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and no progress. We must acknowledge that more than once while contemplating the doctrines of the Academy and the Portico, even as they appear in the transparent splendor of Cicero's incomparable diction, we have been tempted to mutter with the surly centurion in Persius-Cur quis non prandeat hoc est ?' What is the highest good,-whether pain be an evil,whether all things be fated,-whether we can be certain of anything,-whether we can be certain that we are certain of nothing,-whether a wise man can be unhappy,-whether all departures from right be equally reprehensible, these, and other questions of the same sort, occupied the brains, the tongues, and the pens, of the ablest men in the civilized world during several centuries. This sort of philosophy, it is evident, could not be progressive. It might indeed sharpen and invigorate the minds of those who devoted themselves to it; and so might the disputes of the orthodox Lilliputians, and the heretical Blefuscudians, about the big ends and the little ends of eggs. But such disputes could add nothing to the stock of knowledge. The human mind accordingly, instead of marching, merely marked time. It took as much trouble as would have sufficed to carry it forward; and yet remained on the same spot. There was no accumulation of truth,heritage of truth acquired by the labor of one generation and bequeathed to another, to be again transmitted with large additions to a third. Where this philosophy was in the time of Cicero, there it continued to be in the time of Seneca, and there it continued to be in the time of Favorinus. The same sects were still battling, with the same unsatisfactory argunients, about the same interminable questions. There had been no want of ingenuity, of zeal, of industry. Every trace of intellectual cultivation was there except a harvest. There had been plenty of ploughing, harrowing, reaping, thrashing. But the garners contained only smut and

stubble.

-no

The ancient philosophers did not neglect natural science; but they did not cultivate it for the purpose of increasing the power and ameliorating the condition of man. The taint of barrenness had spread from ethical to physical speculations. Seneca wrote largely on natural philosophy, and magnified the importance of that study. But why? Not because it tended to assage suffering, to multiply the conveniences of life, to extend the empire of man over the material world; but solely because it tended to raise the mind above low cares, to separate it from the body, to exercise its subtlety in the solution of very obscure questions.* Thus natural philosophy was considered in the light merely of a mental exercise. It was made subsidiary to the art of disputation; and it consequently proved altogether barren of useful discoveries.

There was one sect, which, however absurd and pernicious some of its doctrines may have been, ought, it should seem, to have merited an exception from the general censure which Bacon has pronounced on the ancient schools of wisdom. The Epicurean, who referred all happiness to bodily pleasure, and all evil to bodily pain, might have been expected to exert himself for the purpose of bettering his own physical condition and that of his neighbors. But the thought seems never to have occurred to any member of that school. Indeed their notion, as reported by their great poet, was, that no more improvements were to be expected in the arts which conduce to the comfort of life:

'Ad victum quæ flagitat usus

Omnia jam ferme mortalibus esse parata.'† This contented despondency,—this disposition to admire what has been done,-and to expect that nothing more will be done,-is strongly characteristic of all the schools which preceded the school of fruit and progress. Widely as the Epicurean and the Stoic differed

* Seneca, Nat. Quaest. præf. Lib. 3.

+ All the means of human subsistence were now attained.'

on most points, they seem to have quite agreed in their contempt for pursuits so vulgar as to be useful. The philosophy of both was a garrulous, declaiming, canting, wrangling philosophy. Century after century they continued to repeat their hostile war-cries-virtue and pleasure; and in the end it appeared the Epicurean had added as little to the quantity of pleasure as the Stoic to the quantity of virtue. It is on the pedestal of Bacon, not on that of Epicurus, that those noble lines ought to be inscribed:

"O tenebris tantis tam clarum extollere lumen Qui primus potuisti, illustrans commoda vita.'* At length the time arrived when the barren philosophy which had, during so many ages, employed the faculties of the ablest men, was destined to fail. It had worn many shapes. It had mingled itself with many creeds. It had survived revolutions in which empires, religions, languages, races, had perished. Driven from its ancient haunts, it had taken sanctuary in that church which it had persecuted; and had, like the daring fiends of the poet, placed its seat

'next the seat of God,

And with its darkness dared affront his light.'

