(three hyperboles, by the way, not one of which M. de Rémusat consents to accept) cannot be expected to contain anything very new, but it does at least make a diligent use of the old materials, and enlivens the narrative by occasional glimpses of the men and manners of the time. Thus we have a group of Bacon's acquaintance and friends, the members of which, if not portrayed with the full measure of French vivacity, are not made an occasion for the usual measure of French inaccuracy and flighty blundering, where old English names and natures are concerned. Our author has actually inquired his way before taking it, examined before he pronounced, looked before he leaped. It is agreeable to meet with one of his nation so accurately versed in the life-histories of a Sir Thomas Bodley and a Ben Jonson, a Bishop Andrews and a Sir John Davies, a Wotton and a Selden, a George Herbert and a Thomas Hobbes.

66

In discussing the question of Bacon's relation to the (so-called) sensational philosophy, M. de Rémusat keeps aloof from either extreme view. He joins in neither the homage of Diderot nor the imprecations of Joseph de Maistre. Historically, indeed, the modern philosophy of sensation dates from Bacon, whose favourite study was the contemplation of external nature. At the same time he recommends the interpreter of nature to explore the mind of man, and scrutinise its complex movements. But his capital aim is to discover the hidden sources of our errors; it is the weaknesses of the human mind with which he shows himself best acquainted. When, therefore, he implies that even in this department of the history of nature there are facts which might admit of tabular arrangement, he puts forward, as it were precociously (as regards himself), an idea the consequences of which are left to be inferred by others. can no more ascribe to him the honour of having thought like Reid, than that of having thought like Locke. But he is the predecessor of Hobbes, Locke, Reid, and many others;" he has made them think, and is someway implicated in the results of their thought. His extension of the experimental method to other besides the physical sciences, his damaging estimate of the study of metaphysics, &c., may assuredly, says our critic, be regarded as looking like an adhesion, by anticipation, to that which at a later day was to be known as the sensualistic philosophy. Accordingly it may easily be supposed, that had Bacon lived subsequent to the controversies of Descartes and Gassendi, he would have sided with the latter. "The spirit of his philosophy would not belie this conjecture, although the turn of his genius authorised other impressions. It has been forgotten that he was the same man who elsewhere would have us seek for the very laws of the professional arts in à priori contemplations. Spiritualism has its intolerance, and because it has found in the ranks of its enemies certain disciples of Bacon, it has suspected Bacon himself; it has even defamed him, when he has been so unfortunate as to meet with an interpreter in the author of the Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg." What though inconsistencies occur in Bacon's writings? Inconsequence, M. de Rémusat affirms, is never an infallible sign of bad faith; and such inconsequence as we find in Bacon is not of a kind to surprise us amidst the most difficult questions of universal science. The philosopher did not foresee all that modern criticism could and therefore would infer from certain principles not then so scientifically discussed as they are to-day. It does not follow that Bacon was an unbeliever, because modern unbelief has

deduced available conclusions from his general views. Otherwise the charge of unbelief may be equally preferred against all the schoolmen, some of them canonised saints, who were nourished on the maxims of the Aristotelian philosophy.-In short, M. de Rémusat's verdict on the question is, that Bacon neither meditated, nor so much as wrote, anything opposed to what is fundamental in all religion; that he did not make profession of a sensational philosophy, and that no one can assert that he would have adopted it without reserve. But that it is certain, on the other hand, that Bacon did show the way to that philosophy, and has contributed to its acceptance and establishment-if not as the principle, at least as the consequence of his work. It is certain, too, that by the predominance of experimental methods he has urged the human mind towards the sciences of external observation, to the prejudice of those which treat of things unseen. He had some insight into the importance of psychology, but made no researches in its depths, and thus deprived his doctrine of a solid philosophical foundation. But that doctrine remains none the less true in its ensemble, provided always it be regarded exclusively as a general system of the sciences.*

