CHAPTER XX.

HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY FROM 1600 TO 1650.

SECT. I.

_Aristotelian Logic--Campanella--Theosophists--Lord Herbert of Cherbury--Gassendi’s Remarks upon him._

|Subjects of this chapter.|

1. In the two preceding volumes, we have had occasion to excuse the heterogeneous character of the chapters that bear this title. The present is fully as much open to verbal criticism; and perhaps it is rather by excluding both moral and mathematical philosophy, that we give it some sort of unity, than from any close connexion in all the books that will come under our notice in the ensuing pages. But any tabular arrangement of literature, such as has often been attempted with no very satisfactory result, would be absolutely inappropriate to such a work as the present, which has already to labour with the inconvenience of more subdivisions than can be pleasing to the reader, and would interfere too continually with that general regard to chronology, without which the name of history seems incongruous. Hence the metaphysical inquiries that are conversant with the human mind, or with natural theology, the general principles of investigating truth, the comprehensive speculations of theoretical physics, subjects very distinct and not easily confounded by the most thoughtless, must fall, with no more special distribution, within the contents of this chapter. But since during the period which it embraces, men arose, who have laid the foundations of a new philosophy, and thus have rendered it a great epoch in the intellectual history of mankind, we shall not very strictly, though without much deviation, follow a chronological order, and after reviewing some of the less important labourers in speculative philosophy, come to the names of three who have most influenced posterity--Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes.

|Aristotelians and Ramists.|

2. We have seen in a former chapter how little progress had been made in this kind of philosophy during the sixteenth century. At its close the schools of logic were divided, though by no means in equal proportion, between the Aristotelians and the Ramists; the one sustained by ancient renown, by civil, or at least academical power, and by the common prejudice against innovation; the other deriving some strength from the love of novelty, and the prejudice against established authority, which the first age of the reformation had generated, and which continued, perhaps, to preserve a certain influence in the second. But neither from one nor the other had philosophy, whether in material or intellectual physics, much to hope; the disputations of the schools might be technically correct; but so little regard was paid to objective truth, or at least so little pains taken to ascertain it, that no advance in real knowledge signalised either of these parties of dialecticians. According, indeed, to a writer of this age, strongly attached to the Aristotelian party, Ramus had turned all physical science into the domain of logic, and argued from words to things still more than his opponents.[141] Lord Bacon, in the bitterest language, casts on him a similar reproach.[142] It seems that he caused this branch of philosophy to retrograde rather than advance.

[141] Keckermann, Præcognita Logica, p. 129. This writer charges Ramus with plagiarism from Ludovicus Vives, placing the passages in apposition, so as to prove his case. Ramus, he says, never alludes to Vives. He praises the former, however, for having attacked the scholastic party, being himself a genuine Aristotelian.

[142] Ne vero, fili, cum hanc contra Aristotelem sententiam fero, me cum rebelli ejus quodam neoterico Petro Ramo conspirasse augurare. Nullum mihi commercium cum hoc ignorantiæ latibulo, perniciosissima literarum tinea, compendiorum patre, qui cum methodi suæ et compendii vinclis res torqueat et premat, res quidem, si qua fuit, elabitur protinus et exsilit; ipse vero aridas et desertissimas nugas stringit. Atque Aquinas quindam cum Scoto et sociis etiam in non rebus rerum varietatem effinxit, hic vero etiam in rebus non rerum solitudinem æquavit. Atque hoc hominis cum sit, humanos tamen usus in ore habet impudens, ut mihi etiam pro [præ?] sophistis prævaricari videatur Bacon de Interpretatione Naturæ.

|No improvement till near the end of the century.|

3. It was obvious at all events, that from the universities, or from the church, in any country, no improvement in philosophy was to be expected; yet those who had strayed from the beaten track, a Paracelsus, a Jordan Bruno, even a Telesio, had but lost themselves in irregular mysticism, or laid down theories of their own, as arbitrary and destitute of proof as those they endeavoured to supersede. The ancient philosophers, and especially Aristotle, were, with all their errors and defects, far more genuine high-priests of nature than any moderns of the sixteenth century. But there was a better prospect at its close, in separate though very important branches of physical science. Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, were laying the basis of a true philosophy; and they, who do not properly belong to this chapter, laboured very effectually to put an end to all antiquated errors, and to check the reception of novel paradoxes.

|Methods of the Universities.|

4. We may cast a glance, meantime, on those universities which still were so wise in their own conceit, and maintained a kind of reputation by the multitude of their disciples. Whatever has been said of the scholastic metaphysicians of the sixteenth century, may be understood as being applicable to their successors during the present period. That method was by no means extinct, though the books which contain it are forgotten. In all that part of Europe which acknowledged the authority of Rome, and in all the universities which were swayed by the orders of Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits, the metaphysics of the thirteenth century, the dialectics of the Peripatetic school, were still taught. If new books were written, as was frequently the case, they were written upon old systems. Brucker, who sometimes transcribes Morhof word for word, but frequently expands with so much more copiousness, that he may be presumed to have had a direct acquaintance with many of the books he mentions, has gone most elaborately into this subject.[143] The chairs of philosophy in Protestant German universities, except where the Ramists had got possession of them, which was not very common, especially after the first years of this period, were occupied by avowed Aristotelians; so that if one should enumerate the professors of physics, metaphysics, logic, and ethics, down to the close of the century, he would be almost giving a list of strenuous adherents to that system.[144] One cause of this was the “Philippic method,” or course of instruction in the philosophical books of Melanchthon, more clear and elegant, and better arranged than that of Aristotle himself or his commentators. But this, which long continued to prevail, was deemed by some too superficial, and tending to set aside the original authority. Brucker however admits, what seems at least to limit some of his expressions as to the prevalence of Peripateticism, that many reverted to the scholastic metaphysics, which raised its head about the beginning of the seventeenth century, even in the protestant regions of Germany. The universities of Altdorf and Helmstadt were the chief nurseries of the genuine Peripateticism.[145]

[143] Morhof, vol. iii., l. 1. c. 13, 14. Brucker, iv., cap. 2, 3.

[144] Brucker, iv. 243.

[145] Id. pp. 248-253.

|Scholastic Writers.|

5. Of the metaphysical writers whom the older philosophy brought forth we must speak with much ignorance. Suarez of Granada is justly celebrated for some of his other works; but of his Metaphysical Disputations, published at Mentz, in 1614, in two folio volumes, and several times afterwards, I find no distinct character in Morhof or Brucker. They both, especially the former, have praised Lalemandet, a Franciscan, whose Decisiones Philosophicæ, on logic, physics, and metaphysics, appeared at Munich, in 1644 and 1645. Lalemandet, says Morhof, has well stated the questions between the Nominalist and Realist parties; observing that the difference between them is like that of a man who casts up a sum of money by figures, and one who counts the coins themselves.[146] This, however, seems no very happy illustration of the essential points of controversy. Vasquez, Tellez, and several more names, without going for the present below the middle of the century, may be found in the two writers quoted. Spain was peculiarly the nurse of these obsolete and unprofitable metaphysics.

[146] Morhof, vol. ii., lib. i., cap. 14., sect. 15. Brucker, iv. 129.

6. The Aristotelian philosophy, unadulterated by the figments of the schoolmen, had eminent upholders in the Italian universities, especially in that of Padua. Cæsar Cremonini taught in that famous city till his death in 1630. Fortunio Liceto, his successor, was as staunch a disciple of the Peripatetic sect. We have a more full account of these men from Gabriel Naudé, both in his recorded conversation, the Naudæana, and in a volume of letters, than from any other quarter. His twelfth letter, especially, enters into some detail as to the state of the university of Padua, to which, for the purpose of hearing Cremonini, he had repaired in 1625. He does not much extol its condition; only Cremonini and one more were deemed by him safe teachers: the rest were mostly of a common class; the lectures were too few, and the vacations too long. He observes, as one might at this day, the scanty population of the city compared with its size, the grass growing and the birds singing in the streets, and, what we should not find now to be the case, the “general custom of Italy, which keeps women perpetually locked up in their chambers, like birds in cages.”[147] Naudé in many of these letters speaks in the most panegyrical terms of Cremonini,[148] and particularly for his standing up almost alone in defence of the Aristotelian philosophy, when Telesio, Patrizi, Bruno, and others had been propounding theories of their own. Licetus, the successor of Cremonini, maintained, he afterwards informs us, with little support the Peripatetic verity. It is probable that, by this time, Galileo, a more powerful adversary than Patrizi and Telesio, had drawn away the students of physical philosophy from Aristotle; nor did Naudé himself long continue in the faith he had imbibed from Cremonini. He became the intimate friend of Gassendi, and embraced a better system without repugnance, though he still kept up his correspondence with Licetus.

[147] Naudæi Epistolæ, p. 52 (edit. 1667.)

[148] P. 27, et alibi sæpius.

|Treatises on logic.|

7. Logic had never been more studied, according to a writer who has given a sort of history of the science about the beginning of this period, than in the preceding age; and in fact he enumerates above fifty treatises on the subject, between the time of Ramus and his own.[149] The Ramists, though of little importance in Italy, in Spain, and even in France, had much influence in Germany, England, and Scotland.[150] None however of the logical works of the sixteenth century obtained such reputation as those by Smiglecius, Burgersdicius, and our countryman Crakanthorp, all of whom flourished, if we may use such a word for those who bore no flowers, in the earlier part of the next age. As these men were famous in their generation, we may presume that they at least wrote better than their predecessors. But it is time to leave so jejune a subject, though we may not yet be able to produce what is much more valuable.

[149] Keckermann, Præcognita Logica, p. 110 (edit 1606.)

[150] Id. p. 147.

|Campanella.|

8. The first name, in an opposite class, that we find in descending from the sixteenth century, is that of Thomas Campanella, whose earliest writings belong to it. His philosophy being wholly dogmatical, must be classed with that of the paradoxical innovators whom he followed and eclipsed. Campanella, a Dominican friar, and like his master Telesio, a native of Cosenza, having been accused, it is uncertain how far with truth, of a conspiracy against the Spanish government of his country, underwent an imprisonment of twenty-seven years; during which almost all his philosophical treatises were composed and given to the world. Ardent and rapid in his mind, and, as has just been seen, not destitute of leisure, he wrote on logic, physics, metaphysics, morals, politics, and grammar. Upon all these subjects his aim seems to have been to recede as far as possible from Aristotle. He had early begun to distrust this guide, and had formed a noble resolution to study all schemes of philosophy, comparing them with their archetype, the world itself, that he might distinguish how much exactness was to be found in those several copies, as they ought to be, from one autograph of nature.[151]

[151] Cypriani Vita Campanellæ, p. 7.

|His theory taken from Telesio.|

9. Campanella borrowed his primary theorems from Telesio, but enlarged that Parmenidean philosophy by the invention of his own fertile and imaginative genius. He lays down the fundamental principle, that the perfectly wise and good Being has created certain signs and types (statuas atque imagines) of himself, all of which, severally as well as collectively, represent power, wisdom, and love, and the objects of these namely, existence, truth, and excellence, with more or less evidence. God first created space, the basis of existence, the primal substance, an immovable and incorporeal capacity of receiving body. Next he created matter without form or figure. In this corporeal mass God called to being two workmen, incorporeal themselves, but incapable of subsisting apart from body, the organs of no physical forms, but of their maker alone. These are heat and cold, the active principles diffused through all things. They were enemies from the beginning, each striving to occupy all material substances itself; each, therefore, always contending with the other, while God foresaw the great good that their discord would produce.[152] The heavens, he says in another passage, were formed by heat out of attenuated matter, the earth by cold out of condensed matter; the sun, being a body of heat, as he rolls round the earth, attacks the colder substance, and converts part of it into air and vapour.[153] This last part of his theory Campanella must have afterwards changed in words, when he embraced the Copernican system.

[152] In hac corporea mole tantæ materia statuæ, dixit Deus, ut nascerentur fabri duo incorporei, sed non potentes nisi a corpore subsistere, nullarum physicarum formarum organa, sed formatoris tantummodo. Id circo nati calor et frigus, principia activa principalia, ideoque suæ virtutis diffusiva. Statim inimici fuerunt mutuo, dum uterque cupit totam substantiam materialem occupare. Hinc contra se invicem pugnare cœperunt providente Deo ex hujusmodi discordia ingens bonum. Philosophia Realis Epilogistica (Frankfort, 1623), sect. 4.

[153] This is in the Compendium de Rerum Natura pro Philosophia humana, published by Adami in 1617. In his Apology for Galileo, in 1632, Campanella defends the Copernican system, and says that the modern astronomers think they cannot construct good ephemerides without it.

|Notion of universal sensibility.|

10. He united to this physical theory another not wholly original, but enforced in all his writings with singular confidence and pertinacity, the sensibility of all created beings. All things, he says, feel; else would the world be a chaos. For neither would fire tend upwards, nor stones downwards, nor waters to the sea; but everything would remain where it was, were it not conscious that destruction awaits it by remaining amidst that which is contrary to itself, and that it can only be preserved by seeking that which is of a similar nature. Contrariety is necessary for the decay and reproduction of nature; but all things strive against their contraries, which they could not do, if they did not perceive what is their contrary.[154] God, who is primal power, wisdom, and love, has bestowed on all things the power of existence, and so much wisdom and love as is necessary for their conversation during that time only for which his providence has determined that they shall be. Heat, therefore, has power, and sense, and desire of its own being; so have all other things seeking to be eternal like God, and in God they are eternal, for nothing dies before him, but is only changed.[155] Even to the world, as a sentient being, the death of its parts is no evil, since the death of one is the birth of many. Bread that is swallowed dies to revive as blood, and blood dies, that it may live again in our flesh and bones; and thus as the life of man is compounded out of the deaths and lives of all his parts, so is it with the whole universe.[156] God said, Let all things feel, some more, some less, as they have more or less necessity to imitate my being. And let them desire to live in that which they understand to be good for them, lest my creation should come to nought.[157]

[154] Omnia ergo sentiunt; alias mundus esset chaos. Ignis enim non sursum tenderet, nec aquæ in mare, nec lapides deorsum; sed res omnis ubi primo reperiretur, permaneret, cum non sentiret sui destructionem inter contraria nec sui conservationem inter similia. Non esset in mundo generatio et corruptio nisi esset contrarietas, sicut omnes physiologi affirmant. At si alteram contrarium non sentiret alterum sibi esse contrarium, contra ipsum non pugnaret. Sentiunt ergo singula. De Sensu Rerum, l. i. c. 4.

[155] Igitur ipse Deus, qui est prima potentia, prima sapientia, primus amor, largitus est rebus omnibus potentiam vivendi, et sapientiam et amorem quantum sufficit conservationi ipsarum in tanto tempore necessariæ, quantum determinavit ejus mens pro rerum regimine in ipso ente, nec præteriri potest. Calor ergo potest, sentit, amat esse; ita et res omnis cupitque æternari sicut Deus, et Deo res nulla moritur, sed solummodo mutatur, &c. l. ii., c. 26.

[156] Non est malus ignis in suo esse; terræ autem mams videtur, non autem mundo; nec vipera mala est, licet homini sit mala. Ita de omnibus idem prædico. Mors quoque rei unius si nativitas est multarum rerum, mala non est. Moritur panis manducatus, ut fiat sanguis, et sanguis moritur, ut in carnem nervos et ossa vertatur ac vivat; neque tamen hoc universo displicit animali, quamvis partibus mors ipsa, hoc est, transmutatio dolorifica sit, displiceatque. Ita utilis est mundo transmutatio eorum particularium noxia displicensque illis. Totus homo compositus est ex morte ac vita partialibus, quæ integrant vitam humanam. Sic mundus totus ex morticus ac vitibus compositus est, quæ totius vitam efficiunt. Philosop. Realis, c. 10.

[157] Sentiant alia magis, alia minus, prout magis minusque opus habent, et me imitentur in essendo. Ibidem ament, omnia vivere in proprio esse præcognito ut bono, ne corruat factura mea. Id. c. 10.

|His imagination and eloquence.|

11. The strength of Campanella’s genius lay in his imagination, which raises him sometimes to flights of impressive eloquence on this favourite theme. The sky and stars are endowed with the keenest sensibility; nor is it unreasonable to suppose that they signify their mutual thoughts to each other by the transference of light, and that their sensibility is full of pleasure. The blessed spirits that inform such living and bright mansions behold all things in nature and in the divine ideas; they have also a more glorious light than their own, through which they are elevated to a supernatural beatific vision.[158] We can hardly read this, without recollecting the most sublime passage, perhaps, in Shakspeare:--

“Sit, Jessica; look how the vault of heaven Is thick inlayed with patins of bright gold. There’s not the smallest orb, that thou behold’st, But in its motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim; Such harmony is in immortal souls. But while this muddy vesture of decay Does grossly close us in, we cannot hear it.”[159]

[158] Animæ beatæ habitantes sic vivas lucidasque mansiones, res naturales vident omnes divinasque ideas, habent quoque lumen gloriosius quo elevantur ad visionem supernaturalem beatificam, et veluti apud nos luces plurimæ sese mutuo tangunt, intersecant, decussant, sentiuntque ita in cœlo luces distinguuntur, uniuntur, sentiunt. De Sensu Rerum, l. iii. c. 4.

[159] Merchant of Venice, Act V.

12. The world is full of living spirits, he proceeds; and when the soul shall be delivered from this dark cavern, we shall behold their subtle essences. But now we cannot discern the forms of the air, and the winds as they rush by us; much less the angels and dæmons who people them. Miserable as we are, we recognise no other sensation than that which we observe in animals and plants, slow and half extinguished, and buried under a weight that oppresses it. We will not understand that all our actions and appetites and motions and powers flow from heaven. Look at the manner in which light is diffused over the earth, penetrating every part of it with endless variety of operation, which we must believe that it does not perform without exquisite pleasure.[160] And hence there is no vacuum in nature, except by violent means; since all bodies delight in mutual contact, and the world no more desires to be rent in its parts than an animal.

[160] Prætervolant in conspectu nostro venti et aer, at nihil eos videmus, multo minus videmus Angelos Dæmonasque, quorum plenus est mundus.

Infelices qui sensum alium nullum agnoscimus, nisi obtusum animalium plantarumque, tardum, demortuum aggravatum; sepultum: nec quidem intelligere volumus omnem actionem nostram et appetitum et sensum et motum et vim a cœlo manare. Ecce lux quanto acutissimo expanditur sensu super terram, quo multiplicatur, generatur, amplificatur, idque non sine magna efficere voluptate existimanda est, l. iii. c. 5.

Campanella used to hear, as he tells us, whenever any evil was impending, a voice calling him by his name, sometimes with other words; he doubted whether this were his proper Dæmon, or the air itself speaking. It is not wonderful that his imagination was affected by length of confinement.

13. It is almost a descent in Campanella from these visions of the separate sensibility of nature in each particle, when he seizes hold of some physical fact or analogy to establish a subordinate and less paradoxical part of his theory. He was much pleased with Gilbert’s treatise on the magnet, and thought it of course a proof of the animation of the earth. The world is an animal, he says, sentient as a whole, and enjoying life in all its parts.[161] It is not surprising that he ascribes intelligence to plants; but he here remarks that we find the male and female sexes in them, and that the latter cannot fructify without the former. This is manifest in siliquose plants and in palms (which on this account he calls in another place the wiser plants, plantæ sapientiores), in which the two kinds incline towards each other for the purpose of fructification.[162]

[161] Mundum esse animal, totum sentiens, omnesque portiones ejus communi gaudere vita, l. i. c. 9.

[162] Inveniemus in plantis sexum masculinum et fœmininum, ut in animalibus, et fœminam non fructificare sine masculi congressu. Hoc patet in siliquis et in palmis, quarum mas fœminaque inclinantur mutuo alter in alterum et sese osculantur, et fœmina impregnatur, nec fructificat sine mare; immo conspicitur dolens, squalida mortuaque, et pulvere illius et odore reviviscit.

|His works published by Adami.|

14. Campanella, when he uttered from his Neapolitan prison these dulcet sounds of fantasy, had the advantage of finding a pious disciple who spread them over other parts of Europe. This was Tobias Adami, initiated, as he tells us, in the same mysteries as himself (nostræ philosophiæ symmysta), who dedicated to the philosophers of Germany his own Prodromus Philosophiæ Instauratio, prefixed to his edition of Campanella’s Compendium de Rerum Natura, published at Frankfort in 1617. Most of the other writings of the master seem to have preceded this edition; for Adami enumerates them in his Prodromus. Campanella did not fully obtain his liberty till 1629, and died some years afterwards in France, where he had experienced the kindness of Peiresc, and the patronage of Richelieu. His philosophy made no very deep impression; it was too fanciful, too arbitrary, too much tinctured with marks of an imagination rendered morbid by solitude, to gain many proselytes in an age that was advancing in severe science. Gassendi, whose good nature led him to receive Campanella, oppressed by poverty and ill usage, with every courteous attention, was of all men the last to be seduced by his theories. No one, probably, since Campanella, aspiring to be reckoned among philosophers, has ventured to assert so much on matters of high speculative importance and to prove so little. Yet he seems worthy of the notice we have taken of him, if it were only as the last of the mere dogmatists in philosophy. He is doubtless much superior to Jordano Bruno, and I should presume, except in mathematics, to Cardan.[163]

[163] Brucker (vol. v., p. 106-144) has given a laborious analysis of the philosophy of Campanella.

|Basson.|

15. A less important adversary of the established theory in physics was Sebastian Basson, in his “Philosophiæ Naturalis adversus Aristotelem libri XII., in quibus abstrusa veterum physiologia restauratur, et Aristotelis errores solidis rationibus refelluntur. Genevæ, 1621.” This book shows great animosity against Aristotle, to whom, as Lord Bacon has himself insinuated, he allows only the credit of having preserved fragments of the older philosophers, like pearls in mud. It is difficult to give an account of this long work. In some places we perceive signs of a just philosophy; but in general his explanations of physical phænomena seem as bad as those of his opponents, and he displays no acquaintance with the writings and the discoveries of his great contemporaries. We find also some geometrical paradoxes; and in treating of astronomy he writes as if he had never heard of the Copernican system.

|Berigard.|

16. Claude Berigard, born at Moulins, became professor of natural philosophy at Pisa and Padua. In his Circuli Pisani, published in 1643, he attempted to revive, as it is commonly said, the Ionic or corpuscular philosophy of Anaxagoras, in opposition to the Aristotelian. The book is rare; but Brucker, who had seen it, seems to have satisfactorily repelled the charge of atheism, brought by some against Berigard.[164]

[164] Brucker, iv. 460. Niceron, xxxi., where he is inserted by the name of Beauregard, which is probably more correct, but against usage.

|Magnen.|

Another Frenchman domiciled in Italy, Magnen, trod nearly the same path as Berigard, professing, however, to follow the modification of the corpuscular theory introduced by Democritus.[165] It seems to be observable as to these writers, Basson and the others, that, coming with no sufficient knowledge of what had recently been discovered in mathematical and experimental science, and following the bad methods of the universities, even when they deviated from their usual doctrines, dogmatizing and asserting when they should have proved, arguing synthetically from axioms, and never ascending from particular facts, they could do little good to philosophy, except by contributing, so far as they might be said to have had any influence, to shake the authority of Aristotle.

[165] Brucker (p. 504) thinks that Magnen misunderstood the atomic theory of Democritus, and substituted one quite different in his Democritus reviviscens, published in 1646.

|Paracelsists.|

17. This authority, which at least required but the deference of modest reason to one of the greatest of mankind, was ill exchanged, in any part of science, for the unintelligible dreams of the school of Paracelsus, which had many disciples in Germany, and a very few in England. Germany indeed has been the native soil of mysticism in Europe. The tendency to reflex observation of the mind, characteristic of that people, has exempted them from much gross error, and given them insight into many depths of truth, but at the expense of some confusion, some liability to self-deceit, and to some want of strictness in metaphysical reasoning. It was accompanied by a profound sense of the presence of Deity; yet one which, acting on their thoughtful spirits, became rather an impression than an intellectual act, and settled into a mysterious indefinite theopathy, when it did not even evaporate in pantheism.

|And Theosophists.|

18. The founder, perhaps, of this sect was Tauler of Strasburg, in the fourteenth century, whose sermons in the native language, which, however, are supposed to have been translated from Latin, are full of what many have called by the vague word mysticism, an intense aspiration for the union of the soul with God. An anonymous work generally entitled The German Theology, written in the fifteenth century, pursues the same track of devotional thought. It was a favourite book with Luther, and was translated into Latin by Castalio.[166] These indeed are to be considered chiefly as theological; but the study of them led readily to a state of mental emotion, wherein a dogmatic pseudo-philosophy, like that of Paracelsus, abounding with assertions that imposed on the imagination, and appealing frequently both to scriptural authority and the evidence of inward light, was sure to be favourably received. The mystics, therefore, and the theosophists belonged to the same class, and it is not uncommon to use the names indifferently.

[166] Episcopius places the author of the Theologia Germanica, with Henry Nicolas and David George, among mere enthusiasts.

|Fludd.|

19. It may appear not here required to dwell on a subject scarcely falling under any province of literary history, but two writers within this period have been sufficiently distinguished to deserve mention. One of these was Robert Fludd, an English physician, who died in 1637; a man of indefatigable diligence in collecting the dreams and follies of past ages, blending them in a portentous combination with new fancies of his own. The Rabbinical and Cabbalistic authors, as well as the Paracelsists, the writers on magic, and whatever was most worthy to be rejected and forgotten, form the basis of his creed. Among his numerous works the most known was his “Mosaic Philosophy,” in which, like many before his time as well as since, he endeavoured to build a scheme of physical philosophy on the first chapters in Genesis. I do not know whether he found there his two grand principles or forces of nature: a northern force of condensation, and a southern force of dilatation. These seem to be the Parmenidean cold and heat, expressed in a jargon affected in order to make dupes. In peopling the universe with dæmons, and in ascribing all phænomena to their invisible agency, he pursued the steps of Agrippa and Paracelsus, or rather of the whole school of fanatics and impostors called magical. He took also from older writers the doctrine of a constant analogy between universal nature, or the macrocosm, and that of man, or the microcosm; so that what was known in one might lead us to what was unknown in the other.[167] Fludd possessed, however, some acquaintance with science, especially in chemistry and mechanics; and his rhapsodies were so far from being universally contemned in his own age, that Gassendi thought it not unworthy of him to enter into a prolix confutation of the Fluddian philosophy.[168]

[167] This was a favourite doctrine of Paracelsus. Campanella was much too fanciful not to embrace it. Mundus, he says, habet spiritum qui est cœlum, crassum corpus quod est terra, sanguinem qui est mare. Homo igitur compendium epilogusque mundi est. De Sensu Rerum, l. ii. c. 32.

[168] Brucker, iv. 691. Buhle, iii. 157.

|Jacob Behmen.|

20. Jacob Behmen, or rather Boehm, a shoemaker of Gorlitz, is far more generally familiar to our ears than his contemporary Fludd. He was, however, much inferior to him in reading, and in fact seems to have read little but the Bible and the writings of Paracelsus. He recounts the visions and ecstasies during which a supernatural illumination had been conveyed to him. It came indeed without the gift of transferring the light to others; for scarce any have been able to pierce the clouds in which his meaning has been charitably presumed to lie hid. The chief work of Behmen is his Aurora, written about 1612, and containing a record of the visions wherein the mysteries of nature were revealed to him. It was not published till 1641. He is said to have been a man of great goodness of heart, which his writings display; but, in literature, this cannot give a sanction to the incoherencies of madness. His language, as far as I have seen any extracts from his works, is coloured with the phraseology of the alchemists and astrologers; as for his philosophy, so to style it, we find according to Brucker, who has taken some pains with the subject, manifest traces of the system of emanation, so ancient and so attractive; and from this and several other reasons, he is inclined to think the unlearned shoemaker of Gorlitz must have had assistance from men of more education in developing his visions.[169] But the emanative theory is one into which a mind absorbed in contemplation may very naturally fall. Behmen had his disciples, which such enthusiasts rarely want; and his name is sufficiently known to justify the mention of it even in philosophical history.

[169] Brucker, iv. 698.

|Lord Herbert De Veritate.|

21. We come now to an English writer of a different class, little known as such at present, but who, without doing much for the advancement of metaphysical philosophy, had at least the merit of devoting to it with a sincere and independent spirit the leisure of high rank, and of a life not obscure in the world--Lord Herbert of Cherbury. The principal work of this remarkable man is his Latin treatise, published in 1624, “On truth as it is distinguished from Revelation, from Probability, from Possibility, and from Falsehood.” Its object is to inquire what are the sure means of discerning and discovering truth. This, as, like other authors, he sets out by proclaiming, had been hitherto done by no one, and he treats both ancient and modern philosophers rather haughtily, as being men tied to particular opinions, from which they dare not depart. “It is not from an hypocritical or mercenary writer, that we are to look for perfect truth. Their interest is not to lay aside their mask, or think for themselves. A liberal and independent author alone will do this.” [170] So general an invective, after Lord Bacon, and indeed after others, like Campanella, who could not be charged with following any conceits rather than their own, bespeaks either ignorance of philosophical literature, or a supercilious neglect of it.

[170] Non est igitur a larvatoaliquo vel stipendioso scriptore ut verum consummatum opperiaris: Illorum apprime interest ne personam deponant, vel aliter quidem sentiant. Ingenuus et sui arbitrii ista solummodo præstabit auctor. Epist. ad Lectorem.

|His axioms.|

22. Lord Herbert lays down seven primary axioms. 1. Truth exists: 2. It is coeval with the things to which it relates: 3. It exists everywhere: 4. It is self-evident:[171] 5. There are as many truths, as there are differences in things: 6. These differences are made known to us by our natural faculties: 7. There is a truth belonging to these truths; “Est veritas quædam harum veritatum.” This axiom he explains as obscurely, as it is strangely expressed. All truth he then distinguishes into the truth of the thing or object, the truth of the appearance, the truth of the perception, and the truth of the understanding. The truth of the object is the inherent conformity of the object with itself, or that which makes everything what it is.[172] The truth of appearance is the conditional conformity of the appearance with the object. The truth of perception is the conditional conformity of our senses (facultates nostras prodromas) with the appearances of things. The truth of understanding is the due conformity between the aforesaid conformities. All truth, therefore, is conformity, all conformity relation. Three things are to be observed in every inquiry after truth; the thing or object, the sense or faculty, and the laws or conditions by which its conformity or relation is determined. Lord Herbert is so obscure, partly by not thoroughly grasping his subject, partly by writing in Latin, partly perhaps by the “sphalmata et errata in typographo, quædam fortasse in seipso,” of which he complains at the end, that it has been necessary to omit several sentences as unintelligible, though what I have just given is far enough from being too clear.

[171] Hæc veritas est in se manifesta. He observes that what are called false appearances, are true as such, though not true according to the reality of the object: sua veritas apparentiæ falsæ inest, verè enim ita apparebit, vera tamen ex veritate rei non erit.

[172] Inhærens illa conformitas rei cum seipsa, sive illa ratio, ex qua res unaquæque sibi constant.

|Conditions of truth.|

23. Truth, he goes on to say, exists as to the object, or outward thing itself, when our faculties are capable of determining everything concerning it; but though this definition is exact, it is doubtful whether any such truth exists in nature. The first condition of discerning truth in things, is that they should have a relation to ourselves; (ut intra nostram stet analogiam) since multitudes of things may exist which the senses cannot discover. The three chief conditions of this condition seem to be: 1. That it should be of a proper size, neither immense, nor too small; 2. That it should have its determining difference, or principle of individuation, to distinguish it from other things; 3. That it should be accommodated to some sense or perceptive faculty. These are the universally necessary conditions of truth (that is of knowledge) as it regards the object. The truth of appearance depends on others, which are more particular; as that the object should be perceived for a sufficient time, through a proper medium, at a due distance, in a proper situation.[173] Truth of perception is conditional also, and its conditions are, that the sense should be sound, and the attention directed towards it. Truth of understanding depends on the κοιναι εννοιαι [koinai ennoiai], the common notions possessed by every man of sane mind, and implanted by nature. The understanding teaches us by means of these, that infinity and eternity exist, though our senses cannot perceive them. The understanding deals also with universals, and truth is known as to universals, when the particulars are rightly apprehended.

