In as old as Plato and Aristotle, and probably very much older. It is considered doubtful whether Bacon was very familiar with Aristotle at first hand; perhaps, like other men in those days, he had his knowledge of him mainly through Latin and Italian sources; but it can never be correct to say that a great and original mind "takes" its views from any particular writer; it takes them from anywhere and everywhere, and makes them its own. There are few things in any department of thought in which absolute originality is possible. writing on this, as on other branches of philosophic inquiry, I think Bacon had the views of Aristotle mainly in mind. These were developed from the speculations of Plato and earlier philosophers, and were formed upon the theory that there was more than one form of soul. Aristotle's argument on this subject is contained in the book De Anima. It can be easily read in Grote, but unless read in extenso it cannot be fully understood. Very briefly, however, the theory is that there are three souls, the Nutritive, which is the lowest, and concerned with all the automatic processes of life; the Sentient, which, broadly speaking, is consciousness, and includes the practical or working intelligence, imagination,' memory, perception and sensation; and the Noetic (the Nous), which is pure intelligence, a capacity with regard to truth by which the individual is enabled to apprehend and judge in terms of the abstract and universal. The first of these souls is common to plants, animals and man; the first and second are in animals; and all three are in man. The two first are communicated in the act of generation; the third enters later "from without," and operates without any bodily organ. The Nous is alone immortal, and from this statement (which is found in summaries) it might be supposed that Aristotle maintained what is generally known as the immortality of the soul. But though the whole argument appears to be leading up to that conclusion, 1 "Phantasy belongs to the sentient soul . . . not identical with the movement of sense, but continued from and produced by that alone." So also Memory. Grote's Aristotle, "De Anima," chap. xii. he apparently feels compelled at the last moment to abandon it in deference to certain logical conceptions which at that point obtrude themselves, with the result that though the Noûs (the celestial particle) cannot perish (as the sentient and nutritive souls do with the death of the body), it nevertheless ceases to have any more relation to the individual experience after separation than it had before incorporation. It simply rejoins the celestial body from which it emanated. Therefore the intellectual man is no more immortal than the sentient man: the species alone continues. It seems hardly worth while that the whole machinery of the physical and metaphysical universe should be invoked to produce such a result. The interest of Aristotle's argument, however, is now only relative, as it rests primarily on a fabulous conception of the nature of the universe. Bacon used these ideas, and while refusing (at first contemptuously and later with less confidence) to admit the validity of the new astronomical theory (of Copernicus), which by that time had been placed beyond reasonable doubt by Galileo, he endeavoured to bring them into relation with Christian revelation. He asserts the duality of the human soul. Man, according to his doctrine, has two souls, one peculiar to himself, the rational soul, "springing from the breath of God" (e Spiraculo Dei); the other, shared in common with the brutes, the irrational soul, which comes from the "wombs of the elements" (e Matricibus Elementorum). The latter (as it exists in man) is "only the instrument of the rational soul, and has its origin like that of the brutes in the dust of the earth." Accordingly the first part of the general doctrine concerning the human soul he terms “the doctrine concerning the Breath of Life; the other the doctrine concerning the Sensible or Produced Soul." He continues: "The doctrine concerning the breath of life, as well as the doctrine concerning the substance of the rational soul, includes those inquiries touching its nature,-whether it be native or adventive, separable or inseparable, mortal or immortal, how far it is tied to the laws of matter, how far exempted from them; and the like. Which questions though even in philosophy they admit an inquiry both more diligent and more profound than they have hitherto received, yet I hold that in the end such must be handed over to religion to be determined and defined. Otherwise they will be subject to many errors and illusions of the sense. For since the substance of the soul in its creation was not extracted or produced out of the mass of heaven and earth,1 but was immediately inspired from God; and since the laws of heaven and earth are the proper subjects of philosophy; how can we expect to obtain from philosophy the knowledge of the substance of the rational soul? It must be drawn from the same divine inspiration, from which that substance first proceeded."2 Bacon has been frequently charged with materialism, and, in connection with this extract, two grounds for the charge may be mentioned, that he appears to wish to confine philosophy to the business of scientific investigation, and that he does not give due weight to the idea of moral responsibility as the concern of the rational soul. I think both criticisms are justified, but to conclude that Bacon was