Words, and more words, and nothing but words, had been all the fruit of all the toil, of all the most renowned sages of sixty generations. But the days of this sterile exuberance were numbered.

change. The study of a great variety of ancient wri Many causes predisposed the public mind to a ters, though it did not give a right direction to philosophical research, did much towards destroying that blind reverence for authority which had prevailed when Aristotle ruled alone. The rise of the Florentine sect of Platonists,-a sect to which belonged some of the finest minds of the fifteenth century,- -was not an unimportant event. The mere substitution of the academic for the peripatetic philosophy would indeed have done little good. But any thing was better than the old habit of unreasoning servility. It was something to have a choice of tyrants. A spark of freedom,' as Gibbon has justly remarked, 'was produced by this collision of adverse servitude.'

Other causes might be mentioned. But it is chiefly to the great reformation of religion that we owe the great reformation of philosophy. The alliance between the schools and the vatican had for ages been so close, that those who threw off the dominion of the vatican could not continue to recognize the authority of the schools. Most of the great reformers treated the peripatetic philosophy with contempt; and spoke of Aristotle as if Aristotle had been answerable for all the dogmas of Thomas Acquinas. Nullo apud Lutheranos philosophaim esse in pretio,' was a reproach which the defenders of the church of Rome loudly repeated, and which many of the Protestant leaders considered as a compliment. Scarcely any text was more frequently cited by them than that in which St. Paul cautions the Colossians not to let any man spoil them by philosophy. Luther, almost at the outset of his career, went so far as to declare that no man could be at once a proficient in the school of Aristotle and in that of Christ. Zwingle, Bucer, Peter Martyr, Calvin, held similar language. In some of the Scotch universities, the Aristotelian system was discarded for that of Ramus. Thus, before the birth of Bacon, the empire of the scholastic philosophy had been shaken to its foundations. There was in the intellectual world an anarchy resembling that which in the political world often follows the overthrow of an old and deeply rooted government. Antiquity, prescription, the sound of great names, had ceased to awe mankind. The dynasty which had reigned for ages was at an end; and the vacant throne was left to be struggled for by pretenders.

Thou, who man's dreary path didst first illume, And show where life's most solid pleasures bloom! We quote on the authority of Bayle, from Melchoir Cano, a scholastic divine of great reputation.

metic of the later Platonists; and laments the propensity of mankind to employ, on mere matters of curiosity, powers, the whole exertion of which is required for purposes of solid advantage. He advises arithmeticians to leave these trifles, and to employ themselves in framing convenient expressions, which may be of use in physical researches.

The first effect of this great revolution was, as Bacon, despised. He speaks with scorn of the mystical arithmost justly observed, to give for a time an undue importance to the mere graces of style. The new breed of scholars, the Aschams and Buchanans, nourished with the finest compositions of the Augustan age, regarded with loathing the dry, crabbed, and barbarous diction of respondents and opponents. They were far less studious about the matter of their works than about the manner. They succeeded in reforming Latinity; but they never even aspired to effect a reform in philosophy.

At this time Bacon appeared. It is altogether incorrect to say, as has often been said, that he was the first man who rose up against the Aristotelian philosophy when in the height of its power. The authority of that philosophy had, as we have shown, received a fatal blow long before he was born. Several speculators, among whom Ramus was the best known, had recently attempted to form new sects. Bacon's own expressions about the state of public opinion in the time of Luther are clear and strong: Accedebat,' says he, 'odium et contemptus, illis ipsis temporibus ortus erga scholas. ticos. And again, 'Scholasticorum doctrina despectui prorsushaberi cœpit tanquam aspera et barbara.'†` The part which Bacon played in this great change was the part, not of Robespierre, but of Bonaparte. When he came forward, the ancient order of things had been subverted. Some bigots still cherished with devoted loyalty the remembrance of the fallen monarchy, and exerted themselves to effect a restoration. But the majority had no such feeling. Freed, yet not knowing how to use their freedom, they pursued no determinate course, and had found no leader capable of conducting

them.

That leader at length arose. The philosophy which he taught was essentially new. It differed from that of the celebrated ancient teachers, not merely in method but in object. Its object was the good of mankind, in the sense in which the mass of mankind always have understood, and always will understand, the word good. 'Meditor,' said Bacon, 'instaurationem philosophiæ ejusmodi quæ nihil inanis aut abstracti habeat, quæque vitæ humanæ conditiones in melius provehat.'