It is not the work of a common mind, as our critic remarks, to embrace at one glance the totality of the sciences, and trace out their general plan. The sages of antiquity studied everything, and their sagesse was the more universal for being the less complete. But with the multiplicity of knowledge came confusion-with confusion, the necessity of order. Plato divides philosophy into logic, ethics, and physics. Aristotle adds to this simple classification, a subdivision of the sciences into the two sections of theoretical and practical-sketching at the same time an encyclopædia which is but, in effect, a catalogue raisonné of his works. "Varro has the reputation of having been the first to draw up a statistical view of the sciences. His treatise Libri novem disciplinarum is lost. But we know what are the elements of which he there composes his Universal Knowledge, and it is by striking off medicine and architecture from the list, that Martianus Capella, in his curious description of the nuptials of Mercury and Philologia, the daughter of Phronesis, bestows on the bride, as her attendant bridesmaids, the seven sciences personified under the name of the seven liberal arts—a classification common in the middle ages, and definitely established by Cassiodorus as the rule of study. The Trivium and Quadrivium are the two divisions of higher and lower instruction from Alcuin down to the renaissance. No kind of systematic view appears to have presided over this consecrated order: grammar, dialectic and rhetoric; music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy." M. de Rémusat then passes in rapid review the encyclopædiac essayings of Isidore of Seville, Vincent of Beauvais, &c.,-the Summa of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which, he observes, still astonishes us by its breadth of view, amount of instruction, and force of memory, and which it is impossible to read without becoming acquainted with the entire range of human knowledge in the thirteenth century-and the labours of that "singular monk who first made illustrious the name of Bacon," that Roger who so long preceded and so nearly prefigured Francis-exercising, to all appearance, a philosophical influence which hastened the awakening of the sixteenth century.

*Rémusat: Livre iii. ch. i. passim.

The tendency to universality which marks the scholastic philosophy, arose, as our author goes on to observe, from the comparative absence of limitation which it imposed on itself, rather than from an aspiring endeavour to co-ordinate the whole. Bacon, in his antagonism with the past, contested neither the extent nor the portée of its principles and its researches: it was the choice of these principles, the spirit of these researches, the confusion amid generality, that he attacked. Although his philosophy is itself very general, he labours rather to restrain than extend its boundaries. All definition is, as the term implies, a limit; and the aim of Bacon is, above all, to define and determine the objects and methods of the sciences. He is encyclopædiac so far only as his design compels him to be, and if his view takes in the far distance, it is rather a distance that lies before him than one that lies around him; it comprises the whole future of the sciences. The grandeur of his philosophy is seen pre-eminently in perspective. "The idea of an encyclopædiac programme was suggested by his subject itself, as a criticism of the sciences involved a review of them. But here is where his real originality commences. Setting out, like all the philosophers, from the enchainement de nos connaissances, or even from the principle of the unity of science, he was the first who thought of classifying the sciences according to the faculties of the human mind—a thought in itself ingenious and philosophic." Ingenious, too, and philosophical is the exposition then given of this Baconian speciality. Other attempts at classification, more or less systematic, are at the same time briefly criticisedthe "specious and original" scheme of Des Cartes-Locke's seemingly unconscious return to that borrowed by scholasticism from antiquitythe eclectic arrangement proposed by Leibnitz-Dugald Stewart's adoption of the old distinction between macrocosm and microcosm, or rather between the mind and the material world, a "reasonable and familiar distinction, which appears to have been accepted by the authors of the Encyclopædia Britannica," a "bifurcation" which, though "perhaps difficult to justify with philosophic precision, is practically at least easy to follow"-Coleridge's essay towards a profounder classification than the rather vulgar one which had satisfied the practical good sense of Stewart and Mackintosh, of Playfair and Leslie ("like all minds of a more elevated than penetrating character, Coleridge rather tends towards the true than attains it-the endeavour with him has more value than the result")-Ampère's system of duality again, which makes a "dichotomic" division of all the sciences into cosmologic and noölogic-and Auguste Comte's philosophy of positivism, which, "as usual, simplifies the difficulty by lopping away whatever inconveniences it." Nor is Hegel's scheme overlooked-his celebrated trinitarian formula of seyn, wesen, begriff (or being, essence, and conception), which may be taken as the basis of an encyclopædia implying the identity in man of subjective and objective, and from which Hegel has drawn, adds his present critic, such a number of happy, of hazardous, and of crackbrained applications.

M. de Rémusat devotes a long and laborious chapter to the subject of Induction. The sum of it is to this effect. Unless a necessary connexion unites the cause to its effects, unless substance is by the nature of

* In the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, Preliminary Discourse (on." Method").

it essentially allied to the phenomena which characterise it, reasoning by induction has no base to work upon, and the mere repetition of the same facts will teach us nothing whatever as to their future recurrence. But these principles upon which induction is supported, are certain; what is not certain, is the application it makes of them to a series of definite facts. The possible error is in the act of observation, in the reconnaissance of what cases are the outward expression of these inward laws of thought. Hence the coexistence in induction of both an absolute element and a relative-an element of certitude, and one merely of probability. Hence it has a weak point as well as a strong, un fort et un faible. But the instinct of reason which leads us to trust to ourselves, to accept as valid our own intuitions in this respect, derives, we may be sure, not only its power but its existence from the fact, that it relates to higher truths of a more universal character than the mind of man itself.

As regards the Inductive Method, again, our author submits, that all the difference between the induction of logicians and that of Bacon, consists in this, that the same logical operation is considered by the former in the subject who conceives it, and by the latter in relation to the objects to which it is applied. Pure philosophy is interested in the essence of induction; but what concerns the advance of the sciences is the employment and verification of induction. Bacon restricts himself to this last point of view, being less occupied with defining his process than with furnishing prescriptions for its practical application.

