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CHAPTER II.

METHOD AND SCIENCE OF ANTIQUITY.

BACON, it has been hastily said, was a Logician, not a Philosopher. He had, it is true, formed no consistent scheme of the universe; but his method was determined by his view of the matter with which he had to deal. Logic, far from being an end in itself, was to him emphatically a means, and the defects of his system are directly traceable to the imperfection of his Science. The larger half of his work being a criticism of the Past, we must, in order to estimate its value, endeavour, at least proximately, to realise the amount and nature of his intellectual inheritance.

As the 'Republic' and 'Timæus' of Plato sum up and concentrate nearly all the previous speculations of Greece, so in the 'Instauratio Magna' we find reflected, though often distorted, two thousand previous years of thought. Bacon's whole attitude is that of hostility to the medieval mode of reasoning which had grown out of the decadence of the Greek philosophy. The first recorded speculations of Europe are attempts to generalise on the data of a few phenomena. The Ionic theorists aim at discovering a physical unity in referring the changes of

Pre-Socratic Philosophy.

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nature to a single element, but without any conception of a true physical method. They are followed by more abstract thinkers, who, denying the reliability of senseimpressions, endeavour to bring everything under the control of a mental idea. The inadequacy of Bacon's criticism is nowhere more conspicuous than in his mistaking their random physical conjectures for the essential points of their systems. Neglecting the central conception of Heraclitus, who regarded the world as a series of dissolving views, he dwells only on the fire, which was an emblem of the perpetual flux, and, similarly, he comprehends the mere phenomenal fringe of the Eleatic Idealism. His notes on the Atomists are more appreciative; but in referring to Anaxagoras-in whom the modern historian recognises the first Greek who had a glimmer of the distinction between the laws of mind and those of matter-he confines his attention to the 'Homoiomereia.' The preSocratic philosophers were only scientific by accident. There is hardly any result of modern science which they do not seem dimly to foreshadow; but the vagueness so obscured the suggestiveness of their conclusions, that when they met and clashed, towards the close of the fifth century B. C., at Athens, the Sophists found a ready audience for their negative thesis: "IIávra peî is as true within as without, we know not anything; but there remains the art of life." Socrates seems to have been as sceptical as Protagoras in his view that the universe was past finding out: he abandoned speculations Tepí τῆς ὅλης φύσεως, and maintained the proper study of mankind is man." It is true that he so far succeeded in reconstructing Ethics, by appeals to a finer analysis of

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the mind, substituted for savoir faire firmer bases of practical belief, and gave to Western thought a moral dye that has never been wholly worn out; but from Bacon's point of view his position was distinctly retrograde. In elevating the Socratic "definitions" into "Ideas," in substituting a more elaborate dialectic for the Socratic "elenchus,” Plato restored the translunary metaphysic his teacher had discarded. In the Dialogues, which have been aptly termed his "plays," the previous world of thought converges, as in a reservoir from which the rivers of the after-world flow; but the physics of the 'Timæus' are a mere réchauffé of Pythagorean and other phantasies, where imperceptible triangles are made to do duty for the atoms of Democritus, and the crudest physiological assumptions take the place of the anatomical or biological facts reserved for the labour of centuries to ascertain. Aristotle, the first great analyst among philosophers, marked the lines of demarcation between Politics, Ethics, and Theology, and tried to exhibit the relation between Psychology and Metaphysics proper. With him formal Logic all but begins; with him it all but ends. He replaced the Ideal Paradigms of Plato by his own theory of "Forms "-i.e., the qualities essential to things being considered to be, and being (for in his system the conception and the reality are merged1), what they are,―qualities which he sought by observation, investigation, and, though more rarely and roughly, by experiment, to discriminate from accidents.

In the works of these masters most mental problems are so defined that, in many directions, later ages have only filled in details; and Aristotle, in his wide accumu

1 They are so in equal degree in the philosophy of Bacon.

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lation of facts, showed himself a student of natural history; but in extending the kingdom of man over nature, they were little in advance of their predecessors. Their near successors, in formulating their doctrines as tenets of rival schools, only contracted their scope, and more unreservedly abandoned the lines of real physical research. Epicurus and Zeno enlarged the ethical views of Aristippus and Antisthenes; but the cosmological theories of Democritus and of Heraclitus, with which they became respectively associated, remained in their hands mere abstract speculations. The great work of Lucretius displays a poetical interpretation of nature often only surpassed in subtilty by Wordsworth; nor are there wanting in its pages occasional references to crude experiment, and a few anticipations of correct theories of the world such as we find somewhat later in Ovid's 'Fasti'; but these are interwoven with views fundamentally false. The services rendered by the Stoics and Epicureans to mankind consist in their criticisms of life. These naturally impressed themselves on the practical genius of Rome, at a time when the Empire was being established, and men were divided between those ready to let the world slide and those who were vainly endeavouring to revive the old life of the Republic. Side by side with these two schools we have the modified negations of the New Academy. Cato would have expelled Carneades for undermining morality; Bacon regards his doubt, "acatalepsia," as a bar to science, profoundly observing that "he who has once despaired of arriving at truth, finds his interest in all things less." Greek philosophy had wrought out, in the only ways open to the existing state of knowledge, the chief ques

tions it had started. Coming into contact with another era of civilisation, it was cramped by legality and formalism before having to succumb to the dominance of the new religion. During the centuries of its wane we meet with various substitutes for genuine research, represented by the following types of confused or superficial thought the Dogmatist-the Baconian spider-who lays down opinions in a final way without caring to give reasons for them; the Empiric, who, on the ground of a few facts or coincidences, compiled as the ant gathers rubbish, forms and acts on narrow views; the Eclectic, who pieces together often discordant parts of several systems, with the idea that somewhere among them the truth must be found; the Sceptic, who, weary of the search, impatiently denies; and the Mystic, who trusts in a new imaginary faculty-resolving itself for the most part into a diseased fancy or vague emotion-to supply those truths which he holds to be above reason.

The Academicians and the Peripatetics are distinguished from the masters of their respective schools by their mixture of scepticism and dogmatism: whatever in the teaching of Plato and Aristotle would not readily submit itself to dogmatic treatment, of that they were sceptical. The Romans generally were eclectics, an attitude variously represented by Cicero, Plutarch, and Pliny. The later Epicureans inclined to empiricism; and their Hedonism, after being degraded in Petronius Arbiter, was relegated to practical life till it was revived in the Renaissance. The asceticism of Zeno and Cleanthes gave way to, not without influencing, Christianity. The mysticism of Alexandria, gathering together the abstractions and myths of the