આર. which is the foundation of our commerce, we are would be but a dull superstition, re wouldated with the pride of counthe column of our empire--that which we become bankrupts indeed if we retain not try and the ancestral loftiness of spirit to as an estate so entailed on our descendants, which England may look with confidence that it admits of no mortgage-our English whenever the sacrifice of personal ambition. character and name--then the Queen's or the suspense of party differences be neMinisters will not rely in vain upon the cessary to the maintenance of national support of Parliament and the people: nor honour. Let be actually threat least, we feel convinced, upon the loyal aid ened from witho matter the quarter of that party now excluded from power, but not insensible to the noble responsibilities it accepts with its political creed. For surely the tendency to conserve the grand institutions which have made us what or what the pretext, and Conservatives would abandon the true genius of Conservatism, dissolve the bond of their party, scatter their strength to the winds, if they were not found, as one man, by her side. き A THE LONDON QUARTERLY REVIEW. No. CXCVIII. FOR OCTOBER, 1856.. ART. I.-Bacon's Essays: with Annota- | and penetrating genius, intimately convertions by Richard Whately, D.D., Arch-sant with the court, the council-table, the bishop of Dublin. London. 1856. parliament, the bar-with all ranks and classes of persons; with the multitudinous Or all the productions in the English lan- forms of human nature and pursuits. The guage Bacon's Essays contain the most larger part of the Essays on Building, matter in the fewest words. He intended Gardens, and Masques set aside, there is them to be as 'grains of salt, which should only here and there a sentence of his lessons rather give an appetite than offend with which has grown out of date. The progress satiety; and never was the intention of of events has not rendered them obsolete; an author more fully attained. There their continuous currency through two cenwere none, he says, of his works which turies and a half has not rendered them had been equally 'current' in his own time; common-place. In this they differ from his and he expressed his belief that they would system of inductive philosophy, to which find no less favour with posterity, and 'last he justly owes so much of his fame. The as long as books and letters endured.' triumph of his principles of scientific invesThus far his proud anticipation has been tigation has made it unnecessary to revert verified. They have been held to be ora- to the reasoning by which they were estacles of subtle wisdom by the profoundest blished; and he might have adopted, says intellects which have flourished since, and Archbishop Whately, the exclamation of few in any department have risen to the some writer engaged in a similar task, 'I rank of authorities with mankind who had have been labouring to render myself usenot themselves been accustomed to sit at less.' The application of the remark is the feet of Bacon. His own account of the happy, but the origin of it was different. scope of his Essays is, that they handled On the admission of the Cardinal Dubois those things wherein both men's lives and into the French Academy, Fontenelle, repersons are most conversant,' while in the ferring to his constant intercourse with the selection of his materials he endeavoured young king, Louis XV., observed with more to make them not vulgar but of a nature gracefulness than truth, It is known that whereof much should be found in experi- in your daily conversation with him you ence, and little in books; so as they should be neither repetitions nor fancies.' This is the cause of their great success. They treat of subjects which, in his well-known phrase, come home to men's business and bosoms;' and the reflections which he offers upon these topics of universal concern are not obvious truisms, nor hacknied maxims, nor airy speculations, but acute and novel deductions drawn from actual life by a vast left nothing untried to render yourself useless.' The pearls of cultivated minds are cast in vain before dull understandings. A Dutch publisher imagined that useless must be an error of the press and substituted useful. Dr. Johnson approved the conciseness of Bacon's Essays, and thought the time might come when all knowledge would be reduced to the same condensed form. To this there are strong objections. Circumstances are like the boughs and leaves of a tree which give life and ornament to the stem; nay more, though single aphorisms may cling to the mind, few things are so quickly forgotten as a series of them. Details always assist the memory, and are often essential to it: they also help the understanding. Archbishop Whately truly observes of Bacon's maxims, that repeated meditation discloses applications of them which had been previously overlooked. Few persons are capable of the continuous reflection required for this purpose, or reflecting would have the acumen to discriminate the bearings of a comprehensive proposition. Examples to illustrate the principles are a necessary aid to ordinary minds, and may afford assistance to the greatest. Diderot used to allege of himself that he had not sufficient understanding to apply subtle remarks which were unaccompanied by instances. The pregnant meaning of Bacon's Essays has been lost upon thousands for want of a commentary; and we have long been of opinion, that to elucidate them would be one of the most useful tasks that could be undertaken. The republication of the choice productions of an old writer by a modern editor of note, has the advantage, in addition to the intrinsic value of the annotations, of attracting readers. The newest books, however brief their day, are usually more in vogue than the best works of past generations, which, unless they are introduced afresh to the world, remain to the majority little more than a name. Notwithstanding Mr. Hallam's assertion that it would be derogatory to any one of the slightest claim to polite letters, were he unacquainted with the Essays of Bacon, we believe that they are much less studied than formerly. No one was likely to have greater weight in calling back to them the attention of the public than Archbishop Whately, who is universally known to be a sagacious observer, an acute thinker, and a man of independent mind, who, if his own judgment were not