Bacon Delia Salter
The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded
But he complains of those who have attempted such interpretations hitherto, that 'being unskilled in nature, and their learning no more than that of common-place, they have applied the sense of the parables to certain general and vulgar matters, without reaching to their real purport, genuine interpretation and full depth;' certainly it would not be that kind of criticism, then, which would be able to bring out the subtleties of the new learning from those popular embodiments, which he tells us it will have to take, in order to make some impression, at least, on the common understanding. 'Settle that question, then, in regard to the old Fables as you will, our pains will not perhaps be misemployed, whether we illustrate antiquity or things themselves,' and to that he adds, 'for myself, therefore, I expect to appear NEW in THESE COMMON THINGS, because, leaving untouched such as are sufficiently plain and open, I shall drive only those that are either deep or rich.' 'For myself?' – I? – 'I expect to appear new in these common things.' But elsewhere, where he lays out the argument of them, by the side of that 'resplendent and lustrous mass of matter,' those heroical descriptions of virtue, duty, and felicity, that others have got glory from, it is some Poet we are given to understand that is going to be found new in them. There, the argument is all —all—poetic, and it is a theme for one who, if he know how to handle it, need not be afraid to put in his modest claim, with those who sung of old, the wrath of heroes, and their arms.
Any one who does not perceive that the passages here quoted were designed to introduce more than 'the wisdom of the ancients', the reader who is disposed to conclude after a careful perusal of these reiterated statements, in regard to the form in which doctrines differing from received opinions must be delivered, taken in connexion, too, with that draught of the new science of the human culture and its parts and points, which has just been produced here, – the reader who concludes that this is, after all, a science that was able to dispense with this method of appeal to the senses and the imagination; that it was not obliged to have recourse to that path; – that the NEW LEARNING, 'the NEW DISCOVERY,' had here no fables, no particular topics, and methods of tradition; that it contented itself with abstractions and generalities, with 'the husks and shells of sciences,' – such an one ought, undoubtedly, to be left undisturbed in that opinion. He belongs precisely to that class of persons which this author himself deliberately proposed to leave to such conclusions. He is one whom this philosopher himself would not take any trouble at all to enlighten on such points. The other reading, with all its gravity, was designed for him. The time for such an one to adopt the reading here produced, will be, when 'those who are incapable of receiving such things as do not directly fall under and strike the senses,' have, at last, got hold of it; when 'the groundlings, who, for the most part are capable of nothing but dumb show and noise,' have had their ears split with it, it will be time enough for him.
This Wisdom of the Moderns, then, to resume with those to whom the appeal is made, this new learning which the Wise Man and Innovator of the Modern Ages tells us must be clothed in fable, and adorned with verse, this learning that must be made to fall under and strike the senses; this dumb show of science, that is but show to him who cannot yet take the player's own version of what it means; this illustrated tradition, this beautiful tradition of the New Science of Human Nature, – where is it? This historical collection, this gallery that was to contain scientific draughts and portraitures of the human character, that should exhaust its varieties, – where is it? These new Georgics of the mind whose argument is here, – where are they? This new Virgil who might promise himself such glory, – such new glory in the singing of them, – where is he? Did he make so deep a summer in his verse, that the track of the precept was lost in it? Were the flowers, and the fruit, so thick, there; was the reed so sweet that the argument of that great husbandry could no point, – could leave no furrow in it?
'Where souls do couch, on flowers, we'll hand in hand,
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze:
Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops,
And all the haunt be ours.'
'The neglect of our times,' says this author, in proposing this great argument, this new argument, of the application of SCIENCE to the Culture and Cure of the Mind, 'the neglect of our times, wherein few men do hold any consultations touching the reformation of their lives, may make this part seem superfluous. As Seneca excellently saith, "De partibus vitae quisquae deliberat, de summa nemo."' And is that, after all, – is that the trouble still? Is it, that that characteristic of Elizabeth's time – that same thing which Seneca complained of in Nero's, – is it that that is not yet obsolete? Is that the reason, this so magnificent part, this radical part of the new discovery of the Modern Ages, is still held 'superfluous?' 'De partibus vitae quisquae deliberat, de summa nemo.' 'Now that we have spoken, and spoken for so many ages, of this fruit of life, it remaineth to speak of the husbandry thereunto.' That is the scientific proposition which has waited now two hundred and fifty years, for a scientific audience. The health of the soul, the scientific promotion of it, the FRUIT OF LIFE, and the observations of its husbandry. 'And if it be said,' he continues, anticipating the first inconsiderate objection, 'if it be said that the cure of mens' minds belongeth to sacred divinity, it is most true; but yet, moral philosophy may be preferred unto her, as a wise servant and humble handmaid. For as the Psalm saith, that the eyes of the handmaid look perpetually towards the mistress, and yet, no doubt, many things are left to the discretion of the handmaid, to discern of the mistress' will; so ought moral philosophy to give a constant attention to the doctrines of divinity, and yet so as it may yield of herself, within due limits, many sound and profitable directions.'
