Chapter 2
CHAPTER I.B. Lastly I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends as I have moderate civil ends. For I have taken all knowledge to be my province. And if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular traditions
and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries. The best state of that province. This, whether it be curiosity or vain glory or nature, or, if one take it favorably, philanthropia, is so fixed in my mind as it cannot be removed.
And I do easily see that place of any reasonable countenance doth bring commandment of more wits than of a man's own, which is the thing I greatly effect. And for your lordship perhaps you shall not find more strength and less encounter in any other. And if your lordship shall find now or at any time that I do seek or effect any place
whereunto any that is nearer unto your lordship shall be concurrent, say then that I am a most dishonest man. And if your lordship will not carry me on, I will not do as Anaxagoras did, who reduced himself with contemplation unto voluntary poverty. But this I will do.
I will sell the inheritance I have, and purchase some lease of quick revenue or some office of gain, that shall be executed by deputy, and so give over all care of service, and become some sorry book-maker, or a true pioneer in that mine of truth which, he said, lay so deep. This which I have writ unto your lordship is rather thoughts than words, being set down
without all art, disguising, or reservation. Wherein I have done honor both to your lordship's wisdom, in judging that that will be best believed of your lordship which is truest, and to your lordship's good nature in retaining nothing from you. And even so I wish your lordship all happiness, and to myself means and occasions to be added
to my faithful desire to do you service. From my lodgings at Gray's Inn. This letter, to his unsympathetic and suspicious but probably not unfriendly relative, is the key to Bacon's plan of life, which with numberless changes of form he followed to the end. That is, a profession steadily, seriously, and laboriously kept to, in order to provide
the means of living. And beyond that, as the ultimate and real end of his life, the pursuit, in a way unattempted before, of all possible human knowledge, and of the methods to improve it and make it sure and fruitful. And so his life was carried out.
On the one hand it was a continual and pertinacious seeking after government employment, which could give credit to his name and put money in his pocket. Attempts by general behavior, by professional services, when the occasion offered, by putting his original and fertile pen at the service of the government, to win confidence, and to overcome the manifest indisposition of those in power to think that a man who cherished
the chimera of universal knowledge could be a useful public servant. On the other hand, all the while, in the crises of his disappointment or triumph, the one great subject lay next to his heart, filling him with fire and passion. How really to know! And to teach men to know, indeed, and to use their knowledge so as to command nature!
The great hope to be the reformer and restorer of knowledge in a more wonderful sense than the world had yet seen in the reformation of learning and religion, and in the spread of civilized order in the great states of the Renaissance time. To this he gave his best and deepest thoughts. Before this he was forever accumulating and forever rearranging and reshaping those masses
of observation and inquiry and invention and mental criticism which were to come in as parts of the great design which he had seen in the visions of his imagination, and of which at last he was only able to leave noble fragments incomplete after numberless recastings. This was not indeed the only, but it was the predominant and governing interest of his life.
Whether as solicitor for court favor or public office, whether drudging at the work of the law or managing state prosecutions, whether writing an opportune pamphlet against Spain or Father Parsons, or inventing a device for his inn or for Lord Essex to give amusement to Queen Elizabeth, whether fulfilling his duties as Member of Parliament or rising step by step to the highest places in the Council Board and the State, whether in the pride
of success or under the amazement of unexpected and irreparable overthrow, while it seemed as if he was only measuring his strength against the rival ambitions of the day, in the same spirit and with the same object as his competitors the true motive of all his eagerness and all his labors was not theirs. He wanted to be powerful, and still more to be rich, but he wanted to be so because without
power and without money he could not follow what was to him the only thing worth following on earth, a real knowledge of the amazing and hitherto almost unknown world in which he had to live. Bacon, to us at least, at this distance, who can only judge him from partial and imperfect knowledge, often seems to fall far short of what a man should be.
He was not one of the high-minded and proud searchers after knowledge and truth like Descartes, who were content to accept a frugal independence so that their time and their thoughts might be their own. Bacon was a man of the world, and wished to live in and with the world. He threatened sometimes retirement, but never with any very serious intention.