[173] Lord Herbert defines appearance, icetypum, seu forma vicaria rei, quæ sub conditionibus istis cum prototypo suo conformata, cum conceptu denuo sub conditionibus etiam suis, conformari et modo quodam spirituali, tanquam ab objecto decisa, etiam in objecti absentia conservari potest.

|Instinctive truths.|

24. Our faculties are as numerous as the differences of things; and thus it is, that the world corresponds by perfect analogy to the human soul, degrees of perception being as much distinct from one another as different modes of it. All our powers may however be reduced to four heads; natural instinct, internal perception, external sensation, and reason. What is not known by one of these four means cannot be known at all. Instinctive truths are proved by universal consent. Here he comes to his general basis of religion, maintaining the existence of κοιναι εννοιαι [koinai ennoiai] or common notions of mankind, on that subject, principles against which no one can dispute, without violating the laws of his nature.[174] Natural instinct he defines to be an act of those faculties existing in every man of sane mind, by which the common notions as to the relations of things not perceived by the senses, (rerum internarum) and especially such as tend to the conversation of the individual, of the species, and of the whole, are formed without any process of reasoning. These common notions, though excited in us by the objects of sense, are not conveyed to us by them; they are implanted in us by nature, so that God seems to have imparted to us not only a part of his image, but of his wisdom.[175] And whatever is understood and perceived by all men alike deserves to be accounted one of these notions. Some of them are instinctive, others are deduced from such as are. The former are distinguishable by six marks; priority, independence, universality, certainty; so that no man can doubt them without putting off as it were his nature, necessity, that is, usefulness for the preservation of man; lastly, intuitive apprehension, for these common notions do not require to be inferred.[176]

[174] Principia illa sacrosancta, contra quæ disputare nefas. p. 44. I have translated this in the best sense I could give it; but to use _fas_ or _nefas_, before we have defined their meaning, or proved their existence, is but indifferent logic.

[175] P. 48.

[176] P. 60.

|Internal perceptions.|

25. Internal perceptions denote the conformity of objects with those faculties existing in every man of sane mind, which, being developed by his natural instinct, are conversant with the internal relations of things, in a secondary and particular manner, and by means of natural instinct.[177] By this ill-worded definition he probably intends to distinguish the general power, or instinctive knowledge, from its exercise and application in any instance. But I have found it very difficult to follow Lord Herbert. It is by means, he says, of these internal senses that we discern the nature of things in their intrinsic relations, or hidden types of being.[178] And it is necessary well to distinguish the conforming faculty in the mind or internal perception, from the bodily sense. The cloudiness of his expression increases as we proceed, and in many pages I cannot venture to translate or abridge it. The injudicious use of a language in which he did not write with facility, and which is not very well adapted, at the best, to metaphysical disquisition, has doubtless increased the perplexity into which he has thrown his readers.

[177] Sensus interni sunt actus conformitatum objectorum cum facultatibus illis in omni homine sano et integro existentibus, quæ ab instinctu naturali expositæ, circa analogiam rerum internam, particulariter, secondario, et ratione instinctûs naturalis versantur. p. 66.

[178] Circa analogiam rerum internam, sive signaturas et characteras rerum penitiores versantur. p. 68.

|Five natural notions of natural religion.|

26. In the conclusion of this treatise, Herbert lays down the five common notions of natural religion, implanted, as he conceives, in the breasts of all mankind. 1. That there is a God; 2. That he ought to be worshipped; 3. That virtue and piety are the chief parts of worship; 4. That we are to repent and turn from our sins; 5. That they are rewards and punishments in another life.[179] Nothing can be admitted in religion which contradicts these primary notions; but if any one has a revelation from heaven in addition to these, which may happen to him sleeping or waking, he should keep it to himself, since nothing can be of importance to the human race, which is not established by the evidence of their common faculties. Nor can anything be known to be revealed, which is not revealed to ourselves; all else being tradition and historic testimony, which does not amount to knowledge. The specific difference of man from other animals he makes not reason, but the capacity of religion. It is a curious coincidence, that John Wesley has said something of the same kind.[180] It is also remarkable that we find in another work of Lord Herbert, De Religione Gentilium, which dwells again on his five articles of natural religion, essential, as he expressly lays it down, to salvation, the same illustration of the being of a Deity from the analogy of a watch or clock, which Paley has since employed. I believe that it occurs in an intermediate writer.[181]

[179] P. 222.

[180] I have somewhere read a profound remark of Wesley, that, considering the sagacity which many animals display, we cannot fix upon reason as the distinction between them and man; the true difference is, that we are formed to know God, and they are not.

[181] Et quidem si horologium per diem et noctem integram horas signanter indicans, viderit quispiam non mente captus, id consilio arteque summa factum judicaverit. Ecquis non planè demens, qui hanc mundi machinam non per viginti quatuor horas tantum, sed per tot sæcula circuitus suos obeuntem animadverterit, non id omne sapientissimo utique potentissimoque alicui autori tribuat? De Relig. Gentil., cap. xiii.

|Remarks of Gassendi on Herbert.|

27. Lord Herbert sent a copy of his treatise De Veritate several years after its publication to Gassendi. We have a letter to the noble author in the third volume of the works of that philosopher, showing, in the candid and sincere spirit natural to him, the objections that struck his mind in reading the book.[182] Gassendi observes that the distinctions of four kinds of truth are not new; the veritas rei of Lord Herbert being what is usually called substance, his veritas apparentiæ no more than accident, and the other two being only sense and reason. Gassendi seems not wholly to approve, but gives us the best, a definition of truth little differing from Herbert’s, the agreement of the cognizant intellect with the thing known: “Intellectûs cognoscentis cum re cognita congruentia.” The obscurity of the treatise De Veritate could ill suit an understanding like that of Gassendi, always tending to acquire clear conceptions; and though he writes with great civility, it is not without smartly opposing what he does not approve. The aim of Lord Herbert’s work, he says, is that the intellect may pierce into the nature of things, knowing them as they are in themselves without the fallacies of appearance and sense. But for himself he confesses that such knowledge he has always found above him, and that he is in darkness when he attempts to investigate the real nature of the least thing; making many of the observations on this which we read also in Locke. And he well says that we have enough for our use in the accidents or appearances of things without knowing their substances, in reply to Herbert, who had declared that we should be miserably deficient, if, while nature has given us senses to discern sounds and colours and such fleeting qualities of things, we had no sure road to eternal, and necessary truths.[183] The universality of those innate principles, especially moral and religious, on which his correspondent had built so much, is doubted by Gassendi on the usual grounds, that many have denied, or been ignorant of them. The letter is imperfect, some sheets of the autograph having been lost.

[182] Gassendi Opera, iii. 411.

[183] Misere nobiscum actum esset, si ad percipiendos colores, sonos et qualitates cæteras caducas atque momentaneas subessent media, nulla autem ad veritates illas internas, æternas, necessarias sine errore superesset via.

28. Too much space may seem to have been bestowed on a writer who cannot be ranked high among metaphysicians. But Lord Herbert was not only a distinguished name, but may claim the precedence among those philosophers in England. If his treatise De Veritate is not as an entire work very successful, or founded always upon principles which have stood the test of severe reflection, it is still a monument of an original, independent thinker, without rhapsodies of imagination, without pedantic technicalities, and above all, bearing witness to a sincere love of the truth he sought to apprehend. The ambitious expectation that the real essences of things might be discovered, if it were truly his, as Gassendi seems to suppose, could not be warranted by anything, at least within the knowledge of that age. But from some expressions of Herbert I should infer that he did not think our faculties competent to solve the whole problem of _quiddity_, as the logicians called it, or the real nature of anything, at least, objectively without us.[184] He is indeed so obscure, that I will not vouch for his entire consistency. It has been an additional motive to say as much as I have done concerning Lord Herbert, that I know not where any account of his treatise De Veritate will be found. Brucker is strangely silent about this writer, and Buhle has merely adverted to the letter of Gassendi. Descartes has spoken of Lord Herbert’s book with much respect, though several of their leading principles were far from the same. It was translated into French in 1639, and this translation he found less difficult than the original.[185]

[184] Cum facultates nostræ ad analogiam propriam terminatæ quidditates rerum intimas non penetrent: ideo quid res naturalis in seipsa sit, tali ex analogia ad nos ut _sit_ constituta, perfecte sciri non potest, p. 165. Instead of _sit_, it might be better to read _est_. In another place he says, it is doubtful whether anything exists in nature, concerning which we have a complete knowledge. The eternal and necessary truths which Herbert contends for our knowing, seem to have been his communes notitiæ, subjectively understood, rather than such as relate to external objects.

[185] Descartes, vol. viii., p. 138 and 168. J’y trouve plusieurs choses fort bonnes, _sed non publici saporis_; car il y a peu de personnes qui soient capables d’entendre la métaphysique. Et, pour le général du livre, il tient un chemin fort différent de celui que j’ai suivi.... Enfin, par conclusion, encore que je ne puisse m’accorder en tout aux sentimens de cet auteur, je ne laisse pas de l’estimer beaucoup au-dessus des esprits ordinaires.

|Gassendi’s defence of Epicurus.|

29. Gassendi himself ought, perhaps, to be counted wholly among the philosophers of this period, since many of his writings were published, and all may have been completed within it. They are contained in six large folio volumes, rather closely printed. The Exercitationes Paradoxicæ, published in 1624, are the earliest. These contain an attack on the logic of Aristotle, the fortress that so many bold spirits were eager to assail. But in more advanced life Gassendi withdrew in great measure from this warfare, and his Logic, in the Syntagma Philosophicum, the record of his latest opinions, is chiefly modelled on the Aristotelian, with sufficient commendation of its author. In the study of ancient philosophy, however, Gassendi was impressed with an admiration of Epicurus. His physical theory, founded on corpuscles and a vacuum, his ethics, in their principle and precepts, his rules of logic and guidance of the intellect, seemed to the cool and independent mind of the French philosopher more worthy of regard than the opposite schemes prevailing in the schools, and not to be rejected on account of any discredit attached to the name. Combining with the Epicurean physics and ethics the religious element which had been unnecessarily discarded from the philosophy of the Garden, Gassendi displayed both in a form no longer obnoxious. The Syntagma Philosophiæ Epicuri, published in 1649, is an elaborate vindication of this system, which he had previously expounded in a commentary on the tenth book of Diogenes Laertius. He had already effaced the prejudices against Epicurus himself, whom he seems to have regarded with the affection of a disciple, in a biographical treatise on his life and moral character.

|His chief works after 1650.|

30. Gassendi died in 1656; the Syntagma Philosophicum, his greatest as well as last work, in which it is natural to seek the whole scheme of his philosophy, was published by his friend Sorbière in 1658. We may, therefore, properly defer the consideration of his metaphysical writings to the next period: but the controversy in which he was involved with Descartes will render it necessary to bring his name forward again before the close of this chapter.

SECT. II.

_On the Philosophy of Lord Bacon._

|Preparation for the philosophy of.|

31. It may be judged from what has been said in a former volume, as well as in our last pages, that at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the higher philosophy which is concerned with general truth, and the means of knowing it, had been little benefitted by the labours of any modern inquirer. It was become indeed no strange thing, at least out of the air of a college, to question the authority of Aristotle; but his disciples pointed with scorn at the endeavours which had as yet been made to supplant it, and asked whether the wisdom so long reverenced was to be set aside for the fanatical reveries of Paracelsus, the unintelligible chimæras of Bruno, or the more plausible, but arbitrary, hypotheses of Telesio.

|Lord Bacon.|

32. Francis Bacon was born in 1561.[186] He came to years of manhood at the time when England was rapidly emerging from ignorance and obsolete methods of study, in an age of powerful minds, full himself of ambition, confidence and energy. If we think on the public history of Bacon, even during the least public portion of it, philosophy must appear to have been but his amusement; it was by his hours of leisure, by time hardly missed from the laborious study and practice of the law and from the assiduities of a courtier’s life, that he became the father of modern science. This union of an active with a reflecting life had been the boast of some ancients, of Cicero and Antonine; but what comparison, in depth and originality, between their philosophy and that of Bacon?

[186] Those who place Lord Bacon’s birth in 1560, as Mr. Montagu has done, must be understood to follow the old style, which creates some confusion. He was born the 22nd of January, and died the 9th of April, 1626, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, as we are told in his life by Rawley, the best authority we have.

|His plan of philosophy.|

33. This wonderful man, in sweeping round the champaign of universal science with his powerful genius, found as little to praise in the recent, as in the ancient methods of investigating truth. He liked as little the empirical presumption of drawing conclusions from a partial experience as the sophistical dogmatism which relied on unwarranted axioms and verbal chicane. All, he thought, was to be constructed anew; the investigation of facts, their arrangement for the purposes of inquiry, the process of eliciting from them the required truth. And for this he saw, that, above all, a thorough purgation of the mind itself would be necessary, by pointing out its familiar errors, their sources, and their remedies.

|Time of its conception.|

34. It is not exactly known at what age Bacon first conceived the scheme of a comprehensive philosophy, but it was, by his own account, very early in life.[187] Such noble ideas are most congenial to the sanguine spirit of youth, and to its ignorance of the extent of labour it undertakes. In the dedication of the Novum Organum to James in 1620, he says that he had been about some such work near thirty years, “so as I made no haste.” “And the reason,” he adds, “why I have published it now, specially being imperfect, is, to speak plainly, because I number my days, and would have it saved. There is another reason of my so doing, which is to try whether I can get help in one intended part of this work, namely, the compiling of a natural and experimental history, which must be the main foundation of a true and active philosophy.” He may be presumed at least to have made a very considerable progress in his undertaking, before the close of the sixteenth century. But it was first promulgated to the world by the publication of his Treatise on the Advancement of Learning in 1605. In this, indeed, the whole of the Baconian philosophy may be said to be implicitly contained, except perhaps the second book of the Novum Organum. In 1623, he published his more celebrated Latin translation of this work, if it is not rather to be deemed a new one, entitled, De Augmentis Scientiarum. I find, upon comparison, that more than two thirds of this treatise are a version, with slight interpolation or omission, from the Advancement of Learning, the remainder being new matter.

[187] In a letter to Father Fulgentio, which bears no date in print, but must have been written about 1624, he refers to a juvenile work about forty years before, which he had confidently entitled The Greatest Birth of Time. Bacon says: Equidem memini me quadraginta abhinc annis juvenile opusculum circa has res confecisse, quod magna prorsus fiducia et magnifico titulo, “Temporis partum maximum” inscripsi. The apparent vain-glory of this title is somewhat extenuated by the sense he gave to the phrase Birth of Time. He meant that the lapse of time and long experience were the natural sources of a better philosophy, as he says in his dedication of the Instauratio Magna: Ipse certè, ut ingenue fateor, soleo, æstimare hoc opus magis pro partu temporis quam ingenii. Illud enim in eo solummodo mirabile est, initia rei et tantas de iis quæ invaluerunt suspiciones, alicui in mentem venire potuisse. Cætera non illibenter sequuntur.

No treatise with this precise title appears. But we find prefixed to some of the short pieces a general title, Temporis Partus Masculus, sive Instauratio Magna Imperii Universi in Humanum. These treatises, however, though earlier than his great works, cannot be referred to so juvenile a period as his letter to Fulgentio intimates, and I should rather incline to suspect that the _opusculum_ to which he there refers, has not been preserved. Mr. Montagu is of a different opinion. See his Note I. to the life of Bacon in vol. xvi. of his edition. The Latin tract De Interpretatione Naturæ Mr. M. supposes to be the germ of the Instauratio, as the Cogitata et Visa are of the Novum Organum. I do not dissent from this; but the former bears marks of having been written after Bacon had been immersed in active life. The most probable conjecture appears to be that he very early perceived the meagreness and imperfection of the academical course of philosophy, and of all others which fell in his way, and formed the scheme of affording something better from his own resources: but that he did not commit _much_ to paper, nor had planned his own method till after he was turned thirty, which his letter to the King intimates.

In a recent and very brilliant sketch of the Baconian philosophy (Edinb. Review, July, 1837), the two leading principles that distinguish it throughout all its parts, are justly denominated _utility_ and _progress_. To do good to mankind, and do more and more good, are the ethics of its inductive method. We may only regret that the ingenious author of this article has been hurried sometimes into the low and contracted view of the deceitful word _utility_, which regards rather the enjoyments of physical convenience, than the general well-being of the individual and the species. If Bacon looked more frequently to the former, it was because so large a portion of his writings relates to physical observation and experiment. But it was far enough from his design to set up physics in any sort of opposition to ethics, much less in a superior light. I dissent also from some of the observations in this article, lively as they are, which tend to depreciate the originality and importance of the Baconian methods. The reader may turn to a note on this subject by Dugald Stewart, at the end of the present section.

|Instauratio Magna.|

35. The Instauratio Magna had been already published in 1620, while Lord Bacon was still chancellor. Fifteen years had elapsed since he gave to the world his Advancement of Learning, the first fruits of such astonishing vigour of philosophical genius, that, inconceivable as the completion of the scheme he had even then laid down in prospect for his new philosophy by any single effort must appear, we may be disappointed at the great deficiencies which this latter work exhibits, and which he was not destined to fill up. But he had passed the interval in active life, and in dangerous paths, deserting, as in truth he had all along been prone enough to do, the “shady spaces of philosophy,” as Milton calls them, for the court of a sovereign, who with some real learning, was totally incapable of sounding the depths of Lord Bacon’s mind, or even of estimating his genius.

|First Part: Partitiones Scientiarum.|

36. The Instauratio Magna, dedicated to James, is divided, according to the magnificent groundplot of its author, into six parts. The first of these he entitles Partitiones Scientiarum, comprehending a general summary of that knowledge which mankind already possess; yet not merely treating this affirmatively, but taking special notice of whatever should seem deficient or imperfect; sometimes even supplying, by illustration or precept, these vacant spaces of science. This first part he declares to be wanting in the Instauratio. It has been chiefly supplied by the treatise De Augmentis Scientiarum; yet perhaps even that does not fully come up to the amplitude of his design.

|Second part: Novum Organum.|

37. The second part of the Instauratio was to be, as he expresses it “the science of a better and more perfect use of reason in the investigation of things, and of the true aids of the understanding,” the new logic, or inductive method, in which what is eminently styled the Baconian philosophy consists. This, as far as he completed it, is known to all by the name of the Novum Organum. But he seems to have designed a fuller treatise in place of this; the aphorisms into which he has digested it being rather the heads or theses of chapters, at least in many places, that would have been further expanded.[188] And it is still more important to observe, that he did not achieve the whole of this summary that he had promised; but out of nine divisions of his method we only possess the first, which he denominates prærogative instantiarum. Eight others, of exceeding importance in logic, he has not touched at all, except to describe them by name and to promise more. “We will speak,” he says, “in the first place, of prerogative instances; secondly, of the aids of induction; thirdly, of the rectification of induction; fourthly, of varying the investigation according to the nature of the subject; fifthly, of prerogative natures (or objects), as to investigation, or the choice of what shall be first inquired into; sixthly, of the boundaries of inquiry, or the synoptical view of all natures in the world; seventhly, on the application of inquiry to practice, and what relates to man; eighthly, on the preparations (parascevis) for inquiry; lastly, on the ascending and descending scale of axioms.”[189] All these, after the first, are wanting, with the exception of some slightly handled in separate parts of Bacon’s writings; and the deficiency, which is so important, seems to have been sometimes overlooked by those who have written about the Novum Organum.

[188] It is entitled by himself, Partis secundæ Summa, digesta in aphorismos.

[189] Dicemus itaque primo loco de prærogativis instantiarum; secundo, de adminiculis inductiones; tertio, de rectificatione inductionis; quarto, de variatione inquisitionis pro natura subjecti; quinto, de prærogativis naturarum quatenus ad inquisitionem, sive de eo quod inquirendum est prius et posterius; sexto, de terminis inquisitionis, sive de synopsi omnium naturarum in universo; septimo, de deductione ad praxin, sive de eo quod est in ordine ad hominem; octavo, de parascevis ad inquisitionem; postremo autem, de scala ascensoria et descensoria axiomatum, lib. ii. 22.

|Third part: Natural History.|

38. The third part of the Instauratio Magna was to comprise an entire natural history, diligently and scrupulously collected from experience of every kind; including under that name of natural history everything wherein the art of man has been employed on natural substances either for practice or experiment; no method of reasoning being sufficient to guide us to truth as to natural things, if they are not themselves clearly and exactly apprehended. It is unnecessary to observe that very little of this immense chart of nature could be traced by the hand of Bacon, or in his time. His Centuries of Natural History, containing about one thousand observed facts and experiments, are a very slender contribution towards such a description of universal nature as he contemplated; these form no part of the Instauratio Magna, and had been compiled before. But he enumerates one hundred and thirty particular histories which ought to be drawn up for his great work. A few of these he has given in a sort of skeleton, as samples rather of the method of collecting facts, than of the facts themselves; namely, the History of Winds, of Life and Death, of Density and Rarity, of Sound and Hearing.

|Fourth part: Scala Intellectûs.|

39. The fourth part, called Scala Intellectûs, is also wanting with the exception of a very few introductory pages. “By these tables,” says Bacon, “we mean not such examples as we subjoin to the several rules of our method, but types and models, which place before our eyes the entire process of the mind in the discovery of truth, selecting various and remarkable instances.”[190] These he compares to the diagrams of geometry, by attending to which the steps of the demonstration become perspicuous. Though the great brevity of his language in this place renders it rather difficult to see clearly what he understood by these models, some light appears to be thrown on this passage by one in the treatise De Augmentis, where he enumerates among the desiderata of logic what he calls traditio lampadis, or a delivery of any science or particular truth according to the order wherein it was discovered.[191] “The methods of geometers,” he there says, “have some resemblance to this art;” which is not, however, the case as to the synthetical geometry with which we are generally conversant. It is the history of analytical investigation, and many beautiful illustrations of it have been given since the days of Bacon in all subjects to which that method of inquiry has been applied.

[190] Neque de iis exemplis loquimur, quæ singulis præceptis ac regulis illustrandi gratia adjiciuntur, hoc enim in secunda operis parte abunde præstitimus, sed plane typos intelligimus ac plasmata, quæ universum mentis processum atque inveniendi continuatam fabricam et ordinem in certis subjectis, iisque variis et insignibus tanquam sub oculos ponant. Etenim nobis venit in mentem in mathematicis, astente machina, sequi demonstrationem facilem et perspicuam; contra absque hac commoditate omnia videri involuta et quam revera sunt subtiliora.

[191] Lib. vi. cap. 2. Scientia quæ aliis tanquam tela pertexendo traditur, eadem methodo, si fieri possit, animo alterius est insinuanda, qua primitus inventa est. Atque hoc ipsum fieri sane potest in scientia per inductionem acquisita: sed in anticipata ista et præmatura scientia, qua utimur, non facile dicat quis quo itinere ad eam quam nactus est scientiam pervenerit. Attamen sane secundum majus et minus possit quis scientiam propriam revisere, et vestigia suæ cognitionis simul et consensûs remetiri; atque hoc facto scientiam sic transplantare in animum alienum, sicut crevit in suo.... Cujus quidem generis traditionis, methodus mathematicorum in eo subjecto similitudinem quandam habet. I do not well understand the words, in eo subjecto; he may possibly have referred to analytical processes.

|Fifth part: Anticipationes Philosophiæ.|

|Sixth part: Philosophia Secunda.|

40. In the fifth part of the Instauratio Magna, Bacon had designed to give a specimen of the new philosophy which he hoped to raise after a due use of his natural history and inductive method, by way of anticipation or sample of the whole. He calls it Prodromi, sive Anticipationes Philosophiæ Secundæ. And some fragments of this part are published by the names Cogitata et Visa, Cogitationes de Natura Rerum, Filum Labyrinthi, and a few more, being as much, in all probability, as he had reduced to writing. In his own metaphor, it was to be like the payment of interest, till the principal could be raised; tanquam fœnus reddatur, donec sors haberi possit. For he despaired of ever completing the work by a sixth and last portion, which was to display a perfect system of philosophy, deduced and confirmed by a legitimate, sober, and exact inquiry according to the method which he had invented and laid down. “To perfect this last part is above our powers and beyond our hopes. We may, as we trust, make no despicable beginnings, the destinies of the human race must complete it; in such a manner, perhaps, as men, looking only at the present, would not readily conceive. For upon this will depend not only a speculative good, but all the fortunes of mankind, and all their power.” And with an eloquent prayer that his exertions may be rendered effectual to the attainment of truth and happiness, this introductory chapter of the Instauratio, which announces the distribution of its portions, concludes. Such was the temple, of which Bacon saw in vision before him the stately front and decorated pediments, in all their breadth of light and harmony of proportion, while long vistas of receding columns and glimpses of internal splendour revealed a glory that it was not permitted him to comprehend. In the treatise De Augmentis Scientiarum, and in the Novum Organum, we have less, no doubt, than Lord Bacon, under different conditions of life, might have achieved; he might have been more emphatically the high-priest of nature, if he had not been the chancellor of James I.; but no one man could have filled up the vast outline which he alone, in that stage of the world, could have so boldly sketched.

|Course of studying Lord Bacon.|

41. The best order of studying the Baconian philosophy would be to read attentively the Advancement of Learning; next, to take the treatise De Augmentis, comparing it all along with the former, and afterwards to proceed to the Novum Organum. A less degree of regard has usually been paid to the Centuries of Natural History, which are the least important of his writings, or even to the other philosophical fragments, some of which contain very excellent passages; yet such, in great measure, as will be found substantially in other parts of his works. The most remarkable are the Cogitata et Visa. It must be said, that one who thoroughly venerates Lord Bacon will not disdain his repetitions, which sometimes, by variations of phrase, throw light upon each other. It is generally supposed that the Latin works were translated by several assistants, among whom Herbert and Hobbes have been named, under the author’s superintendence.[192] The Latin style of these writings is singularly concise, energetic and impressive, but frequently crabbed, uncouth and obscure; so that we read with more admiration of the sense than delight in the manner of delivering it. But Rawley, in his Life of Bacon, informs us that he had seen about twelve autographs of the Novum Organum, wrought up and improved year by year, till it reached the shape in which it was published, and he does not intimate that these were in English, unless the praise he immediately afterwards bestows on his English style may be thought to warrant that supposition.[193] I do not know that we have evidence as to any of the Latin works being translations from English, except the treatise De Augmentis.

[192] The translation was made, as Archbishop Tenison informs us, “by Mr. Herbert and some others, who were esteemed masters in the Roman eloquence.”

[193] Ipse reperi in archivis dominationis suæ, autographa plus minus duodecim Organi Novi de anno in annum elaborati, et ad incudem revocati, et singulis annis, ulteriore lima subinde politi et castigati, donec in illud tandem corpus adoleverat, quo in lucem editum fuit; sicut multa ex animalibus fœtus lambere consuescunt usque quo ad membrorum firmitudinem eos perducant. In libris suis componendis verborum vigorem et perspicuitatem præcipuè sectabatur, non elegantiam aut concinnitatem sermonis, et inter scribendum aut dictandum sæpe interrogavit, num sensus ejus clare admodum et perspicuè redditus esset? Quippe qui sciret æquum esse ut verba famularentur rebus, non res verbis. Et si in stylum forsitan politiorem incidisset, siquidem apud nostrates eloquii Anglicani artifex habitus est, id evenit, quia evitare arduum ei erat.

42. The leading principles of the Baconian philosophy are contained in the Advancement of Learning. These are amplified, corrected, illustrated, and developed in the treatise De Augmentis Scientiarum, from the fifth book of which, with some help from other parts, is taken the first book of the Novum Organum, and even a part of the second. I use this phrase, because, though earlier in publication, I conceive that the Novum Organum was later in composition. All the very important part of this fifth book which relates to Experientia Litterata, or Venatio Panis, as he calls it, and contains excellent rules for conducting experiments in natural philosophy, is new, and does not appear in the Advancement of Learning, except by way of promise of what should be done in it. Nor is this, at least so fully and clearly, to be found in the Novum Organum. The second book of this latter treatise he professes not to anticipate. De Novo Organo silemus, he says, neque de eo quicquam prælibamus. This can only apply to the second book, which he considered as the real exposition of his method, after clearing away the fallacies which form the chief subject of the first. Yet what is said of Topica particularis, in this fifth book De Augmentis (illustrated by “articles of inquiry concerning gravity and levity”), goes entirely on the principles of the second book of the Novum Organum.

|Nature of the Baconian Induction.|

43. Let us now see what Lord Bacon’s method really was. He has given it the name of induction, but carefully distinguishes it from what bore that name in the old logic, that is, an inference from a perfect enumeration of particulars to a general law of the whole. For such an enumeration, though of course conclusive, is rarely practicable in nature, where the particulars exceed our powers of numbering.[194] Nor again is the Baconian method to be confounded with the less complete form of the inductive process, namely, inferences from partial experience in similar circumstances; though this may be a very sufficient ground for practical, which is probable knowledge. His own method rests on the same general principle, namely, the uniformity of the laws of nature, so that in certain conditions of phænomena the same effects or the same causes may be assumed; but it endeavours to establish these laws on a more exact and finer process of reasoning than partial experience can effect. For the recurrence of antecedents, and consequents does not prove a necessary connection between them, unless we can exclude the presence of all other conditions which may determine the event. Long and continued experience of such a recurrence, indeed, raises a high probability of a necessary connexion; but the aim of Bacon was to supersede experience in this sense, and to find a shorter road to the result; and for this his methods of exclusion are devised. As complete and accurate a collection of facts, connected with the subject of inquiry, as possible is to be made out by means of that copious natural history which he contemplated, or from any other good sources. These are to be selected, compared, and scrutinized, according to the rules of natural interpretation delivered in the second book of the Novum Organum, or such others as he designed to add to them; and if experiments are admissible, these are to be conducted according to the same rules. Experience and observation are the guides through the Baconian philosophy, which is the handmaid and interpreter of nature. When Lord Bacon seems to decry experience, which in certain passages he might be thought to do, it is the particular and empirical observation of individuals, from which many rash generalisations had been drawn, as opposed to that founded on an accurate natural history. Such hasty inferences he reckoned still more pernicious to true knowledge than the sophistical methods of the current philosophy; and, in a remarkable passage, after censuring this precipitancy of empirical conclusions in the chemists, and in Gilbert’s Treatise on the Magnet, utters a prediction that if ever mankind, excited by his counsels, should seriously betake themselves to seek the guidance of experience instead of relying on the dogmatic schools of the sophists, the proneness of the human mind to snatch at general axioms would expose them to much risk of error from the theories of this superficial class of philosophers.[195]

[194] Inductio quæ procedit per enumerationem simplicem, res puerilis est, et precario concludit, et periculo exponitur ab instantia contradictoria, et plerumque secundum pauciora quam par est, et ex his tantummodo quæ præsto sunt, pronuntiat. At inductio quæ ad inventionem et demonstrationem scientiarum et artium erit utilis, naturam separare debet, per rejectiones et exclusiones debitas; ac deinde post negativas tot quot sufficiunt, super affirmativas concludere; quod adhuc factum non est, nec tentatum certe, nisi tantummodo a Platone, qui ad excutiendas definitiones et ideas, hac certe forma inductionis aliquatenus utitur. Nov. Org. i. 105. In this passage Bacon seems to imply that the enumeration of particulars in any induction is or may be imperfect. This is certainly the case in the plurality of physical inductions; but it doss not appear that the logical writers looked upon this as the primary and legitimate sense. Induction was distinguished into the complete and incomplete. “The word,” says a very moderate writer, “is perhaps unhappy, as indeed it is taken in several vague senses; but to abolish it is impossible. It is the Latin translation of επαγωγη [epagôgê], which word is used by Aristotle as a counterpart to συλλογισμος [sullogismos]. He seems to consider it in a perfect, or dialectic, and in an imperfect or rhetorical sense. Thus, if a genus (G.) contained four species (A. B. C. D.), syllogism would argue, that what is true of G. is true of any one of the four; but perfect induction would reason, that what we can prove true of A. B. C. D. separately, we may properly state as true of G., the whole genus. This is evidently a formal argument, as demonstrative as syllogism. But the imperfect or rhetorical induction will perhaps enumerate three only of the species, and then draw the conclusion concerning G., which virtually includes the fourth, or what is the same thing, will argue, that what is true of the three is to be believed true likewise of the fourth.” Newman’s Lectures on Logic, p. 73 (1837). The same distinction between perfect and imperfect induction is made in the Encyclopédie Françoise, art. Induction, and apparently on the authority of the ancients.