For the times that were 'far off' when that proposition was made, it is brought out anew and reopened. Oh, people of the ages of arts and sciences that are called by this man's name, shall we have the fruits of his new doctrine of KNOWLEDGE, brought to our relief in all other fields, and reject it in this, which he himself laid out, and claimed as its only worthy field? Instructed now in the validity of its claims, by its 'magnitude of effects' in every department of the human practice to which it has yet been applied, shall we permit the department of it, on which his labour was expended, to escape that application? Shall we suffer that wild barbaric tract of the human life which the will and affections of man create, – that tract which he seized, – which it was his labour to collect into an art or science, to lie unreclaimed still?
Oh, Man of the new ages of science, will you have the new fore-knowledge, the magical command of effects, which the scientific inquiry into causes as they are actual in nature, puts into our hands, in every other practice, in every other culture and cure, – will you have the rule of this knowledge imposed upon your fields, and orchards, and gardens, to assist weak nature in her 'conservations' and 'advancements' in these, – to teach her to bring forth here the latent ideals, towards which she struggles and vainly yearns, and can only point to, and wait for, till science accepts her hints; – will you have the Georgics of this new Virgil to load your table with its magic clusters; – will you take the Novum Organum to pile your plate with its ideal advancements on spontaneous nature and her perfections; – will you have the rule of that Organum applied in its exactest rigors, to all the physical oppositions of your life, to minister to your physical safety, and comfort, and luxury, and never relax your exactions from it, till the last conceivable degree of these has been secured; and in this department of art and science, – this, in which the sum of our good and evil is contained, – in a mere oversight of it, in a disgraceful indifference and carelessness about it, be content to accept, without criticism, the machinery of the past – instrumentalities that the unlearned ages of the world have left to us, – arts whose precepts were concluded ages ere we knew that knowledge is power.
Shall we be content to accept as a science any longer, a science that leaves human life and its actualities and particulars, unsearched, uncollected, unreduced to scientific nomenclature and axiom? Shall we be content any longer with a knowledge that is power, – shall we boast ourselves any longer of a scientific art that leaves human nature, – that makes over human nature to the tampering of an unwatched, unchecked empiricism, that leaves our own souls it may be, and the souls in which ours are garnered up, all wild and hidden, and gnarled within with nature's crudities and spontaneities, or choked and bitter with artificial, but unscientific, unartistic repression?
Will you have of that divinely appointed and beautiful 'handmaid,' that was brought in on to this Globe Theatre, with that upward look, – with eyes turned to that celestial sovereignty for her direction, with the sum of good in her intention, with the universal doctrine of practice in her programme, with the relief 'of man's estate and the Creator's glory' put down in her role, – with her new song– with her song of man's nature and life as it is, on her lips – will you have of her, only the minister to your physical luxuries and baser wants? Be it so: but in the name of that truth which is able to survive ages of misunderstanding and detraction, in the name of that honor which is armed with arts of self-delivery and tradition, that will enable it to live again, 'though all the earth o'erwhelm it to men's eyes,' while this Book of the Advancemement of Learning stands, do not charge on this man henceforth, that election.