In the court was his element, and there were his hopes. Often there seemed little to distinguish him from the ordinary place-hunters, obsequious and selfish, of every age, little to distinguish him from the servile and insecure flatterers of whom he himself complains, who crowded the antechambers of the great Queen, content to submit with smiling face and thankful words to the insolence of her waywardness and temper,
in the hope, more often disappointed than not, of hitting her taste on some lucky occasion and being rewarded for the accident by a place of gain or honor. Bacon's history, as read in his letters, is not an agreeable one. After every allowance made for the fashions of language and the necessities of a suitor, there is too much of insincere profession of disinterestedness, too much of exaggerated
profession of admiration and devoted service, too much of disparagement and insinuation against others for a man who respected himself. He submitted too much to the miserable conditions of rising which he found, but nevertheless be said that it was for no mean object, for no mere private selfishness or vanity, that he endured all this.
He strove hard to be a great man and a rich man, but it was that he might have his hands free and strong and well furnished to carry forward the double task of overthrowing ignorance and building up the new and solid knowledge on which his heart was set. That immense conquest of nature on behalf of man which he believed to be possible, and which he believed himself to have the key.
The letter to Lord Burghley did not help him much. He received the reversion of a place, the clerkship of the council, which did not become vacant for twenty years. But these years of service declined and place withheld were busy and useful ones. What he was most intent upon, and what occupied his deepest and most serious thought, was
unknown to the world round him, and probably not very intelligible to his few intimate friends such as his brother Antony and Dr. Andrews. Meanwhile he placed his pen at the disposal of the authorities, and though they regarded him more as a man of study than of practice and experience, they were glad to make use of it.
His versatile genius found another employment. Besides his affluence in topics, he had the liveliest fancy and most active imagination. But that he wanted the sense of poetic fitness and melody, he might almost be supposed with his reach and play of thought to have been capable, as is maintained in some eccentric modern theories, of writing Shakespeare's plays.
No man ever had a more imaginative power of illustration drawn from the most remote and most unlikely analogies. Analogies often of the quaintest and most unexpected kind, but often also not only felicitous in application but profound and true. His powers were early called upon for some of those sportive compositions in which that
age delighted on occasions of rejoicing or festival. Three of his contributions to these devices have been preserved, two of them composed in honor of the Queen as triumphs, offered by Lord Essex, one probably in 1592 and another in 1595, a third for a graze-in revel in 1594. The devices themselves were of the common type of the time, extravagant, odd, full of
awkward allegory and absurd flattery, and running to a prolixity which must make modern lovers of amusement wonder at the patience of those days. But the discourses, furnished by Bacon, are full of fine observation and brilliant thought and wit and happy illustration, which, fantastic as the general conception is, raises them far above the level of such fugitive trifles.
Among the fragmentary papers belonging to this time which have come down, not the least curious are those which throw light on his manner of working. While he was following out the great ideas which were to be the basis of his philosophy, he was as busy and painstaking in fashioning the instruments by which they were to be expressed. And in these papers we have the records and specimens of this preparation.
He was a great collector of sentences, proverbs, quotations, sayings, illustrations, anecdotes, and he seems to have read sometimes simply to gather phrases and apt words. He jots down at random any good and pointed remark which comes into his thought or his memory. At another time he groups a set of stock quotations with a special drift, bearing on some subject,
such as the faults of universities or the habits of lawyers. Nothing is too minute for his notice. He brings together in great profusion mere forms, varied turns of expression, heads and tails of clauses and paragraphs, transitions, connections. He notes down fashions of compliment, of excuse or repartee, even morning and evening salutations.
He records neat and convenient opening and concluding sentences, ways of speaking more adapted than others to give a special color or direction to what the speaker or writer has to say. All that hook-and-eye work which seems so trivial and passes so unnoticed as a matter of course, and which yet is often hard to reach, and which makes all the difference
between tameness and liveliness, between clearness and obscurity. All the difference not merely to the ease and naturalness but often to the logical force of speech. These collections it was his way to sift and transcribe again and again, adding as well as omitting.
From one of these, belonging to 1594 and the following years, the promis of formularies and elegancies, Mr. Spedding has given curious extracts, and the whole collection has been recently edited by Mrs. Henry Pot. Thus it was that he prepared himself for what as we read it, or as his audience heard it, seems the suggestion or recollection of the moment.
Bacon was always much more careful of the value or aptness of a thought than of its appearing new and original. Of all great writers he leased minds repeating himself, perhaps in the very same words. So that a simile, an illustration, a quotation pleases him, he returns to it. He is never tired of it.
