or taken into consideration other faculties of the soul than those which are merely intellectual. 48. Stewart has praised with justice a short but beauFine passage tiful paragraph concerning poetry (under which on poetry. title may be comprehended all the various creations of the faculty of imagination, at least as they are manifested by words), wherein Bacon "has exhausted everything that philosophy and good sense have yet had to offer on the subject of what has since been called the beau idéal." The same eminent writer and ardent admirer of Bacon observes that D'Alembert improved on the Baconian arrangement by classing the fine arts together with poetry. Injustice had been done to painting and music, especially the former, when, in the fourth book De Augmentis, they were counted as mere "artes voluptariæ," subordinate to a sort of Epicurean gratification of the senses, and only somewhat more liberal than cookery or cosmetics. theology and 49. In the third book, science having been divided into Natural theological and philosophical, and the former, or metaphysics. what regards revealed religion, being postponed for the present, he lays it down that all philosophy relates to God, to nature, or to man. Under natural theology, as a sort of appendix, he reckons the science or theory of angels and superhuman spirits; a more favourite theme, especially as treated independently of revelation, in the ages that preceded Lord Bacon, than it has been since. Natural philosophy is speculative or practical; the former divided into physics, in a particular sense, and meta physics; "one of which inquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; the other handleth the formal and final causes." Hence physics dealing with particular instances, and regarding only the effects produced, is precarious in its conclusions, and does not reach the stable principles of causation. Limus ut hic durescit, et hæc ut cera liquescit Uno eodemque igni. Form of bodies Metaphysics, to which word he gave a sense as remote from that which it bore in the Aristotelian schools as from that in which it is commonly employed at present, had for its proper object the investigation of forms. It was "a generally received and inveterate opinion, that the inquisition of man is not competent to find out essential forms or true differences." "Formæ inventio," he says in another place, "habetur pro desperata." The word form itself, being borrowed from the old philosophy, is not immediately intelligible to every reader. "In the Baconian sense," says Playfair, "form differs only from cause in being permanent, whereas we apply cause to that which exists in order of time.' Form (natura naturans, as it was barbarously called) is the general law, or condition of existence, in any substance or quality (natura naturata), which is wherever its form is." The conditions of a mathematical figure, prescribed in its definition, might in this sense be called its form, if it did not seem to be Lord Bacon's intention to confine the word to the laws of particular sensible existences. In modern philosophy, it might be defined to be that particular combination of forces which impresses a certain modification upon matter subjected to their influence. times be in 50. To a knowledge of such forms, or laws of essence and existence, at least in a certain degree, it might might somebe possible, in Bacon's sanguine estimation of his quired into. own logic, for man to attain. Not that we could hope to understand the forms of complex beings, which are almost infinite in variety, but the simple and primary n Licet enim in natura nihil vere existat præter corpora individua, edentia actus puros individuos ex lege, in doctrinis tamen illa ipsa lex, ejusque inquisitio, et inventio atque explicatio pro fundamento est tam ad sciendum quam operandum. Eam autem legem ejusque paragraphos Formarum nomine intelligimus; præsertim cum hoc vocabulum invaluerit et familiariter occurrat. Nov. Org., ii. 2. natures, which are combined in them. "To inquire the form of a lion, of an oak, of gold, nay of water, of air, is a vain pursuit; but to inquire the forms of sense, of voluntary motion, of vegetation, of colours, of gravity and levity, of density and tenuity, of heat, of cold, and all other natures and qualities, which, like an alphabet, are not many, and of which the essences, upheld by matter, of all creatures do consist; to inquire, I say, the true forms of these is that part of metaphysics which we now define of." Thus, in the words he soon afterwards uses, "of natural philosophy, the basis is natural history; the stage next the basis is physic; the stage next the vertical point is metaphysic. As for the vertical point, Opus quod operatur Deus a principio usque ad finem,' the summary law of nature, we know not whether man's inquiry can attain unto it." P too much 51. The second object of metaphysics, according to Lord Final causes Bacon's notion of the word, was the investigation of final causes. It is well known that he has spoken of this, in physics, with unguarded disparagement.a slighted. In the Novum Organum he seems to have gone a little beyond this, and to have hoped that the form itself of concrete things might be known. Datæ autem naturæ formam, sive differentiam veram, sive naturam naturantem, sive fontem emanationis (ista enim vocabula habemus, quæ ad indicationem rei proxime accedunt), invenire opus et intentio est Humanæ Scientiæ. Lib. ii. 1. P Advancement of Learning, book ii. This sentence he has scarcely altered in the Latin. ¶ Causa finalis tantum abest ut prosit, ut etiam scientias corrumpat, nisi in hominis actionibus. Nov. Org., ii. 2. It must be remembered that Bacon had good reason to deprecate the admixture of theological dogmas with philosophy, which had been, and has often since been, the absolute perversion of all legitimate reasoning in science. See what Stewart has said upon Lord Bacon's objection to reasoning from final causes in physics. Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers, book iii, chap. ii. sect. 4. [It ought to be more remembered than sometimes it has been, that Bacon solely objects to the confusion of final with efficient causes, or, as some would say, with antecedent conditions. These alone he considered to fall within the province of physics. But, as a part of metaphysical theology, he gives the former here a place. Stewart has quoted at length the passage, which entirely vindicates Bacon from the charge of depreciating the argument in favour of theism from the structure of the world: a charge not uncommonly insinuated against him in the seventeenth century, but repeated lately with the most dogmatic violence by a powerful writer, Count de Maistre, Examen de la Philos. de Bacon, c. 13, et alibi. Bruxelles, 1838. This work, little known perhaps in England, is from beginning to end a violent attack upon the Baconian philosophy and its author, by a man of extraordinary vigour as a polemical writer, quick to discover any weak point, and powerful to throw upon it the light of a remarkably masculine and perspicuous style; second only perhaps in these respects to Bossuet, or rather only falling short of him in elegance of language; but, like him, a mere sworn soldier of one party, utterly destitute of an eclectic spirit in his own philosophy, or even of the power of appreciating with ordinary candour the diversities of opinion in others; repulsive therefore not only to "Like a virgin consecrated to God, it bears nothing;" one of those witty conceits that sparkle over his writings, but will not bear a severe examination. It has been well remarked that almost at the moment he published this, one of the most important discoveries of his age, the circulation of the blood, had rewarded the acuteness of Harvey in reasoning on the final cause of the valves in the veins. cluded by physics. 52. Nature, or physical philosophy, according to Lord Bacon's partition, did not comprehend the human Man not inspecies. Whether this be not more consonant to him in popular language, adopted by preceding systems of philosophy, than to a strict and perspicuous arrangement, may by some be doubted; though a very respectable authority, that of Dugald Stewart, is opposed to including man in the province of physics. For it is surely strange to separate the physiology of the human body, as quite a science of another class, from that of inferior animals; and if we place this part of our being under the department of physical philosophy, we shall soon be embarrassed by what Bacon has called the "doctrina de fædere," the science of the connexion between the soul of man and his bodily frame, a vast and interesting field, even yet very imperfectly explored. 53. It has pleased, however, the author to follow his own arrangement. The fourth book relates to Man, in body the constitution, bodily and mental, of mankind. and mind. In this book he has introduced several subdivisions which, considered merely as such, do not always appear the most philosophical; but the pregnancy and acuteness of his observations under each head silence all criticism of this kind. This book has nearly double the extent of the corresponding pages in the Advancement of Learning. The doctrine as to the substance of the thinking principle having been very slightly touched, or rather passed over, with two curious disquisitions on divination and fascina all who have looked with reverence upon those whom he labours to degrade, but to all who abhor party-spirit in the research of truth; yet not unworthy to be read even by them, since he has many just criticisms, and many acute observations; such, however, as ought always to be tried by comparison with the text of Bacon, whom he may not designedly have misrepresented, but, having set out with the conviction that he was a charlatan and an atheist, he naturally is led to exhibit in no other light.-1847.] extent given it by tion, he advances in four ensuing books to the intellectual and moral faculties, and those sciences which immediately depend upon them. Logic and Ethics are the Logic; grand divisions, correlative to the reason and the will of man. Logic, according to Lord Bacon, comprises the sciences of inventing, judging, retaining, and delivering the conceptions of the mind. We invent, that is, discover new arts, or new arguments; we judge by induction or by syllogism; the memory is capable of being aided by artificial methods. All these processes of the mind are the subjects of several sciences, which it was the peculiar aim of Bacon, by his own logic, to place on solid foundations. 54. It is here to be remarked, that the sciences of logic and ethics, according to the partitions of Lord Bacon. Bacon, are far more extensive than we are accustomed to consider them. Whatever concerned the human intellect came under the first; whatever related to the will and affections of the mind fell under the head of ethics. Logica de intellectu et ratione, ethica de voluntate appetitu et affectibus disserit; altera decreta, altera actiones progignit. But it has been usual to confine logic to the methods of guiding the understanding in the search for truth; and some, though, as it seems to me, in a manner not warranted by the best usage of philosophers," have endeavoured to exclude everything but the syllogistic mode of reasoning from the logical province. Whether, again, the nature and operations of the human mind, in general, ought to be reckoned a part of physics, has already been mentioned as a disputable question. and rhe toric. 55. The science of delivering our own thoughts to Grammar others, branching into grammar and rhetoric, and including poetry, so far as its proper vehicles, metre and diction, are concerned, occupies the sixth book. In all this he finds more desiderata than, from the great attention paid to these subjects by the ancients, could have been expected. Thus his ingenious collection of antitheta, or common-places in rhetoric, though mentioned by Cicero as to the judicial species of eloquence, is first extended by Bacon himself, as he supposes, to deliberative or poli r tur. In altera philosophiæ parte, quæ est quærendi ac disserendi, quæ 20yen diciCic. de Fin., i. 14. |