It may be observed, that this imperfect induction may be put in a regular logical form, and is only vicious in syllogistic reasoning when the conclusion asserts a higher probability than the premises. If, for example, we reason thus: Some serpents are venomous--This unknown animal is a serpent-Therefore, this is venomous; we are guilty of an obvious paralogism. If we infer only, This may be venomous, our reasoning is perfectly valid in itself, at least in the common apprehension of all mankind, except dialecticians, but not regular in form. The only means that I perceive of making it so, is to put it in some such phrase as the following: All unknown serpents are affected by a certain probability of being venomous: This animal, &c. It is not necessary, of course, that the probability should be capable of being estimated, provided we mentally conceive it to be no other in the conclusion than in the major term. In the best treatises on the strict or syllogistic method, as far as I have seen, there seems a deficiency in respect to _probable_ conclusions, which may have arisen from the practice of taking instances from universal or necessary, rather than contingent truths, as well as from the contracted views of reasoning which the Aristotelian school have always inculcated. No sophisms are so frequent in practice as the concluding generally from a partial induction, or assuming (most commonly tacitly) by what Archbishop Whateley calls “a kind of logical fiction,” that a few individuals are “adequate samples or representations of the class they belong to.” These sophisms cannot, in the present state of things, be practised largely in physical science or natural history; but in reasonings on matter of fact they are of incessant occurrence. The “logical fiction” may indeed frequently be employed, even on subjects unconnected with the physical laws of nature; but to know when this may be, and to what extent, is just that which, far more than any other skill, distinguishes what is called a good reasoner from a bad one. This note will not, by an attentive reader, be thought inapposite to the text, or to some passages that will follow in the present chapter.

[195] Nov. Organ. lib. i. 64. It may be doubted whether Bacon did full justice to Gilbert.

|His dislike of Aristotle.|

44. The indignation, however, of Lord Bacon is more frequently directed against the predominant philosophy of his age, that of Aristotle and the schoolmen. Though he does justice to the great abilities of the former, and acknowledges the exact attention to facts displayed in his History of Animals, he deems him one of the most eminent adversaries to the only method that can guide us to the real laws of nature. The old Greek philosophers, Empedocles, Leucippus, Anaxagoras, and others of their age, who had been in the right track of investigation, stood much higher in his esteem than their successors, Plato, Zeno, Aristotle, by whose lustre they had been so much superseded, that both their works have perished and their tenets are with difficulty collected. These more distinguished leaders of the Grecian schools were in his eyes little else than disputatious professors (it must be remembered that Bacon had in general only physical science in his view) who seemed to have it in common with children, “ut ad garriendum prompti sint, generare non possint;” so wordy and barren was their miscalled wisdom.

|His method much required.|

45. Those who object to the importance of Lord Bacon’s precepts in philosophy that mankind have practised, many of them immemorially, are rather confirming their utility than taking off much from their originality in any fair sense of that term. Every logical method is built on the common faculties of human nature, which have been exercised since the creation in discerning, better or worse, truth from falsehood, and inferring the unknown from the known. That men might have done this more correctly, is manifest from the quantity of error into which, from want of reasoning well on what came before them, they have habitually fallen. In experimental philosophy, to which the more special rules of Lord Bacon are generally referred, there was a notorious want of that very process of reasoning which he has supplied. It is probable, indeed, that the great physical philosophers of the seventeenth century would have been led to employ some of his rules, had he never promulgated them; but I believe they had been little regarded in the earlier period of science.[196] It is also a very defective view of the Baconian method to look only at the experimental rules given in the Novum Organum. The preparatory steps of completely exhausting the natural history of the subject of inquiry by a patient and sagacious consideration of it in every light, are at least of equal importance, and equally prominent in the inductive philosophy.

[196] It has been remarked, that the famous experiment of Pascal on the barometer, by carrying it to a considerable elevation, was “a _crucial instance_, one of the first, if not the very first on record in physics.” Herschel, p. 229.

|Its objects.|

46. The first object of Lord Bacon’s philosophical writings is to prove their own necessity, by giving an unfavourable impression as to the actual state of most sciences, in consequence of the prejudices of the human mind, and of the mistaken methods pursued in their cultivation. The second was to point out a better prospect for the future. One of these occupies the treatise De Augmentis, and the first book of the Novum Organum. The other, besides many anticipations in these, is partially detailed in the second book, and would have been more thoroughly developed in those remaining portions which the author did not complete. We shall now give a very short sketch of these two famous works, which comprise the greater part of the Baconian philosophy.

|Sketch of the treatise De Augmentis.|

|History.|

|Poetry.|

47. The Advancement of Learning is divided into two books only; the treatise De Augmentis into nine. The first of these, in the latter, is introductory, and designed to remove prejudices against the search for truth, by indicating the causes which had hitherto obstructed it. In the second book, he lays down his celebrated partition of human learning into history, poetry, and philosophy, according to the faculties of the mind respectively concerned in them, the memory, imagination and reason. History is natural or civil, under the latter of which ecclesiastical and literary histories are comprised. These again fall into regular subdivisions; all of which he treats in summary manner, and points out the deficiencies which ought to be supplied in many departments of history. Poetry succeeds in the last chapter of the same book, but by confining that name to fictitious narrative, except as to the ornaments of style, which he refers to a different part of his subject, he much limited his views of that literature; even if it were true, as it certainly is not, that the imagination alone, in any ordinary use of the word, is the medium of poetical emotion. The word emotion indeed is sufficient to show that Bacon should either have excluded poetry altogether from his enumeration of sciences and learning, or taken into consideration other faculties of the soul than those which are merely intellectual.

|Fine passage on poetry.|

48. Stewart has praised with justice a short but beautiful paragraph concerning poetry (under which title may be comprehended all the various creations of the faculty of imagination) wherein Bacon “has exhausted everything that philosophy and good sense have yet had to offer on the subject of what has since been called the _beau idéal_.” The same eminent writer and ardent admirer of Bacon observes that D’Alembert improved on the Baconian arrangement by classing the fine arts with poetry. Injustice had been done to painting and music, especially the former, when, in the fourth book De Augmentis, they were counted as mere “artes voluptariæ,” subordinate to a sort of Epicurean gratification of the senses, and only somewhat more liberal than cookery or cosmetics.

|Natural Theology and Metaphysics.|

|Form of bodies.|

49. In the third book, science having been divided into theological and philosophical, and the former, or what regards revealed religion, being postponed for the present, he lays it down that all philosophy relates to God, to nature, or to man. Under natural theology, as a sort of appendix, he reckons the doctrine of angels and superhuman spirits; a more favourite theme, especially as treated independently of revelation, in the ages that preceded Lord Bacon, than it has been since. Natural philosophy is speculative or practical; the former divided into physics, in a particular sense, and metaphysics; “one of which enquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; the other handleth the formal and final causes.” Hence, physics dealing with particular instances, and regarding only the effects produced, is precarious in its conclusions, and does not reach the stable principles of causation.

Limus ut hic durescit, et hæc ut cera liquescit Uno eodemque igni.

Metaphysics, to which word he gave a sense as remote from that which it bore in the Aristotelian schools, as from that in which it is commonly employed at present, had for its proper object the investigation of forms. It was “a generally received and inveterate opinion, that the inquisition of man is not competent to find out essential forms or true differences.” Formæ inventio, he says in another place, habetur pro desperata. The word _form_ itself, being borrowed from the old philosophy, is not immediately intelligible to every reader. “In the Baconian sense,” says Playfair, “form differs only from cause in being permanent, whereas, we apply cause to that which exists in order of time.” Form (_natura naturans_, as it was barbarously called) is the general law, or condition of existence, in any substance or quality (_natura naturata_), which is wherever its form is.[197] The conditions of a mathematical figure, prescribed in its definition, might in this sense be called its form, if it did not seem to be Lord Bacon’s intention to confine the word to the laws of particular sensible existences. In modern philosophy, it might be defined to be that particular combination of forces, which impresses a certain modification upon matter subjected to their influence.

[197] Licet enim in natura nihil vere existat præter corpora individua, edentia actus puros individuos ex lege, in doctrinis tamen illa ipsa lex, ejusque inquisitio, et inventio atque explicatio pro fundamento est tam ad sciendum quam operandum. Eam autem legem ejusque paragraphos, Formarum nomine intelligimus; præsertim cum hoc vocabulum invaluerit et familiariter occurrat. Nov. Org. ii. 2.

|Might sometimes be inquired into.|

50. To a knowledge of such forms, or laws of essence and existence, at least in a certain degree, it might be possible, in Bacon’s sanguine estimation of his own logic, for man to attain. Not that we could hope to understand the forms of complex beings, which are almost infinite in variety, but the simple and primary natures, which are combined in them. “To inquire the form of a lion, of an oak, of gold, nay of water, of air, is a vain pursuit; but to inquire the forms of sense, of voluntary motion, of vegetation, of colours, of gravity and levity, of density and tenuity, of heat, of cold, and all other natures and qualities, which, like an alphabet, are not many, and of which the essences, upheld by matter, of all creatures do consist; to inquire, I say, the true forms of these is that part of metaphysic which we now define of.”[198] Thus, in the words he soon afterwards uses, “of natural philosophy, the basis is natural history; the stage next the basis is physic; the stage next the vertical point is metaphysic. As for the vertical point, ‘Opus quod operatur Deos a principio usque ad finem,’ the summary law of nature, we know not whether man’s inquiry can attain unto it.”[199]

[198] In the Novum Organum he seems to have gone a little beyond this, and to have hoped that the form itself of concrete things might be known. Datæ autem naturæ formam, sive differentiam veram, sive naturam naturantem, sive fontem emanationis (ista enim vocabula habemus, quæ ad indicationem rei proxime accedunt), invenire opus et intentio est Humanæ Scientiæ. Lib. ii. 1.

[199] Advancement of Learning, book ii. This sentence he has scarcely altered in the Latin.

|Final causes too much slighted.|

51. The second object of metaphysics, according to Lord Bacon’s notion of the word, was the investigation of final causes. It is well known that he has spoken of this with unguarded disparagement.[200] “Like a virgin consecrated to God, it bears nothing;” one of those witty conceits that sparkle over his writings, but will not bear a severe examination. It has been well remarked that almost at the moment he published this, one of the most important discoveries of his age, the circulation of the blood, had rewarded the acuteness of Harvey in reasoning on the final cause of the valves in the veins.

[200] Causa finalis tantum abest ut prosit, ut etiam scientias corrumpat, nisi in hominis actionibus. Nov. Org. ii. 2. It must be remembered that Bacon had good reason to deprecate the admixture of theological dogmas with philosophy, which had been, and has often since been, the absolute perversion of all legitimate reasoning in science. See what Stewart has said upon Lord Bacon’s objection to reasoning from final causes in _physics_. Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers, book iii., chap. 2, sect. 4.

|Man not included by him in physics.|

52. Nature, or physical philosophy, according to Lord Bacon’s partition, did not comprehend the human species. Whether this be not more consonant to popular language, adopted by preceding systems of philosophy, than to a strict and perspicuous arrangement, may by some be doubted; though a very respectable authority, that of Dugald Stewart, is opposed to including man in the province of physics. For it is surely strange to separate the physiology of the human body, as quite a science of another class, from that of inferior animals; and if we place this part of our being under the department of physical philosophy, we shall soon be embarrassed by what Bacon has called the “doctrina de fœdere,” the science of the connection between the soul of man and his bodily frame, a vast and interesting field, even yet very imperfectly explored.

|Man, in body and mind.|

|Logic.|

53. It has pleased, however, the author to follow his own arrangement. The fourth book relates to the constitution, bodily and mental, of mankind. In this book he has introduced several subdivisions which, considered merely as such, do not always appear the most philosophical; but the pregnancy and acuteness of his observations under each head silences all criticism of this kind. This book has nearly double the extent of the corresponding pages in the Advancement of Learning. The doctrine as to the substance of the thinking principle having been very slightly touched, or rather passed over, with two curious disquisitions on divination and fascination, he advances in four ensuing books to the intellectual and moral faculties, and those sciences which immediately depend upon them. Logic and Ethics are the grand divisions, co-relative to the reason and the will of man. Logic, according to Lord Bacon, comprizes the sciences of inventing, judging, retaining, and delivering the conceptions of the mind. We invent, that is, discover new arts or new arguments; we judge by induction or by syllogism; the memory is capable of being aided by artificial methods. All these processes of the mind are the subjects of several sciences, which it was the peculiar aim of Bacon, by his own logic, to place on solid foundations.

|Extent given it by Bacon.|

54. It is here to be remarked, that the sciences of logic and ethics, according to the partitions of Lord Bacon, are far more extensive than we are accustomed to consider them. Whatever concerned the human intellect came under the first; whatever related to the will and affections of the mind fell under the head of ethics. Logica de intellectu et ratione, ethica de voluntate appetitu et affectibus disserit; altera decreta, altera actiones progignit. But it has been usual to confine logic to the methods of guiding the understanding in the search for truth; and some, though, as it seems to me, in a manner not warranted by the best usage of philosophers,[201] have endeavoured to exclude everything but the syllogistic mode of reasoning from the logical province. Whether again the nature and operations of the human mind, in general, ought to be reckoned a part of physics, has already been mentioned as a disputable question.

[201] In altera philosophiæ parte, quæ est _quærendi_ ac disserendi, quæ λογικη [logikê] dicitur. Cic. de Fin. i. 14.

|Grammar and Rhetoric.|

55. The science of delivering our own thoughts to others, branching into grammar and rhetoric, and including poetry, so far as its proper vehicles, metre and diction, are concerned, occupies the sixth book. In all this he finds more desiderata than from the great attention paid to these subjects by the ancients could have been expected. Thus, his ingenious collection of antitheta, or common places in rhetoric, though mentioned by Cicero as to the judicial species of eloquence, is first extended by Bacon himself to the deliberative or political orations. I do not, however, think it probable that this branch of topics could have been neglected by antiquity, though the writings relating to it may not have descended to us; nor can we by any means say there is nothing of the kind in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Whether the utility of these common places, when collected in books, be very great, is another question. And a similar doubt might be suggested with respect to the elenchs, or refutations, of rhetorical sophisms, “colores boni et mali,” which he reports as equally deficient, though a commencement had been made by Aristotle.

|Ethics.|

|Politics.|

|Theology.|

56. In the seventh book we come to ethical science. This he deems to have been insufficiently treated. He would have the different tempers and characters of mankind first considered, then their passions and affections (neither of which, as he justly observes, finds a place in the Ethics of Aristotle, though they are sometimes treated, not so appositely, in his Rhetoric); lastly, the methods of altering and affecting the will and appetite, such as custom, education, imitation, or society. “The main and primitive division of moral knowledge seemeth to be into the exemplar or platform of good, and the regiment or culture of the mind; the one describing the nature of good, the other presenting rules how to subdue, apply and accommodate the will of man thereunto.” This latter he also calls “the Georgics of the mind.” He seems to place “the platform or essence of good” in seeking the good of the whole, rather than that of the individual, applying this to refute the ancient theories as to the summum bonum. But perhaps Bacon had not thoroughly disentangled this question, and confounds, as is not unusual, the _summum bonum_, or personal felicity, with the object of moral action, or _commune bonum_. He is right, however, in preferring, morally speaking, the active to the contemplative life against Aristotle and other philosophers. This part is translated in De Augmentis, with little variation, from the Advancement of Learning; as is also what follows on the Georgics, or culture, of the mind. The philosophy of civil life, as it relates both to the conduct of men in their mutual intercourse, which is properly termed prudence, and to that higher prudence, which is concerned with the administration of communities, fills up the chart of the Baconian ethics. In the eighth book, admirable reflections on the former of these subjects occur at almost every sentence. Many, perhaps most of these, will be found in the Advancement of Learning. But in this, he had been, for a reason sufficiently obvious and almost avowed, cautiously silent upon the art of government--the craft of his king. The motives for silence were still so powerful, that he treats only in the De Augmentis, of two heads in political science; the methods of enlarging the boundaries of the state, which James I. could hardly resent as an interference with his own monopoly, and one of far more importance to the well-being of mankind, the principles of universal jurisprudence, or rather of universal legislation, according to which standard all laws ought to be framed. These he has sketched in ninety-seven aphorisms, or short rules, which, from the great experience of Bacon in the laws, as his peculiar vocation towards that part of philosophy, deserve to be studied at this day. Upon such topics, the progressive and innovating spirit of his genius was less likely to be perceived; but he is, perhaps, equally free from what he has happily called in one of his essays, the “froward retention of custom,” the prejudice of mankind, like that of perverse children, against what is advised to them for their real good, and what they cannot deny to be conducive to it. This whole eighth book is pregnant with profound and original thinking. The ninth and last, which is short, glances only at some desiderata in theological science, and is chiefly remarkable as it displays a more liberal and catholic spirit than was often to be met with in a period signalized by bigotry and ecclesiastical pride. But as the abjuration of human authority is the first principle of Lord Bacon’s philosophy, and the preparation for his logic, it was not expedient to say too much of its usefulness in the theological pursuits.

|Desiderata enumerated by him.|

57. At the conclusion of the whole, we may find a summary catalogue of the deficiencies which, in the course of this ample review, Lord Bacon had found worthy of being supplied by patient and philosophical inquiry. Of these desiderata, few, I fear, have since been filled up, at least in a collective and systematic manner, according to his suggestions. Great materials, useful intimations, and even partial delineations, are certainly to be found, as so many of the rest, in the writings of those who have done honour to the last two centuries. But with all our pride in modern science, very much even of what, in Bacon’s time, was perceived to be wanting, remains for the diligence and sagacity of those who are yet to come.

|Novum Organum: first book.|

58. The first book of the Novum Organum, if it is not better known than any other part of Bacon’s philosophical writings, has at least furnished more of those striking passages which shine in quotation. It is written in detached aphorisms; the sentences, even where these aphorisms are longest, not flowing much into one another, so as to create a suspicion, that he had formed adversaria, to which he committed his thoughts as they arose. It is full of repetitions; and indeed this is so usual with Lord Bacon, that whenever we find an acute reflection or brilliant analogy, it is more than an even chance that it will recur in some other place. I have already observed that he has hinted the Novum Organum to be a digested summary of his method, but not the entire system as he designed to develop it, even in that small portion which he has handled at all.

|Fallacies. Idola.|

59. Of the splendid passages in the Novum Organum none are perhaps so remarkable as his celebrated division of fallacies, not such as the dialecticians had been accustomed to refute, depending upon equivocal words, or faulty disposition of premises, but lying far deeper in the natural or incidental prejudices of the mind itself. These are four in number: _idola tribûs_, to which from certain common weaknesses of human nature we are universally liable; _idola specûs_, which from peculiar dispositions and circumstances of individuals mislead them in different manners; _idola fori_, arising from the current usage of words which represent things much otherwise than as they really are; and _idola theatri_, which false systems of philosophy and erroneous methods of reasoning have introduced. Hence, as the refracted ray gives us a false notion as to the place of the object whose image it transmits, so our own minds are a refracting medium to the objects of their own contemplation, and require all the aid of a well-directed philosophy either to rectify the perception, or to make allowances for its errors.

|Confounded with idols.|

60. These idola, ειδωλα [eidôla], images, illusions, fallacies, or, as Lord Bacon calls them in the Advancement of Learning, false appearances, have been often named in English _idols_ of the tribe, of the den, of the market place. But it seems better, unless we retain the Latin name, to employ one of the synonymous terms given above. For the use of idol in this sense is unwarranted by the practice of the language, nor is it found in Bacon himself; but it has misled a host of writers, whoever might be the first that applied it, even among such as are conversant with the Novum Organum. “Bacon proceeds,” says Playfair, “to enumerate the causes of error, the _idols_ as he calls them, or false divinities to which the mind had so long been accustomed to bow.” And with a similar misapprehension of the meaning of the word, in speaking of the _idola specûs_, he says: “besides the causes of error which are common to all mankind, each individual, according to Bacon, has his own dark cavern or den, into which the light is imperfectly admitted, and obscurity of which a tutelary idol lurks, at whose shrine the truth is often sacrificed.”[202] Thus also Dr. Thomas Brown; “in the inmost sanctuaries of the mind were all the idols which he overthrew;” and a later author on the Novum Organum fancies that Bacon “strikingly, though in his usual quaint style, calls the prejudices that check the progress of the mind by the name of idols, because mankind are apt to pay homage to these instead of regarding truth.”[203] Thus too in the translation of the Novum Organum, published in Mr. Basil Montagu’s edition, we find _idola_ rendered by idols, without explanation. We may in fact say that this meaning has been almost universally given by the later writers. By whom it was introduced, I am not able to say. Cudworth, in a passage where he glances at Bacon, has said, “it is no _idol of the den_, to use that affected language.” But, in the pedantic style of the seventeenth century, it is not impossible that idol may here have been put as a mere translation of the Greek ειδωλον [eidôlon], and in the same general sense of an idea or intellectual image.[204] Although the popular sense would not be inapposite to the general purpose of Bacon in this first part of the Novum Organum, it cannot be reckoned so exact and philosophical an illustration of the sources of human error as the unfaithful image, the shadow of reality, seen through a refracting surface, or reflected from an unequal mirror, as in the Platonic hypothesis of the cave, wherein we are placed with our backs to the light, to which he seems to allude in his _idola specûs_.[205] And as this is also plainly the true meaning, as a comparison with the parallel passages in the Advancement of Learning demonstrates, there can be no pretence for continuing to employ a word which has served to mislead such men as Brown and Playfair.

[202] Preliminary Dissertation to Encyclopædia.

[203] Introduction to the Novum Organum, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Even Stewart seems to have fallen into the same error. “While these idols of the den maintain their authority, the cultivation of the philosophical spirit is impossible; or rather it is in a renunciation of his idolatry that the philosophical spirit essentially consists.” Dissertation, &c.--The observation is equally true, whatever sense we may give to _idol_.

[204] In Todd’s edition of Johnson’s Dictionary this sense is not mentioned. But in that of the Encyclopædia Metropolitana we have these words: “An _idol_ or image is also opposed to a reality: thus Lord Bacon (see the quotation from him) speaks of idols or false appearances.” The quotation is from the translation of one of his short tracts, which is not made by himself. It is however a proof that the word _idol_ was once at least used in this sense.

[205] Quisque ex phantasiæ suæ cellulis, tanquam ex specu Platonis, philosophatur; Historia Naturalis, in præfatione Coleridge has some fine lines in allusion to this hypothesis in that magnificent effusion of his genius, the introduction to the second book of Joan of Arc, but withdrawn, after the first edition, from that poem; where he describes us as “Placed with our backs to bright reality.” I am not however certain that Bacon meant this. See De Augmentis, lib. v. c. 4.

|Second book of Novum Organum.|

61. In the second book of the Novum Organum, we come at length to the new logic, the interpretation of nature, as he calls it, or the rules for conducting inquiries in natural philosophy according to his inductive method. It is, as we have said, a fragment of his entire system, and is chiefly confined to the “prerogative instances,”[206] or phænomena which are to be selected, for various reasons, as most likely to aid our investigations of nature. Fifteen of these are used to guide the intellect, five to assist the senses, seven to correct the practice. This second book is written with more than usual want of perspicuity, and though it is intrinsically the Baconian philosophy in a pre-eminent sense, I much doubt whether it is very extensively read, though far more so than it was fifty years since. Playfair, however, has given an excellent abstract of it in his Preliminary Dissertation to the Encyclopædia Britannica, with abundant and judicious illustrations from modern science. Sir John Herschel, in his admirable Discourse on Natural Philosophy, has added a greater number from still more recent discoveries, and has also furnished such a luminous development of the difficulties of the Novum Organum, as had been vainly hoped in former times. The commentator of Bacon should be himself of an original genius in philosophy. These novel illustrations are the more useful, because Bacon himself, from defective knowledge of natural phænomena, and from what, though contrary to his precepts, his ardent fancy could not avoid, a premature hastening to explain the essences of things instead of their proximate causes, has frequently given erroneous examples. It is to be observed on the other hand, that he often anticipates with marvellous sagacity the discoveries of posterity, and that his patient and acute analysis of the phænomena of heat has been deemed a model of his own inductive reasoning. “No one,” observes Playfair, “has done so much in such circumstances.” He was even ignorant of some things that he might have known; he wanted every branch of mathematics; and placed in this remote corner of Europe, without many kindred minds to animate his zeal for physical science, seems hardly to have believed the discoveries of Galileo.

[206] The allusion in “prærogativæ instantiarum” is not to the English word prerogative, as Sir John Herschel seems to suppose (Discourse on Natural Philosophy, p. 182), but to the prærogativa centuria in the Roman comitia, which being first called, though by lot, was generally found, by some prejudice or superstition, to influence the rest, which seldom voted otherwise. It is rather a forced analogy, which is not uncommon with Bacon.

|Confidence of Bacon.|

62. It has happened to Lord Bacon, as it has to many other writers, that he has been extolled for qualities by no means characteristic of his mind. The first aphorism of the Novum Organum, so frequently quoted, “Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, performs and understands so much as he has collected concerning the order of nature by observation or reason, nor do his power or his knowledge extend farther,” has seemed to bespeak an extreme sobriety of imagination, a willingness to acquiesce in registering the phænomena of nature without seeking a revelation of her secrets. And nothing is more true than that such was the cautious and patient course of inquiry prescribed by him to all the genuine disciples of his inductive method. But he was far from being one of those humble philosophers who would limit human science to the enumeration of particular facts. He had, on the contrary, vast hopes of the human intellect under the guidance of his new logic. The Latens Schematismus, or intrinsic configuration of bodies, the Latens processus ad formam, or transitional operation through which they pass from one form, or condition of nature, to another, would one day, as he hoped, be brought to light; and this not, of course, by simple observation of the senses, nor even by assistance of instruments, concerning the utility of which he was rather sceptical, but by a rigorous application of exclusive and affirmative propositions to the actual phænomena by the inductive method. “It appears,” says Playfair, “that Bacon placed the ultimate object of philosophy too high, and too much out of the reach of man, even when his exertions are most skilfully conducted. He seems to have thought, that by giving a proper direction to our researches, and carrying them on according to the inductive method, we should arrive at the knowledge of the essences of the powers and qualities residing in bodies; that we should, for instance, become acquainted with the essence of heat, of cold, of colour, of transparency. The fact however is that, in as far as science has yet advanced, no one essence has been discovered, either as to matter in general, or as to any of its more extensive modifications. We are yet in doubt whether heat is a peculiar motion of the minute parts of bodies, as Bacon himself conceived it to be, or something emitted or radiated from their surfaces, or, lastly, the vibrations of an elastic medium by which they are penetrated and surrounded.”

|Almost justified of late.|

63. It requires a very extensive survey of the actual dominion of science, and a great sagacity to judge, even in the loosest manner, what is beyond the possible limits of human knowledge. Certainly, since the time when this passage was written by Playfair, more steps have been made towards realising the sanguine anticipations of Bacon than in the two centuries that had elapsed since the publication of the Novum Organum. We do not yet _know_ the real nature of heat, but few would pronounce it impossible or even unlikely that we may know it, in the same sense that we know other physical realities not immediately perceptible, before many years shall have expired. The atomic theory of Dalton, the laws of crystalline substances discovered by Häuy, the development of others still subtler by Mitscherlich, instead of exhibiting, as the older philosophy had done, the idola rerum, the sensible appearances of concrete substance, radiations from the internal glory, admit us, as it were, to stand within the vestibule of nature’s temple, and to gaze on the very curtain of the shrine. If indeed we could know the internal structure of one primary atom, and could tell, not of course by immediate testimony of sense, but by legitimate inference from it, through what constant laws its component molecules, the atoms of atoms, attract, retain, and repel each other, we should have before our mental vision not only the Latens Schematismus, the real configuration of substances, but their _form_, or efficient nature, and could give as perfect a definition of any one of them, of gold for example, as we can of a cone or parallelogram. The recent discoveries of animal and vegetable development, and especially the happy application of the microscope to observing chemical and organic changes in their actual course, are equally remarkable advances towards a knowledge of the Latens processus ad formam, the corpuscular motions by which all change must be accomplished, and are in fact a great deal more than Bacon himself would have deemed possible.[207]

[207] By the Latens processus, he meant only what is the natural operation by which one form or condition of being is induced upon another. Thus, when the surface of iron becomes rusty, or when water is converted into steam some change has taken place, a _latent_ _progress_ from one form to another. This, in numberless cases, we can now answer, at least to a very great extent, by the science of chemistry.

|But should be kept within bounds.|

64. These astonishing revelations of natural mysteries, fresh tidings of which crowd in upon us every day, may be likely to overwhelm all sober hesitation as to the capacities of the human mind, and to bring back that confidence which Bacon, in so much less favourable circumstances, has ventured to feel. There seem, however, to be good reasons for keeping within bounds this expectation of future improvement, which, as it has sometimes been announced in unqualified phrases, is hardly more philosophical than the vulgar supposition that the capacities of mankind are almost stationary. The phænomena of nature indeed, in all their possible combinations, are so infinite, in a popular sense of the word, that during no period, to which the human species can be conceived to reach, would they be entirely collected and registered. The case is still stronger as to the secret agencies and processes by means of which their phænomena are displayed. These have as yet, in no one instance, so far as I know, been fully ascertained. “Microscopes,” says Herschel, “have been constructed which magnify more than one thousand times in linear dimension, so that the smallest visible grain of sand may be enlarged to the appearance of one million times more bulky; yet the only impression we receive by viewing it through such a magnifier is that it reminds us of some vast fragment of a rock; while the intimate structure on which depends its colour, its hardness, and its chemical properties, remains still concealed; we do not seem to have made even an approach to a closer analysis of it by any such scrutiny.”[208]

[208] Discourse on Nat. Philos., p. 191.

|Limits to our knowledge by sense.|

65. The instance here chosen is not the most favourable for the experimental philosopher. He might perhaps hope to gain more knowledge by applying the best microscope to a regular crystal or to an organised substance. And it is impossible not to regret that the great discovery of the solar microscope has been either so imperfectly turned to account by philosophers, or has disappointed their hopes of exhibiting the mechanism of nature with the distinctness they require. But there is evidently a fundamental limitation of physical science, arising from those of the bodily senses and of muscular motions. The nicest instruments must be constructed and directed by the human hand; the range of the finest glasses must have a limit not only in their own natural structure but in that of the human eye. But no theory in science will be acknowledged to deserve any regard, except as it is drawn immediately, and by an exclusive process, from the phænomena which our senses report to us. Thus, the regular observation of definite proportions in chemical combination has suggested the atomic theory; and even this has been sceptically accepted by our cautious school of philosophy. If we are ever to go farther into the molecular analysis of substances, it must be through the means and upon the authority of new discoveries exhibited to our senses in experiment. But the existing powers of exhibiting or compelling nature by instruments, vast as they appear to us, and wonderful as has been their efficacy in many respects, have done little for many years past in diminishing the number of substances reputed to be simple; and with strong reasons to suspect that some of these, at least, yield to the crucible of nature, our electric batteries have up to this hour played innocuously round their heads.