The times of that ignorance in which it could be thus accredited, are past; for the leader of this Advancement is already unfolding his tradition, and opening his books; and he bids us debase his name no longer, into a name for these sordid fatuities. The Leader of ages that are yet to be, – ages whose nobler advancements, whose rational and scientific advancements to the dignity and perfection of the human form, it was given to him and to his company to plan and initiate, – he declines to be held any longer responsible for the blind, demoniacal, irrational spirit, that would seize on his great instrument of science, and wrest it from its nobler object and intent, and debase it into the mere tool of the senses; the tool of a materialism more base and sordid than any that the world has ever known; more sordid, a thousand-fold, than the materialism of ages, when there was yet a god in the wood and the stone, when there was yet a god in the brick and the mortar. This 'broken science' that has no end of ends, this godless science, this railway learning that travels with restless, ever quickening speed, no whither, – these dead, rattling 'branches' and slivers of arts and sciences, these modern arts and sciences, hacked and cut away from that tree of sciences, from which they sprang, whereon they grew, are his no longer. He declines to be held any longer responsible for a materialism that shelters itself under the name of philosophy, and identifies his own name with it. Call it science, if you will, though science be the name for unity and comprehension, and the spirit of life, the spirit of the largest whole; call it philosophy if you will, if you think philosophy is capable of being severed from that common trunk, in which this philosopher found its pith and heart, – call it science, – call it philosophy, – but call it not, he says, – call it not henceforth 'Baconian.'
For his labor is to collect into an art or science the doctrine of human life. He, too, has propounded that problem, – he has translated into the modern speech, that problem, which the inspired Leader of men, of old propounded. 'What is a man profited if he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul; or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?' He, too, has recognized that ideal type of human excellence, which the Great Teacher of old revealed and exemplified; he has found scientifically, – he has found in the universal law, – that divine dogma, which was taught of old by One who spake as having authority – One who also had looked on nature with a loving and observant eye, and found in its source, the Inspirer of his doctrine. In his study of that old book of divinity which he calls the book of God's Power this Modern Innovator has found the scientific version of that inspired command 'Be ye therefore perfect.' This new science of morality, which is 'moral knowledge,' is able to recognise the inspiration and divinity of that received platform and exemplar of good, and pours in on it the light of a universal illustration. And in his new scientific policy, in his scientific doctrine of success, in his doctrine of the particular and private good, when he brings out at last the rule which shall secure it from all the blows of fortune, what is it but that same old 'Primum quærite' which he produces, – clothing it with the authority and severe exaction of a scientific rule in art, – that same 'Primum quærite' which was published of old as a doctrine of faith only. 'But let men rather build,' he says, 'upon that foundation, which is as a corner-stone of divinity and philosophy, wherein they join close; namely, that same 'Primum quærite.' For divinity saith, 'Seek first the kingdom of God, and all other things shall be added to you'; and philosophy saith, 'Primum quærite bona animi cætera aut aderunt, aut non oberunt.'
And who will now undertake to say that it is, indeed, written in the Book of God, – in the Book of the Providential Design, and Creative Law, or that it is written in the Revelation of a divine good will to men; that those who cultivate and cure the soul – who have a divine appointment to the office of its cure – shall thereby be qualified to ignore its actual laws, or that they shall find in the scientific investigation of its actual history, or in this new – so new, this so wondrous and beautiful science, which is here laid out in all its parts and points on the basis of a universal science of practice, – no 'ministry' to their end? Who shall say that the Regimen of the mind, that its Education and healthful culture, as well as its cure, shall be able to accept of no instrumentalities from the advancement of learning? Who shall say that this department of the human life —this alone, is going to be held back to the past, with bonds and cramps of iron, while all else is advancing; that this is going to be held forever as a place where the old Aristotelian logic, which we have driven out of every other field, can keep its hold unchallenged still, – as a place for the metaphysics of the school-men, the empty conceits, the old exploded inanities of the Dark Ages, to breed and nestle in undisturbed?
Who shall claim that this department is the only one, which that gift, that is the last gift of Creation and Providence to man is forbidden to enter?
Surely it is the authorised doctrine of a supernatural aid, that it is never brought in to sanction indolence and the neglect of means and instruments already in our power; and in that book of these new ages in which the doctrine of a successful human practice was promulgated, is it not written that in no department of the human want, 'can those noble effects, which God hath set forth to be bought as the price of labour, be obtained as the price of a few easy and slothful observances?'