The difference between the philosophy of Bacon and that of his predecessors, cannot, we think, be better illustrated than by comparing his views on some important subjects with those of Plato. We select Plato, because we conceive that he did more than any other person towards giving to the minds of speculative men that bent which they retained till they received from Bacon a new impulse in a diametrically opposite direction.

The same reasons which led Plato to recommend the study of arithmetic, led him to recommend also the study of mathematics. The vulgar crowd of geometricians, he says, will not understand him. They have practice always in view. They do not know that the real use of the science is to lead man to the knowledge of abstract, essential, eternal truth. Indeed, if we are to believe Plutarch, Plato carried this feeling so far, that he considered geometry as degraded by being applied to any purpose of vulgar utility. Archytas, it seems, had framed machines of extraordinary power, on mathematical principles. Plato remonstrated with his friend; and declared that this was to degrade a noble intellectual exercise into a low craft, fit only for carpenters and wheelwrights. The office of geometry, he said, was to discipline the mind, not to minister to the base wants of the body. His interference was successful; and from that time, according to Plutarch, the science of mechanics was considered as unworthy of the attention of a philosopher.

Archimedes in a later age imitated and surpassed Archytas. But even Archimedes was not free from the prevailing notion that geometry was degraded by being employed to produce anything useful. It was with difficulty that he was induced to stoop from speculation to practice. He was half ashamed of those inventions which were the wonder of hostile nations; and always spoke of them slightingly as mere amusements-as trifles in which a mathematician might be suffered to relax his mind after intense application to the higher parts of his science.

The opinion of Bacon on this subject was diametrically opposed to that of the ancient philosophers. He valued geometry chiefly, if not solely, on account of those uses which to Plato appeared so base. And it is remarkable that the longer he lived the stronger this feeling became. When, in 1605, he wrote the two books on the 'Advancement of Learning,' he dwelt on the advantages which mankind derived from mixed mathematics; but he at the same time admitted, that the beneficial effect produced by mathematical study on the intellect, though a collateral advantage, was 'no less worthy than that which was principal and intended.' But it is evident that his views underwent a It is curious to observe how differently these great change. When, nearly twenty years later, he published men estimated the value of every kind of knowledge. the De Augmentis, which is the treatise on the 'AdvanceTake arithmetic for example. Plato, after speaking ment of Learning,' greatly expanded and carefully slightly of the convenience of being able to reckon and corrected, he made important alterations in the part compute in the ordinary transactions of life, passes to which related to mathematics. He condemned with what he considers as a far more important advantage. severity the high pretensions of the mathematicians,The study of the properties of numbers, he tells us,delicias et fastum mathematicorum.' Assuming the habituates the mind to the contemplation of pure truth, and raises it above the material universe. He would have his disciples apply themselves to this study,-not that they may be able to buy or sell,-not that they may qualify themselves to be shopkeepers or travelling merchants, but that they may learn to withdraw their minds from the ever-shifting spectacle of this visible and tangible world, and to fix them on the immutable essence of things.t

well-being of the human race to be the end of knowledge, he pronounced that mathematical science could claim no higher rank than that of an appendage, or an auxiliary to other sciences. Mathematical science, he says, is the handmaid of natural philosophy-she ought to demean herself as such-and he declares that he cannot conceive by what ill chance it has happened that she presumes to claim precedence over her mistress. He predicts, a prediction which would have made Plato shudder,-that as more and more discoveries are made in physics, there will be more and more branches of mixed mathematics. Of that collateral advantage, the value of which, twenty years before, he rated so highly, he says not one word. This omission cannot have been the effect of mere inadvertence. His own treatise was before him. From that treatise he delibeRedargutio Philosophiarum.-- I aim to new-model Philoso-rately expunged whatever was favorable to the study phy; so that it may have no empty abstractions, and may im- of pure mathematics, and inserted several keen reflecprove the condition of mankind.

Bacon on the other hand, valued this branch of knowledge only on account of its uses with reference to that visible and tangible world which Plato so much

arisen.'

Besides--a hatred and contempt of the schoolmen had then The learning of the schoolmen began to be despised, as rugged and barbarous.'

Plato's Republic, Book 7.

