No More Learning

To whom he answered, "Reynard shall be tasked
With this; that subtle fox, whom thou dost see. "
The tortoise then (no hesitater she! )
Kept jogging on, but earliest reached the post;
The hare, relying on his fleetness, lost
Space, during sleep, he thought he could recover
When he awoke. But then the race was over;
The tortoise gained her aim, and slept her sleep.
FROM negligence doth care the vantage reap.


## p. 1155 (#581) ###########################################

1155
FRANCIS BACON
(1561-1626)
BY CHARLTON T. LEWIS
T
HE startling contrasts of splendor and humiliation which
marked the life of Bacon, and the seemingly incredible
inconsistencies which hasty observers find in his character,
have been the themes of much rhetorical declamation, and even of
serious and learned debate. From Ben Jonson in his own day, to
James Spedding the friend of Tennyson, he has not lacked eminent
eulogists, who look up to him as not only the greatest and wisest,
but as among the noblest and most worthy of mankind: while the
famous epigram of Pope, expanded by Macaulay into a stately and
eloquent essay, has impressed on the popular mind the lowest esti-
mate of his moral nature; and even such careful scholars as Charles
de Rémusat and Dean Church, who have devoted careful and instruct-
ive volumes to the survey of Bacon's career and works, insist that
with all his intellectual supremacy, he was a servile courtier, a false
friend, and a corrupt judge. Yet there are few important names in
human history of men who have left us so complete materials for a
just judgment of their conduct; and it is only a lover of paradox
who can read these and still regard Bacon's character as an unsolved
problem.
Mr. Spedding has given a long life of intelligent labor to the col-
lection of every fact and document throwing light upon the motives,
aims, and thoughts of the great "Chancellor of Nature," from the
cradle to the grave. The results are before us in the seven volumes
of 'The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon,' which form perhaps
the most complete biography ever written. It is a book of absolute
candor as well as infinite research, giving with equal distinctness all
the evidence which makes for its hero's dishonor and that which
tends to justify the writer's reverence for him. Another work by Mr.
Spedding, 'Evenings with a Reviewer,' in two volumes, is an elab-
orate refutation, from the original and authentic records, of the most
damning charges brought by Lord Macaulay against Bacon's good
fame. It is a complete and overwhelming exposure of false color-
ing, of rhetorical artifices, and of the abuse of evidence, in the
famous essay.
As one of the most entertaining and instructive
pieces of controversy in our literature, it deserves to be widely read.
The unbiased reader cannot accept the special pleading by which, in
his comments, Spedding makes every failing of Bacon "lean to


## p. 1156 (#582) ###########################################

1156
FRANCIS BACON
virtue's side"; but will form upon the unquestioned facts presented a
clear conception of him, will come to know him as no other man of
an age so remote is known, and will find in his many-sided and mag-
nificent nature a full explanation of the impressions which partial
views of it have made upon his worshipers and his detractors.
It is only in his maturity, indeed, that we are privileged to enter
into his mind and read his heart. But enough is known of the
formative period of his life to show us the sources of his weaknesses
and of his strength. The child whom high authorities have regarded
as endowed with the mightiest intellect of the human race was born
at York House, on the Strand, in the third year of Elizabeth's reign,
January 22d, 1561. He was the son of the Queen's Lord Keeper of
the Seals, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and his second wife Anne, daughter
of Sir Anthony Cook, formerly tutor of King Edward VI. Mildred,
an elder daughter of the same scholar, was the wife of William
Cecil, Lord Burghley, who for the first forty years of her reign was
Elizabeth's chief minister. As a child Bacon was a favorite at court,
and tradition represents him as something of a pet of the Queen,
who called him "my young Lord Keeper. " His mother was among
the most learned women of an age when, among women of rank,
great learning was as common and as highly prized as great beauty;
and her influence was a potent intellectual stimulus to the boy,
although he revolted in early youth from the narrow creed which
her fierce Puritan zeal strove to impose on her household. Outside
of the nursery, the atmosphere of his world was that of craft, all
directed to one end; for the Queen was the source of honor, power,
and wealth, and advancement in life meant only a share in the
grace distributed through her ministers and favorites. Apart from
the harsh and forbidding religious teachings of his mother, young
Francis had before him neither precept nor example of an ambition
more worthy than that of courting the smiles of power.
At the age of twelve he entered Trinity College, Cambridge
(April, 1573), and left it before he was fifteen (Christmas, 1575); the
institution meanwhile having been broken up for more than half a
year (August, 1574, to March, 1575) by the plague, so that his inter-
mittent university career summed up less than fourteen months.
There is no record of his studies, and the names of his teachers are
unknown; for though Bacon in later years called himself a pupil of
Whitgift, and his biographers assumed that the relation was direct
and personal, yet that great master of Trinity had certainly ended his
teaching days before Bacon went to Cambridge, and had entered as
Dean of Lincoln on his splendid ecclesiastical career. University life
was very different from that of our times. The statutes of Cam-
bridge forbade a student, under penalties, to use in conversation with