66. Bacon has thrown out, once or twice, a hint at a single principle, a summary law of nature, as if all subordinate causes resolved themselves into one great process, according to which God works his will in the universe: Opus quod operatur Deus a principio usque ad finem. The natural tendency towards simplification, and what we consider as harmony, in our philosophical systems, which Lord Bacon himself reckons among the _idola tribûs_, the fallacies incident to the species, has led some to favour this unity of physical law. Impact and gravity have each had their supporters. But we are as yet at a great distance from establishing such a generalization, nor does it appear by any means probable that it will ever assume any simple form.

|Inductive logic; whether confined to physics.|

67. The close connexion of the inductive process recommended by Bacon with natural philosophy in the common sense of that word, and the general selection of his examples for illustration from that science, have given rise to a question, whether he comprehended metaphysical and moral philosophy within the scope of his inquiry.[209] That they formed a part of the Instauration of Sciences, and therefore of the Baconian philosophy in the fullest sense of the word, is obvious from the fact that a large proportion of the treatise De Augmentis Scientiarum is dedicated to those subjects; and it is not less so that the _idola_ of the Novum Organum are at least as apt to deceive us in moral as in physical argument. The question, therefore, can only be raised as to the peculiar method of conducting investigations, which is considered as his own. This would, however, appear to have been decided by himself in very positive language. “It may be doubted, rather than objected, by some, whether we look to the perfection, by means of our method, of natural philosophy alone, or of the other sciences also, of logic, of ethics, of politics. But we certainly mean what has here been said, to be understood as to them all; and as the ordinary logic, which proceeds by syllogism, does not relate to physical only, but to every other science; so ours, which proceeds by induction, comprizes them all. For we as much collect a history and form tables concerning anger, fear, shame and the like, and also concerning examples from civil life, and as much concerning the intellectual operations of memory, combination and partition, judgment and the others, as concerning heat and cold, or light, or vegetation, or such things.”[210] But he proceeds to intimate, as far as I understand the next sentence, that, although his method or logic, strictly speaking, is applicable to other subjects, it is his immediate object to inquire into the properties of natural things, or what is generally meant by physics. To this indeed the second book of the Novum Organum, and the portions that he completed of the remaining parts of the Instauratio Magna bear witness.

[209] This question was discussed some years since by the late editor of the Edinburgh Review on one side, and by Dugald Stewart on the other. See Edinburgh Review, vol. iii., p. 273, and the Preliminary Dissertation to Stewart’s Philosophical Essays.

[210] Etiam dubitabit quispiam potius quam objiciet, utrum nos de naturali tantum philosophia, an etiam de scientiis reliquis, logicis, ethicis, politicis, secundum viam nostram perficiendis loquamur. At nos certè de universis hæc, quæ dictasunt, intelligimus; atque quemadmodum vulgaris logica, quæ regit res per syllogismum, non tantum ad naturales, sed ad omnes scientias pertinet, ita et nostra, quæ procedit per inductionem, omnia complectitur. Tam enim Historiam et Tabulas Inveniendi conficimus de ira, metu et verecundia et similibus, ac etiam de exemplis rerum civilium; nec minùs de motibus mentalibus memoriæ, compositionis et divisionis, judicii et reliquorum, quam de calido et frigido, aut luce, aut vegetatione aut similibus. Sed tamen cum nostra ratio interpretandi, post historiam præparatam et ordinatam, non mentis tantum motus et discursus, ut logica vulgaris, sed et rerum naturam intueatur, ita mentem regimus ut ad rerum naturam se aptis per omnia modis applicare possit. Atque propterea multa et diversa in doctrina interpretationis præcipimus. quæ ad subjecti, de quo inquirimus, qualitatem et conditionem modum inveniendi nonnulla ex parte applicent. Nov. Org. i. 127.

|Baconian philosophy built on observation and experiment.|

68. It by no means follows, because the leading principles of the inductive philosophy are applicable to other topics of inquiry than what is usually comprehended under the name of physics, that we can employ all the prærogativæ instantiarum, and still less the peculiar rules for conducting experiments which Bacon has given us, in moral, or even psychological disquisitions. Many of them are plainly referrible to particular manipulations, or at most to limited subjects of chemical theory. And the frequent occurrence of passages which show Lord Bacon’s fondness for experimental processes, seem to have led some to consider his peculiar methods as more exclusively related to such modes of inquiry than they really are. But when the Baconian philosophy is said to be experimental, we are to remember that experiment is only better than what we may call passive observation, because it enlarges our capacity of observing with exactness and expedition. The reasoning is grounded on observation in both cases. In astronomy, where nature remarkably presents the objects of our observation without liability to error or uncertain delay, we may reason on the inductive principle as well as in sciences that require tentative operations. The inference drawn from the difference of time in the occultation of the satellites of Jupiter at different seasons, in favour of the Copernican theory and against the instantaneous motion of light, is an induction of the same kind with any that could be derived from an _experimentum crucis_. It is an exclusion of those hypotheses which might solve many phænomena, but fail to explain those immediately observed.

|Advantages of the latter.|

69. But astronomy, from the comparative solitariness, if we may so say, of all its phænomena, and the simplicity of their laws, has an advantage that is rarely found in sciences of mere observation. Bacon justly gave to experiment, or the interrogation of nature, compelling her to give up her secrets, a decided preference whenever it can be employed; and it is unquestionably true that the inductive method is tedious, if not uncertain, when it cannot resort to so compendious a process. One of the subjects selected by Bacon in the third part of the Instauration as specimens of the method by which an inquiry into nature should be conducted, the History of Winds, does not greatly admit of experiments; and the very slow progress of meteorology, which has yet hardly deserved the name of a science, when compared with that of chemistry or optics, will illustrate the difficulties of employing the inductive method without their aid. It is not, therefore, that Lord Bacon’s method of philosophising is properly experimental, but that by experiment it is most successfully displayed.

|Sometimes applicable to philosophy of human mind.|

|Less so to politics and morals.|

70. It will follow from hence that in proportion as, in any matter of inquiry, we can separate, in what we examine, the determining conditions, or law of form, from everything extraneous, we shall be more able to use the Baconian method with advantage. In metaphysics, or what Stewart would have called the philosophy of the human mind, there seems much in its own nature capable of being subjected to the inductive reasoning. Such are those facts which, by their intimate connection with physiology, or the laws of the bodily frame, fall properly within the province of the physician. In these, though exact observation is chiefly required, it is often practicable to shorten its process by experiment. And another important illustration may be given from the education of children, considered as a science of rules deduced from observation; wherein also we are frequently more able to substitute experiment for mere experience, than with mankind in general, whom we may observe at a distance, but cannot control. In politics, as well as in moral prudence, we can seldom do more than this. It seems however practicable to apply the close attention enforced by Bacon, and the careful arrangement and comparison of phænomena, which are the basis of his induction, to these subjects. Thus, if the circumstances of all popular seditions recorded in history were to be carefully collected with great regard to the probability of evidence, and to any peculiarity that may have affected the results, it might be easy to perceive such a connection of antecedent and subsequent events in the great plurality of instances, as would reasonably lead us to form probable inferences as to similar tumults when they should occur. This has sometimes been done, with less universality, and with much less accuracy than the Baconian method requires, by such theoretical writers on politics as Machiavel and Bodin. But it has been apt to degenerate into pedantry, and to disappoint the practical statesman, who commonly rejects it with scorn; partly because civil history is itself defective, seldom giving a just view of events, and still less frequently of the motives of those concerned in them; partly because the history of mankind is far less copious than that of nature, and in much that relates to politics, has not yet had time to furnish the groundwork of a sufficient induction; but partly also from some distinctive circumstances, which affect our reasonings in moral far more than in physical science, and which deserve to be considered, so far at least as to sketch the arguments that might be employed.

|Induction less conclusive in these subjects.|

71. The Baconian logic, as has been already said, deduces universal principles from select observation, that is, from particular, and, in some cases of experiment, from singular instances. It may easily appear to one conversant with the syllogistic method less legitimate than the old induction which proceeded by an exhaustive enumeration of particulars, and at most warranting but a probable conclusion. The answer to this objection can only be found in the acknowledged uniformity of the laws of nature, so that whatever has once occurred will, under absolutely similar circumstances, always occur again. This may be called the suppressed premise of every Baconian enthymem, every inference from observation of phænomena, which extends beyond the particular case. When it is once ascertained that water is composed of one proportion of oxygen to one of hydrogen, we never doubt but that such are its invariable constituents. We may repeat the experiment to secure ourselves against the risk of error in the operation or of some unperceived condition that may have affected the result; but when a sufficient number of trials has secured us against this, an invariable law of nature is inferred from the particular instance; nobody conceives that one pint of pure water _can_ be of a different composition from another. All men, even the most rude, reason upon this primary maxim; but they reason inconclusively from misapprehending the true relations of cause and effect in the phænomena to which they direct their attention. It is by the sagacity and ingenuity with which Bacon has excluded the various sources of error, and disengaged the true cause, that this method is distinguished from that which the vulgar practise.

|Reasons for this difference.|

72. It is required, however, for the validity of this method, first that there should be a strict uniformity in the general laws of nature, from which we can infer that what has been will, in the same conditions, be again; and secondly, that we shall be able to perceive and estimate all the conditions with an entire and exclusive knowledge. The first is granted in all physical phænomena; but in those which we cannot submit to experiment, or investigate by some such method as Bacon has pointed out, we often find our philosophy at fault for want of the second. Such is at present the case with respect to many parts of chemistry; for example, that of organic substances, which we can analyse, but as yet can in very few instances recompose. We do not know, and, if we did know, could not perhaps command, the entire conditions of organic bodies (even structurally, not as living), the _form_, as Bacon calls it, of blood, or milk, or oak galls. But in attempting to subject the actions of men to this inductive philosophy, we are arrested by the want of both the necessary requisitions. Matter can only be diverted from its obedience to unvarying laws by the control of mind; but we have to inquire whether mind is equally the passive instrument of any law. We have to open the great problem of human liberty, and must deny even a disturbing force to the will before we can assume that all actions of mankind must, under given conditions, preserve the same necessary train of sequences as a molecule of matter. But if this be answered affirmatively, we are still almost as far removed from a conclusive result as before. We cannot without contradicting every day experience, maintain that all men are determined alike by the same exterior circumstances; we must have recourse to the differences of temperament, of physical constitution, of casual or habitual association. The former alone, however, are, at the best, subject to our observation, either at the time, or, as is most common, through testimony; of the latter, no being, which does not watch the movements of the soul itself, can reach more than a probable conjecture. Sylla resigned the dictatorship, therefore all men, in the circumstances of Sylla, will do the same, is an argument false in one sense of the word circumstances, and useless at least in any other. It is doubted by many, whether meteorology will ever be well understood, on account of the complexity of the forces concerned, and their remoteness from the apprehension of the senses. Do not the same difficulties apply to human affairs? And while we reflect on these difficulties, to which we must add those which spring from the scantiness of our means of observation, the defectiveness and falsehood of testimony, especially what is called historical, and a thousand other errors to which the various “idola of the world and the cave” expose us, we shall rather be astonished that so many probable rules of civil prudence have been treasured up and confirmed by experience than disposed to give them a higher place in philosophy than they can claim.

|Considerations on the other side.|

73. It might be alleged in reply to these considerations, that admitting the absence of a strictly scientific certainty in moral reasoning, we have yet, as seems acknowledged on the other side, a great body of probable inferences, in the extensive knowledge and sagacious application of which most of human wisdom consists. And all that is required of us in dealing either with moral evidence or with the conclusions we draw from it, is to estimate the probability of neither too high; an error from which the severe and patient discipline of the inductive philosophy is most likely to secure us. It would be added by some, that the theory of probabilities deduces a wonderful degree of certainty from things very uncertain, when a sufficient number of experiments can be made; and thus, that events depending upon the will of mankind, even under circumstances the most anomalous and apparently irreducible to principles, may be calculated with a precision inexplicable to any one who has paid little attention to the subject. This, perhaps, may appear rather a curious application of mathematical science, than one from which our moral reasonings are likely to derive much benefit, especially as the conditions under which a very high probability can mathematically be obtained, involve a greater number of trials than experience will generally furnish. It is, nevertheless, a field that deserves to be more fully explored: the success of those who have attempted to apply analytical processes to moral probabilities has not hitherto been very encouraging, inasmuch as they have often come to results falsified by experience; but a more scrupulous regard to all the conditions of each problem may perhaps obviate many sources of error.[211]

[211] A calculation was published not long since, said to be on the authority of an eminent living philosopher, according to which, granting a moderate probability that each of twelve jurors would decide rightly, the chances in favour of the rectitude of their unanimous verdict were made something extravagantly high, I think about 8000 to 1. It is more easy to perceive the the fallacies of this pretended demonstration, than to explain how a man of great acuteness should have overlooked them. One among many is that it assumes the giving a verdict at all to be voluntary, whereas, in practice, the jury must decide one way or the other. We must deduct, therefore, a fraction expressing the probability that some of the twelve have wrongly conceded their opinions to the rest. One danger of this rather favourite application of mathematical principles to moral probabilities, as indeed it is of statistical tables (a remark of far wider extent), is that, by considering mankind merely as units, it practically habituates the mind to a moral and social levelling, as inconsistent with a just estimate of men as it is characteristic of the present age.

|Result of the whole.|

74. It seems upon the whole that we should neither conceive the inductive method to be useless in regard to any subject but physical science, nor deny the peculiar advantages it possesses in those inquiries rather than others. What must in all studies be important, is the habit of turning round the subject of our investigation in every light, the observation of everything that is peculiar, the exclusion of all that we find on reflection to be extraneous. In historical and antiquarian researches, in all critical examination which turns upon facts, in the scrutiny of judicial evidence, a great part of Lord Bacon’s method, not, of course, all the experimental rules of the Novum Organum, has, as I conceive, a legitimate application.[212] I would refer any one who may doubt this to his History of Winds, as one sample of what we mean by the Baconian method, and ask whether a kind of investigation, analogous to what is therein pursued for the sake of eliciting physical truths, might not be employed in any analytical process where general or even particular facts are sought to be known. Or if an example is required of such an investigation, let us look at the copious induction from the past and actual history of mankind upon which Malthus established his general theory of the causes which have retarded the natural progress of population. Upon all these subjects before-mentioned, there has been an astonishing improvement in the reasoning of the learned, and perhaps of the world at large since the time of Bacon, though much remains very defective. In what degree it may be owing to the prevalence of a physical philosophy founded upon his inductive logic, it might not be uninteresting to inquire.[213]

[212] The _principle_ of Bacon’s prerogative instances, and perhaps in some cases a very analogous application of them, appear to hold in our inquiries into historical evidence. The fact sought to be ascertained in the one subject corresponds to the physical law in the other. The testimonies, as we, though rather laxly, call them, or passages in books from which we infer the fact, correspond to the observations or experiments from which we deduce the law. The necessity of a sufficient induction by searching for all proof that may bear on the question, is as manifest in one case as in the other. The exclusion of precarious and inconclusive evidence is alike indispensable in both. The selection of prerogative instances, or such as carry with them satisfactory conviction, requires the same sort of inventive and reasoning powers. It is easy to illustrate this by examples. Thus, in the controversy concerning the Icon Basilike, the admission of Gauden’s claim by Lord Clarendon is in the nature of a _prerogative instance_; it renders the supposition of the falsehood of that claim highly improbable. But the many second hand and hearsay testimonies which may be alleged on the other side, to prove that the book was written by King Charles, are not prerogative instances, because their falsehood will be found to involve very little improbability. So, in a different controversy, the silence of some of the fathers as to the text, commonly called, of the three heavenly witnesses, even while expounding the context of the passage, is a _quasi-prerogative instance_; a decisive proof that they did not know it, or did not believe it genuine; because if they did, no motive can be conceived for the omission. But the silence of Laurentius Valla as to its absence from the manuscripts on which he commented, is no prerogative instance to prove that it was contained in them; because it is easy to perceive that he might have motives for saying nothing; and, though the negative argument, as it is called, or inference that a fact is not true, because such and such persons have not mentioned it, is, taken generally, weaker than positive testimony, it will frequently supply prerogative instances where the latter does not. Launoy, in a little treatise, De Auctoritate Negantis Argumenti, which displays more plain sense than ingenuity or philosophy, lays it down that a fact of a public nature, which is not mentioned by any writer within 200 years of the time, supposing, of course, that there is extant a competent number of writers who would naturally have mentioned it, is not to be believed. The period seems rather arbitrary, and was possibly so considered by himself; but the general principle is of the highest importance in historical criticism. Thus, in the once celebrated question of Pope Joan, the silence of all writers near the time as to so wonderful a fact, was justly deemed a kind of _prerogative_ argument, when set in opposition to the many repetitions of the story in later ages. But the silence of Gildas and Bede as to the victories of Arthur is no such argument against their reality, because they were not under an historical obligation, or any strong motive, which would prevent their silence. Generally speaking, the more anomalous and interesting an event is, the stronger is the argument against its truth from the silence of contemporaries, on account of the propensity of mankind to believe and recount the marvellous; and the weaker is the argument from the testimony of later times for the same reason. A similar analogy holds also in jurisprudence. The principle of our law, rejecting hearsay and secondary evidence, is founded on the Baconian rule. Fifty persons may depose that they have heard of a fact or of its circumstances; but the eye-witness is the prerogative instance. It would carry us too far to develop this at length, even if I were fully prepared to do so; but this much may lead us to think, that whoever shall fill up that lamentable _desideratum_, the logic of evidence, ought to have familiarised himself with the Novum Organum.

[213] “The effects which Bacon’s writings have hitherto produced, have indeed been far more conspicuous in physics than in the science of mind. Even here, however, they have been great and most important, as well as in some collateral branches of knowledge, such as natural jurisprudence, political economy, criticism and morals, which spring up from the same root, or rather which are branches of that tree of which the science of mind is the trunk.” Stewart’s Philosophical Essays, Prelim. Dissertation. The principal advantage, perhaps, of those habits of reasoning which the Baconian methods, whether learned directly or through the many disciples of that school, have a tendency to generate, is that they render men cautious and painstaking in the pursuit of truth, and therefore restrain them from deciding too soon. Nemo reperitur qui in rebus ipsis et experientia moram fecerit legitimam. These words are more frequently true of moral and political reasoners than of any others. Men apply historical or personal experience, but they apply it hastily, and without giving themselves time for either a copious or an exact induction; the great majority being too much influenced by passion, party-spirit, or vanity, or perhaps by affections morally right, but not the less dangerous in reasoning, to maintain the patient and dispassionate suspense of judgment (ακαταληψια [akatalêpsia]), which ought to be the condition of our enquiries.

|Bacon’s aptitude for moral subjects.|

75. It is probable that Lord Bacon never much followed up in his own mind that application of his method to psychological, and still less to moral and political subjects, which he has declared himself to intend. The distribution of the Instauratio Magna, which he has prefixed to it, relates wholly to physical science. He has in no one instance given an example, in the Novum Organum, from moral philosophy, and one only, that of artificial memory, from what he would have called logic.[214] But we must constantly remember that the philosophy of Bacon was left exceedingly incomplete. Many lives would not have sufficed for what he had planned, and he gave only the _horæ subsecivæ_ of his own. It is evident that he had turned his thoughts to physical philosophy rather for an exercise of his reasoning faculties, and out of his insatiable thirst for knowledge, than from any peculiar aptitude for their subjects, much less any advantage of opportunity for their cultivation. He was more eminently the philosopher of human, than of general nature. Hence, he is exact as well as profound in all his reflections on civil life and mankind, while his conjectures in natural philosophy, though often very acute, are apt to wander far from the truth in consequence of his defective acquaintance with the phænomena of nature. His Centuries of Natural History give abundant proof of this. He is, in all these inquiries, like one doubtfully, and by degrees, making out a distant prospect, but often deceived by the haze. But if we compare what may be found in the sixth, seventh, and eighth books De Augmentis, in the Essays, the History of Henry VII., and the various short treatises contained in his works, on moral and political wisdom, and on human nature, from experience of which all such wisdom is drawn, with the Rhetoric, Ethics, and Politics of Aristotle, or with the historians most celebrated for their deep insight into civil society and human character, with Thucydides, Tacitus, Philip de Comines, Machiavel, Davila, Hume, we shall, I think, find that one man may almost be compared with all of these together. When Galileo is named as equal to Bacon, it is to be remembered that Galileo was no moral or political philosopher, and in this department Leibnitz certainly falls very short of Bacon. Burke, perhaps, comes, of all modern writers, the nearest to him; but though Bacon may not be more profound than Burke, he is still more copious and comprehensive.

[214] Nov. Organ. ii. 26. It may however be observed, that we find a few passages in the ethical part of De Augmentis, lib. vii. cap. 3, which show that he had some notions of moral induction germinating in his mind.

|Comparison of Bacon and Galileo.|

76. The comparison of Bacon and Galileo is naturally built upon the influence which, in the same age they exerted in overthrowing the philosophy of the schools, and in founding that new discipline of real science which has rendered the last centuries glorious. Hume has given the preference to the latter, who made accessions to the domain of human knowledge so splendid, so inaccessible to cavil, so unequivocal in their results, that the majority of mankind would perhaps be carried along with this decision. There seems however to be no doubt that the mind of Bacon was more comprehensive and profound. But these comparisons are apt to involve _incommensurable_ relations. In their own intellectual characters, they bore no great resemblance to each other. Bacon had scarce any knowledge of geometry, and so far ranks much below not only Galileo, but Descartes, Newton, and Leibnitz, all signalised by wonderful discoveries in the science of quantity, or in that part of physics which employs it. He has, in one of the profound aphorisms of the Novum Organum, distinguished the two species of philosophical genius, one more apt to perceive the differences of things, the other their analogies. In a mind of the highest order neither of these powers will be really deficient, and his own inductive method is at once the best exercise of both, and the best safeguard against the excess of either. But upon the whole, it may certainly be said, that the genius of Lord Bacon was naturally more inclined to collect the resemblances of nature than to note her differences. This is the case with men like him of sanguine temper, warm fancy, and brilliant wit; but it is not the frame of mind which is best suited to strict reasoning.

77. It is no proof of a solid acquaintance with Lord Bacon’s philosophy, to deify his name as the ancient schools did those of their founders, or even to exaggerate the powers of his genius. Powers they were surprisingly great, yet limited in their range, and not in all respects equal; nor could they overcome every impediment of circumstance. Even of Bacon it may be said, that he attempted more than he has achieved, and perhaps more than he clearly apprehended. His objects appear sometimes indistinct, and I am not sure that they are always consistent. In the Advancement of Learning, he aspired to fill up, or at least to indicate, the deficiencies in every department of knowledge, he gradually confined himself to philosophy, and at length to physics. But few of his works can be deemed complete, not even the treatise De Augmentis, which comes nearer to it than most of the rest. Hence, the study of Lord Bacon is difficult and not, as I conceive, very well adapted to those who have made no progress whatever in the exact sciences, nor accustomed themselves to independent thinking. They have never been made a textbook in our universities; though after a judicious course of preparatory studies, by which I mean a good foundation in geometry and the philosophical principles of grammar, the first book of the Novum Organum might be very advantageously combined with the instruction of an enlightened lecturer.[215]

[215] It by no means is to be inferred, that because the actual text of Bacon is not always such as can be well understood by very young men, I object to their being led to the real principles of inductive philosophy, which alone will teach them to think, firmly but not presumptuously, for themselves. Few defects, on the contrary, in our system of education are more visible than the want of an adequate course of logic; and this is not likely to be rectified so long as the Aristotelian methods challenge that denomination exclusively of all other aids to the reasoning faculties. The position that nothing else is to be called logic, were it even agreeable to the derivation of the word, which it is not, or to the usage of the ancients, which is by no means uniformly the case, or to that of modern philosophy and correct language, which is certainly not at all the case, is no answer to the question, whether what we call logic does not deserve to be taught at all.

A living writer of high reputation, who has at least fully understood his own subject, and illustrated it better than his predecessors from a more enlarged reading and thinking, wherein his own acuteness has been improved by the writers of the Baconian school, has been unfortunately instrumental, by the very merits of his treatise on Logic, in keeping up the prejudices on this subject, which have generally been deemed characteristic of the university to which he belonged. All the reflection I have been able to give to the subject has convinced me of the inefficacy of the syllogistic art in enabling us to think rightly for ourselves, or, which is part of thinking rightly, in detecting those fallacies of others which might impose on our understanding before we have acquired that art. It has been often alleged, and, as far as I can judge, with perfect truth, that no man, who can be worth answering, ever commits, except through mere inadvertence, any paralogisms which the common logic serves to point out. It is easy enough to construct syllogisms which sin against its rules; but the question is, by whom they were employed. It is not uncommon, as I am aware, to represent an adversary as reasoning illogically; but this is generally effected by putting his argument into our own words. The great fault of all, over-induction, or the assertion of a general premise upon an insufficient examination of particulars, cannot be discovered or cured by any _logical_ skill; and this is the error into which men really fall, not that of omitting to _distribute the middle_ term, though it comes in effect, and often in appearance, to the same thing. I do not contend that the rules of syllogism, which are very short and simple, ought not to be learned; or that there may not be some advantage in occasionally stating our own argument, or calling on another to state his, in a regular form (an advantage, however, rather dialectical, which is, in other words, rhetorical, than one which affects the reasoning faculties themselves): nor do I deny that it is philosophically worth while to know that all _general reasoning by words_ may be reduced into syllogism, as it is to know that most of geometry may be resolved into the superposition of equal triangles; but to represent this portion of logical science as the whole, appears to me almost like teaching the scholar Euclid’s axioms, and the axiomatic theorem to which I have alluded, and calling this the science of geometry. The following passage from the Port-Royal logic is very judicious and candid, giving as much to the Aristotelian system as it deserves: “Cette partie, que nous avons maintenant à traiter, qui comprend les règles du raisonnement, est estimée la plus importante de la logique, et c’est presque l’unique qu’on y traite avec quelque soin; mais il y a sujet de douter si elle est aussi utile qu’on se l’imagine. La plupart des erreurs des hommes, comme nous avons déjà dit ailleurs, viennent bien plus de ce qu’ils raisonnent sur de faux principes, que non pas de ce qu’ils raisonnent mal suivant leurs principes. Il arrive rarement qu’on se laisse tromper par des raisonnemens qui ne soient faux que parce que la conséquence en est mal tirée; et ceux qui ne seroient pas capables d’en reconnoître la fausseté par la seule lumière de la raison, ne le seroient pas ordinairement d’entendre les règles que l’on en donne, et encore moins de les appliquer. Néanmoins, quand on ne considéreroit ces règles que comme des vérités spéculatives, elles serviroient toujours à exercer l’esprit; et de plus, on ne peut nier qu’elles n’aient quelque usage en quelques rencontres, et à l’égard de quelques personnes, qui, étant d’un naturel vif et pénétrant, ne se laissent quelquefois tromper par des fausses conséquences, que faute d’attention, à quoi la réflexion qu’ils feroient sur ces règles, seroit capable de remédier.” Art de Penser, part iii. How different is this sensible passage from one quoted from some anonymous writer in Whateley’s Logic, p. 34. “A fallacy consists of an ingenious mixture of truth and falsehood so entangled, so intimately blended, that the fallacy is, in the chemical phrase, held in solution _one drop of sound logic_ is that test which immediately disunites them, makes the foreign substance visible, and precipitates it to the bottom.” One fallacy, it might be answered, as common as any, is the _false analogy_ the misleading the mind by a comparison, where there is no real proportion or resemblance. The chemist’s test is the _necessary_ means of detecting the foreign substance; if the “drop of sound logic” be such, it is strange that lawyers, mathematicians, and mankind in general, should so sparingly employ it; the fact being notorious, that those most eminent for strong reasoning powers are rarely conversant with the syllogistic method. It is also well known, that these “intimately blended mixtures of truth and falsehood” deceive no man of plain sense. So much for the _test_.

|His prejudice against mathematics.|

78. The ignorance of Bacon in mathematics, and, what was much worse, his inadequate notions of their utility, must be reckoned among the chief defects in his philosophical writings. In a remarkable passage of the Advancement of Learning, he held mathematics to be a part of metaphysics; but the place of this is altered in the Latin, and they are treated as merely auxiliary or instrumental to physical inquiry. He had some prejudice against pure mathematics, and thought they had been unduly elevated in comparison with the realities of nature. “I know not,” he says, “how it has arisen that mathematics and logic, which ought to be the serving-maids of physical philosophy, yet affecting to vaunt the certainty that belongs to them, presume to exercise a dominion over her.” It is surely very erroneous to speak of geometry, which relates to the objective realities of space, and to natural objects so far as extended, as a mere handmaid of physical philosophy, and not rather a part of it. Playfair has made some good remarks on the advantages derived to experimental philosophy itself from the mere application of geometry and algebra. And one of the reflections which this ought to excite is, that we are not to conceive, as some hastily do, that there can be no real utility to mankind, even of that kind of utility which consists in multiplying the conveniences and luxuries of life, springing from theoretical and speculative inquiry. The history of algebra, so barren in the days of Tartaglia and Vieta, so productive of _wealth_, when applied to dynamical calculations in our own, may be a sufficient answer.

|Bacon’s excess of wit.|

79. One of the petty blemishes which, though lost in the splendour of Lord Bacon’s excellencies, it is not unfair to mention, is connected with the peculiar characteristics of his mind; he is sometimes too metaphorical and witty. His remarkable talent for discovering analogies seems to have inspired him with too much regard to them as arguments, even when they must appear to any common reader fanciful and far-fetched. His terminology, chiefly for the same reason, is often a little affected, and, in Latin, rather barbarous. The divisions of his prerogative instances in the Novum Organum are not always founded upon intelligible distinctions. And the general obscurity of the style, neither himself nor his assistants being good masters of the Latin language, which at the best is never flexible or copious enough for our philosophy, renders the perusal of both his great works too laborious for the impatient reader. Brucker has well observed that the Novum Organum has been neglected by the generality, and proved of far less service than it would otherwise have been in philosophy, in consequence of these very defects, as well as the real depths of the author’s mind.[216]

[216] Legenda ipsa nobilissima tractatio ab illis est, qui in rerum naturalium inquisitione feliciter progredi cupiunt. Quæ si paulo plus luminis et perspicuitatis haberet, et novorum terminorum et partitionum artificio lectorem non remoraretur, longè plura, quam factum est, contulisset ad philosophiæ emendationem. His enim obstantibus a plerisque hoc organum neglectum est. Hist. Philos. v. 99.

|Fame of Bacon on the Continent.|

80. What has been the fame of Bacon, “the wisest, greatest, of mankind,” it is needless to say. What has been his real influence over mankind, how much of our enlarged and exact knowledge may be attributed to his inductive method, what of this again has been due to a thorough study of his writings, and what to an indirect and secondary acquaintance with them, are questions of another kind, and less easily solved. Stewart, the philosopher who has dwelt most on the praises of Bacon, while he conceives him to have exercised a considerable influence over the English men of science in the seventeenth century, supposes, on the authority of Montucla, that he did not “command the general admiration of Europe,” till the publication of the preliminary discourse to the French Encyclopædia by Diderot and D’Alembert. This, however, is by much too precipitate a conclusion. He became almost immediately known on the continent. Gassendi was one of his most ardent admirers. Descartes mentions him, I believe, once only, in a letter to Mersenne, in 1632;[217] but he was of all men the most unwilling to praise a contemporary. It may be said that these were philosophers, and that their testimony does not imply the admiration of mankind. But writers of a very different character mention him in a familiar manner. Richelieu is said to have highly esteemed Lord Bacon.[218] And it may in some measure be due to this, that in the Sentimens de l’Académie Français sur le Cid, he is alluded to, simply by the name Bacon, as one well known.[219] Voiture, in a letter to Costar, about the same time, bestows high eulogy on some passages of Bacon which his correspondent had sent to him, and observes that Horace would have been astonished to hear a barbarian Briton discourse in such a style. The treatise De Augmentis was republished in France in 1624, the year after its appearance in England. It was translated into French as early as 1632; no great proofs of neglect. Editions came out in Holland, 1645, 1652, and 1662.[220] Even the Novum Organum, which, as has been said, never became so popular as his other writings, was thrice printed in Holland, in 1645, 1650, and 1660.[221] Leibnitz and Puffendorf are loud in their expressions of admiration, the former ascribing to him the revival of true philosophy as fully as we can at present.[222] I should be more inclined to doubt whether he were adequately valued by his countrymen in his own time, or in the immediately subsequent period. Under the first Stuarts, there was little taste among studious men but for theology, and chiefly for a theology which, proceeding with an extreme deference to authority, could not but generate a disposition of mind, even upon other subjects, alien to the progressive and inquisitive spirit of the inductive philosophy.[223] The institution of the Royal Society, or rather the love of physical science out of which that institution arose, in the second part of the seventeenth century, made England resound with the name of her illustrious chancellor. Few now spoke of him without a kind of homage that only the greatest men receive. Yet still, it was by natural philosophers alone that the writings of Bacon were much studied. The editions of his works, except the Essays, were few; the Novum Organum never came separately from the English press.[224] They were not even much quoted; for I believe it will be found that the fashion of referring to the brilliant passages of the De Augmentis and the Novum Organum, at least in books designed for the general reader, is not much older than the close of the last century. Scotland has the merit of having led the way; Reid, Stewart, Robison, and Playfair turned that which had been a blind veneration into a rational worship; and I should suspect that more have read Lord Bacon within these thirty years than in the two preceding centuries. It may be an usual consequence of the enthusiastic panegyrics lately poured upon his name, that a more positive efficacy has sometimes been attributed to his philosophical writings than they really possessed, and it might be asked whether Italy, where he was probably not much known, were not the true school of experimental philosophy in Europe, whether his methods of investigation were not chiefly such as men of sagacity and lovers of truth might simultaneously have devised. But, whatever may have been the case with respect to actual discoveries in science, we must give to written wisdom its proper meed; no books prior to those of Lord Bacon carried mankind so far on the road to truth; none have obtained so thorough a triumph over arrogant usurpation without seeking to substitute another; and he may be compared with those liberators of nations, who have given them laws by which they might govern themselves, and retained no homage but their gratitude.[225]

[217] Vol. vi., p. 210, edit. Cousin.

