On Francis Bacon,
from Letters on the English or Lettres Philosophiques, c. 1778
Letter XII: On The Lord Bacon
Not long since the trite and frivolous question following was debated in a very polite
and learned company, viz., Who was the greatest man, Caesar, Alexander, Tamerlane,
Cromwell, &c.?
Somebody answered that Sir Isaac Newton excelled them all. The gentleman's assertion
was very just; for if true greatness consists in having received from heaven a mighty
genius, and in having employed it to enlighten our own mind and that of others, a man like
Sir Isaac Newton, whose equal is hardly found in a thousand years, is the truly great man.
And those politicians and conquerors (and all ages produce some) were generally so many
illustrious wicked men. That man claims our respect who commands over the minds of the
rest of the world by the force of truth, not those who enslave their fellow-creatures: he
who is acquainted with the universe, not they who deface it.
Since, therefore, you desire me to give you an account of the famous personages whom
England has given birth to, I shall begin with Lord Bacon, Mr. Locke, Sir Isaac Newton,
&c. Afterwards the warriors and Ministers of State shall come in their order.
I must begin with the celebrated Viscount Verulam, known in Europe by the name of
Bacon, which was that of his family. His father had been Lord Keeper, and himself was a
great many years Lord Chancellor under King James I. Nevertheless, amidst the intrigues of
a Court, and the affairs of his exalted employment, which alone were enough to engross his
whole time, he yet found so much leisure for study as to make himself a great philosopher,
a good historian, and an elegant writer; and a still more surprising circumstance is that
he lived in an age in which the art of writing justly and elegantly was little known, much
less true philosophy. Lord Bacon, as is the fate of man, was more esteemed after his death
than in his lifetime. His enemies were in the British Court, and his admirers were
foreigners.
When the Marquis d'Effiat attended in England upon the Princess Henrietta Maria,
daughter to Henry IV., whom King Charles I, had married, that Minister went and visited
the Lord Bacon, who, being at that time sick in his bed, received him with the curtains
shut close. "You resemble the angels," said the Marquis to him; "we hear
those beings spoken of perpetually, and we believe them superior to men, but are never
allowed the consolation to see them."
You know that this great man was accused of a crime very unbecoming a philosopher: I
mean bribery and extortion. You know that he was sentenced by the House of Lords to pay a
fine of about four hundred thousand French livres, to lose his peerage and his dignity of
Chancellor; but in the present age the English revere his memory to such a degree, that
they will scarce allow him to have been guilty. In case you should ask what are my
thoughts on this head, I shall answer you in the words which I heard the Lord Bolingbroke
use on another occasion. Several gentlemen were speaking, in his company, of the avarice
with which the late Duke of Marlborough had been charged, some examples whereof being
given, the Lord Bolingbroke was appealed to (who, having been in the opposite party, might
perhaps, without the imputation of indecency, have been allowed to clear up that matter):
"He was so great a man," replied his lordship, "that I have forgot his
vices."
I shall therefore confine myself to those things which so justly gained Lord Bacon the
esteem of all Europe.
The most singular and the best of all his pieces is that which, at this time, is the
most useless and the least read, I mean his Novum Scientiarum Organum. This is the
scaffold with which the new philosophy was raised; and when the edifice was built, part of
it at least, the scaffold was no longer of service.
The Lord Bacon was not yet acquainted with Nature, but then he knew, and pointed out,
the several paths that lead to it. He had despised in his younger years the thing called
philosophy in the Universities, and did all that lay in his power to prevent those
societies of men instituted to improve human reason from depraving it by their quiddities,
their horrors of the vacuum, their substantial forms, and all those impertinent terms
which not only ignorance had rendered venerable, but which had been made sacred by their
being rediculously blended with religion.
