Page:The Works of Francis Bacon (1884) Volume 1.djvu/88

lxxx Upon the obstacles from want of lime, more imaginary than real, if time is not wasted in frivolous pursuits, in sensuality or in sleep, in mis-application of times of recreation, or in idle curiosity, the Novum Organum contains but one casual, consolatory observation: "We judge also that mankind may conceive some hopes from our example, which we offer, not by way of ostentation, but because it may be useful." The obstacles to the acquisition of knowledge from want of means he through life deeply felt, and he never omitted an opportunity earnestly to express his hope that it would be diminished or destroyed by such a collection of natural history as would show the world, not as man has made it, not as it exists only in imagination, but as it really exists, as God has made it.

Anxious to lay the true foundation of philosophy, he, in the Novum Organum, availed himself of the power with which he was intrusted, to induce the king to form such a collection of natural history as he had measured out in his mind, and such as really ought to be procured; "a great and royal work, requiring the purse of a prince and the assistance of a people." He, therefore, in the dedication, and in his presentation letter, urged the king to imitate Solomon, by procuring the compilation and completion of such a natural and experimental history as should be serviceable for raising the superstructure of philosophy: that, at length, after so many ages, philosophy and the sciences may no longer he unsettled and speculative, but fixed on the solid foundation of a varied and well-considered experience: and in his reply to the king's acknowledgment of the receipt of the Novum Organum, he repeats his hope that the king will aid him in employing the community in collecting a natural and experimental history, as "basis totius negotii; for who can tell, now this mine of truth is opened, how the veins go, and what lieth higher, and what lieth lower?"

Such were the hopes in which he indulged. So difficult is it to love and be wise. The king complimented him upon his work, saying, that, "like the peace of God, it passeth all understanding;" but of a collection of natural history, "ne verbum quidem."

Annexed to this doctrine of idols, there are some inquiries into the signs of false philosophy; the causes of the errors in philosophy; and the grounds of hope that knowledge must be progressive; hopes which he had beautifully stated in the conclusion of his Advancement of Learning.

After having thus cleared the way by considering the modes by which we are warped from the truth: by which, formed to adore the true God, we fall down and worship an idol: after having admonished us, that, in the conduct of the understanding, a false step may be fatal, that a cripple in the right will beat a racer in the wrong way, erring in proportion to his fleetness, he expresses; his astonishment that no mortal should have taken care to open and prepare a way for the human understandings from sense and a well-conducted experience, but that all things should be left either to the darkness of tradition, the giddy agitation and whirlwind of argument, or else to the uncertain waves of accident, or a vague and uninformed experience. To open this way, to discover how our reason shall be guided, that it may be right, that it be not a blind guide, but direct us to the place where the star appears, and point us to the very place where the babe lieth, is the great object of this inquiry.

As our opinions are formed by impressions made upon our senses, by confidence in the communications of others, and by our own meditations, man, in the infancy of his reason, is unavoidably in error: for, although our senses never deceive us, the communications made by others, and our own speculations must, according to the ignorance of our teachers, and the liveliness of our own imaginations, teem with error.

Bacon saw the evil, and he saw the remedy: he saw and taught his contemporaries and future ages, that reasoning is nothing worth, except as it is founded on facts.

In his Sylva Sylvarum, he thus speaks: "The philosophy of Pythagoras, which was full of superstition, did first plant a monstrous imagination, which afterwards was, by the school of Plato and others, watered and nourished. It was, that the world was one entire, perfect, living creature; that the ebbing and flowing of the sea was the respiration of the world, drawing in water as breath, and putting it forth again. They went on and inferred, that if the world were a living creature, it had a soul and spirit. This foundation being laid, they might build upon it what they would; for in a living creature, though never so great, as, for example, in a great whale, the sense, and the effects of any one part of the body, instantly make a transcursion throughout the whole body: so that by this they did insinuate that no distance of place, nor want or indisposition of matter, could hinder magical operation; but that, for example, we might here in Europe have sense and feeling of that which was done in China. With these vast and bottomless follies, men have been in part entertained. But we that hold firm to the works of God, and to the sense, which is God's lamp, Lucerna Dei Spiraculum Hominis, will inquire, with all sobriety and severity, whether there is to be found, in the footsteps of nature, any such transmission and influx of immateriate virtues.

In this state of darkness was society involved, when Bacon formed his Art of Invention, which consists in collecting all bodies that have any affinity with the nature sought; and in a systematic examination of the bodies collected.

To discover facts is, therefore, his first object;