Bacon has been accused of overrating the importance of those sciences which minister to the physical well-being of man, and of underrating the importance of moral philosophy; and it cannot be denied that persons who read the Novum Organum and the De Augmentis, without adverting to the circumstances under which those works were written, will find much that may seem to countenance the accusation.It is certain, however, that, though in practice he often went very wrong, and though, as his historical work and his essays prove, he did not hold, even in theory, very strict opinions on points of political morality, he was far too wise a man not to know how much our well-being depends on the regulation of our minds.The world for which he wished was not, as some people seem to imagine, a world of water-wheels, power-looms, steam-carriages, sensualists, and knaves.He would have been as ready as Zeno himself to maintain that no bodily comforts which could be devised by the skill and labour of a hundred generations would give happiness to a man whose mind was under the tyranny of licentious appetite, of envy, of hatred, or of fear.If he sometimes appeared to ascribe importance too exclusively to the arts which increase the outward comforts of our species, the reason is plain.Those arts had been most unduly depreciated.They had been represented as unworthy of the attention of a man of liberal education." Cogitavit," says Bacon of himself, "eam esse opinionem sive aestimationem humidam et damnosam, minui nempe majestatem mentis humanae, si in experimentis et rebus particularibus, sensui subjectis, et in materia terminatis, diu ac multum versetur: praesertim cum hujusmodi res ad inquirendum laboriosae, ad meditandum ignobiles, ad discendum asperae, ad practicam illiberales, numero infinitae, et subtilitate pusillae videri soleant, et ob hujusmodi conditiones, gloriae artium minus sint accommodatae." [Cogitata et visa.The expression opinio humida may surprise a reader not accustomed to Bacon's style.The allusion is to the maxim of Heraclitus the obscure: "Dry light is the best." By dry light, Bacon understood the light of the intellect, not obscured by the mists of passion, interest, or prejudice.] This opinion seemed to him "omnia in familia humana turbasse." It had undoubtedly caused many arts which were of the greatest utility, and which were susceptible of the greatest improvements, to be neglected by speculators, and abandoned to joiners, masons, smiths, weavers, apothecaries.It was necessary to assert the dignity of those arts, to bring them prominently forward, to proclaim that, as they have a most serious effect on human happiness, they are not unworthy of the attention of the highest human intellects.Again, it was by illustrations drawn from these arts that Bacon could most easily illustrate his principles.It was by improvements effected in these arts that the soundness of his principles could be most speedily and decisively brought to the test, and made manifest to common understandings.He acted like a wise commander who thins every other part of his line to strengthen a point where the enemy is attacking with peculiar fury, and on the fate of which the event of the battle seems likely to depend.In the Novum Organum, however, he distinctly and most truly declares that his philosophy is no less a Moral than a Natural Philosophy, that, though his illustrations are drawn from physical science, the principles which those illustrations are intended to explain are just as applicable to ethical and political inquiries as to inquiries into the nature of heat and vegetation.[Novum Organum, Lib, I.Aph 127.]
He frequently treated of moral subjects; and he brought to those subjects that spirit which was the essence of his whole system.
He has left us many admirable practicable observations on what he somewhat quaintly called the Georgics of the mind, on the mental culture which tends to produce good dispositions.Some persons, he said, might accuse him of spending labour on a matter so simple that his predecessors had passed it by with contempt.He desired such persons to remember that he had from the first announced the objects of his search to be not the splendid and the surprising, but the useful and the true, not the deluding dreams which go forth through the shining portal of ivory, but the humbler realities of the gate of horn.[De Augmentis, Lib.
vii.Cap.3.]
True to this principle, he indulged in no rants about the fitness of things, the all-sufficiency of virtue, and the dignity of human nature.He dealt not at all in resounding nothings, such as those with which Bolingbroke pretended to comfort himself in exile, and in which Cicero vainly sought consolation after the loss of Tullia.The casuistical subtilties which occupied the attention of the keenest spirits of his age had, it should seem, no attractions for him.The doctors whom Escobar afterwards compared to the four beasts and the four-and-twenty elders in the Apocalypse Bacon dismissed with most contemptuous brevity.
"Inanes plerumque evadunt et futiles." [Ibid.Lib.vii.Cap.2.]