convinced, would not swear by the words of any master. Even after the tributes of Burke and Johnson, and the inferior authority of Dugald Stewart, his testimony to the depth and wisdom of Bacon's maxims and his habit of appending to them the illustrative observations suggested by his experience or which he met with in his reading, must add to our faith in their superlative excellence. His edition is not precisely of the kind which was required. The notes are too lengthy and discursive, and should have been framed a little more upon the model of the text. That they sometimes seem superfluous, is an objection of less force, since it is nearly inseparable from the nature of the task. All men have not an equal degree of familiarity with the same truths; and what is novel to one is hacknied to another. It is here as with jests, which each person calls new.or old according as they are new or old to him. Pascal conceived that every possible maxim of conduct existed in the world, though no individual can be with the entire series; and we are apt to can be conversant imagine that those rules must be the tritest with which we ourselves have been longest acquainted, and those most momentous which we have chanced to see exemplified in our own experience. Whoever reads the comment of Archbishop Whately must expect to come upon truths which were known to him before, but he will certainly meet with more which are attractive both by their novelty and their intrinsic importance. Many shrewd observations are made, many fallacies exposed, and many interesting circumstances related. The notes alone have the value of a distinct work, and have afforded us too much pleasure and instruction to permit us to quarrel with the digressive amplitude which occasionally characterises them. They may well entice those who are familiar with the Essays of Bacon to ponder them again, and induce the persons who are ignorant of this treasury of wisdom to draw upon its stores. Archbishop Whately censures the tendency to mysticism which prevails at present, and draws attention to the circumstance that the writings of Bacon are as clear as they are profound. His reflections may permit of numerous ramifications beyond what common eyes can trace, but the principles themselves are perfectly plain. If an author is obscure, it is either because his ideas are undefined, or because he lacks the power to express them. He is a confused thinker or a bad writer, and commonly both. Nor is the case altered if he is wandering beyond the limits set to hu man inquiry. A great intelligence recog nises its ignorance and refuses to confound the dim and unsubstantial dreams of the mind with the true knowledge permitted to man. In general, however, it will be found that the mystic has been employed in troubling waters which were before translucent, and that the whole of their muddiness is contracted in the dull understanding through which they flow. The sham philosopher is commonly a person, who has the ambition to be original without the capacity, and hopes to gain the credit of soaring to the clouds by shroud ing familiar objects in mist. To the frequent remark, "It is a pity such an author does not express matter so admirable in intelligible English," Archbishop Whately replies, that, except for the strangeness of the style, the matter would be seen to be common-place. A writer with a little talent and a great deal of eccentricity is sure of followers, since foolish scholars are still more numerous than foolish masters. The quack philosopher can always meet with a M. Jourdain, who will fly into ecstacies when he is told in pompous jargon how to pronounce those letters of the alphabet which he has been speaking from infancy. Nothing,' said Cardinal de Retz, "imposes so much upon people of weak understanding as what they do not comprehend.' This mental defect, by the nature of the case, is common to all the partizans of the shallow-profound school, and the majority are probably striving to compensate for their inferiority by affecting to be at home in pathless regions which wiser and honester men confess their inability to tread. In poetry, in politics, in art, in science, nay even in history and biography, we have delusive mystics who are applauded by pretentious admirers. But it is a fashion which passes away. The next generation of worshippers set up their own idols, and the true judges who are the ultimate arbiters of fame are not wont to construct pedestals for rejected and misshapen gods. · man to himself. The inducement to them is manifestly the self-esteem and visionary prospects which they foster, and not strictly the love of the lies for their own sake.' Whatever be the motive, the importance of Bacon's assertion is the same That in framing opinions, it is common to give the preference to falsehood. Of the deliberate deviation from theological and philosophical truth,' which he places first, Rousseau was a flagrant example. He perceived,' as he told Hume, that to strike and interest the public the marvellous must be produced; that the marvellous of the heathen mythology had long since lost its effect; that giants, magicians, fairies, and heroes of romance which succeeded, had exhausted the portion of credulity which belonged to their age; and that now nothing was left to a writer but the marvellous in life, in manners, in characters, and in extraordinary situations, giving rise to new and unlooked-for strokes in politics and morals.'* Upon this principle he framed his paradoxical creed, the offspring of a morbid passion for notoriety. In the language of La Rochefoucauld he found the first places on the right side forestalled, and was not content to occupy the last. Truth,' said Dr. Johnson of the sceptics who went astray from the same motive, 'will not afford sufficient food to their vanity, so they have betaken themselves to error. Truth is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.' Party feeling has a still larger influence in perverting the judgments of mankind, in causing them to substitute bigoted belief for honest inquiry, misrepresentations for facts, transparent fallacies for solid conclusions. Religion, above all subjects, has given rise to a spirit which it rebukes and disowns. The satirical portrait which Le Clerc has drawn of the ecclesiastical historian has had innumerable originals. He must adhere inviolably to the maxim that whatever can be favourable to heretics is false, and