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tions on the ardent votaries of that study. This fact, in our opinion, admits of only one explanation. Bacon's love of those pursuits which directly tend to improve the condition of mankind, and his jealousy of all pursuits merely curious, had grown upon him, and had, it may be, become immoderate. He was afraid of using any expression which might have the effect of inducing any man of talents to employ in speculations, useful only to the mind of the speculator, a single hour which might be employed in extending the empire of man over matter. If Bacon erred here, we must acknowledge that we greatly prefer his error to the opposite error of Plato. We have no patience with a philosophy which, like those Roman matrons who swallowed abortives in order to preserve their shapes, takes pains to be barren for fear of being homely.

has put into the mouth of an ancient king of Egypt.* But it is evident from the context that they were his own; and so they were understood to be by Quinctilian. Indeed they are in perfect accordance with the whole Platonic system.

Bacon's views, as may easily be supposed, were widely different. The powers of the memory, he observes, without the help of writing, can do little towards the advancement of any useful science. He acknowledges that the memory may be disciplined to such a point as to be able to perform very extraordinary feats. But on such feats he sets little value. The habits of his mind, he tells us, are such that he is not disposed to rate highly any accomplishment, however rare, which is of no practical use to mankind. As to these prodigious achievements of the memory, he ranks them with the exhibitions of rope-dancers and tumblers. The two performances,' he says, 'are of much the same sort. The one is an abuse of the powers of the body; the other is an abuse of the powers of the mind. Both may perhaps excite our wonder; but neither is entitled to our respect.'

Let us pass to astronomy. This was one of the sciences which Plato exhorted his disciples to learn, but for reasons far removed from common habits of thinking. 'Shall we set down astronomy,' says Socrates, among the subjects of study?' 'I think so,' answers his young friend Glaucon: 'to know something about the seasons, about the months and the To Plato, the science of medicine appeared one of years, is of use for military purposes, as well as for very disputable advantage.§ He did not indeed object agriculture and navigation.' 'It amuses me,' says to quick cures for acute disorders, or for injuries proSocrates, 'to see how afraid you are lest the common duced by accidents. But the art which resists the slow herd of people should accuse you of recommending sap of a chronic disease-which repairs frames eneruseless studies.' He then proceeds in that pure and vated by lust, swollen by gluttony, or inflamed by magnificent diction, which, as Cicero said, Jupiter wine-which encourages sensuality, by mitigating the would use if Jupiter spoke Greek, to explain, that the natural punishment of the sensualist, and prolongs use of astronomy is not to add to the vulgar comforts of existence when the intellect has ceased to retain its life, but to assist in raising the mind to the contempla- entire energy--had no share of his esteem. A life protion of things which are to be perceived by the pure in-tracted by medical skill he pronounced to be a long tellect alone. The knowledge of the actual motions of death. The exercise of the art of medicine ought, he the heavenly bodies he considers as of little value. The said, to be tolerated so far as that art may serve to cure appearances which make the sky beautiful at night are, the occasional distempers of men whose constitutions he tells us, like the figures which a geometrician draws are good. As to those who have bad constitutions, let on the sand, mere examples, mere helps to feeble minds. them die ;-and the sooner the better. Such men are We must get beyond them; we must neglect them; unfit for war, for magistracy, for the management of we must attain to an astronomy which is as independent their domestic affairs. That however is comparatively of the actual stars as geometrical truth is independent of little consequence. But they are incapable of study of the lines of an ill-drawn diagram. This is, we and speculation. If they engage in any severe mental imagine, very nearly, if not exactly, the astronomy which exercise, they are troubled with giddiness and fulness Bacon compared to the ox of Prometheus-a sleek, of the head; all which they lay to the account of phiwell shaped hide, stuffed with rubbish, goodly to look losophy. The best thing that can happen to such at, but containing nothing to eat. He complained that wretches is to have done with life at once. He quotes astronomy had, to its great injury, been separated from mythical authority in support of this doctrine; and natural philosophy, of which it was one of the noblest reminds his disciples that the practice of the sons of provinces, and annexed to the domain of mathematics. Esculapius, as described by Homer, extended only to The world stood in need, he said, of a very different the cure of external injuries. astronomy-of a living astronomy; of an astronomy which should set forth the nature, the motion, and the influences of the heavenly bodies, as they really are.