[218] The only authority that I can now quote for this is not very good, that of Aubery’s Manuscripts, which I find in Seward’s Anecdotes, iv. 328. But it seems not improbable. The same book quotes Balzac as saying: “Croyons donc, pour l’amour du Chancelier Bacon, que toutes les folies des anciens sont sages; et tous leurs songes mystères, et de celles-là qui sont estimées pures fables, il n’y en a pas une, quelque bizarre et extravagante qu’elle soit, qui n’ait son fondement dans l’histoire, _si l’on en veut croire Bacon_, et qui n’ait été déguisée de la sorte par les sages du vieux temps, pour la rendre plus utile aux peuples.

[219] P. 44 (1633).

[220] J’ai trouvé parfaitement beau tout ce que vous me mandez de Bacon. Mais ne vous semble t’il pas qu’Horace qui disoit, Visam Britannos hospitibus feros, seroit bien étonné d’entendre un barbare discourir comme cela? Costar is said by Bayle to have borrowed much from Bacon. La Mothe le Vayer mentions him in his Dialogues; in fact, instances are numerous.

[221] Montagu’s Life of Bacon, p. 407. He has not mentioned an edition at Strasburg, 1635, which is in the British Museum.

There is also an edition, without time or place, in the catalogue of the British Museum.

[222] Brucker, v. 95. Stewart says that “Bayle does not give above twelve lines to Bacon;” but he calls him one of the greatest men of his age, and the length of an article in Bayle was never designed to be a measure of the merit of its subject.

[223] It is not uncommon to meet with persons, especially who are or have been engaged in teaching others dogmatically what they have themselves received in the like manner, to whom the inductive philosophy appears a mere school of scepticism, or at best wholly inapplicable to any subjects which require entire conviction. A certain deduction from certain premises is the only reasoning they acknowledge. This is peculiarly the case with theologians, but it is also extended to everything which is taught in a synthetic manner. Lord Bacon has a remarkable passage on this in the 9th book De Augmentis. Postquam articuli et principia religionis jam in sedibus suis fuerint locata, ita ut a rationis examine penitus eximantur, tum demum conceditur ab illis illationes derivare ac deducere, secundum analogiam ipsorum. In rebus quidem naturalibus hoc non tenet. Nam et ipsa principia examini subjiciuntur; per inductionem, inquam, licet minime per syllogismum. Atque eadem illa nullam habent cum ratione repugnantiam, ut ab eodem fonte cum primæ propositiones, tum mediæ, deducantur. Aliter fit in religione; ubi et primæ propositiones authopystatæ sunt, atque per se subsistentes; et rursus non reguntur ab illa ratione quæ propositiones consequentes deducit. Neque tamen hoc fit in religione sola, sed etiam in aliis scientiis, tam gravioribus, quam levioribus, ubi scilicet propositiones humanæ placita sunt, non posita; siquidem et in illis rationis usus absolutus esse non potest. Videmus enim in ludis, puta schaccorum, aut similibus, priores ludi normas et leges merè positivas esse, et ad placitum; quas recipi, non in disputationem vocari, prorsus oporteat; ut vero vincas, et peritè lusum instituas, id artificiosum est et rationale. Eodem modo fit et in legibus humanis; in quibus haud paucæ sunt maximæ, ut loquuntur, hoc est, placita mera juris, quæ auctoritate magis quam ratione nituntur, neque in disceptationem veniunt. Quid vero sit justissimum, non absolutè, sed relativè, hoc est ex analogiâ illarum maximarum, id demum rationale est, et latum disputationi campum præbet. This passage, well weighed, may show us where, why, and by whom the synthetic and syllogistic methods have been preferred to the inductive and analytical.

[224] The De Augmentis was only once published after the first edition, in 1638. An indifferent translation, by Gilbert Watts, came out in 1640. No edition of Bacon’s Works was published in England before 1730; another appeared in 1740, and there have been several since. But they had been printed at Frankfort in 1665. It is unnecessary to observe, that many copies of the foreign editions were brought to this country. This is mostly taken from Mr. Montague’s account.

[225] I have met, since this passage was written, with one in Stewart’s Life of Reid, which seems to state the _effects_ of Bacon’s philosophy in a just and temperate spirit, and which I rather quote, because this writer has, by his eulogies on that philosophy, led some to an exaggerated notion. “The influence of Bacon’s genius on the subsequent progress of physical discovery has been seldom duly appreciated: by some writers almost entirely overlooked, and by others considered as the sole cause of the reformation in science which has since taken place. Of these two extremes, the latter certainly is the least wide of the truth: for in the whole history of letters no other individual can be mentioned whose exertions have had so indisputable an effect in forwarding the intellectual progress of mankind. On the other hand, it must be acknowledged that before the era when Bacon appeared, various philosophers in different parts of Europe had struck into the right path; and it may perhaps be doubted, whether any one important rule with respect to the true method of investigation be contained in his works, of which no hint can be traced in those of his predecessors. His great merit lay in concentrating their feeble and scattered lights; fixing the attention of philosophers on the distinguishing characteristics of true and of false science, by a felicity of illustration peculiar to himself, seconded by the commanding powers of a bold and figurative eloquence. The method of investigation which he recommended had been previously followed in every instance in which any solid discovery had been made with respect to the laws of nature; but it had been followed accidentally and without any regular preconceived design; and it was reserved for him to reduce to rule and method what others had effected, either fortuitously, or from some momentary glimpse of the truth. These remarks are not intended to detract from the just glory of Bacon; for they apply to all those, without exception, who have systematised the principles of any of the arts. Indeed, they apply less forcibly to him than to any other philosopher whose studies have been directed to objects analogous to his; inasmuch as we know of no art of which the rules have been reduced successfully into a didactic form, when the art itself was as much in infancy as experimental philosophy was when Bacon wrote.” Account of Life and writings of Reid sect. 2.

SECT. III.

_On the Metaphysical Philosophy of Descartes._

|Early life of Descartes.|

81. René Descartes was born in 1596 of an ancient family in Touraine. An inquisitive curiosity into the nature and causes of all he saw is said to have distinguished his childhood, and this was certainly accompanied by an uncommon facility and clearness of apprehension. At a very early age he entered the college of the Jesuits at La Fleche, and passed through their entire course of literature and philosophy. It was now, at the age of sixteen, as he tells us, that he began to reflect, with little satisfaction, on his studies, finding his mind beset with error, and obliged to confess that he had learned nothing but the conviction of his ignorance. Yet he knew that he had been educated in a famous school, and that he was not deemed behind his contemporaries. The ethics, the logic, even the geometry of the ancients, did not fill his mind with that clear stream of truth, for which he was ever thirsting. On leaving La Fleche, the young Descartes mingled for some years in the world, and served as a volunteer both under Prince Maurice, and in the Imperial army. Yet during this period there were intervals when he withdrew himself wholly from society, and devoted his leisure to mathematical science. Some germs also of his peculiar philosophy were already ripening in his mind.

|His beginning to philosophise.|

82. Descartes was twenty-three years old when, passing a solitary winter in his quarters at Neuburg on the Danube, he began to resolve in his mind the futility of all existing systems of philosophy, and the discrepancy of opinions among the generality of mankind, which rendered it probable that no one had yet found out the road to real science. He determined, therefore, to set about the investigation of truth for himself, erasing from his mind all preconceived judgments, as having been hastily and precariously taken up. He laid down for his guidance a few fundamental rules of logic, such as to admit nothing as true which he did not clearly perceive, and to proceed from the simpler notions to the more complex, taking the method of geometers, by which they had gone so much farther than others, for the true art of reasoning. Commencing, therefore, with the mathematical sciences, and observing that, however different in their subjects, they treat properly of nothing but the relations of quantity, he fell, almost accidentally, as his words seem to import, on the great discovery that geometrical curves may be expressed algebraically.[226] This gave him more hope of success in applying his method to other parts of philosophy.

[226] Œuvres de Descartes, par Cousin, Paris, 1824, vol. i., p. 143.

|He retires to Holland.|

83. Nine years more elapsed, during which Descartes, though he quitted military service, continued to observe mankind in various parts of Europe, still keeping his heart fixed on the great aim he had proposed to himself, but, as he confesses, without having framed the scheme of any philosophy beyond those of his contemporaries. He deemed his time of life immature for so stupendous a task. But at the age of thirty-three, with little notice to his friends, he quitted Paris, convinced that absolute retirement was indispensable for that rigorous investigation of first principles he now determined to institute, and retired into Holland. In this country he remained eight years so completely aloof from the distractions of the world, that he concealed his very place of residence, though preserving an intercourse of letters with many friends in France.

|His publications.|

84. In 1637 he broke upon the world with a volume containing the Discourse upon Method, the Dioptrics, the Meteors, and the Geometry. It is only with the first that we are for the present concerned.[227] In this discourse, the most interesting perhaps of Descartes’ writings, on account of the picture of his life, and of the progress of his studies that it furnishes, we find the Cartesian metaphysics, which do not consist of many articles, almost as fully detailed as in any of his later works. In the Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, published in Latin, 1641, these fundamental principles are laid down again more at length. He invited the criticism of philosophers on these famous Meditations. They did not refuse the challenge; and seven sets of objections, from as many different quarters, with seven replies from Descartes himself, are subjoined to the later editions of the Meditations. The Principles of Philosophy, published in Latin in 1644, contains what may be reckoned the final statement, which occupies most of the first book, written with uncommon conciseness and precision. The beauty of philosophical style which distinguished Descartes is never more seen than in this first book of the Principia, the translation of which was revised by Clerselier, an eminent friend of the author. It is a contrast at once to the elliptical brevity of Aristotle, who hints, or has been supposed to hint, the most important positions in a short clause, and to the verbose, figurative declamation of many modern metaphysicians. In this admirable perspicuity Descartes was imitated by his disciples Arnaud and Malebranche, especially the former. His unfinished posthumous treatise, the “Inquiry after Truth by Natural Reason,” is not carried farther than a partial development of the same leading principles of Cartesianism. There is consequently a great deal of apparent repetition in the works of Descartes, but such as on attentive consideration will show, not perhaps much real variance, but some new lights that had occurred to the author in the course of his reflections.[228]

[227] Id. p. 121-212.

[228] A work has lately been published, Essais Philosophiques, suivis de la Métaphysique de Descartes resembleé et mise en ordre, par L. A. Gruyer, 4 vols. Bruxelles, 1832. In the fourth volume we find the metaphysical passages in the writings of Descartes, including his correspondence, arranged methodically in his own words, but with the omission of a large part of the objections to the Meditations and of his replies. I did not, however, see this work in time to make use of it.

|He begins by doubting all.|

85. In pursuing the examination of the first principles of knowledge, Descartes perceived not only that he had cause to doubt of the various opinions he had found current among men, from that very circumstance of their variety, but that the sources of all that he had received for truth themselves, namely, the senses, had afforded him no indisputable certainty. He began to recollect how often he had been misled by appearances, which had at first sight given no intimation of their fallacy, and asked himself in vain, by what infallible test he could discern the reality of external objects, or at least their conformity to his idea of them. The strong impressions made in sleep led him to inquire whether all he saw and felt might not be in a dream. It was true that there seemed to be some notions more elementary than the rest, such as extension, figure, duration, which could not be reckoned fallacious; nor could he avoid owning that, if there were not an existing triangle in the world, the angles of one conceived by the mind, though it were in sleep, must appear equal to two right angles. But even in this certitude of demonstration he soon found something deficient; to err in geometrical reasoning is not impossible: why might he not err in this; especially in a train of consequences, the particular terms of which are not at the same instant present to the mind. But above all, there might be a superior being, powerful enough and willing to deceive him. It was no kind of answer to treat this as improbable, or as an arbitrary hypothesis. He had laid down as a maxim that nothing could be received as truth which was not demonstrable, and in one place, rather hyperbolically, and indeed extravagantly in appearance, says that he made little difference between merely probable and false suppositions; meaning this, however, as we may presume, in the sense of geometers, who would say the same thing.

|His first step in knowledge.|

86. But, divesting himself thus of all belief in what the world deemed most unquestionable, plunged in an abyss, as it seemed for a time, he soon found his feet on a rock, from which he sprang upwards to an unclouded sun. Doubting all things, abandoning all things, he came to the question, what is it that doubts and denies? Something it must be; he might be deceived by a superior power, but it was he that was deceived. He felt his own existence; the proof of it was that he did feel it; that he had affirmed, that he now doubted, in a word, that he was a thinking substance. _Cogito: Ergo sum_--this famous enthymem of the Cartesian philosophy veiled in rather formal language, that which was to him, and must be to us all, the eternal basis of conviction, which no argument can strengthen, which no sophistry can impair, the consciousness of a self within, a percipient indivisible Ego.[229] The only proof of this is that it admits of no proof, that no man can pretend to doubt of his own existence with sincerity, or to express a doubt without absurd and inconsistent language.

[229] This word, introduced by the Germans, or originally perhaps by the old Cartesians, is rather awkward, but far less so than the English pronoun I, which is also equivocal in sound. Stewart has adopted it as the lesser evil, and it seems reasonable not to scruple a word so convenient, if not necessary, to express the unity of the conscious principle. If it had been employed earlier, I am apt to think that some great metaphysical extravagances would have been avoided, and some fundamental truths more clearly apprehended. Fichte is well known to have made the grand division of _Ich_ and _Nicht Ich_, _Ego_ and _Non Ego_, the basis of his philosophy; in other words, the difference of subjective and objective reality.

|His mind.|

|Not sceptical.|

87. The scepticism of Descartes, it appears, which is merely provisional, is not at all similar to that of the Pyrrhonists, though some of his arguments may have been shafts from their quiver. Nor did he make use, which is somewhat remarkable, of the reasonings afterwards employed by Berkley against the material world, though no one more frequently distinguished than Descartes between the objective reality, as it was then supposed to be, of ideas in the mind, and the external or sensible reality of things. Scepticism, in fact, was so far from being characteristic of his disposition, that his errors sprang chiefly from the opposite source, little as he was aware of it, from an undue positiveness in theories which he could not demonstrate, or even render highly probable.[230]

[230] One of the rules Descartes lays down in his posthumous art of logic, is that we ought never to busy ourselves except about objects concerning which our understanding appears capable of acquiring an unquestionable and certain knowledge, vol. xi., p. 204. This is at least too unlimited a proposition, and would exclude, not indeed all probability, but all inquiries which must by necessity end in nothing more than probability. Accordingly, we find in the next pages, that he made little account of any sciences but arithmetic and geometry, or such others as equal them in certainty. “From all this,” he concludes, “we may infer, not that arithmetic and geometry are the only sciences which we must learn, but that he who seeks the road to truth should not trouble himself with any object of which he cannot have as certain a knowledge, as of arithmetical and geometrical demonstrations.” It is unnecessary to observe what havoc this would make with investigations, even in physics, of the highest importance to mankind.

Beattie, in the essay on Truth, part ii. chap. 2, has made some unfounded criticisms on the scepticism of Descartes, and endeavours to turn into ridicule his, Cogito; ergo sum. Yet if any one should deny his own, or our existence, I do not see how we could refute him, were he worthy of refutation, but by some such language; and, in fact, it is what Beattie himself says, more paraphrastically, in answering Hume.

|He arrives at more certainty.|

88. The certainty of an existing Ego easily led him to that of the operations of the mind, called afterwards by Locke ideas of reflection, the believing, doubting, willing, loving, fearing, which he knew by consciousness, and indeed by means of which alone he knew that the Ego existed. He now proceeded a step farther; and reflecting on the simplest truths of arithmetic and geometry, saw that it was as impossible to doubt of them as of the acts of his mind. But as he had before tried to doubt even of these, on the hypothesis that he might be deceived by a superior intelligent power, he resolved to inquire whether such a power existed, and if it did, whether it could be a deceiver. The affirmative of the former, and the negative of the latter question Descartes established by that extremely subtle reasoning so much celebrated in the seventeenth century, but which has less frequently been deemed conclusive in later times. It is at least that which no man, not fitted by long practise for metaphysical researches, will pretend to embrace.

|His proof of a Deity.|

89. The substance of his argument was this. He found within himself the idea of a perfect Intelligence, eternal, infinite, necessary. This could not come from himself, nor from external things, because both were imperfect, and there could be no more in the effect than there is in the cause. And this idea requiring a cause, it could have none but an actual being, not a possible being, which is undistinguishable from mere non-entity. If, however, this should be denied, he inquires whether he, with this idea of God, could have existed by any other cause, if there were no God. Not, he argues, by himself; for, if he were the author of his own being, he would have given himself every perfection, in a word, would have been God. Not by his parents, for the same might be said of them, and so forth, if we remount to a series of productive beings. Besides this, as much power is required to preserve as to create, and the continuance of existence in the effect implies the continued operation of the cause.

|Another proof of it.|

90. With this argument, in itself sufficiently refined, Descartes blended another still more distant from common apprehension. Necessary existence is involved in the idea of God. All other beings are conceivable in their essence, as things possible; in God alone his essence and existence are inseparable. Existence is necessary to perfection; hence, a perfect being, or God, cannot be conceived without necessary existence. Though I do not know that I have misrepresented Descartes in this result of his very subtle argument, it is difficult not to treat it as a sophism. And it was always objected by his adversaries, that he inferred the necessity of the thing from the necessity of the idea, which was the very point in question. It seems impossible to vindicate many of his expressions, from which he never receded in the controversy to which his meditations gave rise. But the long habit of repeating in his mind the same series of reasonings gave Descartes, as it will always do, an inward assurance of their certainty, which could not be weakened by any objection. The former argument for the being of God, whether satisfactory or not, is to be distinguished from the present.[231]

[231] “From what is said already of the ignorance we are in of the essence of mind, it is evident that we are not able to know whether any mind be necessarily existent by a necessity à priori founded in its essence, as we have showed time and space to be. Some philosophers think that such a necessity may be demonstrated of God from the nature of perfection. For God being infinitely, that is, absolutely perfect, they say he must needs be necessarily existent; because, say they, necessary existence is one of the greatest of perfections. But I take this to be one of those false and imaginary arguments, that are founded in the abuse of certain terms; and of all others this word, perfection, seems to have suffered most this way. I wish I could clearly understand what these philosophers mean by the word perfection, when they thus say, that necessity of existence is perfection. Does perfection here signify the same thing that it does, when we say that God is infinitely good, omnipotent, omniscient? Surely perfections are properly asserted of the several powers that attend the essences of things, and not of anything else, but in a very unnatural and improper sense. Perfection is a term of relation, and its sense implies a fitness or agreement to some certain end, and most properly to some power in the thing that is denominated perfect. The term, as the etymology of it shows, is taken from the operation of artists. When an artist proposes to himself to make anything that shall be serviceable to a certain effect, his work is called more or less perfect, according as it agrees more or less with the design of the artist. From arts, by a similitude of sense, this word has been introduced into morality, and signifies that quality of an agent by which it is able to act agreeable to the end its actions tend to. The metaphysicians who reduce everything to transcendental considerations, have also translated this term into their science, and use it to signify the agreement that anything has with that idea, which it is required that thing should answer to. This perfection, therefore, belongs to those attributes that constitute the essence of a thing; and that being is properly called the most perfect which has all, the best, and each the completest in its kind of those attributes, which can be united in one essence. Perfection, therefore, belongs to the essence of things, and not properly to their existence; which is not a perfection of anything, no attribute of it, but only the mere constitution of it _in rerum natura_. Necessary existence, therefore, which is a mode of existence, is not a perfection, it being no attribute of the thing no more than existence is, which is a mode of it. But it may be said, that though necessary existence is not a perfection in itself, yet it is so in its cause, upon account of that attribute of the entity from whence it flows; that that attribute must of all others be the most perfect and most excellent, which necessary existence flows from, it being such as cannot be conceived otherwise than as existing. But what excellency, what perfection is there in all this? Space is necessarily existent on account of extension, which cannot be conceived otherwise than as existing. But what perfection is there in space upon this account, which can in no manner act on anything, which is entirely devoid of all power, wherein I have showed all perfections to consist? Therefore, necessary existence, abstractedly considered, is no perfection; and, therefore, the idea of infinite perfection does not include, and consequently not prove, God to be necessarily existence [sic]. If he be so, it is on account of those attributes of his essence which we have no knowledge of.”

I have made this extract from a very short tract, called Contemplatio Philosophica, by Brook Taylor, which I found in an unpublished memoir of his life printed by the late Sir William Young, in 1793. It bespeaks the clear and acute understanding of this celebrated philosopher, and appears to me an entire refutation of the scholastic argument of Descartes; one more fit for the Anselms and such dealers in words, from whom it came, than for himself.

|His deductions from this.|

91. From the idea of a perfect being, Descartes immediately deduced the truth of his belief in an external world, and in the inferences of his reason. For to deceive his creatures would be an imperfection in God; but God is perfect. Whatever, therefore, is clearly and distinctly apprehended by our reason, must be true. We have only to be on our guard against our own precipitancy and prejudice, or surrender of our reason to the authority of others. It is not by our understanding, such as God gave it to us, that we are deceived; but the exercise of our free will, a high prerogative of our nature, is often so incautious as to make us not discern truth from falsehood, and affirm or deny, by a voluntary act, that which we do not distinctly apprehend. The properties of quantity, founded on our ideas of extension and number, are distinctly perceived by our minds, and hence the sciences of arithmetic and geometry are certainly true. But when he turns his thoughts to the phenomena of external sensation, Descartes cannot wholly extricate himself from his original concession, the basis of his doubt, that the senses do sometimes deceive us. He endeavours to reconcile this with his own theory, which had built the certainty of all that we clearly hold certain on the perfect veracity of God.

|Primary and secondary qualities.|

92. It is in this inquiry that he reaches that important distinction between the primary and secondary properties of matter, the latter being modifications of the former, relative only to our apprehension, but not inherent in things, which, without being wholly new, contradicted the Aristotelian theories of the schools;[232] and he remarked that we are never, strictly speaking, deceived by our senses, but by the inferences which we draw from them.

[232] See Stewart’s First Dissertation on the Progress of Philosophy. This writer has justly observed, that many persons conceive _colour_ to be inherent in the object, so that the censure of Reid on Descartes and his followers, as having pretended to discover what no one doubted, is at least unreasonable in this respect. A late writer has gone so far as to say: “Nothing at first can seem a more rational, obvious, and incontrovertible conclusion, than that the colour of a body is an inherent quality, like its weight, hardness, &c; and that to _see_ the object, and to see it of _its own colour_, when nothing intervenes between our eyes and it, are one and the same thing. Yet this is only a prejudice.” &c. Herschel’s Discourse on Nat. Philos., p. 82. I almost even suspect that the notion of sounds and smells being secondary or merely sensible qualities, is not distinct in all men’s minds. But after we are become familiar with correct ideas, it is not easy to revive prejudices in our imagination. In the same page of Stewart’s Dissertation, he has been led, by dislike of the university of Oxford, to misconceive, in an extraordinary manner, a passage of Addison in the Guardian, which is evidently a sportive ridicule of the Cartesian theory, and is absolutely inapplicable to the Aristotelian.

93. Such is nearly the substance, exclusive of a great variety of more or less episodical theories, of the three metaphysical works of Descartes, the history of the soul’s progress from opinion to doubt, and from doubt to certainty. Few would dispute, at the present day, that he has destroyed too much of his foundations to render his superstructure stable; and to readers averse from metaphysical reflection, he must seem little else than an idle theorist, weaving cobwebs for pastime which common sense sweeps away. It is fair, however, to observe, that no one was more careful than Descartes to guard against any practical scepticism in the affairs of life. He even goes so far as to maintain, that a man having adopted any practical opinion on such grounds as seem probable should pursue it with as much steadiness as if it were founded on demonstration; observing, however, as a general rule, to choose the most moderate opinions among those which he should find current in his own country.[233]

[233] Vol. i., p. 147. Vol. iii., p. 64.

|Objections made to his Meditations.|

94. The objections adduced against the Meditations are in a series of seven. The first are by a theologian named Caterus, the second by Mersenne, the third by Hobbes, the fourth by Arnauld, the fifth by Gassendi, the sixth by some anonymous writers, the seventh by a Jesuit of the name of Bourdin. To all of these Descartes replied with spirit and acuteness. By far the most important controversy was with Gassendi, whose objections were stated more briefly, and I think with less skill, by Hobbes. It was the first trumpet in the new philosophy of an ancient war between the sensual and ideal schools of psychology. Descartes had revived, and placed in a clearer light, the doctrine of mind, as not absolutely dependent upon the senses, nor of the same nature as their objects. Stewart does not acknowledge him as the first teacher of the soul’s immateriality. “That many of the schoolmen, and that the wisest of the ancient philosophers, when they described the mind as a spirit, or as a spark of celestial fire, employed these expressions, not with any intention to materialize its essence, but merely from want of more unexceptionable language, might be shown with demonstrative evidence, if this were the proper place for entering into the discussion.”[234] But though it cannot be said that Descartes was absolutely the first who maintained the strict immateriality of the soul, it is manifest to any one who has read his correspondence, that the tenet, instead of being general, as we are apt to presume, was by no means in accordance with the common opinion of his age. The fathers, with the exception, perhaps the single one, of Augustin, had taught the corporeity of the thinking substance. Arnauld seems to consider the doctrine of Descartes as almost a novelty in modern times. “What you have written concerning the distinction between the soul and body appears to me very clear, very evident, and quite divine; and as nothing is older than truth, I have had singular pleasure to see that almost the same things have formerly been very perspicuously and agreeably handled by St. Augustin in all his tenth book on the Trinity, but chiefly in the tenth chapter.”[235] But Arnauld himself, in his objections to the Meditations, had put it as at least questionable, whether that which thinks is not something extended, which, besides the usual properties of extended substances, such as mobility and figure, has also this particular virtue and power of thinking.[236] The reply of Descartes removed the difficulty of the illustrious Jansenist, who became an ardent and almost complete disciple of the new philosophy. In a placard against the Cartesian philosophy, printed in 1647, which seems to have come from Revius, professor of theology at Leyden, it is said: “As far as regards the nature of things, nothing seems to hinder but that the soul may be either a substance, or a mode of corporeal substance.”[237] And More, who had carried on a metaphysical correspondence with Descartes, whom he professed to admire, at least at that time, above all philosophers that had ever existed, without exception of his favourite Plato, extols him after his death in a letter to Clerselier, as having best established the foundations of religion. “For the peripatetics,” he says, “pretend that there are certain substantial forms emanating from matter, and so united to it that they cannot subsist without it, to which class these philosophers refer the souls of almost all living beings, even those to which they allow sensation and thought; while the Epicureans, on the other hand, who laugh at substantial forms, ascribe thought to matter itself, so that it is M. Descartes alone of all philosophers, who has at once banished from philosophy all these substantial forms or souls derived from matter, and absolutely divested matter itself of the faculty of feeling and thinking.”[238]

[234] Dissertation, ubi suprà.

[235] Descartes, x. 138.

[236] Id. ii 14.

[237] Vol. x., p. 73.

[238] Vol. x., p. 386. Even More seems to have been perplexed at one time by the difficulty of accounting for the knowledge and sentiment of disembodied souls, and almost inclined to admit their corporeity. “J’aimerois mieux dire avec les Platoniciens, les anciens pères, et presque tous les philosophes, que les âmes humaines, tous les génies tant bons que mauvais, sont corporels, et que par consequent ils ont un sentiment réel, c’est à dire, qui leur vient du corps dont ils sont revêtus.” This is in a letter to Descartes, in 1649, which I have not read in Latin (vol. x., p. 249). I do not quite understand whether he meant only that the soul, when separated from the gross body, is invested with a substantial clothing, or that there is what we may call an interior body, a supposed monad, to which the thinking principle is indissolubly united. This is what all materialists mean, who have any clear notions whatever; it is a possible, perhaps a plausible, perhaps even a highly probable, hypothesis, but one which will not prove their theory. The former seems almost an indispensable supposition, if we admit sensibility to phenomena at all in the soul after death; but it is rather, perhaps, a theological than a metaphysical speculation.

|Theory of memory and imagination.|

95. It must be owned that the firm belief of Descartes in the immateriality of the Ego or thinking principle, was accompanied with what in later times would have been deemed rather too great concessions to the materialists. He held the imagination and the memory to be portions of the brain, wherein the images of our sensations are bodily preserved; and even assigned such a motive force to the imagination, as to produce those involuntary actions which we often perform, and all the movements of brutes. “This explains how all the motions of all animals arise, though we grant them no knowledge of things, but only an imagination entirely corporeal, and how all those operations which do not require the concurrence of reason are produced in us.” But the whole of his notions as to the connexion of the soul and body, and indeed all his physiological theories, of which he was most enamoured, do little credit to the Cartesian philosophy. They are among those portions of his creed which have lain most open to ridicule, and which it would be useless for us to detail. He seems to have expected more advantage to psychology from anatomical researches than in that state of the science, or even probably in any future state of it, anatomy could afford. When asked once where was his library, he replied, showing a calf he was dissecting, This is my library.[239] His treatise on the passions, a subject so important in the philosophy of the human mind, is made up of crude hypotheses, or at best irrelevant observations, on their physical causes and concomitants.