And who that looks on the world as it is at this hour, with all our boasted aids and instrumentalities, – who that hears that cry of sorrow which goes up from it day and night, – who that looks at these masses of men as they are, – who that dares to look at all this vice and ignorance and suffering which no instrumentality, mighty to relieve, has yet reached, shall think to put back, – as if we had no need of it, – this great gift of light and healing, – this gift of power, which the scientific ages are bringing in; this gift which the ages of 'anticipation,' the ages of inspiration and spontaneous affirmation, could only divinely – diviningly – foresee and promise; – this gift which the knowledge of the creative laws, the historic laws, the laws of kind, as they are actual in the human nature and the human life, puts into our hands? Who shall think himself competent to oppose this benefaction? Alas for such an one! let us take up a lamentation for him. He has stayed too long. The constitution of things, the universal laws of being, and the Providence of this world are against him. The track of the advancing ages goes over him. He is at variance with that which was and shall be. The world's wheel goes over him. And whosoever falls on that stone shall be broken, but on whomsoever it falls it shall grind him to powder.
It is by means of the scientific Art of Delivery and Tradition, that this doctrine of the scientific Culture and Cure of the Mind, which is the doctrine of the scientific ages, has been made over to us in the abstract; and it is by means of the rule of interpretation, which this Art of Delivery prescribes, it is by means of the secret of an Illustrated Tradition, or Poetic Tradition of this science, that we are now enabled to unlock at last those magnificent collections in it – those inexhaustible treasures and mines of it – which the Discoverer, in spite of the time, has contrived to leave us, in that form of Fable and Parable in which the advancing truth has always been left, – in that form of Poesy in which the highest truth has, from of old, been uttered. For over all this ground lay extended, then, in watchful strength all safe and unespied, the basilisk of whom the Fable goes, if he sees you first, you die for it, —but if YOU SEE HIM FIRST, HE DIES. And this is the Bishop who fought with a mace, because he would kill his enemy and not wound him.
BOOK II.
ELIZABETHAN 'SECRETS OF MORALITY AND POLICY'; OR, THE FABLES OF THE NEW LEARNING
Reason cannot be so sensible, nor examples so fit. Advancement of Learning.
INTRODUCTORY
CHAPTER I
THE DESIGN
The object of this Volume is merely to open as a study, and a study of primary consequence, those great Works of the Modern Learning which have passed among us hitherto, for lack of the historical and scientific key to them, as Works of Amusement, merely.
But even in that superficial acquaintance which we have had with them in that relation, they have, all the time, been subtly operating upon the minds in contact with them, and perpetually fulfilling the first intention of their Inventor.
'For,' says the great Innovator of the Modern Ages, – the author of the Novum Organum, and of the Advancement of Learning, – in claiming this department of Letters as the necessary and proper instrumentality of a new science, – of a science at least, 'foreign to opinions received,' – as he claims elsewhere that it is, under all conditions, the inevitable essential form of this science in particular. 'Men have proposed to answer two different and contrary ends by the use of parables, for they serve as well to instruct and illustrate as to wrap up and envelope, so that, though for the present, we drop the concealed use, and suppose them to be vague undeterminate things, formed for AMUSEMENT merely, still the other use remains. 'And every man of any learning must readily concede,' he says, 'the value of that use of them as a method of popular instruction, grave, sober, exceedingly useful, and sometimes necessary in the sciences, as it opens an easy and familiar passage to the human understandings in all new discoveries, that are abstruse and out of the road of vulgar opinion. They were used of old by philosophers to express any point of reason more sharp and subtle than the vulgar, and nevertheless now, and at all times, these allusive parabolical forms retain much life and vigor, because reason cannot be so sensible nor examples so fit.' That philosophic use of them was to inform and teach, whilst the minds of men continued rude and unpractised in matters of subtilty and speculation, and even impatient and in a manner incapable of receiving anything that did not directly fall under and strike the senses. 'And, even to this day, if any man would let new light in upon the human understanding, and conquer prejudices without raising animosities, opposition, or disturbance, he must still go in the same path and have recourse to the like method.'
That is the use which the History and Fables of the New Philosophy have already had with us. We have been feeding without knowing it, on the 'principal and supreme sciences' – the 'Prima Philosophia' and its noblest branches. We have been taking the application of the Inductive Philosophy to the principal concerns of our human life, and to the phenomena of of the human nature itself, as mere sport and pastime; though the precepts concluded, the practical axioms inclosed with it have already forced their way into our learning, for all our learning is, even now, inlaid and glittering with those 'dispersed directions.'