## p. 1157 (#583) ###########################################

FRANCIS BACON
1157
another any language but Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, unless in his pri-
vate apartments and in hours of leisure. It was a regular custom at
Trinity to bring before the assembled undergraduates every Thurs-
day evening at seven o'clock such junior students as had been
detected in breaches of the rules during the week, and to flog them.
It would be interesting to know in what languages young Bacon con-
versed, and what experiences of discipline befell him; but his subse-
quent achievements at least suggest that Cambridge in the sixteenth
century may have afforded more efficient educational influences than
our knowledge of its resources and methods can explain. For it is
certain that, at an age when our most promising youths are begin-
ning serious study, Bacon's mind was already formed, his habits and
modes of research were fixed, the universe of knowledge was an
open field before him. Thenceforth he was no man's pupil, but in
intellectual independence and solitude he rapidly matured into the
supreme scholar of his age.
After registering as a student of law at Gray's Inn, apparently
for the purpose of a nominal connection with a profession which
might aid his patrons in promoting him at court, Bacon was sent
in June, 1576, to France in the train of the British Ambassador, Sir
Amyas Paulet; and for nearly three years followed the roving em-
bassy around the great cities of that kingdom. The massacre of
St. Bartholomew had taken place four years before, and the boy's
recorded observations on the troubled society of France and of
Europe show remarkable insight into the character of princes and
the sources of political movements. Sir Nicholas had hitherto directed
his son's education and associations with the purpose of making
him an ornament of the court, and had set aside a fund to provide
Francis at the proper time with a handsome estate. But he died
suddenly, February 20th, 1579, without giving legal effect to this
provision, and the sum designed for the young student was divided
equally among the five children, while Francis was excluded from
a share in the rest of the family fortune; and was thus called home
to England to find himself a poor man.
He made himself a bachelor's home at Gray's Inn, and devoted
his energies to the law, with such success that he was soon recog-
nized as one of the most promising members of the profession. In
1584 he entered Parliament for Melcombe Regis in Somersetshire,
and two years later sat for Liverpool. During these years the schism
between his inner and his outer life continued to widen. Drawing
his first breath in the atmosphere of the court, bred in the faith that
honor and greatness come from princes' favor, with a native taste
for luxury and magnificence which was fostered by delicate health,
he steadily looked for advancement through the influence of Burghley


## p. 1158 (#584) ###########################################

1158
FRANCIS BACON
and the smiles of the Queen. But Burghley had no sympathy with
speculative thought, and distrusted him for his confidences concerning
his higher studies, while he probably feared in Bacon a dangerous
rival of his own son; so that with expressions of kind interest, he
refrained from giving his nephew practical aid. Elizabeth, too, sus-
pected that a young man who knew so many things could not be
trusted to know his own business well, and preferred for important
professional work others who were lawyers and nothing besides.
Thus Bacon appeared to the world as a disappointed and uneasy
courtier, struggling to keep up a certain splendor of appearance and
associations under a growing load of debt, and servile to a Queen on
whose caprice his prospects of a career must depend. His unques-
tioned power at the bar was exercised only in minor causes; his
eloquence and political dexterity found slow recognition in Parlia-
ment, where they represented only themselves; and the question
whether he would ever be a man of note in the kingdom seemed
for twenty-five years to turn upon what the Crown might do for its
humble suitor.
Meanwhile this laborious advocate and indefatigable courtier,
whose labors at the bar and in attendance upon his great friends
were enough to fill the days of two ordinary men, led his real life
in secret, unknown to the world, and uncomprehended even by the
few in whom he had divined a capacity for great thought, and whom
he had selected for his confidants. From his childhood at the uni-
versity, where he felt the emptiness of the Aristotelian logic, the
instrument for attaining truth which traditional learning had conse-
crated, he had gradually formed the conception of a more fruitful
process. He had become convinced that the learning of all past ages
was but a poor result of the intellectual capacities and labors which
had been employed upon it; that the human mind had never yet
been properly used; that the methods hitherto adopted in research
were but treadmill work, returning upon itself, or at best could pro-
duce but fragmentary and accidental additions to the sum of knowl-
edge. All nature is crammed with truth, he believed, which it
concerns man to discover; the intellect of man is constructed for its
discovery, and needs but to be purged of errors of every kind, and
directed in the most efficient employment of its faculties, to make
sure that all the secrets of nature will be revealed, and its powers
made tributary to the health, comfort, enjoyment, and progressive
improvement of mankind.
This stupendous conception, of a revolution which should trans-
form the world, seems to have taken definite form in Bacon's mind
as early as his twenty-fifth year, when he embodied the outline of it
in a Latin treatise; which he destroyed in later life, unpublished, as


