an aspect as if he pitied men.” But unless
it is utilitarianism to be keenly alive to the needs
and pains of life, and to be eager and busy to lighten
and assuage them, Bacon’s philosophy was not
utilitarian. It may deserve many reproaches, but
not this one. Such a passage as the following—in
which are combined the highest motives and graces
and passions of the soul, love of truth, humility of
mind, purity of purpose, reverence for God, sympathy
for man, compassion for the sorrows of the world and
longing to heal them, depth of conviction and faith—fairly
represents the spirit which runs through his works.
After urging the mistaken use of imagination and authority
in science, he goes on—
“There is not and never will
be an end or limit to this; one catches at one
thing, another at another; each has his favourite
fancy; pure and open light there is none; every
one philosophises out of the cells of his own
imagination, as out of Plato’s cave; the
higher wits with more acuteness and felicity, the duller,
less happily, but with equal pertinacity.
And now of late, by the regulation of some learned
and (as things now are) excellent men (the former
license having, I suppose, become wearisome), the
sciences are confined to certain and prescribed
authors, and thus restrained are imposed upon
the old and instilled into the young; so that
now (to use the sarcasm of Cicero concerning Caesar’s
year) the constellation of Lyra rises by edict,
and authority is taken for truth, not truth for
authority. Which kind of institution and discipline
is excellent for present use, but precludes all prospect
of improvement. For we copy the sin of our
first parents while we suffer for it. They
wished to be like God, but their posterity wish to
be even greater. For we create worlds, we direct
and domineer over nature, we will have it that
all things are as in our folly we think
they should be, not as seems fittest to the Divine
wisdom, or as they are found to be in fact; and
I know not whether we more distort the facts
of nature or of our own wits; but we clearly impress
the stamp of our own image on the creatures and works
of God, instead of carefully examining and recognising
in them the stamp of the Creator himself.
Wherefore our dominion over creatures is a second
time forfeited, not undeservedly; and whereas after
the fall of man some power over the resistance
of creatures was still left to him—the
power of subduing and managing them by true and solid
arts—yet this too through our insolence,
and because we desire to be like God and to follow
the dictates of our own reason, we in great part
lose. If, therefore, there be any humility towards
the Creator, any reverence for or disposition
to magnify His works, any charity for man and
anxiety to relieve his sorrows and necessities,
any love of truth in nature, any hatred of darkness,
any desire for the purification of the understanding,
we must entreat men again and again to discard,
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