tical orations. I do not, however, think it probable that this branch of topics could have been neglected by antiquity, though the writings relating to it may not have descended to us; nor can we by any means say there is nothing of the kind in Aristotle's Rhetoric. Whether the utility of these common-places, when collected in books, be very great, is another question. And a similar doubt might be suggested with respect to the elenchs, or refutations, of rhetorical sophisms, "colores boni et mali," which he reports as equally deficient, though a commencement had been made by Aristotle.

Ethics.

"The

56. In the seventh book we come to ethical science. This he deems to have been insufficiently treated. He would have the different tempers and characters of mankind first considered, then their passions and affections; (neither of which, as he justly observes, find a place in the Ethics of Aristotle, though they are sometimes treated, not so appositely, in his Rhetoric;) lastly, the methods of altering and affecting the will and appetite, such as custom, education, imitation, or society. main and primitive division of moral knowledge seemeth to be into the exemplar or platform of good, and the regiment or culture of the mind; the one describing the nature of good, the other presenting rules how to subdue, apply, and accommodate the will of man thereunto." This latter he also calls "the Georgics of the mind." He seems to place "the platform or essence of good" in seeking the good of the whole, rather than that of the individual, applying this to refute the ancient theories as to the summum bonum. But perhaps Bacon had not thoroughly disentangled this question, and confounds, as is not unusual, the summum bonum, or personal felicity, with the object of moral action, or commune bonum. He is right, however, in preferring, morally speaking, the active to the contemplative life against Aristotle and other philosophers. This part is translated in De Augmentis, with little variation, from the Advancement of Learning; as is also what follows on the Georgics, or culture, of the mind. philosophy of civil life, as it relates both to the conduct of men in their mutual intercourse, which is peculiarly termed prudence, and to that higher prudence which is concerned

The

Politics.

with the administration of communities, fills up the chart of the Baconian ethics. In the eighth book, admirable reflections on the former of these subjects occur at almost every sentence. Many, perhaps most, of these will be found in the Advancement of Learning. But in this, he had been, for a reason sufficiently obvious and almost avowed, cautiously silent upon the art of government, the craft of his king. The motives for silence were still so powerful, that he treats, in the De Augmentis, only of two heads in political science; the methods of enlarging the boundaries of a state, which James I. could hardly resent as an interference with his own monopoly, and one of far more importance to the well-being of mankind, the principles of universal jurisprudence, or rather of universal legislation, according to which standard all laws ought to be framed. These he has sketched in ninety-seven aphorisms, or short rules, which, from the great experience of Bacon in the laws, as well as his peculiar vocation towards that part of philosophy, deserve to be studied at this day. Upon such topics, the progressive and innovating spirit of his genius was less likely to be perceived; but he is here, as on all occasions, equally free from what he has happily called in one of his essays, the "froward retention of custom," the prejudice of mankind, like that of perverse children, against what is advised to them for their real good, and what they cannot deny to be conducive to it. This whole eighth book is pregnant with profound and Theology. original thinking. The ninth and last, which is short, glances only at some desiderata in theological science, and is chiefly remarkable as it displays a more liberal and catholic spirit than was often to be met with in a period signalised by bigotry and ecclesiastical pride. But as the abjuration of human authority is the first principle of Lord Bacon's philosophy, and the preparation for his logic, it was not expedient to say too much of its usefulness in theological pursuits.

enumerated

57. At the conclusion of the whole, we may find a Desiderata summary catalogue of the deficiencies, which, in by him. the course of this ample review, Lord Bacon had found worthy of being supplied by patient and philosophical inquiry. Of these desiderata, few, I fear, have

since been filled up, at least in a collective and systematic manner, according to his suggestions. Great materials, useful intimations, and even partial delineations, are certainly to be found, as to many of the rest, in the writings of those who have done honour to the last two centuries. But with all our pride in modern science, very much even of what, in Bacon's time, was perceived to be wanting, remains for the diligence and sagacity of those who are yet

to come.

Novum

Organum :

first book.

58. The first book of the Novum Organum, if it is not better known than any other part of Bacon's philosophical writings, has at least furnished more of those striking passages which shine in quotation. It is written in detached aphorisms; the sentences, even where these aphorisms are longest, not flowing much into one another, so as to create a suspicion, that he had formed adversaria, to which he committed his thoughts as they arose. It is full of repetitions; and indeed this is so usual with Lord Bacon, that whenever we find an acute reflection or brilliant analogy, it is more than an even chance that it will recur in some other place. I have already observed that he has hinted the Novum Organum to be a digested summary of his method, but not the entire system as he designed to develop it, even in that small portion which he has handled at all.

