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"Rom. Art thou so base and full of wretchedness,
And fear'st to die? famine is in thy cheeks,
Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes,
Contempt and beggary hang upon thy back.1
The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law:
The world affords no law to make thee rich;

Then be not poor, but break it, and take this."-Act V. Sc. 1.

But Nemesis more particularly represents the dark and secret judgment of God; and, continues Bacon, in the fable:

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"This Nemesis of the Darkness (the human not agreeing with the divine judgment) was matter of observation even among the heathen.

Ripheus fell too,

Than whom a juster and truer man

In all his dealings was not found in Troy.
But the gods judged not so: "—

which difference of the divine and human judgment creeps into the end of the play thus:

"Fri.

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Lady, come from that nest

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Prince. See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That Heaven finds means to kill your joys with love."

Act V. Sc. 3.

"Fri. Peace, ho! for shame! confusion's cure lives not In these confusions. Heaven and yourself

Had part in this fair maid; now Heaven hath all;

And all the better is it for the maid:

Your part in her you could not keep from death,
But Heaven keeps his part in eternal life.

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1 This play seems to have undergone considerable emendation subsequently to the quarto of 1597, which, in place of this and the preceding line, reads as follows:

"Upon thy back hangs ragged miserie,

And starved famine dwelleth in thy cheeks."

See White's Shakes., X. 182; Notes, 189.

For though fond Nature bids us all lament,

Yet nature's tears are reason's merriment."— -Act IV. Sc. 5.

§ 5. SCIENCE OF MATTER.

The general scope of Bacon's theory of universals was essentially and at bottom the same with that of the higher modern philosophy: its end was to be Philosophy itself. His discussions concerning the nature of cause and form make it clear that he had arrived, substantially, at the transcendental conceptions of both. Forms, as anything separate and distinct from the real essence of things and those fundamental and eternal laws of thought under which essence takes form, were mere fictions of the imagination ; and matter, as anything distinct from the last and positive power and cause of nature, was simply a fantastic superstition. "His form and cause conjoined" in the ghost exactly illustrate the metaphysical conception of the true nature of matter and form, cause and effect, noumena and phenomena, and the mode and manner of action and operation of that uncaused power that creates all things; that is to say, that it is, in fact and reality, a power of the nature of the power of thought, wholly, as the only actual substance, essence, or matter, eternally in activity, under laws which are necessary laws of all possible thinking, divine or human, and in reference to the divine mind, identical with the laws of nature or physics so far, and in the modes of thought only, giving therein the substances of all created things and their forms, together with the order, particular distribution, movement, and total plan, moral fitness, perfection, and artistic beauty, exhibited in the entire providential scheme and purpose in the creation of any universe, past, present, or future: whence comes for us, in the study and contemplation of the past and present universe that lies open before us as the book of God's works so far, a foreground and promise of the certain (so far as certain), the possible, and the probable continuation thereof in

the future; - an uncreated thinking Power, thinking His universe. And so he imagined it possible for the Creator to bring the disembodied spirit or ghost into view of the physical eye of Hamlet. Not that this was possible in actual human experience, but that by a certain poetic license, the thing might be conceived in the mind as possible in the artistically creative manner in which the imagination works. A strictly scientific observation of facts in external nature clearly proves that it would be utterly impossible for the human eye, organized and constructed as it is, actually to see and perceive any object, substance, or thing whatever so thin and ethereal in its nature as the spiritual form of a disembodied soul must be; though such a spiritual creation, on the metaphysical principles which Bacon had laid down and expounded, and in accordance with exact scientific thinking, too, might have a real existence in nature as a finite created object, or subject, and a substantial thing, existing in time and space as a part of the existent universe, though invisible to mortal eyes:

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It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you."— Act I. Sc. 5.

Nevertheless, even Hamlet himself was not quite sure of

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"Ham.

The spirit that I have seen

May be the Devil: and the Devil hath power
T'assume a pleasing shape; yea, and, perhaps,
Out of my weakness and melancholy

(As he is very potent with such spirits)

Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds

More relative than this: the play 's the thing,

Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King."— Act II. Sc. 2.

The natural eye, when the sunlight streams in at a window, or some small crevice, can see very fine particles of dust floating in the air, which are wholly invisible beyond the stream of light: yet this dust is a gross cloud of solid particles, compared with the air itself, which, though

a fluid mass of atoms, is yet utterly invisible to human sight, even with the aid of the most powerful microscope. The blue sky that we see is not so much the air as the totality of a stratum forty five miles thick; whilst the substance of any spiritual body must be infinitely more subtil than the air, else it might be bottled like a gas, and examined by the chemist. Nevertheless, we can easily imagine an eye to be so constituted as to be capable of seeing such an object; but it would necessarily be a superhuman eye. Such an eye and such a form are supposed in the Tempest," when the supernatural magician, Prospero, says to his invisible Genius, Ariel

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Go, make thyself like to a nymph o' the sea;
Be subject to no sight but mine; invisible
To every eye-ball else." — Act I. Sc. 2.

In truth, modern science ascertains that all matter that we know of, even the most solid rocks of the mountains, can be melted down and resolved into gases more invisible than the air we breathe. Some gases are so thin as to be scarcely ponderable in any balance that can be constructed by human art. The ether that fills interplanetary space, retards comets, is the medium of transmission of the radiating waves of light and heat, and is supposed to pervade, or to traverse, the most solid bodies, escapes all scrutiny of scientific instruments and experimentation. Electricity, though appearing in some respects to act like a fluid, and imagined by some to consist of infinitesimal globules, is certainly so subtil and ethereal as to be utterly imponderable by any means yet known; but, if a stroke of lightning could be caught in a pair of scales, its weight, that is, the degree and measure of force with which it struck, in that particular instance, might be exactly ascertained and set down in figures; and it is questionable whether electricity can come under any scientific theory of atoms, or equivalents, at least, otherwise than as just so many strokes of it as have been so weighed and set down: in short, whether it

be not some more direct exhibition of the creative power, and itself a pure totality of power, with only a certain polarity and a certain duality of positive and negative. And motion, a something still further removed from what is commonly understood by matter, may be the mere result and consequence of a more or less immediate and direct exhibition of that same pure power.

One year, an astronomer raises a new telescope to the heavens, that sweeps nine or ten times as much space as the largest one did, the year before, and while he and his telescope are whirling through the circumference of the earth, in a day, and the earth, through its orbit, in a year, and the solar system itself is making 17,000 miles or so, in an hour, on a circle of the heavens so immeasurable that the length of the arc travelled over since the beginning of astronomy cannot be distinguished from a straight line, he looks across the astronomical history in time and space of whole solar systems, and sees, at the remotest reach of his new sight, what appears to be a vast nebulous cloud gathering to a centre, catches it, perhaps, in the first half turn of its spiral winding, and reveals a new wonder of creation to the eye of physical science. The true philosopher beholds with awe this work of the creative power, proceeds with reverence to observe and study the mode, manner, and method of the proceeding, searches for the cause and law of it, and endeavors to penetrate even to the point of origin of the new phenomenon; for he sees it to be at all events the work of Him whose thought is reality. A machine philosopher resorts to new observation, calculation, and experimentation, seeking only to find out the physical laws and forces and "the properties of matter," whereby this apparent ethereal cloud may condense itself into a solar system of revolving globes, thinking, perhaps, that physical laws and forces and a cloud of matter should explain the whole affair without more. Empedocles had got as far as this about twenty-three centuries ago.

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