therefore a materialist would, in my opinion, be unsound, because (as has been often pointed out) he is not a consistently logical thinker. For that he is too much under the influence of his imagination, and he trusts for his conclusions more to a certain innate instinct for truth than to any chain of reasoning, sometimes with most convincing results, at others with results as disconcerting from their arbitrary and fanciful character. I think it can hardly be doubted that, as Macaulay said, Bacon was "a sincere believer in the divine authority of the Christian revelation." On the other hand, his philosophic habit and his temperament militated against this belief fructifying in his mind as an active principle. His reverence for the order of nature (which, in my opinion, finds expression in the personification of it in the " Mutabilitie" cantos of Spenser to which I have alluded) made him feel that philosophy 1 This is a reference to the doctrine of Aristotle. 2 De Augmentis, bk. iv. 3, trans. Ellis and Spedding; Works, iv. 396 sq. was ennobled rather than debased by being brought back from the pursuit of what he regarded as vain speculations and confined to the study of natural processes. This attitude is summarised in a sentence of a letter to Father Beranzano written in 1622: "De Metaphysica ne sis sollicitus. Nulla enim erit post veram Physicam inventam; ultraquam nihil praeter divinam." ("Be not troubled about the metaphysics. When true physics have been discovered, there will be no metaphysics. Beyond the true physics is divinity only.")1 But grand as this conception is, if it be accepted as a complete statement of the order of the world, not only in relation to mechanical processes but also to human life, it does not necessarily imply any advance on the position reached long ago by philosophers of antiquity, of which the lines of Lucretius are, in effect, the final summary : Omnis enim per se divom natura necessest nec bene promeritis capitur neque tangitur ira. In English the lines may perhaps be thus rendered: For what is God [he3 thought] must, under fate, Bacon, however, appears to me, even on the philosophic 1 Spedding, Life, vii. 375. 2 Lucretius, De rerum natura, ii. 646-651. A distinguished modern writer has described these lines as "plangent," and to a present-day reader no doubt they are, especially if read apart from the context. But the context shows clearly that the poet is not animated (consciously at least) by any such feeling, for he is discussing the popular mythology, which, he says, however beautifully it may be set forth by the poets, is yet widely removed from true reason. "For the nature of gods," etc. And he continues that if any one thinks proper to call the sea Neptune and corn Ceres, etc., let him do so, provided he forbears in earnest to stain his mind turpi religione. 3 i.e. Lucretius. The words in brackets were inserted by the translator, as this passage was being quoted in another connection. side, to have accepted the Christian revelation, but rather as a means of satisfying his sense of order, and stopping the void of infinity in which philosophy has always lost itself, than as supplying a motive for devotion and conduct. On that side, like Machiavelli, whose writings he had studied in his youth, he was more appealed to by the Roman standards of "virtue," 1 "magnanimity," and "the few." I believe he had a strong sense of attachment for the institutions of the Church, and was quite without the hardness and smallness of self-satisfaction. But the idea of the Christian revelation as a means by which the individual may be brought, through personality and the emotional appeal, into close relations with the divine, is one of which I can find no trace in Bacon's writings, though Christian theology was a subject on which he thought and wrote well. Revelation, in relation to practical life, is regarded by him mainly as a means of securing order and finality, by providing, as it were, a permanent overlord, who is referred to by Bacon in terms which are indistinguishable, in feeling or form, from those which he applies to the earthly sovereign : "his majesty," "his divine majesty," "his excellent majesty." 2 Two of Bacon's sayings, which (if he had the distinction in mind) refer to the rational soul, imply the recognition of it as the source of all that is noble and magnanimous in conduct, though they carry no inference as to his ideas on the persistence of the individual 1 "Virtus," the primary meaning of which was "courage," in action and habit. 2 The following passage from his speech in the House of Commons in favour of general naturalisation of the Scotch (probably revised as a literary document) is an illustration: "Do we not see (Mr. Speaker) that in the administration of the world under the great monarch, God himself, that his laws are divers," etc. Spedding, Life, iii. 314. Spenser's habit of thought on this subject is marked by a similar primitive spiritual feeling. Thus, in the Hymne of Heavenly Beautie, he apparently sees no incongruity in describing Sapience, whom he represents as enthroned in the bosom of the Almighty, under terms which are obviously intended to apply to Queen Elizabeth; and when in imagination (in the same poem) he himself approaches the footstool of the Deity, the language suggests nothing so much as an audience with the Sovereign on the part of a minister who is apprehensive of embarrassing revelations. At the same time the writing is evidently natural. |