He is the father of experimental philosophy. It must, indeed, be confessed that very
surprising secrets had been found out before his time-the sea-compass, printing, engraving
on copper plates, oil-painting, looking-glasses; the art of restoring, in some measure,
old men to their sight by spectacles; gunpowder, &c., had been discovered. A new world
has been sought for, found, and conquered. Would not one suppose that these sublime
discoveries had been made by the greatest philosophers, and in ages much more enlightened
than the present? But it was far otherwise; all these great changes happened in the most
stupid and barbarous times. Chance only gave birth to most of those inventions; and it is
very probable that what is called chance contributed very much to the discovery of
America; at least, it has been always thought that Christopher Columbus undertook his
voyage merely on the relation of a captain of a ship which a storm had driven as far
westward as the Caribbean Islands. Be this as it will, men had sailed round the world, and
could destroy cities by an artificial thunder more dreadful than the real one; but, then,
they were not acquainted with the circulation of the blood, the weight of the air, the
laws of motion, light, the number of our planets, &c. And a man who maintained a
thesis on Aristotle's "Categories," on the universals a part rei, or such-like
nonsense, was looked upon as a prodigy.
The most astonishing, the most useful inventions, are not those which reflect the
greatest honour on the human mind. It is to a mechanical instinct, which is found in many
men, and not to true philosophy, that most arts owe their origin.
The discovery of fire, the art of making bread, of melting and preparing metals, of
building houses, and the invention of the shuttle, are infinitely more beneficial to
mankind than printing or the sea-compass: and yet these arts were invented by
uncultivated, savage men.
What a prodigious use the Greeks and Romans made afterwards of mechanics! Nevertheless,
they believed that there were crystal heavens, that the stars were small lamps which
sometimes fell into the sea, and one of their greatest philosophers, after long
researches, found that the stars were so many flints which had been detached from the
earth.
In a word, no one before the Lord Bacon was acquainted with experimental philosophy,
nor with the several physical experiments which have been made since his time. Scarce one
of them but is hinted at in his work, and he himself had made several. He made a kind of
pneumatic engine, by which he guessed the elasticity of the air. He approached, on all
sides as it were, to the discovery of its weight, and had very near attained it, but some
time after Torricelli seized upon his truth. In a little time experimental philosophy
began to be cultivated on a sudden in most parts of Europe. It was a hidden treasure which
the Lord Bacon had some notion of, and which all the philosophers, encouraged by his
promises, endeavoured to dig up.
But that which surprised me most was to read in his work, in express terms, the new
attraction, the invention of which is ascribed to Sir Isaac Newton.
We must search, says Lord Bacon, whether there may not be a kind of magnetic power
which operates between the earth and heavy bodies, between the moon and the ocean, between
the planets, &c. In another place he says, either heavy bodies must be carried towards
the centre of the earth, or must be reciprocally attracted by it; and in the latter case
it is evident that the nearer bodies, in their falling, draw towards the earth, the
stronger they will attract one another. We must, says he, make an experiment to see
whether the same clock will of faster on the top of a mountain or at the bottom of a mine;
whether the strength of the weights decreases on the mountain and increases in the mine.
It is probable that the earth has a true attractive power.
This forerunner in philosophy was also an elegant writers, an historian, and a wit.
His moral essays are greatly esteemed, but they were drawn up in the view of
instructing rather than of pleasing; and, as they are not a satire upon mankind, like
Rochefoucauld's "Maxims," nor written upon a sceptical plan, Like Montaigne's
"Essays," they are not so much read as those two ingenious authors.
His History of Henry VII. was looked upon as a masterpiece, but how is it possible that
some persons can presume to compare so little a work with the history of our illustrious
Thuanus?
Speaking about the famous impostor Perkin, son to a converted Jew, who assumed boldly
the name and title of Richard IV., King of England, at the instigation of the Duchess of
Burgundy, and who disputed the crown with Henry VII., the Lord Bacon writes as follows:
"At this time the King began again to be haunted with sprites, by the magic and
curious arts of the Lady Margaret, who raised up the ghost of Richard, Duke of York,
second to King Edward IV., to walk and vex the King.
"After such time as she (Margaret of Burgundy) thought he (Perkin Warbeck) was
perfect in his lesson, she began to cast with herself from what coast this blazing star
should first appear, and at what time it must be upon the horizon of Ireland; for there
had the like meteor strong influence before."
Methinks our sagacious Thuanus does not give in to such fustian, which formerly was
looked upon as sublime, but in this age is justly called nonsense.
Source:
French and English philosophers : Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire, Hobbes : with
introductions and notes. New York : P.F. Collier, c1910. Series: The Harvard classics
v. 34.
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© Paul Halsall, August 1998