On the greatest and most useful of all inventions,-the invention of alphabetical writing,--Plato did not look with much complacency. He seems to have thought that the use of letters had operated on the human mind as the use of the go-cart in learning to walk, or of corks in learning to swim, is said to operate on the human body. It was a support which soon became indispensable to those who used it,-which made vigorous exertion first unnecessary, and then impossible. The powers of the intellect would, he conceived, have been more fully developed without this delusive aid. Men would have been compelled to exercise the understanding and the memory; and, by deep and assiduous meditation, to make truth thorough ly their own. Now, on the contrary, much knowledge is traced on paper, but little is engraved in the soul. A man is certain that he can find information at a moment's notice when he wants it. He therefore suffers it to fade from his mind. Such a man cannot in strictness be said to know any thing. He has the show, without the reality of wisdom. These opinions Plato

Compare the passage relating to mathematics in the second book of the Advancement of Learning with the De Augmentis, Lib. 3, Cap. 6.

Plato's Republic, Book 7.

;

Far different was the philosophy of Bacon. Of all the sciences, that which he seems to have regarded with the greatest interest was the science which, in Plato's opinion, would not be tolerated in a well regulated community. To make men perfect was no part of Bacon's plan. His humble aim was to make imperfect men comfortable. The beneficence of his philosophy resembled the beneficence of the common Father, whose sun rises on the evil and the good-whose rain descends for the just and the unjust. In Plato's opinion man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion philosophy was made for man; it was a means to an end and that end was to increase the pleasures, and to mitigate the pains of millions who are not and cannot be philosophers. That a valetudinarian who took great pleasure in being wheeled along his terrace, who relished his boiled chicken and his weak wine and water, and who enjoyed a hearty laugh over the Queen of Navarre's tales, should be treated as a caput lupinum because he could not read the Timæus without a headache, was a notion which the humane spirit of the English school of wisdom altogether rejected. Bacon would not have thought it beneath the dignity of a philosopher to contrive an improved garden chair for such a valetu

*Plato's Phædrus,
Quinctilian, XI.

De Augmentis, Lib. 5. Cap. 5.
Plato's Republic, Book 3,

dinarian, to devise some way of rendering his medicines more palatable,-to invent repasts which he might enjoy, and pillows on which he might sleep soundly; and this though there might not be the smallest hope that the mind of the poor invalid would ever rise to the contemplation of the ideal beautiful and the ideal good. As Plato had cited the religious legends of Greece to justify his contempt for the more recondite parts of the art of healing, Bacon vindicated the dignity of that art by appealing to the example of Christ; and reminded his readers that the great physician of the soul did not disdain to be also the physician of the body.

