REVIEW.
Philosophical Classics for English Readers. Francis Bacon : His Life and Philosophy. By John NicHOL. Part I. — Bacon's Life. William Black- wood & Sons : Edinburgh and London, 1888.
There is a certain propriety in the treatment of Bacon by one whose equipment is generally supposed to be less that of the specialised philosopher than of the litterateur at large. On Hobbes or Berkeley, or even on the loose and sensational Locke, one would scarcely feel comfortable with any monograph which did not bear the hall-mark of a Professor of Meta- physics. But Bacon is in a quite different category from any of these. In the first place, he was so much more than a mere philosopher — an orator, a jurist, a states- man, and, perhaps most notable of all, one of the first masters of English prose. His Essays have made him familiar to thousands who know the De Augmentis and the Novum Organum only by vague and exaggerated report. His character is one of the thrice-drenched battle-grounds of history. And then, too, his philo- sophy, when one does penetrate to it athwart the tenfold trappings of his reputation, is after all so veiy unphilosophic by any of the accepted canons of accurate thought. There is no denying it, the introduction to Bacon as a philosopher is painfully disappointing. From boyhood one has been used to hear and to talk with reverence about the Baconian system, and it is no slight shock, on fuller knowledge, to find in the system little else than an imposing impotence. Bacon looked at knowledge and its pos- sibilities with the eye not of a philosopher, but of a poet ; he prophesied mightily of the millennium, and had not an inkling of the next reform. The root principle, indeed, of science — that it shall start from a face-to-face observation of nature — he enunciated quite forcibly enough ; and one would think he actually had grasped it, if almost in every instance he did not conspicuously fail in the application. His half- anticipations of later discoveries, of which so much has in many quarters been made, are really to be reckoned among the number of imaginative premonitions — in the same categoiy almost with Dante's prophecy of the Cntx Aastralis and Swift's miraculous divination of the satellites of Mars. Yet, in spite of everything, Bacon was altogether so large and lordly a personage that his rhetoric has imposed upon posterity, and there must be many people who believe in him as the first founder of modern science. The book before us is occupied altogether with the hfe of Bacon — consideration of his philosophy being kept for a future volume. It is open to question whethei', in a series of professedly philosophic manuals, there is legitimate room for what is really a chapter, and a pretty long one too, of the political liistoi-y of England. But that impropriety, if such it be, need not spoil anybody's use of a very serviceable biography. It would be too much to say that Professor Nichol had thrown any new light on his subject, but he has re- produced, in a readable fashion, the best results of specialised judgment and research. Perhaps the best, as it is certainly the most entertaining, pai-t of the book, is its opening chapter, which contains a bright and incisive summary of the milieu. On the broad and brilliant stage where Sidney, Spenser, and Raleigh play their parts of mingled thought and action, the Professor is infinitely more at home than among the obscure intrigues of Secretary Winwood, or the blustrous brutalities of Coke. The positive blemishes of the book are insignificant. Yet here and there one does find sentences which look odd in the work of a Professor of English Literature, and there is a fling or two at present-day politics which should have had no temptations for an exponent of ' divine philo- sophy.' More than once in the course of his work the Pro- fessor makes a very suggestive hint at a parallel between the careers of Bacon and Cicero. Of course the resemblance is only a partial one : intellectually Cicero is one of the poorest creatures in histoiy, and morally he lies under no such sentence of gross dishonesty as has been passed upon Bacon. Yet in the characters and in the lives of the two men there is matei'ial for a parallel not less conclusive than any of the best of Plutarch's. Both were born rhetoricians, both men of the widest interests and the most varied versatility, and both had a fatal and incurable passion for the perilous pleasures of public life. Most import- ant of all, there was in each the same weakness of moral fibre, making his life abortive, and his memory a dubious fame. But fate was less kind to the English- man than to the Roman. The party struggles of the dying Republic put Cicero in a position which was the place of honour, though hardly the place of wisdom. His own foibles made success and the great betrayal alike impossible to him, and he stands charged with nothing worse than a host of minor and venial tergi- versations. But under the settled government of Elizabeth and James there was only one way in politics, and that the crooked path of courtiership and bribes. As yet there was no gi-eat civil strife to call forth the higher politic virtues — it was a time of diplomacy and not of contest, an age of flattery instead of philippics. Failure in such a scramble is always ignoble, and could scarcely be elevated into tragedy even by an ending on Tower Hill. But Bacon was doomed only to fine and imprisonment (and these remitted by the ungainly grace of his sovereign), while Cicero perished, fortun- ately, at the hands of the assassins of liberty and Rome.