We have profited by this use of them. It has not been pastime merely with us. We have not spent our time in vain on this first stage of an Advancing Learning, a learning that will not cease to advance until it has invaded all our empiricisms, and conquered all our practice; a learning that will recompence the diligence, the exactitude, the severity of observance which it will require here also (when it comes to put in its claim here, as Learning and not Amusement merely), with that same magnitude of effects that, in other departments, has already justified the name which its Inventor gave it – a Learning which will give us here, also, in return for the severity of observance it will require, what no ceremonial, however exacting can give us, that control of effects, with which, even in its humblest departments, it has already fulfilled, in the eyes of all the world, the prophecy which its Inventors uttered when they called it the NEW MAGIC.
That first use of the Histories and Fables of the Modern Learning, we have had already; and it is not yet exhausted. But in that rapid development of a common intelligence, to which the new science of practice has itself so largely contributed, even in its lower and limited developments, we come now to that other and so important use of these Fables, which the philosophic Innovator proposed to drop for the time, in his argument – that use of them, in which they serve 'to wrap up and conceal' for the time, or to limit to the few, who are able to receive them, those new discoveries which are as yet too far in advance of the common beliefs and opinions of men, and too far above the mental habits and capacities of the masses of men, to be safely or profitably communicated to the many in the abstract.
But in order to arrive at this second and nobler use of them, it will be necessary to bestow on them a very different kind of study from any that we have naturally thought it worth while to spend on them, so long as we regarded them as works of pastime merely; and especially while that insuperable obstacle to any adequate examination of them, which the received history of the works themselves created, was still operating on the criticism. The truths which these Parabolic and Allusive Poems wrap up and conceal, have been safely concealed hitherto, because they are not those common-place truths which we usually look for as the point and moral of a tale which is supposed to have a moral or politic intention, – truths which we are understood to be in possession of beforehand, while the parable or instance is only designed to impress the sensibility with them anew, and to reach the will that would not take them from the reason, by means of the senses or the imagination. It is not that spontaneous, intuitive knowledge, or those conventional opinions, those unanalysed popular beliefs, which we usually expect to find without any trouble at all, on the very surface of any work that has morality for its object, it is not any such coarse, lazy performance as that, that we need trouble ourselves to look for here. This higher intention in these works 'their real import, genuine interpretation, and full depth,' has not yet been found, because the science which is wrapped in them, though it is the principal science in the plan of the Advancement of Learning, has hitherto escaped our notice, and because of the exceeding subtlety of it, – because the truths thus conveyed or concealed are new, and recondite, and out of the way of any casual observation, – because in this scientific collection of the phenomena of the human life, designed to serve as the basis of new social arts and rules of practice, the author has had occasion to go behind the vague, popular, unscientific terms which serve well enough for purposes of discourse, and mere oratory, to those principles which are actual and historical, those simple radical forms and differences on which the doctrine of power and practice must be based.
It is pastime no longer. It is a study, the most patient, the most profoundly earnest to which these works now invite us. Let those who will, stay in the playground still, and make such sport and pastime of it there, as they may; and let those who feel the need of inductive rules here also, – here on the ground which this pastime covers – let those who perceive that we have as yet, set our feet only on the threshold of the Great Instauration, find here with diligent research, the ascent to the axioms of practice, – that ascent which the author of the science of practice in general, made it his labour to hew out here, for he undertook 'to collect here into an art or science, that which had been pretermitted by others as matters of common sense and experience.'
It does not consist with the design of the present work to track that draught of a new science of morality and policy, that 'table' of an inductive science of human nature, and human life, which the plan of the Advancement of Learning contains, with all the lettering of its compartments put down, into these systematic scientific collections, which the Fables of the Modern Learning, – which these magnificent Parabolical Poems have been able hitherto to wrap up and conceal.
This work is merely introductory, and the design of it is to remove that primary obstacle to the diligent study of these works, which the present theory of them contains; since that concealment of their true intention and history, which was inevitable at the time, no longer serves the author's purpose, and now that the times are ripe for the learning which they contain, only serves indeed to hinder it. And the illustrations which are here produced, are produced with reference to that object, and are limited strictly to the unfolding of those 'secrets of policy,' which are the necessary introduction to that which follows.