The boast of the ancient philosophers was, that their doctrine formed the minds of men to a high degree of wisdom and virtue. This was indeed the only practical good which the most celebrated of those teachers even pretended to effect; and undoubtedly if they had effected this, they would have deserved the greatest praise. But the truth is, that in those very matters in which alone they professed to do any good to mankind, in those very matters for the sake of which they neglected all the vulgar interests of mankind, they did nothing, or worse than nothing. They promised what was im practicable; they despised what was practicable; they filled the world with long words and long beards; and When we pass from the science of medicine to that they left it as wicked and as ignorant as they found it. of legislation, we find the same difference between the An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in systems of these two great men. Plato, at the com- Utopia. The smallest actual good is better than the mencement of the fine Dialogue on Laws, lays it down most magnificent promises of impossibilities. The wise as a fundamental principle, that the end of legislation man of the Stoics would, no doubt, be a grander object is to make men virtuous. It is unnecessary to point than a steam-engine. But there are steam-engines; out the extravagant conclusions to which such a pro-and the wise man of the Stoics is yet to be born. A position leads. Bacon well knew to how great an ex- philosophy which should enable a man to feel perfectly tent the happiness of every society must depend on the happy while in agonies of pain, may be better than a virtue of its members; and he also knew what legis-philosophy which assuages pain. But we know that lators can, and what they cannot do, for the purpose of there are remedies which will assuage pain; and we promoting virtue. The view which he has given of know that the ancient sages liked the toothache just as the end of legislation and of the principal means for the little as their neighbors. A philosophy which should attainment of that end, has always seemed to us emi- extinguish cupidity, would be better than a philosophy nently happy; even among the many happy passages which should devise laws for the security of property. of the same kind with which his works abound. Finis But it is possible to make laws which shall, to a very et scopus quem leges intueri atque ad quem jussiones great extent, secure property. And we do not underet sanctiones suas dirigere debent, non alius est quam stand how any motives which the ancient philosophy ut cives feliciter degant. Id fiet si pietate et religione furnished could extinguish cupidity. We know indeed recte instituti, moribus honesti, armis adversus hostes that the philosophers were no better than other men. externos tuti, legum auxilio adversus seditiones et pri- From the testimony of friends as well as of foesvatas injurias muniti, imperio et magistratibus obse- from the confessions of Epictetus and Seneca, as well as quentes, copiis et opibus locupletes et florentes fuerint.' from the sneers of Lucian and the fierce invectives of The end is the well-being of the people. The means Juvenal, it is plain that these teachers of virtue had all are the imparting of moral and religious education; the the vices of their neighbors, with the additional vice providing of every thing necessary for defence against of hypocrisy. Some people may think the object of foreign enemies; the maintaining of internal order; the the Baconian philosophy a low object, but they cannot establishing of a judicial, financial, and commercial deny that, high or low, it has been attained. They system, under which wealth may be rapidly accumu- cannot deny that every year makes an addition to what lated and securely enjoyed. Bacon called 'fruit.' They cannot deny that mankind Had Plato lived to finish the 'Critias,' a comparison have made, and are making, great and constant progress between that noble fiction and the New Atlantis,' in the road which he pointed out to them. Was there would probably have furnished us with still more stri- any such progressive movement among the ancient king instances. It is amusing to think with what hor-philosophers? After they had been declaiming eight ror he would have seen such an institution as 'Solomon's hundred years, had they made the world better than House' rising in his republic; with what vehemence he when they began? Our belief is, that among the phiwould have ordered the brewhouses, the perfume houses, losophers themselves, instead of a progressive improveand the dispensatories to be pulled down; and with ment, there was a progressive degeneracy. An abject what inexorable rigor he would have driven beyond the superstition, which Democritus or Anaxagoras would frontier all the fellows of the college, merchants of light have rejected with scorn, added the last disgrace to the and depredators, lamps and pioneers. long dotage of the Stoic and Platonic schools. Those unsuccessful attempts to articulate which are so dein an aged paralytic; and in the same way, those wild mythological fictions which charm us when lisped by Greek poetry in its infancy, excite a mixed sensation of pity and loathing when mumbled by Greek philosophy in its old age. We know that guns, cutlery, spyglasses, clocks, are better in our time than they were in the time of our fathers; and were better in the time of our fathers than they were in the time of our grandfathers. We might, therefore, be inclined to think, that when a philosophy which boasted that its object was the elevation and purification of the mind, and which for this object neglected the sordid office of minis tering to the comforts of the body, had flourished in the highest honor for many hundreds of years, a vast moral amelioration must have taken place. Was it so? Look at the schools of this wisdom four centuries before the christian era, and four centuries after that era. pare the men whom those schools formed at those two periods. Compare Plato and Libanius. Compare Pericles and Julian. This philosophy confessed, nay boast ed, that for every end but one it was useles s. Had it

To sum up the whole: we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.lightful and interesting in a child, shock and disgust us The aim of the Baconian philosophy was to provide man with what he requires while he continues to be man. The aim of the Platonic philosophy was to raise us far above vulgar wants. The aim of the Baconian philosophy was to supply our vulgar wants. The former aim was noble; but the latter was attainable. Plato drew a good bow; but, like Acestes in Virgil, he aimed at the stars; and therefore, though there was no want of strength or skill, the shot was thrown away. His arrow was indeed followed by a track of dazzling radiance, but it struck nothing.

Volans liquidis in nubibus arsit arundo
Signavitque viam flammis, tenuisque recessit
Consumpta in ventos.'

Bacon fixed his eye on a mark which was placed on
the earth and within bow-shot, and hit it in the white.
The philosophy of Plato began in words and ended in
words,-noble words indeed,-words such as were to
be expected from the finest of human intellects exer-
cising boundless dominion over the finest of human
languages. The philosophy of Bacon began in obser-

vations and ended in arts.