[239] Descartes was very fond of dissection: C’est un exercise où je me suis souvent occupé depuis onze ans, et je crois qu’il n’y a guère de médecins qui y ait regardé de si près que moi. Vol. viii., p. 100., also p. 174 and 180.

|Seat of soul in pineal gland.|

96. It may be considered as a part of this syncretism, as we may call it, of the material and immaterial hypothesis, that Descartes fixed the seat of the soul in the conarion, or pineal gland, which he selected as the only part of the brain which is not double. By some mutual communication which he did not profess to explain, though later metaphysicians have attempted to do so, the unextended intelligence, thus confined to a certain spot, receives the sensations which are immediately produced through impressions on the substance of the brain. If he did not solve the problem, be it remembered that the problem has never since been solved. It was objected by a nameless correspondent, who signs himself Hyperaspistes, that the soul being incorporeal could not leave by its operations a trace on the brain, which his theory seemed to imply. Descartes answered, in rather a remarkable passage, that as to things purely intellectual, we do not, properly speaking, remember them at all, as they are equally original thoughts every time they present themselves to the mind, except that they are habitually joined as it were, and associated with certain names, which being bodily, make us remember them.[240]

[240] This passage I must give in French, finding it very obscure, and having translated more according to what I guess than literally. Mais pour ce qui est des choses purement intellectuelles, à proprement parler on n’en aucun ressouvenir; et la première fois qu’elles se présentent à l’esprit, on les pense aussi bien que la seconde, si ce n’est peut-être qu’elles ont coûtume d’être jointes et comme attachées a certains noms qui, étant corporels, font que nous nous ressouvenons aussi d’elles. Vol. viii., p. 271.

|Gassendi’s attacks on the Meditations.|

97. If the orthodox of the age were not yet prepared for a doctrine which seemed so favourable at least to natural religion as the immateriality of the soul, it may be readily supposed, that Gassendi, like Hobbes, had imbibed too much of the Epicurean theory to acquiesce in the spiritualising principles of his adversary. In a sportive style, he addresses him, _O anima!_ and Descartes, replying more angrily, retorts upon him the name _O caro!_ which he frequently repeats. Though we may lament such unhappy efforts at wit in these great men, the names do not ill represent the spiritual and carnal philosophies; the school that produced Leibnitz, Kant, and Stewart, contrasted with that of Hobbes, Condillac, and Cabanis.

|Superiority of Descartes.|

98. It was a matter of course that the vulnerable passages of the six Meditations would not escape the spear of so skilful an antagonist as Gassendi. But many of his objections appear to be little more than cavils; and upon the whole, Descartes leaves me with the impression of his great superiority in metaphysical acuteness. It was indeed impossible that men should agree, who persisted in using a different definition of the important word, _idea_; and the same source of interminable controversy has flowed ever since for their disciples. Gassendi adopting the scholastic maxim, “Nothing is in the understanding, which has not been in the sense,” carried it so much farther than those from whom it came that he denied anything to be an idea but what was imagined by the mind. Descartes repeatedly desired both him and Hobbes, whose philosophy was built on the same notion, to remark that he meant by idea, whatever can be conceived by the understanding, though not capable of being represented by the imagination.[241] Thus we imagine a triangle, but we can only conceive a figure of a thousand sides; we know its existence, and can reason about its properties, but we have no image whatever in the mind, by which we can distinguish such a polygon from one of a smaller or greater number of sides. Hobbes, in answer to this, threw out a paradox which he has not, at least in so unlimited a manner, repeated, that by reason, that is, by the process of reasoning, we can infer nothing as to the nature of things, but only as to their names.[242] It is singular that a man conversant at least with the elements of geometry should have fallen into this error. For it does not appear that he meant to speak only of natural substances, as to which his language might seem to be a bad expression of what was afterwards clearly shown by Locke. That the understanding can conceive and reason upon that which the imagination cannot delineate, is evident not only from Descartes’ instance of a polygon, but more strikingly by the whole theory of infinites, which are certainly somewhat more than bare words, whatever assistance words may give us in explaining them to others or to ourselves.[243]

[241] Par le nom d’idée, il veut seulement qu’on entende ici les images des choses matérielles dépeintes en la fantaisie corporelle; et cela étant supposé, il lui est aisé de montrer qu’on ne peut avoir propre et véritable idée de Dieu ni d’un ange; mais j’ai souvent averti, et principalement en celui là même, que je prends le nom d’idée pour tout ce qui est conçu immédiatement par l’esprit; en sorte que, lorsque je veux et que je crains, parce que je conçois en même temps que je veux et que je crains, ce vouloir et cette crainte sont mis par moi en nombre des idées; et je me suis servi de ce mot, parce qu’il étoit déjà communément reçu par les philosophes pour signifier les formes des conceptions. de l’entendement divin, encore que nous ne reconnoissions en Dieu aucune fantaisie ou imagination corporelle, et je n’en savois point de plus propre. Et je pense avoir assez expliqué l’idée de Dieu pour ceux qui veulent concevoir les sens que je donne à mes paroles; mais pour ceux qui s’attachent à les entendre autrement que je ne fais, je ne le pourrais jamais assez. Vol. i., p. 404. This is in answer to Hobbes; the objections of Hobbes, and Descartes’ replies, turn very much on this primary difference between ideas and images, which alone our countrymen could understand, and ideas as intellections, conceptions, νοουμενα [nooumena], incapable of being imagined, but not less certainly known and reasoned upon. The French is a translation, but made by Clerselier under the eye of Descartes, so that it may be quoted as an original.

[242] Que dirons nous maintenant si peut-être le raisonnement n’est rien autre chose qu’un assemblage et un enchaînement de noms par ce mot est? D’ou il s’ensuivroit que par la raison nous ne concluons rien de tout touchant la nature des choses, mais seulement touchant leurs appellations, c’est à dire que par elle nous voyons simplement si nous assemblons bien ou mal les noms des choses, selon les conventions que nous avons faites à notre fantaisie touchant leurs significations, p. 476. Descartes merely answered:--L’assemblage qui se fait dans le raisonnement n’est pas celui des noms, mais bien celui des choses signifiées par les noms; et je m’étonne que le contraire puisse venir en l’esprit de personne. Descartes treated Hobbes, whom he did not esteem, with less attention than his other correspondents. Hobbes could not understand what have been called ideas of reflection, such as fear, and thought it was nothing more than the idea of the object feared. “For what else is the fear of a lion,” he says, “than the idea of this lion, and the effect which it produces in the heart, which leads us to run away? But this running is not a thought; so that nothing of thought exists in fear but the idea of the object.” Descartes only replied, “it is self-evident that it is not the same thing to see a lion and fear him, that it is to see him only,” p. 483.

[243] I suspect, from what I have since read, that Hobbes had a different, and what seems to me a very erroneous view of infinite, or infinitesimal quantities in geometry. For he answers the old sophism of Zeno, Quicquid dividi potest in partes infinitas est infinitum, in a manner which does not meet the real truth of the case: Dividi posse in partes infinitas nihil aliud est quam dividi posse in partes _quotcunque quis velit_. Logica sive Computatio, c. 5., p. 38 (edit. 1667).

|Stewart’s remarks on Descartes.|

99. Dugald Stewart has justly dwelt on the signal service rendered by Descartes to psychological philosophy, by turning the mental vision inward upon itself, and accustoming us to watch the operations of our intellect, which, though employed upon ideas obtained through the senses, are as distinguishable from them as the workman from his work. He has given indeed to Descartes a very proud title, Father of the experimental philosophy of the human mind, as if he were to man what Bacon was to nature.[244] By patient observation of what passed within him, by holding his soul as it were an object in a microscope, which is the only process of a good metaphysician, he became habituated to throw away those integuments of sense which hide us from ourselves. Stewart has censured him for the paradox, as he calls it, that the _essence_ of mind consists in thinking, and that of matter in extension. That the act of thinking is as inseparable from the mind as extension is from matter, cannot indeed be proved; since, as our thoughts are successive, it is not inconceivable that there may be intervals of duration between them; but it can hardly be reckoned a paradox. But whoever should be led by the word essence to suppose that Descartes confounded the percipient thinking substance, the Ego, upon whose bosom, like that of the ocean, the waves of perception are raised by every breeze of sense, with the perception itself, or even, what is scarcely more tenable, with the reflective action, or thought; that he anticipated this strange paradox of Hume in his earliest work, from which he silently withdrew in his Essays, would not only do great injustice to one of the acutest understandings that ever came to the subject, but overlook several clear assertions of the distinction, especially in his answer to Hobbes. “The thought,” he says, “differs from that which thinks, as the mode from the substance.”[245] And Stewart has in his earliest work justly corrected Reid in this point as to the Cartesian doctrine.[246]

[244] Dissertation on Progress of Philosophy. The word experiment must be taken in the sense of observation. Stewart very early took up his admiration for Descartes. “He was the first philosopher who stated in a clear and satisfactory manner the distinction between mind and matter, and who pointed out the proper plan for studying the intellectual philosophy. It is chiefly in consequence of his precise ideas with respect to this distinction, that we may remark in all his metaphysical writings, a perspicuity which is not observable in those of any of his predecessors.” Elem. of Philos. of Human Mind, vol. i. (published in 1792) note A. “When Descartes,” he says in the dissertation before quoted, “established it as a general principle that _nothing conceivable by the power of imagination could throw any light on the operations of thought_, a principle which I consider as exclusively his own, he laid the foundations of the experimental philosophy of the human mind. That the same truth had been previously perceived more or less distinctly by Bacon and others, appears probable from the general complexion of their speculations; but which of them has expressed it with equal precision, or laid it down as a fundamental maxim in their logic?” The words which I have put in italics seem too vaguely and not very clearly expressed, nor am I aware that they are borne out in their literal sense, by any position of Descartes; nor do I apprehend the allusion to Bacon. But it is certain that Descartes, and still more his disciples Arnauld and Malebranche, take better care to distinguish what can be imagined from what can be conceived or understood, than any of the school of Gassendi in this or other countries. One of the great merits of Descartes as a metaphysical writer, not unconnected with this, is that he is generally careful to avoid figurative language in speaking of mental operations, wherein he has much the advantage over Locke.

[245] Vol. i., p. 470. Arnauld objected, in a letter to Descartes, Comment se peut il faire que la pensée constitue l’essence de l’esprit, puisque l’esprit est une substance, et que la pensée semble n’en être qu’un mode? Descartes replied that thought in general, la pensée, ou la nature que pense, in which he placed the essence of the soul, was very different from such or such particular acts of thinking, vol. vi., p. 153-160.

[246] Philosophy of Human Mind, vol. i., note A. See the Principia, § 63.

|Paradoxes of Descartes.|

100. Several singular positions which have led to an undue depreciation of Descartes in general as a philosopher, occur in his metaphysical writings. Such was his denial of thought, and, as is commonly said, sensation to brutes, which he seems to have founded on the mechanism of the bodily organs, a cause sufficient, in his opinion, to explain all the phænomena of the motions of animals, and to obviate the difficulty of assigning to them immaterial souls;[247] his rejection of final causes in the explanation of nature, as far above our comprehension, and unnecessary to those who had the internal proof of God’s existence; his still more paradoxical tenet that the truth of geometrical theorems, and every other axiom of intuitive certainty, depended upon the will of God; a notion that seems to be a relic of his original scepticism, but which he pertinaciously defends throughout his letters.[248] From remarkable errors, men of original and independent genius are rarely exempt; Descartes had pulled down an edifice constructed by the labours of near two thousand years, with great reason in many respects, yet perhaps with too unlimited a disregard of his predecessors; it was his destiny, as it had been theirs, to be sometimes refuted and depreciated in his turn. But the single fact of his having first established, both in philosophical and popular belief, the immateriality of the soul, were we even to forget the other great accessions which he made to psychology, would declare the influence he has had on human opinion. From this immateriality, however, he did not derive the tenet of its immortality. He was justly contented to say that from the intrinsic difference between mind and body, the dissolution of the one could not necessarily take away the existence of the other, but that it was for God to determine whether it should continue to exist; and this determination, as he thought, could only be learned from his revealed will. The more powerful arguments, according to general apprehension, which reason affords for the sentient being of the soul after death, did not belong to the metaphysical philosophy of Descartes, and would never have been very satisfactory to his mind. He says, in one of his letters, that “laying aside what faith assures us of, he owns that it is more easy to make conjectures for our own advantage and entertain promising hopes, than to feel any confidence in their accomplishment.”[249]

[247] It is a common opinion that Descartes denied all life and sensibility to brutes. But this seems not so clear. Il faut remarquer, he says in a letter to More, where he has been arguing against the existence in brutes of any thinking principle, que je parle de la pensée, non de la vie, ou du sentiment; car je n’ôte la vie à aucun animal, ne la faisant consister que dans la seule chaleur du cœur. Je ne leur refuse pas même le sentiment autant qu’il dépend des organes du corps, vol. x., p. 208. In a longer passage, if he does not express himself very clearly, he admits passions in brutes, and it seems impossible that he could have ascribed passions to what has no sensation. Much of what he here says is very good. Bien que Montaigne et Charron aient dit, qu’il y a plus de différence d’homme à homme que d’homme à bête, il n’est toutefois jamais trouvé aucune bête si parfaite, qu’elle ait usé de quelque signe pour faire entendre à d’autres animaux quelque chose que n’eût point de rapport à ses passions; et il n’y a point d’homme si imparfait qu’il n’en use; en sorte que ceux qui sont sourds et muets inventent des signes particuliers par lesquels ils expriment leur pensées; ce qui me semble un très fort argument pour prouver que ce qui fait que les bêtes ne parlent point comme nous, est qu’elles n’ont aucune pensée, et non point que les organes leur manquent. Et on ne peut dire qu’elles parlent entre elles, mais que nous ne les entendons pas; car _comme les chiens et quelques autres animaux nous expriment leurs passions_, ils nous exprimeroient aussi bien leurs pensées s’ils en avoient. Je sais bien que les bêtes font beaucoup de choses mieux que nous, mais je ne m’en étonne pas; car cela même sert à prouver qu’elles agissent naturellement, et par ressorts, ainsi qu’un horloge; laquelle montre bien mieux l’heure qu’il est, que notre jugement nous l’enseigne.... On peut seulement dire que, bien que les bêtes ne fassent aucune action qui nous assure qu’elles pensent, toutefois, à cause que les organes de leurs corps ne sont pas fort differens des nôtres, on peut conjecturer qu’il y a quelque pensée jointe à ces organes, ainsi que nous experimentons en nous, bien que la leur soit beaucoup moins parfaite; à quoi je n’ai rien à répondre, si non que si elles pensoient aussi que nous, elles auroient une ame immortelle aussi bien que nous; ce qui n’est pas vraisemblable, à cause qu’il n’y a point de raison pour le croire de quelques animaux, sans le croire de tous, et qu’il y en a plusieurs trop imparfaits pour pouvoir croire cela d’eux, comme sont les huitres, les éponges, &c. Vol. ix., p. 425. I do not see the meaning of une ame immortelle in the last sentence; if the words had been une ame immatérielle, it would be to the purpose. More, in a letter to which this is a reply, had argued as if Descartes took brutes for insensible machines, and combats the paradox with the arguments which common sense furnishes. He would even have preferred ascribing immortality to them, as many ancient philosophers did. But surely Descartes, who did not acknowledge any proofs of the immortality of the human soul to be valid, except those founded on revelation, needed not to trouble himself much about this difficulty.

[248] C’est en effet parler de Dieu comme d’un Jupiter ou d’un Saturne, et l’assujettir au Styx et aux destinées, que de dire que ces vérités sont indépendantes de lui. Ne craignez point, je vous prie, d’assurer et de publier partout que c’est Dieu qui a établi ces lois en la nature, ainsi qu’un roi établit les lois en son royaume. Vol. vi., p. 109. He argues as strenuously the same point in p. 132 and p. 307.

[249] Vol. ix., p. 369.

|His just notion of definitions.|

101. Descartes was perhaps the first who saw that definitions of words, already as clear as they can be made, are nugatory or impenetrable. This alone would distinguish his philosophy from that of the Aristotelians, who had wearied and confused themselves for twenty centuries with unintelligible endeavours to grasp by definition what refuses to be defined. “Mr Locke,” says Stewart, “claims this improvement as entirely his own, but the merit of it unquestionably belongs to Descartes, although it must be owned that he has not always sufficiently attended to it in his researches.”[250] A still more decisive passage to this effect, than that referred to by Stewart in the Principia will be found in the posthumous dialogue on the Search after Truth. It is objected by one of the interlocutors, as it had actually been by Gassendi, that, to prove his existence by the act of thinking, he should first know what existence and what thought is. “I agree with you,” the representative of Descartes replies, “that it is necessary to know what doubt is, and what thought is, before we can be fully persuaded of this reasoning; I doubt, therefore I am, or what is the same, I think, therefore I am. But do not imagine that for this purpose you must torture your mind to find out the next genus, or the essential differences, as the logicians talk, and so compose a regular definition. Leave this to such as teach or dispute in the schools. But whoever will examine things by himself, and judge of them according to his understanding, cannot be so senseless as not to see clearly, when he pays attention, what doubting, thinking, being, are, and as to have any need to learn their distinctions. Besides, there are things which we render more obscure, in attempting to define them, because, as they are very simple and very clear, we cannot know and comprehend them better than by themselves. And it should be reckoned among the chief errors that can be committed in science for men to fancy that they can define that which they can only conceive, and distinguish what is clear in it from what is obscure, while they do not see the difference between that which must be defined before it is understood and that which can be fully known by itself. Now, among things which can thus be clearly known by themselves, we must put doubting, thinking, being. For I do not believe any one ever existed so stupid as to need to know what being is before he could affirm that he is; and it is the same of thought and doubt. Nor can he learn these things except by himself, nor be convinced of them but by his own experience, and by that consciousness and inward witness which every man finds in himself when he examines the subject. And as we should define whiteness in vain to a man who can see nothing, while one can open his eyes and see a white object requires no more, so to know what doubting is, and what thinking is, it is only necessary to doubt and to think.”[251] Nothing could more tend to cut short the verbal cavils of the schoolmen, than this limitation of their favourite exercise, definition. It is due, therefore, to Descartes, so often accused of appropriating the discoveries of others, that we should establish his right to one of the most important that the new logic has to boast.

[250] Dissertation, ubi, suprá, Stewart, in his Philosophical Essays, note A, had censured Reid for assigning this remark to Descartes and Locke, but without giving any better reason than that it is found in a work written by Lord Stair; earlier, certainly, than Locke, but not before Descartes. It may be doubtful, as we shall see hereafter, whether Locke has not gone beyond Descartes, or at least distinguished undefinable words more strictly.

[251] Vol. xi., p. 369.

|His notion of substances.|

102. He seems, at one moment, to have been on the point of taking another step very far in advance of his age. “Let us take,” he says, “a piece of wax from the honey-comb; it retains some taste and smell, it is hard, it is cold, it has a very marked colour, form, and size. Approach it to the fire; it becomes liquid, warm, inodorous, tasteless; its form and colour are changed, its size is increased. Does the same wax remain after these changes? It must be allowed that it does; no one doubts it, no one thinks otherwise. What was it then that we so distinctly knew to exist in this piece of wax? Nothing certainly that we observed by the senses, since all that the taste, the smell, the sight, the touch reported to us has disappeared, and still the same wax remains.” This something which endures under every change of sensible qualities cannot be imagined; for the imagination must represent some of these qualities, and none of them are essential to the thing; it can only be conceived by the understanding.[252]

[252] Méditation Seconde, i. 256.

|Not quite correct.|

103. It may seem almost surprising to us, after the writings of Locke and his followers on the one hand, and the chemist with his crucible on the other, have chased these abstract substances of material objects from their sanctuaries, that a man of such prodigious acuteness and intense reflection as Descartes should not have remarked that the identity of wax after its liquefaction is merely nominal, and depending on arbitrary language, which in many cases gives new appellations to the same aggregation of particles after a change of their sensible qualities; and that all we call substances are but aggregates of resisting moveable corpuscles, which by the laws of nature are capable of affecting our senses differently, according to the combinations they may enter into, and the changes they may successively undergo. But if he had distinctly seen this, which I do not apprehend that he did, it is not likely that he would have divulged the discovery. He had already given alarm to the jealous spirit of orthodoxy by what now appears to many so self-evident, that they have treated the supposed paradox as a trifling with words, the doctrine that colour, heat, smell, and other secondary qualities, or accidents of bodies, do not exist in them, but in our own minds, and are the effects of their intrinsic or primary qualities. It was the the tenet of the schools that these were sensible realities, inherent in bodies; and the church held as an article of faith, that the substance of bread being withdrawn from the consecrated wafer, the accidents of that substance remained as before, but independent, and not inherent in any other. Arnauld raised this objection, which Descartes endeavoured to repel by a new theory of transubstantiation; but it always left a shade of suspicion, in the Catholic church of Rome, on the orthodoxy of Cartesianism.

|His notions of intuitive truth.|

104. “The paramount and indisputable authority which, in all our reasonings concerning the human mind, he ascribes to the evidence of consciousness” is reckoned by Stewart among the great merits of Descartes. It is certain that there are truths which we know, as it is called, intuitively, that is, by the mind’s immediate inward glance. And reasoning would be interminable, if it did not find its ultimate limit in truths which it cannot prove. Gassendi imputed to Descartes, that, in his fundamental enthymem, Cogito, ergo sum, he supposed a knowledge of the major premise, Quod cogitat, est. But Descartes replied that it was a great error to believe that our knowledge of particular propositions must always be deduced from universals, according to the rules of logic; whereas, on the contrary, it is by means of our knowledge of particulars that we ascend to generals, though it is true that we descend again from them to infer other particular propositions.[253] It is probable that Gassendi did not make this objection very seriously.

[253] Vol. ii., p. 305. See too the passage, quoted above, in his posthumous dialogue.

105. Thus the logic of Descartes, using that word for principles that guide our reasoning, was an instrument of defence both against the captiousness of ordinary scepticism, that of the Pyrrhonic school, and against the disputatious dogmatism of those who professed to serve under the banner of Aristotle. He who reposes on his own consciousness, or who recurs to first principles of intuitive knowledge, though he cannot be said to silence his adversary, should have the good sense to be silent himself, which puts equally an end to debate. But so far as we are concerned with the investigation of truth, the Cartesian appeal to our own consciousness, of which Stewart was very fond, just as it is in principle, _may_ end in an assumption of our own prejudices as the standard of belief. Nothing can be truly self-evident, but that which a clear, an honest, and an experienced understanding in another man acknowledges to be so.

|Treatise on art of logic.|

106. Descartes has left a treatise highly valuable, but not very much known, on the art of logic, or rules for the conduct of the understanding.[254] Once only, in a letter, he has alluded to the name of Bacon.[255] There are perhaps a few passages in this short tract that remind us of the Novum Organum. But I do not know that the coincidence is such as to warrant a suspicion that he was indebted to it; we may reckon it rather a parallel, than a derivative logic; written in the same spirit of cautious, inductive procedure, less brilliant and original in its inventions, but of more general application than the Novum Organum, which is with some difficulty extended beyond the province of natural philosophy. Descartes is as averse as Bacon to syllogistic forms. “Truth,” he says, “often escapes from these fetters, in which those who employ them remain entangled. This is less frequently the case with those who make no use of logic, experience showing that the most subtle of sophisms cheat none but sophists themselves, not those who trust to their natural reason. And to convince ourselves how little this syllogistic art serves towards the discovery of truth, we may remark that the logicians can form no syllogism with a true conclusion, unless they are already acquainted with the truth that the syllogism develops. Hence it follows that the vulgar logic is wholly useless to him who would discover truth for himself, though it may assist in explaining to others the truth he already knows, and that it would be better to transfer it as a science from philosophy to rhetoric.”[256]

[254] M. Cousin has translated and republished two works of Descartes, which had only appeared in Opera Posthuma Cartesii, Amsterdam, 1701. Their authenticity, from external and intrinsic proofs, is out of question. One of these is that mentioned in the text; entitled “Rules for the Direction of the Understanding;” which, though logical in its subject, takes most of its illustrations from mathematics. The other is a dialogue, left imperfect, in which he sustains the metaphysical principles of his philosophy. Of these two little tracts, their editor has said, that “they equal in vigour and perhaps surpass in arrangement the Meditations and Discourse on Method. We see in these more unequivocally the main object of Descartes, and the spirit of the revolution which has created modern philosophy, and placed in the understanding itself the principle of all certainty, the point of departure for all legitimate inquiry. They might seem written but yesterday, and for the present age.” Vol. xi. preface, p. 1. I may add to this, that I consider the Rules for the direction of the Understanding as one of the best works on logic (in the enlarged sense) which I have ever read; more practically useful, perhaps, to young students than the Novum Organum; and though, as I have said, his illustrations are chiefly mathematical, most of his rules are applicable to the general discipline of the reasoning powers. It occupies little more than one hundred pages, and I think that I am doing a service in recommending it. Many of the rules will, of course, be found in later books; some possibly in earlier. This tract, as well as the dialogue which follows it, is incomplete, a portion being probably lost.

[255] Si quelqu’un de cette humeur vouloit entreprendre d’écrire l’histoire des apparences célestes selon la méthode de Verulamius. Vol. vi., p. 210.

[256] Vol. xi., p. 255.

|Merits of his writings.|

107. It would occupy too much space to point out the many profound and striking thoughts which this treatise on the conduct of the understanding, and indeed most of the writings of Descartes contain. “The greater part of the questions on which the learned dispute are but questions of words. These occur so frequently that, if philosophers would agree on the signification of their words, scarce any of their controversies would remain.” This has been continually said since; but it is a proof of some progress in wisdom, when the original thought of one age becomes the truism of the next. No one had been so much on his guard against the equivocation of words, or knew so well their relation to the operations of the mind. And it may be said, generally, though not without exception of the metaphysical writings of Descartes, that we find in them a perspicuity which springs from his unremitting attention to the logical process of inquiry, admitting no doubtful or ambiguous position, and never requiring from his reader a deference to any authority but that of demonstration. It is a great advantage in reading such writers that we are able to discern when they are manifestly in the wrong. The sophisms of Plato, of Aristotle, of the schoolmen, and of a great many recent metaphysicians, are disguised by their obscurity; and while they creep insidiously into the mind of the reader, are always denied and explained away by partial disciples.

|His notions of free will.|

108. Stewart has praised Descartes for having recourse to the evidence of consciousness in order to prove the liberty of the will. But he omits to tell us that the notions entertained by this philosopher were not such as have been generally thought compatible with free agency in the only sense that admits of controversy. It was an essential part of the theory of Descartes that God is the cause of all human actions. “Before God sent us into the world,” he says in a letter, “he knew exactly what all the inclinations of our will would be; it is he that has implanted them in us; it is he also that has disposed all other things, so that such or such objects should present themselves to us at such or such times, by means of which he has known that our free will would determine us to such or such actions, and he has willed that it should be so; but he has not willed to compel us thereto.”[257] “We could not demonstrate,” he says at another time, “that God exists, except by considering him as a being absolutely perfect; and he could not be absolutely perfect, if there could happen anything in the world which did not spring entirely from him.... Mere philosophy is enough to make us know that there cannot enter the least thought into the mind of man, but God must will and have willed from all eternity that it should enter there.”[258] This is in a letter to his highly intelligent friend, the princess Palatine Elizabeth, granddaughter of James I.; and he proceeds to declare himself strongly in favour of predestination, denying wholly any particular providence, to which she had alluded, as changing the decrees of God, and all efficacy of prayer, except as one link in the chain of his determinations. Descartes, therefore, whatever some of his disciples may have become, was far enough from an Arminian theology. “As to free will,” he says elsewhere, “I own that thinking only of ourselves we cannot but reckon it independent, but when we think of the infinite power of God we cannot but believe that all things depend on him, and that consequently our free will must do so too.... But since our knowledge of the existence of God should not hinder us from being assured of our free will, because we feel and are conscious of it in ourselves, so that if our free will should not make us doubt of the existence of God. For the independence which we experience and feel in ourselves, and which is sufficient to make our actions praiseworthy or blameable, is not incompatible with a dependence of another nature, according to which all things are subject to God.”[259]

[257] Vol. ix., p. 374.

[258] Id. p. 246.

[259] Vol. ix., p. 368. This had originally been stated in the Principia with less confidence, the free will of man and predetermination of God being both asserted as true, but their co-existence incomprehensible. Vol. iii., p. 86.

|Fame of his system and attacks upon it.|

109. A system so novel, so attractive to the imagination by its bold and brilliant paradoxes as that of Descartes, could not but excite the attention of an age already roused to the desire of a new philosophy, and to the scorn of ancient authority. His first treatises appeared in French; and, though he afterwards employed Latin, his works were very soon translated by his disciples, and under his own care. He wrote in Latin with great perspicuity; in French with liveliness and elegance. His mathematical and optical writings gave him a reputation which envy could not take away, and secured his philosophy from that general ridicule which sometimes overwhelms an obscure author. His very enemies, numerous and vehement as they were, served to enhance the celebrity of the Cartesian system, which he seems to have anticipated by publishing their objections to his Meditations with his own replies. In the universities, bigoted for the most part to Aristotelian authority, he had no chance of public reception; but the influence of the universities was much diminished in France, and a new theory had perhaps better chances in its favour on account of their opposition. But the Jesuits, a more powerful body, were in general adverse to the Cartesian system, and especially some time afterwards, when it was supposed to have the countenance of several leading Jansenists. The Epicurean school, led by Gassendi and Hobbes, presented a formidable phalanx; since it in fact comprehended the wits of the world, the men of indolence and sensuality, quick to discern the many weaknesses of Cartesianism, with no capacity for its excellencies. It is unnecessary to say, how predominant this class was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both in France and England.

|Controversy with Voet.|

110. Descartes was evidently in considerable alarm lest the church should bear with its weight upon his philosophy.[260] He had the censure on Galileo before his eyes, and certainly used some chicane of words as to the earth’s movement upon this account. It was, however, in the Protestant country, which he had chosen as his harbour of refuge, that he was doomed to encounter the roughest storm. Gisbert Voet, an eminent theologian in the university of Utrecht, and the head of the party in the church of Holland, which had been victorious in the synod of Dort, attacked Descartes with all the virulence and bigotry characteristic of his school of divinity. The famous demonstration of the being of God he asserted to be a cover for atheism, and thus excited a flame of controversy, Descartes being not without supporters in the university, especially Regius, professor of medicine. The philosopher was induced by these assaults to change his residence from a town in the province of Utrecht to Leyden. Voet did not cease to pursue him with outrageous calumny, and succeeded in obtaining decrees of the senate and university, which interdicted Regius from teaching that “new and unproved (præsumpta) philosophy” to his pupils. The war of libels on the Voetian side did not cease for some years, and Descartes replied with no small acrimony against Voet himself. The latter had recourse to the civil power, and instituted a prosecution against Descartes, which was quashed by the interference of the prince of Orange. But many in the university of Leyden, under the influence of a notable theologian of that age, named Triglandius, one of the stoutest champions of Dutch orthodoxy, raised a cry against the Cartesian philosophy as being favourable to Pelagianism and popery, the worst names that could be given in Holland; and it was again through the protection of the prince of Orange that he escaped a public censure. Regius, the most zealous of his original advocates, began to swerve from the fidelity of a sworn disciple, and published a book containing some theories of his own, which Descartes thought himself obliged to disavow. Ultimately he found, like many benefactors of mankind, that he had purchased reputation at the cost of peace; and, after some visits to France, where, probably from the same cause, he never designed to settle, found an honourable asylum and a premature death at the court of Christina. He died in 1651, having worked a more important change in speculative philosophy than any who had preceded him since the revival of learning; for there could be no comparison, in that age, between the celebrity and effect of his writings and those of Lord Bacon. The latter had few avowed enemies, till it was too late to avow enmity.[261]

[260] On a tellement assujetti la théologie à Aristotle, qu’il est impossible d’expliquer une autre philosophie qu’il ne semble d’abord qu’elle soit contre la foi. Et à propos de ceci, je vous prie de me mander s’il n’y a rien de déterminé en la foi touchant l’étendue du monde: savoir s’il est fini ou plutôt infini, et si tout ce qu’on appelle espaces imaginaires soient des corps créés et véritables. Vol. vi., p. 73.

[261] The life of Descartes was written, very fully and with the warmth of a disciple, by Baillet, in two volumes quarto, 1691, of which he afterwards published an abridgment. In this we find at length the attacks made on him by the Voetian theologians. Brucker has given a long and valuable account of the Cartesian philosophy, but not favourable, and perhaps not quite fair. Vol. v., p. 200-334. Buhle is, as usual, much inferior to Brucker. But those who omit the mathematical portion will not find the original works of Descartes very long, and they are well worthy of being read.

|Charges of plagiarism.|

111. The prejudice against Descartes, especially in his own country, was aggravated by his indiscreet and not very warrantable assumption of perfect originality.[262] No one, I think, can fairly refuse to own, that the Cartesian metaphysics, taken in their consecutive arrangement, form truly an original system; and it would be equally unjust to deny the splendid discoveries he developed in algebra and optics. But upon every one subject which Descartes treated, he has not escaped the charge of plagiarism; professing always to be ignorant of what had been done by others, he falls perpetually into their track; more, as his adversaries maintained, than the chances of coincidence could fairly explain. Leibnitz has summed up the claims of earlier writers to the pretended discoveries of Descartes; and certainly it is a pretty long bill to be presented to any author. I shall insert this passage in a note, though much of it has no reference to this portion of the Cartesian philosophy.[263] It may perhaps be thought by candid minds, that we cannot apply the doctrine of chances to coincidence of reasoning in men of acute and inquisitive spirits, as fairly as we may to that of style or imagery; but, if we hold strictly that the older writer may claim the exclusive praise of the philosophical discovery, we must regret to see such a multitude of feathers plucked from the wing of an eagle.