These rules or prescriptions M. de Rémusat is not singular in accounting over-minute and pedantic. No savant of name, he supposes, has ever cared to observe all the formalities of this scientific procedure, when engaged in the study of phenomena. Besides, there are gaps and omissions in it, which make it a far from safe process, and indeed a not very practicable one. Bacon, indeed, himself avowed the incompleteness of his work: he only conducted to the threshold of science; he left his task unaccomplished, nor have others brought it to a conclusion by following out his schemes for the full and final success of his doctrine. In short, our critic seems to be of opinion that the bulk of Bacon's eulogists, English and French, have as often been beside the mark, as beyond the mark, in the praises they have lavished on him. They have erred perhaps even more in the quale than in the quantum of their panegyric. And whether or not we assent to the spirit of this judgment, it must be confessed that, amongst ourselves, the question, what after all was the distinctive merit of Bacon's Method, is still in a strangely unsettled state-virtually a sort of unresolved problem, which the studious decide in opposite ways, and about which the mass of readers, skippers, and smatterers in ordinary, have but a vague notion, one way or the

other.

In a chapter on Bacon's works in general, M. de Rémusat touches on a whimsical question, recently and gravely discussed in this country, whether Bacon forsooth was the author of Shakspeare's plays. Our critic claims for the philosopher a degree of imagination not inferior, probably, to that possessed by any single intellect of the Elizabethan age-an age during which imagination shone at its brightest in England, though having to pierce through a cloud of pedantry. With some little knack in verse-making, Bacon might have made quelques gracieux

40 Charles de Rémusat: Life and Philosophy of Lord Bacon.

tableaux, M. de Rémusat says, out of his ingenious interpretations of the ancient mythology. His historical narratives are praised for their narrative merit; his political writings are said to show a superior mind. "But it is, above all, in the reflections scattered throughout all his works, that the originality of the great writer, as much in the form of them as in the substance, is displayed. It has been thought that in his general manner of considering and portraying the characters and affairs of men, there may be remarked a something that reminds us of Shakspeare, or rather it is Shakspeare who, imbued with a perusal of Bacon's Essays, has reproduced certain of their characteristic features, unwittingly perhaps, in his own incomparable scenes. A certain disposition to deeply estimate things in their reality rather than judge them with severity was common to both the chancellor and the comedian, to the philosopher and the poet; a sort of calm and elevated Machiavelism was one of the traits of their genius respectively. Here we see what for a moment served to suggest the strange notion of ascribing to Bacon the tragedies of Shakspeare. Truly this is paying the former too much honour by far; and well might we admire the modesty or else the carelessness of the man, who, after having written the Novum Organum, leaves the world unaware that the self-same hand has drawn the likenesses of Othello and Hamlet, and that the reformer of scientific method is at the same time the poet of Juliet and her Romeo. But we have inspected, in M. Cousin's valuable library, that unique copy of the Essays' which is alleged to have belonged to Shakspeare; his name may be read there, inscribed with his own hand; and our idea is, that the dramatic poet, not one of whose plays had been printed previous to the Essays, may have learned to think in the school of Bacon, although Bacon himself, in his haughty silence, does appear to have ignored the very existence of the most illustrious of his contemporaries." We do not pause to comment or cavil, but quote only, and pass on.

Elsewhere M. de Rémusat observes, that as the Greeks saw everything in Homer, in whom Plato was fain to descry even the Platonic philosophy, so, next to holy writ itself, Shakspeare and Bacon are for the English what Homer was to the Greeks. It is curious, he adds, to see Coleridge ("but then Coleridge was a poet") taking Shakspeare for one of his guides in his preliminary discourse on the encyclopædic Method. More natural is his (S. T. C.'s) invocation of Bacon-in whom, however, he, by platonic attachment, discovers Plato-ingeniously bringing together the British Plato and the Verulam of Athens; all the difference between them being, that one paid more attention to metaphysics, the other to natural philosophy. "While they both rested on induction, they both admitted as superior to all else an intellectual intuition, and thus necessarily implied that unity and progression which are the principle of method. If the aim of every act of research and experiment is one of the generalities we call laws, the aim of every such act is an idea. It is by this platonic side of his philosophy and not by his mediocre scientific works, by his indications of impracticable processes, that Bacon, in error about Plato, unjust to Gilbert, behindhand as to Galileo, mute as regards Shakspeare, is yet deserving of being for Englishmen what Cicero was for Rome, and something of what Plato was to Athens." But M. de Rémusat quits Coleridge and ce baconisme platonicien with the remark,