I attained that one end?

Com

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 patronised 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 despatch 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 on cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean in ships which sail 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.'

[Part 3d, and last, in our next number.]

THE MOTHER FOR HER SON.

BY B. W. HUNTINGTON.

Oh God! the giver of all good! defender from all ill!
To thee a mother pours her tears, before thy holy hill:
Omniscience knows for whom they flow; Omnipotence can shed
Their gushing current, redistill'd, in blessings on his head.

Thy presence fills immensity--oh! dwell within his heart,
Nor let his thoughts on things of time provoke thee to depart;
Thy voice goes forth-the angry winds back to their caverns hie,
So let each tumult of his breast, before thy bidding, fly.

I would not ask his cup exempt from time's allotted strife,
Bat mingle with its woes the draught of everlasting life;
Thy providence afar from friends hath made his lonely bed,
Be thou his friend and comforter; and his, thy living bread.
In mercy, every needless boon withhold, however sought;
Each needed blessing kindly grant, though blindness ask it not;
Oh! measure not thy bounties by our feebleness of prayer,
But let them so outcompass speech, as doth the earth, the air.
He left us-twas but yesterday--his brow was lit with bloom,
But yet our threshold may have been his passage to the tomb;
His kiss yet trembles on my cheek--I feel his parting breath;
Those lips may ne'er again be met, 'till they are kiss'd by death.
Thy will be done--there is no power, unless that power be thine,
To whom a mother's only son, a mother may resign;
Is life his boon? let not his soul be barter'd for its pelf;
Is death to hide his form from me? oh! take him to thyself.
Camden, S. C.

THE SHIPWRECK.

BY W. GILMORE SIMMS.

There was a goodly barque, that from her home Went freighted on the deep. A noble freightFond hearts, brave spirits, and a fearless crew— And lovely woman too, that vessel bore, And she went forth in sunshine. Pleasant winds Bore her, with gentle sounds most musical, Cutting the lifted seas, that kept a peace Most treacherous, and whispered not of storms Lurking in wait, like savage foes, that smile In moment of their stroke. If a cloud lay Along that vessel's track, it lay in light, A picture for the eye. They had no fear, They that were in her,—and three days went by In trust and sunshine. Inconsiderate mirth Laugh'd out, and youthful maidens sang aloud, 'Till the rude sailor, charm'd against his toils, Forgot his long experience of the seas, And thought of wreck no more.

But, the fourth day There was a sudden change upon the deep, That groan'd in all its hollows. Night rose up In anger. Wild and sheeted shapes of cloud Came trooping fast to follow in her wake, And do her bidding. Faintly, in her halls,As fearing to be seen, and faltering still, Amidst the scowling of those ruffian forms, That, like rude boors, wine-swill'd and insolent, Would intercept her path of purity,—

The pallid Moon stole forth. With trembling step
She struggled through the gloomy crowds that rush'd
In fierce delight, on wrath-intending wing,
And jostled in their flight. But, vain her toil,-
She faints at last-is swallowed up in storm,
And the fond eyes that watch'd her from that barque
Now look for her in vain. A pitchy mass
Hangs, brooding, like a dusky conqueror, down,
Above, and shadows all her lovely face.

And wilder grows the tempest,―louder yell
The winds;-and, goaded by their vigorous lash,
The billows, madly plunging, like the bull
Press'd by the hunter on Peruvian plains,
Toss their huge limbs on high, and foam with rage.
Man strives--proud man!-brave man!-and woman
cheers,

Sweet woman!-and her prayers are for his strength,
Is clamoring for its prey. Upon the sea
And his strength for her safety!--But the deep

A terrible Spirit rides, and rules the rest,
And laughs with equal scorn at woman's pray'r
And man's endeavor. In white foam he sits,
A tri-formed Giant. In one hand he bears
The mounted winds, that spurn the curb, and leap,
Trampling the raging waves, and laughing wild
In their excess of might. Another flings,
Uncheck'd, the engulphing waters :-from a third
He frees the rock that grows beneath the keel,
And rends its ribs asunder. Thus he rules
The elements of storm--the winds, the seas,--
And from the unfathomable caldron there,
Where haggard Night, a sullen witch, presides,
He waves his ministers forth. Ready they rise,

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