At university, and the manifold occupations and anxieties in which his public and professional duties engaged, and his courtly,-alas! his servile, prostitute, and mendicant-ambition, entangled him in his after years, will be either surprised or offended, though we should avow our conviction, that he had derived his opinions of Plato and Aristotle from any source, rather than from a dispassionate and patient study of the originals themselves. all events it will be no easy task to reconcile many passages in the De Augmentis, and the Redargutio Philosophiarum, with the author's own fundamental principles, as established in his Novum Organum; if we attach to the words the meaning which they may bear, or even, in some instances, the meaning which might appear to us, in the present age, more obvious; instead of the sense in which they were employed by the professors, whose false premises and barren methods Bacon was at that time controverting. And this historical interpretation is rendered the more necessary by his fondness for point and antithesis in his style, where we must often disturb the sound in order to arrive at the sense. But with these precautions; and if, in collating the philosophical works of Lord Bacon with those of Plato, we, in both cases alike, separate the grounds and essential principles of their philosophic systems from the inductions themselves; no inconsiderable portion of which, in the British sage, as well as in the divine Athenian, is neither more nor less crude and erroneous than might be anticipated from the infant state of natural history, chemistry, and physiology, in their several ages; and if we moreover separate the principles from their practical application, which in both is not seldom impracticable, and, in our countryman, not always reconcileable with the principles themselves: we shall not only extract that from each, which is for all ages, and which constitutes their true systems of philosophy, but shall convince ourselves that they are radically one and the same system in that, namely, which is of universal and imperishable worth!-the science of Method, and the grounds and conditions of the science of Method. ESSAY VIII. A great authority may be a poor proof, but it is an excellent presumption: and few things give a wise man a truer delight than to reconcile two great authorities, that had been commonly but falsely held to be dissonant. STAPYLTON. UNDER a deep impression of the importance of the truths we have essayed to develope, we would fain remove every prejudice that does not originate in the heart rather than in the understanding. For Truth, says the wise man, will not enter a malevolent spirit. To offer or to receive names in lieu of sound arguments, is only less reprehensible than an ostentatious contempt of the great men of former ages; but we may well and wisely avail ourselves of authorities, in confirmation of truth, and above all, in the removal of prejudices founded on imperfect information. We do not see, therefore, how we can more appropriately conclude this first, explanatory and controversial section of our inquiry, than by a brief statement of our renowned country man's own principles of Method, conveyed for the greater part in his own words. Nor do we see, in what more precise form we can recapitulate the substance of the doctrines asserted and vindicated in the preceding pages. For we rest our strongest pretensions to a calm and respectful perusal, in the first instance, on the fact, that we have only re-proclaimed the coinciding prescripts of the Athenian Verulam, and the British Platogenuinam scilicet PLATONIS Dialecticem; et Methodologiam principialem FRANCISCI DE VERULAMIO. In the first instance, Lord Bacon equally with ourselves, demands what we have ventured to call the intellectual or mental initiative, as the motive and guide of every philosophical experiment; some well-grounded purpose, some distinct impression of the probable results, some self-consistent anticipation as the ground of the "prudens quæstio" (the forethoughtful query), which he affirms to be the prior half of the knowledge sought, dimidium scientiæ. With him, therefore, as with us, an an idea is an experiment proposed, an experiment is an idea realized. For so, though in other words, he himself informs us: " neque scientiam molimur tam sensu vel instrumentis quam experimentis; etenim experimentorum longe major est subtilitas quam sensûs ipsius, licet instrumentis exquisitis adjuti. Nam de iis loquimur experimentis quæ ad intentionem ejus quod qæritur perité et secundum artem excogitata et apposita sunt. Itaque perceptioni sensus immediatæ et propriæ non multum tribuimus: sed eò rem deducimus, ut sensus tantúm de experimento, experimentum de re judicet." This last sentence is, as the attentive reader will have himself detected, one of those faulty verbal antitheses, not unfrequent in Lord Bacon's writings. Pungent antitheses, and the analogies of wit in which the resemblance is too often more indebted to the double or equivocal sense of a word, than to any real conformity* in the thing or image, Thus (to take the first instance that occurs), Bacon says, that some knowledges, like the stars, are so high |