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dam, and thus to petrify the spirit of Bacon into a Hercules' pillar. Far from disregarding the example of Bacon, we would oppose a true to a fallacious example. The spirit of Bacon may, indeed, stand as a model for the present; but it should appear in all its greatness, not as a disfigured or diminished counterfeit, such as the celebrated English historian gives us in his etching. Bacon's opposition to theory was in a double sense historical. He opposed an historical theory that belonged to the past; he sprang from an historical position that was to decide the turning-point between the past and the future. This opposition was relative, and should not be made absolute; being mainly adapted to a certain age, it should not be applied to ourselves and all ages without distinction. That which is an "idol,” though an inevitable one, in Bacon, ought not to be converted into a truth for us; for the light of the Baconian mind would thus be turned into a misleading ignis fatuus, which, at the present day, no one would have been less inclined to follow than Bacon himself. Even Mr. Macaulay shows how little that opposition, which he stamps with the name of Bacon, is really grounded in his own mind. If we set every other consideration aside, the very style shows, that where

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Bacon was in earnest, Macaulay is only in sport. Bacon had experienced within himself and actually felt his opposition to antiquity, and to that which he calls theoretical philosophy. The opposition lay in the very condition of his intellectual nature. Very different, even as to its expression, does this opposition appear in Macaulay, by whom it is reduced to an artificial antithesis, which with the readiest dexterity passes from one party-word to another. This is the language not of simple feeling, but of artificial imitation. Mr. Macaulay, in his essay, bears the same relation to Bacon that a rhetorical figure bears to a natural character. Voltaire would have stood in a similar relation to Shakespeare if he had wished to represent and imitate a Shakesperian character.

History itself has pronounced the final judgment in this matter, and the historical fact is the last negative instance that we shall oppose to Macaulay. Bacon's philosophy is not an end of theories, but the starting-point of new theories, which were its necessary results in England and France, and of which some were practical in Mr. Macaulay's sense of the word. Hobbes was the disciple of Bacon. His ideal of a state is the direct opposite of the Platonic ideal in every point namely, that it is an equally im

save one

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practicable theory. Macaulay, however, terms Hobbes the most acute and powerful of human intellects. If, now, Hobbes was a practical philosopher, what becomes of Macaulay's politics? If, on the other hand, Hobbes was not a practical philosopher, what becomes of Macaulay's philosophy, that pays homage to the theorist Hobbes ?

CHAP. XIII.

THE PROGRESS OF THE BACONIAN PHILOSOPHY.

STRICTLY speaking, philosophical schools are always the inheritors of systems. Where there are no systems, there is likewise no inheritance; for this arises when the school takes in hand and further elaborates, formally or materially, the intellectual edifice* of the master, if this edifice is not already complete enough to be inhabited in peace and comfort. In modern philosophy such schools have been founded by Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, and Hegel. The Baconian philosophy has not had a school in the same sense as these; the formation of a system belonged neither to its purpose nor its constitution. Not in its purpose; for Bacon was a declared foe to every mania for scientific sects and systems, well knowing the mischief that is done to scientific progress by the confinement of forms. Not in its constitution; for this, like the mind of the founder, was

*The compound word, "Lehrgebäude," is commonly rendered "system;" but to accommodate Dr. Fischer's image it must be reduced to its elements.-J. O.

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not planned for the formation of a complete and fully developed theory;-for the establishment of a doctrine simply to be handed down from master to pupil, and to be elaborated in the same scholastic spirit. Just as in the strict sense of the word, we cannot say there was a Baconian system, so we cannot say that-strictly speakingthere was a Baconian school.

The influence of this philosophy extends far beyond the sphere of the learned; it gives a tendency of the mind, which once taken, cannot be abandoned. Systems die out, for there is no permanence in forms; but a necessary tendency of the mind, founded in human nature, is eternal. The nearer a philosophy stands to common life, the nearer its ideas correspond to actual wants, the less systematic it will probably be; but so much the more indestructible will be its weight, so much the more lasting will be its vitality. It is impossible to banish experience from human science; and equally impossible to banish experiment, the comparison of particular cases, the force of negative instances, and the observation of prerogative instances from the region of experience. It is likewise impossible to deprive human life of the possessions that result from experimentalising experience—namely, natural