whatever can be said against them is true; while, on the other hand, all that does honour to the orthodox is unquestionable, and everything that can do them discredit is a lie. He must suppress with care, or at least extenuate as far as possible, the errors of those whom the orthodox are accustomed to respect, and must exaggerate the faults of the heterodox to the utmost of his power. He must The Essays of Bacon open appropriately with an essay on Truth,' the foundation of all excellence and all knowledge. He starts with one of his pregnant propositions which in this instance he derived from antiquity, that there is often among men a corrupt love of a lie for its own sake,' and he assigns as the reason for it, 'that truth is a naked and open daylight that doth not show the masques and mummeries and triumphs of the world half so stately and daintily as candlelights.' Unless the lie looked more attractive than the truth no one would prefer it, but, we believe, in every case, it is embraced less for its own sake than for some supposed personal advantage to be derived from it. Bacon seems to confess as much when he asks, in proof of his position, whether it can be doubted that it would leave numbers of minds poor, shrunken things, full of melancholy and unpleasing to themselves, if vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, and the like, were taken away?' These, in the milder language of our day, would be termed selfdeceptions. They are the lies told by a France."" *Burke's 'Reflections on the Revolution in remember that any orthodox writer is a competent witness against a heretic, and is to be trusted implicitly on his word; while a heretic is never to be believed against the orthodox, and has honour enough done him in allowing him to speak against his own side or in behalf of ours. It is thus that Cardinal Baronius and the authors of the Centuries of Magdeburg have written, each of their works having by this means acquired an immortal glory with its own party. But it must be owned that in the plan they adopted they have only imitated most of their predecessors. For many ages men had sought in ecclesiastical antiquity not what was to be found there, but what they conceived ought to be there for the good of their sect.' The faculty of seeing not what is, but solely what makes for the advantage of the sect, has in no way declined since the days of Le Clerc. M. Guizot has lately quoted, as a curious example of the illusions into which men may be betrayed by passion, that the greater part of the Popish journals on the Continent are incessantly repeating that Protestantism is in a state of rapid decline; that it is cold and decaying like the dead, and has hardly any adherents who are not either totally indifferent or eager to return to the Roman Catholic Church: The process is easy by which the papal zealot, without avowing his disingenuousness to his own mind, contrives to dupe himself. He overlooks the secessions from his own persuasion, the scepticism and the lukewarmness, and concentrates his attention on the few Protestants who have lapsed into Romanism or infidelity. These exceptions he assumes to be a fair specimen of the whole anti-Papal community, and he has the weakness to believe, without further inquiry, that the reformed religion is tottering to its fall. Archbishop Whately gives some forcible illustrations of this propensity of mankind to close their eyes to all evidence which does not support their antecedent conclusions. Tourists in Ireland have shown themselves particularly subject to the infirmity. They are typified, the Archbishop says, in the jaunting-car of the country in which the passengers sit back to back. Each can only take in the view on his own side of the road; one sees the green prospect, the other the orange. The report brought back by the English travellers who visited France after the first abdication of Napoleon is a striking instance of the tendency. A nephew of one of our ministers wrote a letter in which he stated that every one from the Continent with whom he had conversed agreed that Louis XVIII. was firmly fixed on his throne, and was steadily gaining strength. The letter was dated on the identical day that Napoleon sailed from Elba! Archbishop Whately, who relates this singular anecdote, ascribes many of the partial views of the tourist to the circumstance of his falling into the company of a faction who pass him on to others of the same persuasion, just, he says, as in the old days of posting the bad inn of one town was connected with the bad inn of the next, and the person who started wrong was pretty sure to have bad dinners, bad beds, and bad horses to his journey's end. The case is common; but frequently the traveller deliberately chooses his companions for the similarity of their views, and carefully avoids all contact with people whose sentiments he dislikes. In the same way vehement partisans will only read the arguments on their own side of the question, and hold it a sort of treason to truth to examine the opinions of an adversary. Some will not hesitate to avow that they fear to be infected, which is only saying in other words that they fear to be convinced. I know some of them,' relates Lord Bacon of certain religious zealots of Queen Elizabeth's time, that would think it a tempting of God to hear or read what may be said against them, as if there could be a "hold fast that which is good" without a "prove all things" going before.* Strange as is the inconsistency, it is by no means unusual for men to have the fullest confidence in a cause, and very little in its being able to endure the test of examination. The Roman Catholic priesthood prohibit the Bible wherever they can venture, and by the interdict confess their dread that the Bible will make against them. The followers of a party being regarded through the party medium, there is the same preference of falsehood to truth in the judgment of persons that is frequently found in the judgment of things. Among the many weighty and beautiful observations which Hume has dispersed through his History there is nothing more admirable than his reflection on this frailty. is no wonder that faction is so productive of vices of all kinds, for besides that it inflames the passions, it tends much to remove those great restraints, honour and It * An Advertisement touching the controversies of the Church of England-Bacon's Works, vol. vii. P. 59. |