Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/442

Rh 422 ENGLISH LITEBATUKE [ELIZABETHAN. any damaging concessions, and the question of toleration was laid by till the Revolution. The scholastic philosophy fell, as we have seen, at the change of religion ; and for some time nothing took its place. When philosophical studies were revived, they took a new direction, and were pursued in a new spirit. The old philosophy, summing up the wisdom of Greece and that of the Christian schools, said to the student, &quot;Know God, know thyself; from this twofold knowledge learn what is duty ; that done, investigate at discretion either nature or the world of ideas.&quot; In practice, however, a dry logic and metaphysic, encumbered with technicalities, formed the sole intellectual pabulum provided for most students of philo- Bacon. sophy. The new doctrine, introduced by Bacon, said, &quot; Know Nature, and for that purpose study thy own mind, and discover the criteria by which nature s ways may be tested ; the knowledge so gained will be power, which, well used, will enrich and adorn human life.&quot; Mr Hallarn, re presenting the general English opinion, calls Bacon &quot; the father of modern science ; &quot; but his claim to the title is disputed both by the French and by the Italians. However this may be, it is certain that he very early conceived the idea of working out a new and complete system of philo sophy ; and to a juvenile work unfolding his project in outline, which seems to have been written about 1584, he gave the title Temporis Partus Maximus, the greatest birth of Time. The phrase sounds arrogant, but was not really so ; all that Bacon meant to say was, that the new doctrine was the inevitable outcome of a time now ripe for its recep tion, the growth of the Zeit-geist, to use a modern phrase, and that it was impossible to overstate its importance and potency. But his life was too much taken up with active labours at the bar, on the bench, and in the council- chamber, to permit of his carrying his vast plans into execu tion. All that we possess of his philosophy is contained in the Advancement of Learning (1605), the Instauratio Mayiia (1620), and the De Augmentis Scientiarum (1G23). The Instauratio is a colossal programme of his philosophy in six divisions, of which only the second, the &quot; Novum Organum,&quot; is worked out, and that not completely. The &quot; Novum Organum &quot; was designed to be the new logic of induction, which Bacon regarded as the mind s proper in strument in utilizing the fruits of experience. &quot; Experience and observation are the guides through the Baconian philo sophy, which is the hand-maid and interpreter of nature.&quot; 1 Nevertheless the particular instrument which he invented, the method of instances, is too cumbrous for practical use, and in fact never has been employed in physical inquiries. &quot; If we have not tried it,&quot; says Mr Ellis, in one of his ex ceedingly able introductions to the works of Bacon, &quot; it is because we feel confident that it would not answer. We regard it as a curious piece of machinery, very subtle, elaborate, and ingenious, but not worth constructing, because all the work it could do may be done more easily another way.&quot; It is not in virtue of his method, which will not work, nor on account of special contributions to any branch of physical science, for none such exist, that so high a place among philosophers is assigned to Bacon by his countrymen. It is rather on account of the lofty enthusiasm which animates his writings, and makes him appear in them as the hierophant of Nature, eloquently pleading against the neglect of her worship. The edifice of Christian philosophy lay in ruins, as we have seen, from the time of the Renaissance ; Bacon offered a partial substitute, designed to endow man with power over Hobbes. nature ; it was left for Hobbes, his assistant and disciple, to make an attempt to occupy the whole of the ancient field of thought. He desired to instruct mankind as to the 1 Hallam. origin, nature, and value of their conceptions respecting God and themselves, to investigate the moral uature of man, and to define the forms of guidance and of conduct best suited for a being so constituted in mind and heart. His principal work was published in 1G51 under the title of Leviathan. The fundamental principle from which he starts is, that every thought which can arise in the mind of man is a &quot; representation or appearance of some quality of a body without us, which is commonly called an object.&quot; &quot; There is no conception,&quot; he proceeds, &quot; 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.&quot; The doctrine of innate ideas, and every sugges tion that it is possible for man to obtain real knowledge otherwise than through the reports of the senses, are by this preliminary tenet rejected. He proceeds, with the utmost acuteuess, and a power of close and sustained observation which is truly admirable, to analyse the more important conceptions concerning God, time, infinity, sub stance, &c., which find a harbour within the mind. His explanations and definitions on all these heads bear, as might be expected from his primary tenet, a strong materialistic impress. He is also a nominalist ; all objects, according to him, exist singly and separately ; the only universal is the name given to a number of objects which agree in certain given respects ; the belief in the existence of universals as ideas he rejects, not as erroneous but as absurd ; nothing exists for him between, or besides, the object, and the human faculties perceiving and naming it. Of the belief in a God he says that &quot; 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.&quot; &quot; 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.&quot; In spite of statements of this land, which are obviously capable of being taken in a good sense, it has been customary to regard Hobbes as an atheist. The cause is found in the complete inadequacy of his system of morals to make good what might be wanting in his speculative tenets. It is not the omissions and one-sidedness of his metaphysics alone, but it is these, coupled with the perversions in his moral philosophy, which have affixed to his name a reputation for atheism. The doctrine of the existence of God, even attenuated to the form which we have seen above, might have been sufficiently integrated by a sound doctrine re specting the human conscience, the best witness for God, according to the general belief, that it is in man s power to appeal to. But when we examine Hobbes s teaching on moral matters, we find it full of paradox and absurdity. Every passion and feeling which can move the human heart is, according to him, the more or less disguised offspring of self-love. He scoffs at the very notion of free-will. The warnings of conscience are merely the fear of something disagreeable happening to ourselves, if we proceed in a particular line of conduct towards our neighbours. Justice and virtue are chimeras ; that is just which is commanded by the laws, or which a man has covenanted to do ; that is virtuous which tends to the general well-being of the com munity in which we move. Hobbes s views on civil society and government were first given to the world in his De Give (1647) ; but this was afterwards incorporated in the Leviathan. The state of nature, he holds, is a state of war ; each man has, until he is restrained; a natural right to take everything around him for his own use ; every other man has an equal right ; war is therefore inevitable. But men find that in the long-ruu