[262] I confess, he says in his logic, that I was born with such a temper, that the chief pleasure I find in study is not from the learning the arguments of others, but by inventing my own. This disposition alone impelled me in youth to the study of science; hence, whenever a new book promised by its title some new discovery, before sitting down to read it, I used to try whether my own natural sagacity could lead me to anything of the kind, and I took care not to lose this innocent pleasure by too hasty a perusal. This answered so often that I at length perceived that I arrived at truth, not as other men do after blind and precarious guesses, by good luck rather than skill, but that long experience had taught me certain fixed rules, which were of surprising utility, and of which I afterwards made use to discover more truths. Vol. xi., p. 252.

[263] Dogmata ejus metaphysica, velut circa ideas a sensibus remotas, et animæ distinctionem a corpore, et fluxam per se rerum materialium fidem, prorsus Platonica sunt. Argumentum pro existentia Dei, ex eo, quod ens perfectissimum, vel quo majus intelligi non potest, existentiam includit, fuit Anselmi, et in libro “Contra insipientem” inscripto extat inter ejus opera, passimque a scholasticis examinatur. In doctrina de continuo, pleno et loco Aristotelem noster secutus est, Stoicosque in re morali penitus expressit, floriferis ut apes in saltibus omnia libant. In explicatione rerum mechina Leucippum et Democritum præeuntes habuit, qui et vortices ipsos jam docuerant. Jordanus Brunus easdem fere de magnitudine universi ideas habuisse dicitur, quemadmodum et notavit V. CC. Stephanus Spleissius, ut de Gilberto nil dicam, cujus magneticæ considerationes tum per se, tum ad systema universi applicatæ, Cartesio plurimum profuerunt. Explicationem gravitatis per materiæ solidioris rejectionem in tangente, quod in physica Cartesiana prope pulcherrimum est, didicit ex Keplero, qui similitudine palearum motu aquæ in vase gyrantis ad centrum contrusarum rem explicuit primus. Actionem lucis in distans, similitudine baculi pressi jam veteres adumbravere. Circa iridem a M. Antonio de Dominis non parum lucis accepit. Keplerum fuisse primum suum in dioptricis magistrum, et in eo argumento omnes ante se mortales longo intervallo antegressum, fatetur Cartesius in epistolis familiaribus; nam in scriptis, quæ ipse edidit, longè abest a tali confessione aut laude, tametsi illa ratio, quæ rationum dictionem explicat, et compositione nimirum duplicis conatûs perpendicularis ad superficiem et ad eandem paralleli, disertè apud Keplerum extet, qui eodem, ut Cartesius, modo æqualitatem angulorum incidentiæ et reflexionis hinc deducit. Idque gratam mentionem ideo merebatur, quod omnis prope Cartesii ratiocinatio huic innititur principio. Legem refractionis primum invenisse Willebroodum Snellium, Isaacus Vossius patefecit, quanquam non ideo negare ausim, Cartesium in eadem incidere potuisse de suo. Negavit in epistolis Vietam sibi lectum, sed Thomæ Harrioti Angli libros analyticos posthumos anno 1631 editos vidisse multi vix dubitant; usque adeo magnus est eorum consensus cum calculo geometriæ Cartesianæ. Sane jam Harriotus æquationem nihilo æqualem posuit, et hinc derivavit, quomodo oriatur æquatio ex multiplicatione radicum in se invicem, et quomodo radiorum auctione, diminutione, multiplicatione aut divisione variari æquatio possit, et quomodo proinde natura, et constitutio æquationem et radicum cognosci possit ex terminorum habitudine. Itaque narrat celeberrimus Wallisius, Robervalium, qui miratus erat, unde Cartesio in mentem venisset palmarium illud, æquationem ponere æqualem nihilo ad instar unius quantitatis, ostenso sibi a Domino de Cavendish libro Harrioti exclamasse, il l’a vu! il l’a vu! vidit, vidit. Reductionem quadratoquadratæ æquationis ad cubicam superiori jam sæculo invenit Ludovicus Ferrarius, cujus vitam reliquit Cardanus ejus familiaris. Denique fuit Cartesius, ut a viris doctis dudum notatum est, et ex epistolis nimium apparet, immodicus contemptor aliorum, et famæ cupiditate ab artificiis non abstinens, quæ parum generosa videri possunt. Atque hæc profecto non dico animo obtrectandi viro, quem mirificè æstimo, sed eo consilio, ut cuique suum tribuatur, nec unus omnium laudes absorbeat; justissimum enim est, ut inventoribus suus honos constet, nec sublatis virtutum præmiis præclara faciendi studium refrigescat. Leibnitz, apud Brucker, v. v. 255.

|Recent increase of his fame.|

112. The name of Descartes as a great metaphysical writer has revived in some measure of late years; and this has been chiefly owing, among ourselves, to Dugald Stewart; in France, to the growing disposition of their philosophers to cast away their idols of the eighteenth century. “I am disposed,” says our Scottish philosopher, “to date the origin of the true philosophy of mind from the Principia (why not the earlier works?) of Descartes, rather than from the Organum of Bacon, or the Essays of Locke; without, however, meaning to compare the French author with our two countrymen, either as a contributor to our stock of _facts_ relating to the intellectual phænomena, or as the author of any important conclusion concerning the general laws to which they may be referred.” The excellent edition by M. Cousin, in which alone the entire works of Descartes can be found, is a homage that France has recently offered to his memory, and an important contribution to the studious both of metaphysical and mathematical philosophy. I have made use of no other, though it might be desirable for the inquirer to have the Latin original at his side, especially in those works which have not been seen in French by their author.

SECT. IV.

_On the Metaphysical Philosophy of Hobbes._

|Metaphysical treatise of Hobbes.|

113. The metaphysical philosophy of Hobbes was promulgated in his treatise on Human Nature, which appeared in 1650. This, with his other works, De Cive, and De Corpore Politico, were fused into that great and general system, which he published in 1651 with the title of Leviathan. The first part of the Leviathan, “Of Man,” follows the several chapters of the treatise on Human Nature with much regularity; but so numerous are the enlargements or omissions, so great is the variance with which the author has expressed the same positions, that they should much rather be considered as two works, than as two editions of the same. They differ more than Lord Bacon’s treatise, De Augmentis Scientiarum, does from his Advancement of Learning. I shall, however, blend the two in a single analysis, and this I shall generally give, as far as is possible, consistently with my own limits, in the very words of Hobbes. His language is so lucid and concise, that it would be almost as improper to put an algebraical process in different terms as some of his metaphysical paragraphs. But, as a certain degree of abridgment cannot be dispensed with, the reader must not take it for granted, even where inverted commas denote a closer attention to the text, that nothing is omitted, although, in such cases, I never hold it permissible to make any change.

|His theory of sensation.|

|Coincident with Descartes.|

114. All single thoughts, it is the primary tenet of Hobbes, are representations or appearances of some quality of a body without us, which is commonly called an object. “There is no conception in a man’s mind, which hath not at first totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that original.”[264] In the treatise on Human Nature he dwells long on the immediate causes of sensation; and if no alteration had been made in his manuscript since he wrote his dedication to the Earl of Newcastle in 1640, he must be owned to have anticipated Descartes in one of his most celebrated doctrines. “Because the image in vision, consisting in colour and shape, is the knowledge we have of the qualities of the object of that sense, it is no hard matter for a man to fall into this opinion, that the same colour and shape are the very qualities themselves; and for the same, cause, that sound and noise are the qualities of the bell, or of the air. And this opinion hath been so long received, that the contrary must needs appear a great paradox; and yet the introduction of species visible and intelligible (which is necessary for the maintenance of that opinion), passing to and fro from the object, is worse than any paradox, as being a plain impossibility. I shall, therefore, endeavour to make plain these points: 1. That the subject wherein colour and image are inherent, is not the object or thing seen. 2. That there is nothing without us (really) which we call an image or colour. 3. That the said image or colour is but an apposition unto us of the motion, agitation, or alteration, which the object worketh in the brain, or spirits, or some external substance of the head. 4. That, as in vision, so also in conceptions that arise from the other senses, the subject of their inherence is not the object, but the sentiment.”[265] And this he goes on to prove. Nothing of this will be found in the Discours sur la Méthode, the only work of Descartes then published; and, even if we believe Hobbes to have interpolated this chapter after he had read the Meditations, he has stated the principle so clearly and illustrated it so copiously, that, so far especially as Locke and the English metaphysicians took it up, we may almost reckon him another original source.

[264] Leviathan, c. 1.

[265] Hum. Nat., c. 2.

|Imagination and memory.|

115. The second chapter of the Leviathan, “On Imagination,” begins with one of those acute and original observations we often find in Hobbes: “That when a thing lies still, unless somewhat else stir it, it will lie still for ever, is a truth that no man doubts of. But that when a thing is in motion, it will eternally be in motion, unless somewhat stay it, though the reason be the same, namely, that nothing can change itself, is not so easily assented to. For men measure, not only other men, but all other things, by themselves; and because they find themselves subject after motion to pain and lassitude, think everything else grows weary of motion and seeks repose of its own accord.” The physical principle had lately been established, but the reason here given for the contrary prejudice, though not the sole one, is ingenious and even true. Imagination he defines to be “conception remaining, and by little and little decaying after the act of sense.”[266] This he afterwards expressed less happily, “the gradual decline of the motion in which sense consists;” his phraseology becoming more and more tinctured with the materialism he affected in all his philosophy. Neither definition seems at all applicable to the imagination which calls up long past perceptions. “This decaying sense, when we would express the thing itself (I mean fancy itself), we call imagination, but when we would express the decay, and signify that the sense is fading, old and past, it is called memory. So that, imagination and memory are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names.”[267] It is, however, evident that imagination and memory are distinguished by something more than their names. The second fundamental error of Hobbes in his metaphysics, his extravagant nominalism, if so it should be called, appears in this sentence, as the first, his materialism, does in that previously quoted.

[266] Hum. Nat., c. 3.

[267] Lev., c. 2.

116. The phænomena of dreaming and the phantasms of waking men are considered in this chapter with the keen observation and cool reason of Hobbes.[268] I am not sure that he has gone more profoundly into psychological speculations in the Leviathan than in the earlier treatise; but it bears witness more frequently to what had probably been the growth of the intervening period, a proneness to political and religious allusion, to magnify civil and to depreciate ecclesiastical power. “If this superstitious fear of spirits were taken away, and with its prognostics from dreams, false prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which crafty and ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civil obedience. And this ought to be the work of the schools; but they rather nourish such doctrine.”[269]

[268] Hum. Nat., c. 3.

[269] Id. ibid.

|Discourse or train of imagination.|

117. The fourth chapter on Human Nature, and the corresponding third chapter of the Leviathan, entitled On Discourse, or the Consequence and Train of Imagination, are among the most remarkable in Hobbes, as they contain the elements of that theory of association, which was slightly touched afterwards by Locke, but developed and pushed to a far greater extent by Hartley. “The cause,” he says, “of the coherence or consequence of one conception to another is their first coherence or consequence at that time when they are produced by sense: As, for instance, from St. Andrew the mind runneth to St. Peter, because their names are read together; from St. Peter to a stone, from the same cause; from stone to foundation, because we see them together; and for the same cause from foundation to church, and from church to people, and from people to tumult; and, according to this example, the mind may run almost from anything to anything.”[270] This he illustrates in the Leviathan by the well-known question suddenly put by one, in conversation about the death of Charles I., “What was the value of a Roman penny?” Of this _discourse_, as he calls it, in a larger sense of the word than is usual with the logicians, he mentions several kinds; and after observing that the remembrance of succession of one thing to another, that is, of what was antecedent and what consequent and what concomitant, is called an experiment, adds that “to have had many experiments, is what we call experience, which is nothing else but remembrance of what antecedents have been followed by what consequents.”[271]

[270] Hum. Nat. c. 4, § 2.

[271] Id.

|Experience.|

118. “No man can have a conception of the future, for the future is not yet, but of our conceptions of the past we make a future, or rather call past future relatively.”[272] And again: “The present only has a being in nature; things past have a being in the memory only; but things to come have no being at all; the future being but a fiction of the mind, applying the sequels of actions past to the actions that are present, which with most certainty is done by him that has most experience, but not with certainty enough. And though it be called prudence, when the event answereth our expectation, yet in its own nature it is but presumption.”[273] “When we have observed antecedents and consequents frequently associated, we take one for a sign of the other, as clouds foretell rain, and rain is a sign there have been clouds. But signs are but conjectural, and their assurance is never full or evident. For though a man have always seen the day and night to follow one another hitherto, yet can he not thence conclude they shall do so, or that they have done so, eternally. Experience concludeth nothing universally. But those who have most experience conjecture best, because they have most signs to conjecture by; hence, old men, cæteris paribus, and men of quick parts, conjecture better than the young or dull.”[274] “But experience is not to be equalled by any advantage of natural and extemporary wit, though perhaps many young men think the contrary.” There is a presumption of the past as well as the future founded on experience, as when from having often seen ashes after fire, we infer from seeing them again that there has been fire. But this is as conjectural as our expectations of the future.[275]

[272] Human Nat. c. 4, § 7.

[273] Lev., c. 3.

[274] Hum. Nat.

[275] Lev.

|Unconceivableness of infinity.|

119. In the last paragraph of the chapter in the Leviathan, he adds, what is a very leading principle in the philosophy of Hobbes, but seems to have no particular relation to what has preceded. “Whatsoever we imagine is finite; therefore, there is no idea or conception of anything we call infinite. No man can have in his mind an image of infinite magnitude, nor conceive infinite swiftness, infinite time, or infinite force, or infinite power. When we say anything is infinite, we signify only that we are not able to conceive the ends and bounds of the things named, having no conception of the thing, but of our own inability. And therefore the name of God is used, not to make us conceive him, for he is incomprehensible and his greatness and power are inconceivable, but that we may honour him. Also, because whatsoever, as I said before, we conceive, has been perceived first by sense, either all at once, or by parts; a man can have no thought, representing anything, not subject to sense. No man therefore can conceive anything, but he must conceive it in some place, and indeed with some determinate magnitude, and which may be divided into parts, nor that anything is all in this place, and all in another place at the same time, nor that two or more things can be in one and the same place at once. For none of these things ever have, or can be incident to sense, but are absurd speeches, taken upon credit without any signification at all, from deceived philosophers, and deceived or deceiving schoolmen.” This, we have seen in the last section, had been already discussed with Descartes. The paralogism of Hobbes consists in his imposing a limited sense on the word idea or conception, and assuming that what cannot be conceived according to that sense has no signification at all.

|Origin of language.|

120. The next chapter, being the fifth in one treatise, and the fourth in the other, may be reckoned, perhaps, the most valuable as well as original, in the writings of Hobbes. It relates to speech and language. “The invention of printing,” he begins by observing, “though ingenious, compared with the invention of letters, is no great matter.... But the most noble and profitable invention of all others, was that of speech, consisting of names or appellations, and their connection, whereby men register their thoughts, recall them when they are past, and also declare them one to another for mutual utility and conversation; without which there had been amongst men neither commonwealth, nor society, nor content nor peace, no more than among lions, bears, and wolves. The first author of speech was God himself, that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as he presented to his sight; for the Scripture goeth no further in this matter. But this was sufficient to direct him to add more names, as the experience and use of the creatures should give him occasion, and to join them in such manner by degrees, as to make himself understood; and so by succession of time so much language might be gotten as he had found use for, though not so copious as an orator or philosopher has need of.”[276]

[276] Leviathan, c. 4.

|His political theory interferes.|

121. This account of the original of language appears in general as probable as it is succinct and clear. But the assumption that there could have been no society or mutual peace among mankind without language, the ordinary instrument of contract, is too much founded upon his own political speculations. Nor is it proved by the comparison to lions, bears, and wolves, even if the analogy could be admitted; since the state of warfare which he here intimates to be natural to man, does not commonly subsist in these wild animals of the same species. _Sævis inter se convenit_ _ursis_, is an old remark. But taking mankind with as much propensity to violence towards each other as Hobbes could suggest, is it speech, or reason and the sense of self-interest, which has restrained this within the boundaries imposed on it by civil society? The position appears to be, that man, with every other faculty and attribute of his nature, except language, could never have lived in community with his fellows. It is manifest, that the mechanism of such a community would have been very imperfect. But possessing his rational powers, it is hard to see why he might not have devised signs to make known his special wants, or why he might not have attained the peculiar prerogative of his species and foundation of society, the exchange of what he liked less for what he liked better.

|Necessity of speech exaggerated.|

122. This will appear more evident, and the exaggerated notions of the school of Hobbes as to the absolute necessity of language to the mutual relations of mankind will be checked by considering what was not so well understood in his age as at present, the intellectual capacities of those who are born deaf, and the resources which they are able to employ. It can hardly be questioned, but that a number of families thrown together in this unfortunate situation, without other intercourse, could by the exercise of their natural reason, as well as the domestic and social affections, constitute themselves into a sort of commonwealth, at least as regular as that of ants and bees; and if the want of language would deprive them of many advantages of polity, it would also secure them from much fraud and conspiracy. But those whom we have known to want the use of speech, have also wanted the sense of hearing, and have thus been shut out from many assistances to the reasoning faculties, which our hypothesis need not exclude. The fair supposition is that of a number of persons merely dumb, and although they would not have laws or learning, it does not seem impossible they might maintain at least a patriarchal, if not a political, society for many generations. Upon the lowest supposition, they could not be inferior to the Chimpanzees, who are said to live in communities in the forests of Angola.

|Use of names.|

123. The succession of conceptions in the mind depending wholly on that they had one to another when produced by the senses, they cannot be recalled at our choice and the need we have of them, “but as it chanceth us to hear and see such things as shall bring them to our mind. Hence, brutes are unable to call what they want to mind, and often, though they hide food, do not know where to find it. But man has the power to set up marks or sensible objects, and remember thereby somewhat past. The most eminent of these are names of articulate sounds, by which we recall some conception of things to which we give those names; as the appellation white bringeth to remembrance the quality of such objects as produce that colour or conception in us. It is by names that we are capable of science, as for instance that of number: for beasts cannot number for want of words, and do not miss one or two out of their young, nor could a man without repeating orally or mentally the words of number, know how many pieces of money may be before him.”[277] We have here another assumption, that the numbering faculty is not stronger in man than in brutes, and also that the former could not have found out how to divide a heap of coins into parcels without the use of words of number. The experiment might be tried with a deaf and dumb child.

[277] Hum. Nat., c. 5.

|Names universal not realities.|

124. Of names some are proper, and some common to many or universal, there being nothing in the world universal but names, for the things named are every one of them individual and singular. “One universal name is imposed on many things for their similitude in some quality or other accidents; and whereas a proper name bringeth to mind one thing only, universals recall any one of those many.”[278] “The universality of one name to many things hath been the cause that men think the things are themselves universal, and so seriously contend that besides Peter and John, and all the rest of the men that are, have been, or shall be in the world, there is yet something else that we call man--viz., man in general, deceiving themselves by taking the universal or general appellation for the thing it signifieth.[279] For if one should desire the painter to make him the picture of a man, which is as much as to say, of a man in general, he meaneth no more, but that the painter should chuse what man he pleaseth to draw, which must needs be some of them that are, or have been, or may be, none of which are universal. But when he would have him to draw the picture of the king, or any particular person, he limiteth the painter to that one person he chuseth. It is plain, therefore, that there is nothing universal but names, which are therefore called indefinite.”[280]

[278] Lev. c. 4.

[279] “An universal,” he says in his Logic, “is not a name of many things collectively, but of each taken separately (sigillatim sumptorum). Man is not the name of the human species, in general, but of each single man, Peter, John and the rest, separately. Therefore, this universal name is not the name of any thing existing in nature, nor of any idea or phantasm formed in the mind, but always of some word or name. Thus, when an animal, or a stone, or a ghost (spectrum) or anything else is called universal, we are not to understand that any man or stone or anything else was, or is, or can be an universal, but only that these words animal, stone, and the like are universal names, that is, names common to many things, and the conceptions corresponding to them in the mind are the images and phantasms of single animals or other things. And therefore we do not need, in order to understand what is meant by an universal, any other faculty than that of imagination, by which we remember that such words have excited the conception in our minds sometimes of one particular thing, sometimes of another.” Cap. 2, § 9. Imagination and memory are used by Hobbes almost as synonyms.

[280] Hum. Nat., c. 5.

|How imposed.|

125. “By this imposition of names, some of larger, some of stricter signification, we turn the reckoning of the consequences of things imagined in the mind into a reckoning of the consequences of appellations.”[281] Hence he thinks that though a man born deaf and dumb might by meditation know that the angles of one triangle are equal to two right ones, he could not, on seeing another triangle of different shape, infer the same without a similar process. But by the help of words, after having observed the equality is not consequent on anything peculiar to one triangle, but on the number of sides and angles which is common to all, he registers his discovery in a proposition. This is surely to confound the antecedent process of reasoning with what he calls the registry, which follows it. The instance, however, is not happily chosen, and Hobbes has conceded the whole point in question, by admitting that the truth of the proposition could be observed, which cannot require the use of words.[282] He expresses the next sentence with more felicity, “And thus the consequence found in one particular comes to be registered and remembered as an universal rule, and discharges our mental reckoning of time and place; and delivers us from all labour of the mind saving the first, and makes that which was found true here and now to be true in all times and places.”[283]

[281] It may deserve to be remarked that Hobbes himself, nominalist as he was, did not limit reasoning to comparison of proposition, as some later writers have been inclined to do, and as in his objections to Descartes, he might seem to do himself. This may be inferred from the sentence quoted in the text, and more expressly, though not quite perspicuously, from a passage in the Computatio, sive Logica, his Latin treatise published after the Leviathan. Quomodo autem animo _sine verbis tacita cogitatione ratiocinando addere et subtrahere solemus_ uno aut altero exemplo ostendendum est. Si quis ergo e longinquo aliquid obscurè videat, etsi nulla sint imposita vocabula, habet tamen ejus rei ideam eandem propter quam impositis nunc vocabulis dicit eam rem esse corpus. Postquam autem propius accesserit, videritque eandem rem certo quodam modo nunc uno, nunc alio in loco esse, habebit ejusdem ideam novam, propter quam nunc talem rem _animatam_ vocat, &c., p. 2.

[282] The demonstration of the thirty-second proposition of Euclid could leave no one in doubt whether this property were common to all triangles, after it had been proved in a single instance. It is said, however, to be recorded by an ancient writer, that this discovery was first made as to equilateral, afterwards as to isosceles, and lastly as to other triangles. Stewart’s philosophy of Human Mind, vol. ii., chap., iv., sect. 2 The mode of proof must have been different from that of Euclid. And this might possibly lead us to suspect the truth of the tradition. For if the equality of the angles of a triangle to two right angles admitted of any _elementary_ demonstration, such as might occur in the infancy of geometry, without making use of the property of parallel lines, assumed in the twelfth axiom of Euclid, the difficulties consequent on that assumption would readily be evaded. See the Note on Euclid, i. 29. in Playfair, who has given a demonstration of his own, but one which involves the idea of motion rather more than was usual with the Greeks in their elementary propositions.

[283] Lev.

|The subject continued.|

126. The equivocal use of names makes it often difficult to recover those conceptions for which they were designed “not only in the language of others, wherein we are to consider the drift and occasion and contexture of the speech, as well as the words themselves, but in our own discourse, which, being derived from the custom and common use of speech, representeth unto us not our own conceptions. It is, therefore, a great ability in a man, out of the words, contexture and other circumstances of language to deliver himself from equivocation, and to find out the true meaning of what is said; and this is it we call understanding.”[284] If speech be peculiar to man, as for aught I know it is, then is understanding peculiar to him also; understanding being nothing else but conception caused by speech.”[285] This definition is arbitrary and not conformable to the usual sense. “True and false,” he observes afterwards, “are attributes of speech not of things; where speech is not, there is neither truth nor falsehood, though there may be error. Hence, as truth consists in the right ordering of names in our affirmations, a man that seeks precise truth hath need to remember what every word he uses stands for and place it accordingly. In geometry, the only science hitherto known, men begin by definitions. And every man who aspires to true knowledge, should examine the definitions of former authors, and either correct them or make them anew. For the errors of definitions multiply themselves, according as the reckoning proceeds, and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see, but cannot avoid without reckoning anew from the beginning in which lies the foundation of their errors.... In the right definition of names, lies the first use of speech, which is the acquisition of science. And in wrong or no definitions lies the first abuse from which proceed all false and senseless tenets, which make those men that take their instruction from the authority of books, and not from their own meditation, to be as much below the condition of ignorant men, as men endued with true science are above it. For between true science and erroneous doctrine, ignorance is in the middle. Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.”[286]

[284] Hum. Nat.

[285] Lev.

[286] Lev.

|Names differently imposed.|

127. “The names of such things as affect us, that is, which please and displease us, because all men be not alike affected with the same thing, nor the same man at all times, are in the common discourse of men of inconstant signification. For seeing all names are imposed to signify our conceptions, and all our affections are but conceptions, when we conceive the same thoughts differently, we can hardly avoid different naming of them. For though the nature of that we conceive be the same, yet the diversity of our reception of it, in respect of different constitutions of body and prejudices of opinion, gives everything a tincture of our different passions. And therefore, in reasoning, a man must take heed of words, which, besides the signification of what we imagine of their nature, have a signification also of the nature, disposition and interest of the speaker; such as are the names of virtues and vices; for one man calleth wisdom what another calleth fear, and one cruelty, what another justice; one prodigality, what another magnanimity, and one gravity what another stupidity, &c. And therefore such names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination. No more can metaphors and tropes of speech, but these are less dangerous, because they profess their inconstancy, which the other do not.”[287] Thus ends this chapter of the Leviathan, which, with the corresponding one in the Treatise of Human Nature, are, notwithstanding what appear to be some erroneous principles, as full, perhaps, of deep and original thoughts as any other pages of equal length on the art of reasoning and philosophy of language. Many have borrowed from Hobbes without naming him; and in fact he is the founder of the nominalist school in England. He may probably have conversed with Bacon on these subjects; we see much of that master’s style of illustration. But as Bacon was sometimes too excursive to sift particulars, so Hobbes has sometimes wanted a comprehensive view.

[287] Lev.

|Knowledge.|

128. “There are,” to proceed with Hobbes, “two kinds of knowledge; the one, sense, or knowledge original, and remembrance of the same; the other, science, or knowledge of the truth of propositions, derived from understanding. Both are but experience, one of things from without, the other from the proper use of words in language, and experience being but remembrance, all knowledge is remembrance. Knowledge implies two things, truth and evidence; the latter is the concomitance of a man’s conception with the words that signify such conception in the act of ratiocination.” If a man does not annex a meaning to his words, his conclusions are not evident to him. “Evidence is to truth, as the sap to the tree, which, so far as it creepeth along with the body and branches, keepeth them alive; when it forsaketh them they die; for this evidence, which is meaning with our words, is the life of truth.” “Science is evidence of truth, from some beginning or principle of sense. The first principle of knowledge is that we have such and such conceptions; the second that we have thus and thus named the things whereof they are conceptions; the third is that we have joined those names in such manner as to make true propositions; the fourth and last is that we have joined these propositions in such a manner as they be concluding, and the truth of the conclusion said to be known.”[288]

[288] Hum. Nat., c. 6.

|Reasoning.|

129. Reasoning is the addition or subtraction of parcels. “In whatever matter there is room for addition and subtraction, there is room for reason; and where these have no place, then reason has nothing at all to do.”[289] This is neither as perspicuously expressed, nor as satisfactorily illustrated, as is usual with Hobbes; but it is true that all syllogistic reasoning is dependent upon quantity alone, and consequently upon that which is capable of addition and subtraction. This seems not to have been clearly perceived by some writers of the old Aristotelian school, or perhaps by some others, who, as far as I can judge, have a notion that the relation of a genus to a species, or a predicate to its subject, considered merely as to syllogism or deductive reasoning, is something different from that of a whole to its parts; which would deprive that logic of its chief boast, axiomatic evidence. But, as this would appear too dry to some readers, I shall pursue it farther in a note.[290]

[289] Lev. c. 5.

[290] Dugald Stewart (Elements of Philosophy, &c. vol. ii., ch. ii., sect. 2) has treated this theory of Hobbes on reasoning, as well as that of Condillac, which seems much the same, with great scorn, as “too puerile to admit of (i.e. require) refutation.” I do not myself think the language of Hobbes either here, or as quoted by Stewart from his Latin treatise on Logic, so perspicuous as usual. But I cannot help being of opinion that he is substantially right. For surely, when we assert that A is B, we assert that all things which fall under the class B, taken collectively, comprehend A, or that B = A + X: B being here put, it is to be observed, not for the _res prædicata_ itself, but for the concrete, _de quibus prædicandum est_. I mention this, because this elliptical use of the word predicate seems to have occasioned some confusion in writers on logic. The predicate strictly taken, being an attribute or quality, cannot be said to include or contain the subject. But to return, when we say B = A + X, or B - X = A, since we do not compare, in such a proposition, as is here supposed, A with X, we only mean that A = A, or that a certain part of B is the same as itself. Again, in a particular affirmative, Some A is B, we assert that part of A, or A - Y is contained in B, or that B may be expressed by [A - Y] + X. So also when we say, Some A is not B, we equally divide the class or genus B into A - Y and X, or assert that B = [A - Y] + X; but, in this case, the subject is no longer A - Y, but the remainder, or other part of A, namely, Y; and this is not found in either term of the predicate. Finally, in the universal negative, No A (neither [A - Y] nor Y) is B, the [A - Y] of the predicate vanishes or has no value, and B becomes equal to X, which is incapable of measurement with A, and consequently with either A - Y or Y, which make up A. Now if we combine this with another proposition, in order to form a syllogism, and say that C is A, we find, as before, that A = C + Z; and substituting this value of A in the former proposition, it appears that B = C + Z + X. Then, in the conclusion, we have, C is B; that is C is a part of C + Z + X. And the same in the three other cases or moods of the figure. This seems to be, in plainer terms, what Hobbes means by addition or subtraction of parcels, and what Condillac means by rather a lax expression, that equations and propositions are at bottom the same, or, as he phrases it better, “l’evidence de raison consiste uniquement dans l’identité.” If we add to this, as he probably intended, non-identity, as a condition of all negative conclusions, it seems to be no more than is necessarily involved in the fundamental principle of syllogism, the _dictum de omni et nullo_; which may be thus reduced to its shortest terms; “Whatever can be divided into parts, includes all those parts, add nothing else.” This is not limited to mathematical quantity, but includes everything which admits of more or less. Hobbes has a good passage in his Logic on this; Non putandum est computationi, id est, ratiocinationi in numeris tantum locum esse, tanquam homo a cæteris animantibus, quod censuisse narratur Pythagoras, sola numerandi facultate distinctus esset; nam et magnitudo magnitudini, corpus corpori, motus motui, tempus tempori, gradus qualitatis gradui, actio actioni, conceptus conceptui, proportio proportioni, oratio orationi, nomen nomini, in quibus omne philosophiæ genus continetur, adjici adimique potest.

But it does not follow by any means that we should assent to the strange passages quoted by Stewart from Condillac and Diderot, which reduce all _knowledge_ to identical propositions. Even in geometry, where the objects are strictly magnitudes, the countless variety in which their relations may be exhibited constitutes the riches of that inexhaustible science; and in moral or physical propositions, the relation of quantity between the subject and predicate, as concretes, which enables them to be compared, though it is the sole foundation of all _general deductive reasoning_ or syllogism, has nothing to do with the other properties or relations, of which we obtain a knowledge by means of that comparison. In mathematical reasoning, we infer as to quantity through the medium of quantity; in other reasoning, we use the same medium, but our inference is as to truths which do not lie within that category. Thus, in the hackneyed instance, All men are mortal; that is, mortal creatures include men and something more, it is absurd to assert, that we only know that men are men. It is true that our knowledge of the truth of the proposition comes by the help of this comparison of men in the subject with men in the predicate; but the very nature of the proposition discovers a constant relation between the individuals of the human species and that mortality which is predicated of them along with others; and it is to this, not in an identical equation, as Diderot seems to have thought, that our _knowledge_ consists.

