CHAPTER VI. PHILOSOPHICAL EVIDENCES. "God hath framed the mind of man as a mirrour or glass, capable of the image of the universal world." -BACON. § 1. BACON A PHILOSOPHER. FRANCIS BACON had surveyed with the eye of a master the whole field of the Greek Philosophy, and had carried his studies, beyond almost any other of his time and country, into the deepest profundities of human thought. Standing where Plato stood, long before him, and Des Cartes and Leibnitz, immediately after him, essentially, on the solid platform of fact and universal method, he endeavored to instaurate, revive, and renew the higher philosophy as well as physical science. He attempted, not without great effect, to organize the experimental and inductive method of inquiry and a true method of interpreting Nature, and urged them upon the consideration of the world of science as the best, if not the only, means of obtaining that broad and sure "foundation" in observed and ascertained fact, on which alone he considered it possible to raise, in an adequate manner, the eternal superstructure of philosophy itself, which he was also undertaking, as the chiefest concern, to erect and constitute, or at least to initiate; and to this end, he would begin at the fountain head, and constitute one Universal Science as the science of sciences and mother of all the rest, which was to be as the trunk to the branches of the tree. This science he called Philosophia Prima, or indeed "Sapience," which had been "anciently defined as the knowledge of all things divine and human": "What may be sworn by, both divine and human, He was not a man of physics merely, but understood metaphysics to be one part even of natural philosophy, in theory necessarily preceding physics, and in time and practice necessarily following on physics, the other part, “as a branch or descendant of natural science," and as affording the only safe passage into that Summary or Higher Philosophy, which he recognized as reigning supreme over sciences as "the parent or common ancestor to all knowledge." He divided all philosophy into three divisions, concerning God, Nature, and Man; and he said there was a "three-fold ray of things; for Nature strikes the intellect by a direct ray; but God, by a ray refracted, by reason of the unequal medium (the creation); and Man as shown and exhibited to himself, by a ray reflected." He seemed also, in accordance with the ideas and spirit of that age, in some measure to admit "Divinity or Inspired Theology," resting on Scriptural authority, as a department of inquiry distinct from philosophy; and he spoke of divinity as “the book of God's word," and of philosophy as "the book of God's works." "Physique," says he, "inquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; and the other, which is Metaphysique, handleth the formal and final causes, that which supposes in nature a reason, understanding, and platform"; that is to say, something like the vous or intellect of Anaxagoras and Plato. And again he says, “let the investigation of forms, which (in reasoning at least and after their own laws) are eternal and immutable, constitute metaphysics, and let the investigation of the efficient cause of matter, latent process, and latent conformation (which all relate merely to the ordinary course of nature, and not to the eternal and fundamental laws) constitute physics.” * 1 Adv. of Learn., Works (Mont.), II. 134. 2 De Aug. Scient., L. III. c. 1. 8 Nov. Org., II. § 9. He was able to see through physics into metaphysics, and he drew the line between them distinctly enough. Since the giant Kant grappled with these "forms" or laws of the understanding or reason, and began to make a clearer opening into the true nature of Time and Space, his students and successors, more profoundly penetrating the subject, and, especially, Cousin, more thoroughly studying the critical method of scientific thinking taught by Plato, in a masterly elimination of the errors of Locke and Kant, have contributed much toward making Kant's "narrow foot-path" to be in truth "a high road of thought"; and since all together have still further cleared up these "fundamental and eternal laws" of all thinking, divine or human, it has become easier for others to grasp the profound conceptions of Bacon, which, however obscurely expressed, were nevertheless distinctly defined in the vast comprehension of his mighty intellect. "It is best," he says, "to consider matter, its conformation, and the changes of that conformation, its own action, and the laws of this action or motion; for forms are a mere fiction of the human mind, unless you will call the laws of action by that name." 1 That he referred these laws of action to the one thinking substance or essence, "the Mind of Nature," and considered them as eternal and immutable laws of the Divine Mind, thinking a universe, if a little uncertain here, is made plain enough in other parts of his writings. He says again: "Those which refer all things to the glory of God are as the three acclamations : Sancte! Sancte! Sancte! holy in the description or dilatation of his works; holy in the connection or concatenation of them; and holy in the union of them in a perpetual and uniform law. And therefore the speculation was excellent in Parmenides and Plato, although but a speculation in them, that all things by scale did ascend to unity" in himself, it was an absolute belief, and in this author's Malcolm 1 Nov. Org., I. § 51. declining to be King, we may discover some inverse and oblique appreciation of the same doctrine : "Nay, had I power, I should Pour the sweet milk of concord into Hell, All unity on Earth."- Macb., Act IV. Sc. 3. And so, "in the entrance of philosophy," he continues, "when the second causes, which are next unto the senses, do offer themselves to the mind of man, if it dwell and stay there, it may induce some oblivion of the highest cause; but when a man passeth on further, and seeth the dependence of causes, and the works of Providence, then, according to the allegory of the poets, he will easily believe that the highest link of nature's chain must needs be tied to the foot of Jupiter's chair." The same doctrine is more distinctly expressed in his interpretation of the fable of Pan, thus: "The Horns represent the world as broader below, but sharp at the vertex. For the whole of nature is pointed like a pyramid. Inasmuch as the individual things, in which the basis of nature is extended, are infinite; these are gathered into species which are themselves manifold; species again rise into genera, and these also in ascending are contracted more and more into generals; so that, at length, nature appears to pass into unity; which is the signification of that pyramidal figure of Pan's horns. Indeed, it is no wonder that the horns of Pan even touch the heavens; since the highest parts of nature, or universal ideas, do in a certain manner pertain to divine things. Therefore, that chain (of natural causes), which Homer sung, is said to be fastened to the foot of Jupiter's throne; and every one (as it would seem), who has withdrawn his mind for a while from particulars and the flow of things, and treated of metaphysic and the eternal and immutable in nature, has at once fallen into Natural Theology; so near and ready is the transition from that top of the pyramid to things divine." 1 To his Summary Philosophy he had assigned the "principles and axioms" which were common to the several sciences, and "likewise the inquiry touching the operation of the relative and adventitious characters of essences, as quantity, similitude, diversity, possibility and the rest" (which, he said, might be called "Transcendental "), as being the common ancestor to all knowledge; but to Metaphysic, the inquiry of the formal and final causes, as being the descendant of natural science; whence it would seem that the two, so far as different, stood, in his scheme, in the relation to one another of the beginning to the end, which was to be philosophy itself, when the wheel should come full circle. But these matters were to be "handled as they have efficacy in nature, and not logically"; that is, as they really exist and operate in nature, and not syllogistically only, as if a world could be made out of categories; for it was manifest to him "that Plato, as one that had a wit of elevation situate as upon a cliff, did descry, That forms [laws] were the true object of knowledge, but lost the real fruit of his opinion by considering of forms as absolutely abstracted from matter and not confined and determined by matter, and so turning his opinion upon theology, wherewith all his natural philosophy is infected." Here, in respect of forms abstracted from matter, and not determined by matter, there is probably some misconception of Plato's doctrine, though in accordance with some received interpretations of his philosophy; and this seems to have been the great error of Kant; but Bacon knew that "there was no small difference between the idols of the human mind, and the ideas of the divine mind, that is to say, between certain idle dogmas and the real stamp and impression of created objects as they are found in nature." " Plato, he said, "was without doubt a 1 De Aug. Scient., Lib. II. c. 13. 2 2 Adv. of Learn. 8 Nov. Org., II. § 23. |