Fallacies.

59. Of the splendid passages in the Novum Organum none are perhaps so remarkable as his celebrated division of fallacies, not such as the dialecticians Idola; had been accustomed to refute, depending upon equivocal words, or faulty disposition of premises, but lying far deeper in the natural or incidental prejudices of the mind itself. These are four in number: idola tribûs, to which from certain common weaknesses of human nature we are universally liable; idola specûs, which from peculiar dispositions and circumstances of individuals mislead them in different manners; idola fori, arising from the current usage of words, which represent things much otherwise than as they really are; and idola theatri, which false systems of philosophy and erroneous methods of reasoning have introduced. Hence, as the refracted ray gives us a false notion as to the place of the object whose image it

transmits, so our own minds are a refracting medium to the objects of their own contemplation, and require all the aid of a well-directed philosophy either to rectify the perception, or to make allowances for its errors.

60. These idola, edwλa, images, illusions, fallacies, or, confounded as Lord Bacon calls them in the Advancement with idols. of Learning, false appearances, have been often named in English idols of the tribe, of the den, of the market-place. But it seems better, unless we retain the Latin name, to employ one of the synonymous terms given above. For the use of idol in this sense is little warranted by the practice of the language, nor is it found in Bacon himself; but it has misled a host of writers, whoever might be the first that applied it, even among such as are conversant with the Novum Organum. "Bacon proceeds," says Playfair, "to enumerate the causes of error, the idols, as he calls them, or false divinities to which the mind had so long been accustomed to bow." And with a similar misapprehension of the meaning of the word, in speaking of the idola specûs, he says, "Besides the causes of error which are common to all mankind, each individual, according to Bacon, has his own dark cavern or den, into which the light is imperfectly admitted, and in the obscurity of which a tutelary idol lurks, at whose shrine the truth is often sacrificed." Thus also Dr. Thomas Brown; "in the inmost sanctuaries of the mind were all the idols which he overthrew ;" and a later author on the Novum Organum fancies that Bacon "strikingly, though in his usual quaint style, calls the prejudices that check the progress of the mind by the name of idols, because mankind are apt to pay homage to these, instead of regarding truth." Thus, too, in the translation of the Novum Organum, published in Mr. Basil Montagu's edition, we find idola rendered by idols, without explanation. We may in fact say that this meaning has been almost universally given by later writers. By whom it was introduced I cannot

den maintain their authority, the cultivation of the philosophical spirit is impossible; or rather it is in a renunciation of this idolatry that the philosophical spirit essentially consists." Dissertation, &c.-The observation is equally true, whatever sense we may give to idol.

determine. Cudworth, in a passage where he glances at Bacon, has said, "It is no idol of the den, to use that affected language." But, in the pedantic style of the seventeenth century, it is not impossible that idol may here have been put as a mere translation of the Greek edwλov, and in the same general sense of an idea or intellectual image." Although the popular sense would not be inapposite to the general purpose of Bacon in the first part of the Novum Organum, it cannot be reckoned so exact and philosophical an illustration of the sources of human error as the unfaithful image, the shadow of reality, seen through a refracting surface, or reflected from an unequal mirror, as in the Platonic hypothesis of the cave, wherein we are placed with our backs to the light, to which he seems to allude in his idola specûs. And as this is also plainly the true meaning, as a comparison with the parallel passages in the Advancement of Learning demonstrates, there can be no pretence for continuing to employ a word which has served to mislead such men as Brown and Playfair.

of Novum

61. In the second book of the Novum Organum we come at length to the new logic, the interpretation Second book of nature, as he calls it, or the rules for conducting Organum. inquiries in natural philosophy according to his inductive method. It is, as we have said, a fragment of his entire system, and is chiefly confined to the "prerogative instances," or phænomena which are to be selected, for various reasons, as most likely to aid our investigations of nature. Fifteen of these are used to guide the intellect,

but withdrawn, after the first edition, from that poem; where he describes us as "Placed with our backs to bright reality." I am not, however, certain that Bacon meant this precise analogy by his idola specûs. See De Augmentis, lib. v. c. 4.

y The allusion in "prærogativæ instantiarum" is not to the English word prerogative, as Sir John Herschel seems to suppose (Discourse on Natural Philosophy, p. 182), but to the prærogativa centuria in the Roman comitia, which being first called, though by lot, was generally found, by some prejudice or superstition, to influence the rest, which seldom voted otherwise. It is rather a forced analogy, which is not uncommon with Bacon.