The remarks of Stewart’s friend. M. Prevost of Geneva, on the principle of identity as the basis of mathematical science, and which the former has candidly subjoined to his own volume, appear to me very satisfactory. Stewart comes to admit that the dispute is nearly verbal; but we cannot say that he originally treated it as such; and the principle itself, both as applied to geometry and to logic, is, in my opinion, of some importance to the clearness of our conceptions as to those sciences. It may be added, that Stewart’s objection to the principle of identity as the basis of geometrical reasoning is less forcible in its application to syllogism. He is willing to admit that magnitudes capable of coincidence by immediate superposition may be reckoned identical, but scruples to apply such a word to those which are dissimilar in figure, as the rectangles of the means and extremes of four proportional lines. Neither one nor the other are, in fact, identical as real quantities, the former being necessarily conceived to differ from each other by position in space, as much as the latter; so that the expression he quotes from Aristotle, εν τουτοις ἡ ισοτης ἑνοτης [en toutois hê isotês henotês], or any similar one of modern mathematicians, can only refer to the abstract magnitude of their areas, which being divisible into the same number of equal parts, they are called the same. And there seems no real difference in this respect between two circles of equal radii and two such rectangles as are supposed above, the identity of their magnitudes being a distinct truth, independent of any consideration either of their figure or their position. But however this may be, the identity of the subject with part of the predicate in an affirmative proposition is never fictitious, but real. It means that the persons or things in the one are strictly the same beings with the persons or things to which they are compared in the other, though, through some difference of relations, or other circumstance, they are expressed in different language. It is needless to give examples, as all those who can read this note at all will know how to find them.

I will here take the liberty to remark, though not closely connected with the present subject, that Archbishop Whately seems not quite right in saying (Elements of Logic, p. 46), that in affirmative propositions the predicate is _never_ distributed. Besides the numerous instances where this is, in point of fact, the case, all which he excludes, there are many in which it is involved in the very form of the proposition. Such are all those which assert identity or equality, and such also are all those particular affirmations which have previously been _converted_ from universals. Of the first sort are all the theorems in geometry, asserting an equality of magnitude or ratios, in which the subject and predicate may always change places. It is true that in the instance given in the work quoted, that equilateral triangles are equiangular, the converse requires a separate proof, and so in many similar cases. But in these the predicate is not distributed by the form of the proposition; they assert no quality of magnitude.

The position, that where such equality is affirmed, the predicate is not _logically_ distributed, would lead to the consequence that it can only be _converted_ into a particular affirmation. Thus, after proving that the square of the hypothenuse, in all right-angled triangles, is equal to those of the sides, we could only infer that the squares of the sides are _sometimes_ equal to that of the hypothenuse, which could not be maintained without rendering the rules, of logic ridiculous. The most general mode of considering the question, is to say, as we have done above, that, in an universal affirmative, the predicate B (that is, the class of which B is predicated), is composed of A the subject, and X, an unknown remainder. But if, by the very nature of the proposition, we perceive that X is nothing, or has no value, it is plain that the subject measures the entire predicate, and vice versâ, the predicate measures the subject; in other words, each is taken universally, or distributed.

|False reasoning.|

130. A man may reckon without the use of words in particular things, as in conjecturing from the sight of anything what is likely to follow; and if he reckons wrong, it is error. But in reasoning on general words, to fall on a false inference is not error, though often so called, but absurdity.[291] “If a man should talk to me of a round quadrangle, or accidents of bread in cheese, or immaterial substances, or of a free subject, a free will, or any free, but free from being hindered by opposition, I should not say he were in error, but that his words were without meaning, that is to say, absurd;” Some of these propositions, it will occur, are intelligible in a reasonable sense, and not contradictory, except by means of an arbitrary definition which he who employs them does not admit. It will be observed here, as we have done before, that Hobbes does not confine reckoning, or reasoning, to universals, or even to words.

[291] Lev. c. 5.

|Its frequency.|

131. Man has the exclusive privilege of forming general theorems. But this privilege is allayed by another, that is, by the privilege of absurdity, to which no living creature is subject, but man only. And of men those are of all most subject to it, that profess philosophy.... For there is not one that begins his ratiocination from the definitions or explications of the names they are to use, which is a method used only in geometry, whose conclusions have thereby been made indisputable. He then enumerates seven causes of absurd conclusions; the first of which is the want of definitions, the others are erroneous imposition of names. If we can avoid these errors, it is not easy to fall into absurdity (by which he of course only means any wrong conclusion) except perhaps by the length of a reasoning. “For all men,” he says, “by nature reason alike, and well, when they have good principles. Hence, it appears that reason is not as sense and memory born with us, nor gotten by experience only, as prudence is, but attained by industry, in apt imposing of names, and in getting a good and orderly method of proceeding from the elements to assertions, and so to syllogisms. Children are not endued with reason at all till they have attained the use of speech, but are called reasonable creatures, for the possibility of having the use of reason hereafter. And reasoning serves the generality of mankind very little, though with their natural prudence without science they are in better condition than those who reason ill themselves, or trust those who have done so.”[292] It has been observed by Buhle, that Hobbes had more respect for the Aristotelian forms of logic than his master Bacon. He has in fact written a short treatise, in his Elementa Philosophiæ, on the subject; observing however therein, that a true logic will be sooner learned by attending to geometrical demonstrations than by drudging over the rules of syllogism, as children learn to walk not by precept but by habit.[293]

[292] Id. ibid.

[293] Citius multo veram logicam discunt qui mathematicorum demonstrationibus, quam qui logicorum syllogizandi præceptis legendis tempus conterunt, haud aliter quam parvuli pueri gressum formare discunt non præceptis sed sæpe gradiendo. C. iv., p. 30. Atque hæc sufficiunt, (he says afterwards) de syllogismo, qui est tanquam gressus philosophiæ; nam et quantum necesse est ad cognoscendum unde vim suam habeat omnis argumentatio legitima, tantum diximus; et omnia accumulare quæ dici possunt, æque superfluum esset ac si quis ut dixi puerulo ad gradiendum præcepta dare velit; acquiritur enim ratiocinandi ars non præceptis sed usu et lectione eorum librorum in quibus omnia severis demonstrationibus transiguntur. C. v., p. 35.

|Knowledge of fact not derived from reasoning.|

132. “No discourse whatever,” he says truly in the seventh chapter of the Leviathan, “can end in absolute knowledge of fact past or to come. For as to the knowledge of fact, it is originally sense; and ever after memory. And for the knowledge of consequence, which I have said before, is called science, it is not absolute but conditional. No man can know by discourse that this or that is, has been, or will be, which is to know absolutely; but only that if this is, that is; if this has been, that has been; if this shall be, that shall be; which is to know conditionally, and that not the consequence of one thing to another, but of one name of a thing to another name of the same thing. And therefore when the discourse is put into speech and begins with the definitions of words, and proceeds by connexion of the same into general affirmations, and of those again into syllogisms, the end or last sum is called the conclusion, and the thought of the mind by it signified is that conditional knowledge of the consequence of words which is commonly called science. But if the first ground of such discourse be not definitions; or if definitions be not rightly joined together in syllogisms, then the end or conclusion is again opinion, namely, of the truth of somewhat said, though sometimes in absurd and senseless words, without possibility of being understood.”[294]

[294] Lev. c. 7.

|Belief.|

133. “Belief which is the admitting of propositions upon trust, in many cases is no less free from doubt than perfect and manifest knowledge; for as there is nothing whereof there is not some cause, so when there is doubt, there must be some cause thereof conceived. Now there be many things which we receive from the report of others, of which it is impossible to imagine any cause of doubt; for what can be opposed against the consent of all men, in things they can know and have no cause to report otherwise than they are, such as is great part of our histories, unless a man would say that all the world had conspired to destroy him?”[295] Whatever we believe on the authority of the speaker, he is the object of our faith. Consequently, when we believe that the Scriptures are the word of God, having no immediate revelation from God himself, our belief, faith, and trust is in the church, whose word we take and acquiesce therein. Hence, all we believe on the authority of men, whether they be sent from God or not, is faith in men only.[296] We have no certain knowledge of the truth of Scripture, but trust the holy men of God’s church succeeding one another from the time of those who saw the wondrous works of God Almighty in the flesh. And as we believe the Scriptures to be the word of God on the authority of the church, the interpretation of the Scripture in case of controversy ought to be trusted to the church rather than private opinion.[297]

[295] Hum. Nat. c. 6.

[296] Lev. c. 7.

[297] Lev. c. 9.

|Chart of science.|

134. The ninth chapter of the Leviathan contains a synoptical chart of human science or “knowledge of consequences,” also called philosophy. He divides it into natural and civil, the former into consequences from accidents common to all bodies, quantity and motion, and those from qualities, otherwise called physics. The first includes astronomy, mechanics, architecture, as well as mathematics. The second he distinguishes into consequences from qualities of bodies transient, or meteorology, and from those of bodies permanent, such as the stars, the atmosphere, or terrestrial bodies. The last are divided again into those without sense, and those with sense; and these into animals and men. In the consequences from the qualities of animals generally he reckons optics and music; in those from men we find ethics, poetry, rhetoric, and logic. These altogether constitute the first great head of natural philosophy. In the second, or civil philosophy, he includes nothing but the rights and duties of sovereigns and their subjects. This chart of human knowledge is one of the worst that has been propounded, and falls much below that of Bacon.[298]

[298] Hum. Nat., c. 11.

|Analysis of passions.|

135. This is the substance of the philosophy of Hobbes, so far as it relates to the intellectual faculties, and especially to that of reasoning. In the seventh and two following chapters of the treatise on Human Nature, in the ninth and tenth of the Leviathan, he proceeds to the analysis of the passions. The motion in some internal substance of the head, if it does not stop there, producing mere conceptions, proceeds to the heart, helping or hindering the vital motions, which he distinguishes from the voluntary, exciting in us pleasant or painful affections, called passions. We are solicited by these to draw near to that which pleases us, and the contrary. Hence, pleasure, love, appetite, desire, are divers names for divers considerations of the same thing. As all conceptions we have immediately by the sense are delight or pain or appetite or fear, so are all the imaginations after sense. But as they are weaker imaginations, so are they also weaker pleasures, or weaker pains.[299] All delight is appetite and presupposes a further end. There is no utmost end in this world, for while we live we have desires, and desire presupposes a further end. We are not, therefore, to wonder that men desire more, the more they possess; for felicity, by which we mean continual delight, consists not in having prospered, but in prospering.[300] Each passion, being, as he fancies, a continuation of the motion which gives rise to a peculiar conception, is associated with it. They all, except such as are immediately connected with sense, consist in the conception of a power to produce some effect. To honour a man, is to conceive that he has an excess of power over some one with whom he is compared; hence, qualities indicative of power, and actions significant of it are honourable; riches are honoured as signs of power, and nobility is honourable, as a sign of power in ancestors.[301]

[299] Hum. Nat., c. 7.

[300] Id. Lev., c. 11.

[301] Hum. Nat., c. 8.

|Good and evil relative terms.|

136. “The constitution of man’s body is in perpetual mutation, and hence it is impossible that all the same things should always cause in him the same appetites and aversions; much less can all men consent in the desire of any one object. But whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it, which he for his part calls good, and the object of his hate and aversion, evil, or of his contempt, vile and inconsiderable. For these words of good, evil, and contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person using them; there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves, but from the person of the man, where there is no commonwealth, or in a commonwealth from the person that represents us, or from an arbitrator or judge, whom men disagreeing shall by consent set up, and make his sentence the rule thereof.”[302]

[302] Lev. c., 6.

|His paradoxes.|

137. In prosecuting this analysis all the passions are resolved into self-love, the pleasure we take in our own power, the pain we suffer in wanting it. Some of his explications are very forced. Thus weeping is said to be from a sense of our want of power. And here comes one of his strange paradoxes. “Men are apt to weep that prosecute revenge, when the revenge is suddenly stopped or frustrated by the repentance of their adversary; _and such are the tears of reconciliation_.”[303] So resolute was he to resort to anything the most preposterous, rather than admit a moral feeling in human nature. His account of laughter is better known, and perhaps more probable, though not explaining the whole of the case. After justly observing that whatsoever it be that moves laughter, it must be new and unexpected, he defines it to be “a sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly, for men laugh at the follies of themselves past.” It might be objected, that those are most prone to laughter, who have least of this glorying in themselves, or undervaluing of their neighbours.

[303] Hum. Nat., c. 9. Lev., c. 6 and 10.

|His notion of love.|

138. “There is a great difference between the desire of a man when indefinite, and the same desire limited to one person, and this is that love which is the great theme of poets. But notwithstanding their praises, it must be defined by the word need; for it is a conception a man hath of his need of that one person desired.”[304] “There is yet another passion, sometimes called love, but more properly good-will or charity. There can be no greater argument to a man of his own power than to find himself able not only to accomplish his own desires, but also to assist other men in theirs; and this is that conception wherein consists charity. In which first is contained that natural affection of parents towards their children, which the Greeks call στοργη [storgê], as also that affection wherewith men seek to assist those that adhere unto them. But the affection wherewith men many times bestow their benefits on strangers is not to be called charity, but either contract, whereby they seek to purchase friendship, or fear which makes them to purchase peace.”[305] This is equally contrary to notorious truth, there being neither fear nor contract in generosity towards strangers. It is, however, not so extravagant as a subsequent position, that in beholding the danger of a ship in a tempest, though there is pity, which is grief, yet “the delight in our own security is so far predominant, that men usually are content in such a case to be spectators of the misery of their friends.”[306]

[304] Hum. Nat., c. 9.

[305] Id. ibid.

[306] Hum. Nat., c. 9. This is an exaggeration of some well-known lines of Lucretius, which are themselves exaggerated.

|Curiosity.|

139. As knowledge begins from experience, new experience is the beginning of new knowledge. Whatever, therefore, happens new to a man, gives him the hope of knowing somewhat he knew not before. This appetite of knowledge is curiosity. It is peculiar to man; for beasts never regard new things except to discern how far they may be useful, while man looks for the cause and beginning of all he sees.[307] This attribute of curiosity seems rather hastily denied to beasts. And as men, he says, are always seeking new knowledge, so are they always deriving some new gratification. There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here, because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense. “What kind of felicity God hath ordained to them that devoutly honour him, a man shall no sooner know than enjoy, being joys that now are as incomprehensible, as the word of schoolmen, beatifical vision, is unintelligible.”[308]

[307] Id. ibid.

[308] Lev., c. 6 and c. 11.

|Difference of intellectual capacities.|

140. From the consideration of the passions, Hobbes advances to inquire what are the causes of the difference in the intellectual capacities and dispositions of men.[309] Their bodily senses are nearly alike, whence he precipitately infers there can be no great difference in the brain. Yet men differ much in their bodily constitution, whence he derives the principal differences in their minds; some being addicted to sensual pleasures are less curious as to knowledge, or ambitious as to power. This is called dullness, and proceeds from the appetite of bodily delight. The contrary to this is a quick ranging of mind accompanied with curiosity in comparing things that come into it, either as to unexpected similitude, in which fancy consists, or dissimilitude in things appearing the same, which is properly called judgment; “for to judge is nothing else, but to distinguish and discern. And both fancy and judgment are commonly comprehended under the name of wit, which seems to be a tenuity and agility of spirits, contrary to that restiness of the spirits supposed in those who are dull.”[310]

[309] Hum. Nat., c. 10.

[310] Hum. Nat.

141. We call it levity, when the mind is easily diverted, and the discourse is parenthetical; and this proceeds from curiosity with too much equality and indifference; for when all things make equal impression and delight, they equally throng to be expressed. A different fault is indocibility, or difficulty of being taught; which must arise from a false opinion that men know already the truth of what is called in question; for certainly they are not otherwise so unequal in capacity as not to discern the difference of what is proved and what is not, and therefore if the minds of men were all of white paper, they would all most equally be disposed to acknowledge whatever should be in right method, and by right ratiocination delivered to them. But when men have once acquiesced in untrue opinions, and registered them as authentical records in their minds, it is no less impossible to speak intelligibly to such men, than to write legibly on a paper already scribbled over. The immediate cause therefore of indocibility is prejudice, and of prejudice false opinion of our own knowledge.[311]

[311] Hum. Nat.

|Wit and fancy.|

142. Intellectual virtues are such abilities as go by the name of a good wit, which may be natural or acquired. “By natural wit,” says Hobbes, “I mean not that which a man hath from his birth, for that is nothing else but sense; wherein men differ so little from one another and from brute beasts, as it is not to be reckoned among virtues. But I mean that wit which is gotten by use only and experience, without method, culture or instruction, and consists chiefly in celerity of imagining and steady direction. And the difference in this quickness is caused by that of men’s passions that love and dislike some one thing, some another, and therefore some men’s thoughts run one way, some another; and are held to, and observe differently the things that pass through their imagination.” Fancy is not praised without judgment and discretion, which is properly a discerning of times, places, and persons; but judgment and discretion is commended for itself without fancy: without steadiness and direction to some end, a great fancy is one kind of madness, such as they have who lose themselves in long digressions and parentheses. If the defect of discretion be apparent, how extravagant soever the fancy be, the whole discourse will be taken for a want of wit.[312]

[312] Lev., c. 8.

|Differences in the passions.|

|Madness.|

143. The causes of the difference of wits are in the passions; and the difference of passions proceeds partly from the different constitution of the body and partly from different education. Those passions are chiefly the desire of power, riches, knowledge, or honour; all which may be reduced to the first, for riches, knowledge, and honour are but several sorts of power. He who has no great passion for any of these, though he may be so far a good man as to be free from giving offence, yet cannot possibly have either a great fancy or much judgment. To have weak passions is dullness, to have passions indifferently for everything giddiness and distraction, to have stronger passions for anything than others have is madness. Madness may be the excess of many passions; and the passions themselves, when they lead to evil, are degrees of it. He seems to have had some glimpse of Butler’s hypothesis as to the madness of a whole people. “What argument for madness can there be greater, than to clamour, strike, and throw stones at our best friends? Yet this is somewhat less than such a multitude will do. For they will clamour, fight against, and destroy those by whom all their lifetime before they have been protected, and secured from injury. And if this be madness in the multitude, it is the same in every particular man.”[313]

[313] Id.

|Unmeaning language.|

144. There is a fault in some men’s habit of discoursing which may be reckoned a sort of madness, which is when they speak words with no signification at all. “And this is incident to none but those that converse in questions of matters incomprehensible as the schoolmen, or in questions of abstruse philosophy. The common sort of men seldom speak insignificantly, and are therefore by those other egregious persons counted idiots. But to be assured their words are without anything correspondent to them in the mind, there would need some examples; which if any man require let him take a schoolman into his hands, and see if he can translate any one chapter concerning any difficult point as the Trinity, the Deity, the nature of Christ, transubstantiation, free will, &c., into any of the modern tongues, so as to make the same intelligible, or into any tolerable Latin, such as they were acquainted with, that lived when the Latin tongue was vulgar.” And after quoting some words from Suarez, he adds: “When men write whole volumes of such stuff, are they not mad, or intend to make others so?”[314]

[314] Lev.

|Manners.|

145. The eleventh chapter of the Leviathan, on manners, by which he means those qualities of mankind which concern their living together in peace and unity, is full of Hobbes’s caustic remarks on human nature. Often acute, but always severe, he ascribes overmuch to a deliberate and calculating selfishness. Thus, the reverence of antiquity is referred to “the contention men have with the living, not with the dead, to these ascribing more than due that they may obscure the glory of the other.” Thus “to have received from one to whom we think ourselves equal, greater benefits than we can hope to requite, disposes to counterfeit love, but really to secret hatred, and puts a man into the estate of a desperate debtor, that in declining the sight of his creditor, tacitly wishes him where he might never see him more. For benefits oblige, and obligation is thraldom; and unrequitable obligation perpetual thraldom, which is to one’s equal hateful.” He owns, however, that to have received benefits from a superior, disposes us to love him; and so it does where we can hope to requite even an equal. If these maxims have a certain basis of truth they have at least the fault of those of Rochefoucault; they are made too generally characteristic of mankind.

|Ignorances and prejudice.|

146. Ignorance of the signification of words disposes men to take on trust not only the truth they know not, but also errors and nonsense. For neither can be detected without a perfect understanding of words. “But ignorance of the causes and original constitution of right, equity, law and justice disposes a man to make custom and example the rule of his actions, in such manner as to think that unjust which it has been the custom to punish, and that just, of the impunity and approbation of which they can produce an example, or, as the lawyers which only use this false measure of justice barbarously call it, a precedent.” “Men appeal from custom to reason and from reason to custom as it serves their turn, receding from custom when their interest requires it, and setting themselves against reason, as oft as reason is against them; which is the cause that the doctrine of right and wrong is perpetually disputed both by the pen and the sword; whereas the doctrine of lines and figures is not so, because men care not in that subject what is truth, as it is a thing that crosses no man’s ambition, profit, or lust. For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry, suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.”[315] This excellent piece of satire has been often quoted, and sometimes copied, and does not exaggerate the pertinacity of mankind in resisting the evidence of truth, when it thwarts the interests and passions of any particular sect or community. In the earlier part of the paragraph it seems not so easy to reconcile what Hobbes has said with his general notions of right and justice; since, if these resolve themselves, as is his theory into mere force, there can be little appeal to reason, or to anything else than custom and precedent, which are commonly the exponents of power.

[315] 1 Lev., c. 11.

|His theory of religion.|

147. In the conclusion of this chapter of the Leviathan as well as in the next, he dwells more on the nature of religion than he had done in the former treatise, and so as to subject himself to the imputation of absolute atheism, or at least of a denial of most attributes which we assign to the Deity. Curiosity about causes, he says, led men to search out one after the other, till they came to this necessary conclusion, that there is some eternal cause which men call God. But they have no more idea of his nature, than a blind man has of fire, though he knows that there is something that warms him. So by the visible things of this world and their admirable order, a man may conceive there is a cause of them, which men call God, and yet not have an idea or image of him in his mind. And they that make little inquiry into the natural causes of things, are inclined to feign several kinds of powers invisible and to stand in awe of their own imaginations. And this fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion, and in them that worship or fear that power otherwise than they do, superstition.

148. As God is incomprehensible, it follows that we can have no conception or image of the Deity; and consequently all his attributes signify our inability or defect of power to conceive anything concerning his nature, and not any conception of the same, excepting only this, that there is a God. Men that by their own meditation arrive at the acknowledgment of one infinite, omnipotent, and eternal God, chuse rather to confess this is incomprehensible and above their understanding, than to define his nature by spirit incorporeal, and then confess their definition to be unintelligible.[316] For concerning such spirits he holds that it is not possible by natural means only to come to the knowledge of so much as that there are such things.[317]

[316] Lev., c. 12.

[317] Hum. Nat., c. 11.

|Its supposed sources.|

149. Religion he derives from three sources, the desire of men to search for causes, the reference of everything that has a beginning to some cause, and the observation of the order and consequence of things. But the two former lead to anxiety, for the knowledge that there have been causes of the effects we see, leads us to anticipate that they will in time be the causes of effects to come; so that every man, especially such as are over-provident, is “like Prometheus, the prudent man, as his name implies, who was bound to the hill Caucasus, a place of large prospect, where an eagle feeding on his liver devoured as much by day as was repaired by night; and so he who looks too far before him, has his heart all day long gnawed by the fear of death, poverty or other calamity, and has no repose nor pause but in sleep.” This is an allusion made in the style of Lord Bacon. The ignorance of causes makes men fear some invisible agent, like the gods of the Gentiles; but the investigation of them leads us to a God eternal, infinite, and omnipotent. This ignorance however, of second causes, conspiring with three other prejudices of mankind, the belief in ghosts, or spirits of subtile bodies, the devotion and reverence generally shown towards what we fear as having power to hurt us, and the taking of things casual for prognostics, are altogether the natural seed of religion, which by reason of the different fancies, judgments, and passions of several men hath grown up into ceremonies so different that those which are used by one man are for the most part ridiculous to another. He illustrates this by a variety of instances from ancient superstitions. But the forms of religion are changed when men suspect the wisdom, sincerity, or love of those who teach it, or its priests.[318] The remaining portion of the Leviathan relating to moral and political philosophy, must be deferred to our next chapter.

[318] Lev., c. 12.

150. The Elementa Philosophiæ were published by Hobbes, in 1655, and dedicated to his constant patron the Earl of Devonshire. These are divided into three parts; entitled De Corpore, De Homine, and De Cive. And the first part has itself three divisions; Logic, the First Philosophy, and Physics. The second part, De Homine, is neither the treatise of Human Nature, nor the corresponding part of the Leviathan, though it contains many things substantially found there. A long disquisition on optics and the nature of vision, chiefly geometrical, is entirely new. The third part, De Cive, is the treatise by that name reprinted, as far as I am aware, without alteration.

151. The first part of the first treatise, entitled Computatio sive Logica, is by no means the least valuable among the philosophical writings of Hobbes. In forty pages the subject is very well and clearly explained, nor do I know that the principles are better laid down, or the rules more sufficiently given in more prolix treatises. Many of his observations, especially as to words, are such as we find in his English works, and perhaps his nominalism is more clearly expressed than it is in them. Of the syllogistic method, at least for the purpose of demonstration, or teaching others, he seems to have entertained a favourable opinion, or even to have held it necessary for real demonstration, as his definition shows. Hobbes appears to be aware of what I do not remember to have seen put by others, that in the natural process of reasoning, the minor premise commonly precedes the major.[319] It is for want of attending to this, that syllogisms, as usually stated, are apt to have so formal and unnatural a construction. The process of the mind in this kind of reasoning is explained, in general, with correctness, and, I believe, with originality in the following passage, which I shall transcribe from the Latin, rather than give a version of my own; few probably being likely to read the present section, who are unacquainted with that language. The style of Hobbes, though perspicuous, is concise, and the original words will be more satisfactory than any translation.

[319] In Whateley’s Logic, p. 90, it is observed, that “the _proper order_ is to place the major premise first, and the minor second; but this does not constitute the major and minor premises,” &c. It may be the proper order in one sense, as exhibiting better the foundation of syllogistic reasoning; but it is not that which we commonly follow, either in thinking, or in proving to others. In the rhetorical use of syllogism it can admit of no doubt, that the opposite order is the most striking and persuasive; such as in Cato, “If there be a God, he must delight in virtue; And that which he delights in must be happy.” In Euclid’s demonstrations this will be found the form usually employed. And, though the rules of grammar are generally illustrated by examples, which is beginning with the major premise, yet the process of reasoning which a boy employs in construing a Latin sentence is the reverse. He observes a nominative case, a verb in the third person, and then applies his general rule, or major, to the particular instance, or minor, so as to infer their agreement. In criminal jurisprudence, the Scots begin with the major premise, or relevancy of the indictment, when there is room for doubt; the English with the minor, or evidence of the fact, reserving the other for what we call motion in arrest of judgment. Instances of both orders are common, but by far the most frequent are of that which the Archbishop of Dublin reckons the less proper of the two. Those logicians who fail to direct the student’s attention to this, really do not justice to their own favourite science.

152. Syllogismo directo cogitatio in animo respondens est hujusmodi. Primo concipitur phantasma rei nominatæ cum accidente sive affectu ejus propter quem appellatur eo nomine quod est in minore propositione subjectum; deinde animo occurrit phantasma ejusdem rei cum accidente sive affectu propter quem appellatur, quod est in eadem propositione prædicatum. Tertio redit cogitatio rursus ad rem nominatam cum affectu propter quem eo nomine appellatur, quod est in prædicato propositionis majoris. Postremo cum meminerit eos affectus esse omnes unius et ejusdem rei, concludit tria illa nomina ejusdem quoque rei esse nomina; hoc est, conclusionem esse veram. Exempli causa, quando fit syllogismus hic, Homo est Animal, Animal est Corpus, ergo Homo est Corpus, occurrit animo imago hominis loquentis vel differentis [sic, sed lege disserentis], meminitque id quod sic apparet vocari hominem. Deinde occurrit eadem imago ejusdem hominis sese moventis, meminitque id quod sic apparet vocari animal. Tertio recurrit eadem imago hominis locum aliquem sive spatium occupantis, meminitque id quod sic apparet vocari corpus.[320] Postremo cum meminerit rem illam quæ et extendebatur secundum locum, et loco movebatur, et oratione utebatur, unam et eandem fuisse, concludit etiam nomina illa tria, Homo, Animal, Corpus, ejusdem rei esse nomina, et proinde, Homo est Corpus, esse propositionem veram. Manifestum hinc est conceptum sive cogitationem quæ respondens syllogismo ex propositionibus universalibus in animo existit, nullam esse in iis animalibus quibus deest usus nominum, cum inter syllogizandum oporteat non modo de re sed etiam alternis vicibus de diversis rei nominibus, quæ propter diversas de re cogitationes adhibitæ sunt, cogitare.

[320] This is the questionable part of Hobbes’s theory of syllogism. According to the common and obvious understanding, the mind, in the major premise, Animal est Corpus, does not reflect on the subject of the minor, Homo, as occupying space, but on the subject of the major, Animal, which includes indeed the former, but is mentally substituted for it. It may sometimes happen, that where this predicate of the minor term is _manifestly_ a collective word that comprehends the subject, the latter is not as it were absorbed in it, and may be contemplated by the mind distinctly in the major; as if we say, John is a man: a man feels; we may perhaps have no image in the mind of any man but John. But this is not the case where the predicated quality appertains to many things visibly different from the subject; as in Hobbes’s instance Animal est Corpus, we may surely consider other animals as being extended and occupying space besides men. It does not seem that otherwise there could be any ascending scale from particulars to generals, as far as the reasoning faculties, independent of words, are concerned. And if we begin with the major premise of the syllogism, this will be still more apparent.

153. The metaphysical philosophy of Hobbes, always bold and original, often acute and profound, without producing an immediate school of disciples like that of Descartes, struck, perhaps, a deeper root in the minds of reflecting men, and has influenced more extensively the general tone of speculation. Locke, who had not read much, had certainly read Hobbes, though he does not borrow from him so much as has sometimes been imagined. The French metaphysicians of the next century found him nearer to their own theories than his more celebrated rival in English philosophy. But the writer who has built most upon Hobbes, and may be reckoned, in a certain sense, his commentator, if he who fully explains and develops a system may deserve that name, was Hartley. The theory of association is implied and intimated in many passages of the elder philosopher, though it was first expanded and applied with a diligent, ingenious and comprehensive research, if sometimes in too forced a manner, by his disciple. I use this word without particular inquiry into the direct acquaintance of Hartley with the writings of Hobbes; the subject had been frequently touched in intermediate publications, and, in matters of reasoning, as I have intimated above, little or no presumption of borrowing can be founded on coincidence. Hartley also resembles Hobbes in the extreme to which he has pushed the nominalist theory, in the proneness to materialize all intellectual processes, and either to force all things mysterious to our faculties into something imaginable, or to reject them as unmeaning, in the want, much connected with this, of a steady perception of the difference between the Ego and its objects, in an excessive love of simplifying and generalizing, and in a readiness to adopt explanations neither conformable to reason nor experience, when they fall in with some single principle, the key that was to unlock every ward of the human soul.

154. In nothing does Hobbes deserve more credit than in having set an example of close observation in the philosophy of the human mind. If he errs, he errs like a man who goes a little out of the right track, not like one who has set out in a wrong one. The eulogy of Stewart on Descartes, that he was the father of this experimental psychology, cannot be strictly wrested from him by Hobbes, inasmuch as the publications of the former are of an earlier date; but we may fairly say that the latter began as soon, and prosecuted his inquiries farther. It seems natural to presume that Hobbes, who is said to have been employed by Bacon in translating some of his works into Latin, had at least been led by him to the inductive process he has more than any other employed. But he has seldom mentioned his predecessor’s name; and indeed his mind was of a different stamp; less excursive, less quick in discovering analogies, and less fond of reasoning from them, but more close, perhaps more patient, and more apt to follow up a predominant idea, which sometimes becomes one of the “idola specûs” that deceive him.