It obviously gives him satisfaction to introduce it again and again. These collections of odds and ends illustrate another point in his literary habits. His was a mind keenly sensitive to all analogies and affinities, impatient of a strict and rigid logical groove. But Spedding, as it were, tentacles on all sides in quest of chance prey, and quickened
into a whole system of imagination by the electric quiver imparted by a single word, at once the key and symbol of the thinking it had led to. And so he puts down word or phrase, so enigmatical to us who see it by itself, which to him would wake up a whole train of ideas, as he remembered the occasion of it, how at a certain time in place this word set the whole moving, seemed to breathe new life and shed new light, and
has remained the token meaningless in itself which reminds him of so much. When we come to read his letters, his speeches, his works, we come continually on the results and proofs of this early labor. Some of the most memorable and familiar passages of his writings are to be traced from the storehouses which he filled in these years of preparation.
An example of this correspondence between the Notebook and the composition is to be seen in a paper belonging to this period, written apparently to form part of a mask, or as he himself calls it, a conference of pleasure, and entitled The Praise of Knowledge. It is interesting because it is the first draft which we have from him of some of the leading ideas and most characteristic language about the defects and the improvement of knowledge,
which were afterwards embodied in the Advancement and the Novum Organum. The whole spirit and aim of his great reform is summed up in the following fine passage. Facility to believe, impatience to doubt, temerity to asever, glory to know, doubt to contradict, end to gain, sloth to search, seeking things in words, resting in a part of nature.
These and the like have been the things which have forbidden the happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things, and in place thereof have married it to vain notions and blind experiments. Therefore no doubt the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge, wherein many things are reserved which kings with their treasures cannot buy nor with their force command.
Their spiels and intelligences give no news of them. Their seamen and discoverers cannot sail where they grow. Now we govern nature in opinions, but we are thrall unto her in necessity. But if we could be led by her in invention, we should command her in action. To the same occasion as the discourse on the praise of knowledge belongs also one in praise
of the Queen. As one is an early specimen of his manner of writing and philosophy, so this is a specimen of what was equally characteristic of him. It is political and historical writing. It is, in form, necessarily a panegyric, as high-flown and adulatory as such performances
in those days were bound to be. But it is not only flattery. It fixes with true discrimination on the points in Elizabeth's character and reign which were really subjects of admiration and homage. Thus of her unquailing spirit at the time of the Spanish invasion.
Lastly, see a Queen, that when her realm was to have been invaded by an army, the preparation whereof was like the travail of an elephant, the provisions infinite, the setting forth whereof was the terror and wonder of Europe. It was not seen that her cheer, her fashion, her ordinary manner was anything altered. Not a cloud of that storm did appear in that countenance wherein peace doth ever shine.
But with excellent assurance and advised security she inspired her counsel, animated her nobility, redoubled the courage of her people. Still having this noble apprehension, not only that she would communicate her fortune with them, but that it was she that would protect them and not they her. Which she testified by no less demonstration than her presence in camp.
Therefore that magnanimity that neither feareth greatness of alteration, nor the vows of conspirators, nor the power of the enemy, is more than heroical. These papers, though he put his best workmanship into them, as he invariably did with whatever he touched, were of an ornamental kind. But he did more serious work.
In the year 1592 a pamphlet had been published on the continent in Latin and English, Responsio ad Edictum Regino Anglio, with reference to the severe legislation which followed on making such charges against the Queen and the Government as it was natural for the Roman Catholic Party to make, and making them with the utmost virulence and unscrupulousness. It was supposed to be written by the ablest of the Roman pamphleteers, Father Parsons.
The Government felt it to be a dangerous indictment, and Bacon was chosen to write the answer to it. He had additional interest in the matter, for the pamphlet made a special and bitter on Burghley, as the person mainly responsible for the Queen's policy. Bacon's reply is long and elaborate, taking up every charge, and reviewing from his own
point of view the whole course of the struggle between the Queen and the supporters of the Roman Catholic interest abroad and at home. It cannot be considered an impartial review. Besides that, it was written to order. No man in England could then write impartially in that quarrel.
But it is not more one-sided and uncandid than the pamphlet which it answers, and Bacon is able to recriminate with effect, and to show gross credulity and looseness of assertion on the part of the Roman Catholic advocate. But religion had too much to do with the politics of both sides for either to be able to come into the dispute with clean hands.
The Roman Catholics meant much more than toleration, and the sanguinary punishments of the English law against priests and Jesuits were edged by something even keener than the fear of treason. But the paper contains some large surveys of public affairs, which probably no one at that time could write but Bacon.
Bacon never liked to waste anything good which he had written, and much of what he had written in the Panagyric in Praise of the Queen is made use of again and transferred with little to the pages of the Observations on a Libel.