## p. 1159 (#585) ###########################################

FRANCIS BACON
1159
immature, and partly no doubt because he came to recognize in it an
unbecoming arrogance of tone, for its title was 'Temporis Partus Max-
imus' (The Greatest Birth of Time. ) But six years later he defines
these "vast contemplative ends" in his famous letter to Burghley,
asking for preferment which will enable him to prosecute his grand
scheme and to employ other minds in aid of it. "For I have taken
all knowledge to be my province," he says, "and if I could purge it
of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputations,
confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and
auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils,
I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclus-
ions, and profitable inventions and discoveries: the best state of that
province. This, whether it be curiosity or vain glory, or nature, or
(if one take it favorably) philanthropia, is so fixed in my mind as it
cannot be removed. "
This letter reveals the secret of Bacon's life, and all that we know
of him, read in the light of it, forms a consistent and harmonious
whole. He was possessed by his vast scheme, for a reformation of
the intellectual world, and through it, of the world of human experi-
ence, as fully as was ever apostle by his faith. Implicitly believing
in his own ability to accomplish it, at least in its grand outlines, and
to leave at his death the community of mind at work, by the method
and for the purposes which he had defined, with the perfection of
all science in full view, he subordinated every other ambition to this;
and in seeking and enjoying place, power, and wealth, still regarded
them mainly as aids in prosecuting his master purpose, and in intro-
ducing it to the world. With this clearly in mind, it is easy to
understand his subsequent career. Its external details may be read
in any of the score of biographies which writers of all grades of
merit and demerit have devoted to him, and there is no space for
them here. For our purpose it is necessary to refer only to the
principal crises in his public life.
Until the death of Elizabeth, Bacon had no place in the royal
service worthy of his abilities as a lawyer. Many who, even in the
narrowest professional sense, were far inferior to him, were preferred
before him. Yet he obtained a position recognized by all, and sec-
ond only in legal learning to his lifelong rival and constant adver-
sary, Sir Edward Coke. To-day, it is probable that if the two
greatest names in the history of the common law were to be selected
by the suffrages of the profession, the great majority would be cast.
for Coke and Bacon. As a master of the intricacies of precedent and
an authority upon the detailed formulas of "the perfection of reason,»
the former is unrivaled still; but in the comprehensive grasp of the
law as a system for the maintenance of social order and the protec-
tion of individual rights, Bacon rose far above him. The cherished


## p. 1160 (#586) ###########################################

1160
FRANCIS BACON
aim of his professional career was to survey the whole body of the
laws of England, to produce a digest of them which should result in
a harmonious code, to do away with all that was found obsolete
or inconsistent with the principles of the system, and thus to adapt
the living, progressive body of the law to the wants of the growing
nation. This magnificent plan was beyond the power of any one
man, had his life no other task, but he suggested the method and
the aim; and while for six generations after these legal giants passed
away, the minute, accurate, and profound learning of Coke remained
the acknowledged chief storehouse of British traditional jurispru-
dence, the seventh generation took up the work of revision and
reform, and from the time of Bentham and Austin the progress of
legal science has been toward codification. The contest between the
aggregation of empirical rules and formulated customs which Coke
taught as the common law, and the broad, harmonious application of
scientific reason to the definition and enforcement of rights, still
goes on; but with constant gains on the side of the reformers, all of
whom with one consent confess that no general and complete recon-
struction of legal doctrine as a science is possible, except upon the
lines laid down by Bacon.
The most memorable case in which Bacon was employed to rep-
resent the Crown during Elizabeth's life was the prosecution of the
Earl of Essex for treason. Essex had been Bacon's friend, patron,
and benefactor; and as long as the earl remained faithful to the
Queen and retained her favor, Bacon served him with ready zeal and
splendid efficiency, and showed himself the wisest and most sincere
of counselors. When Essex rejected his advice, forfeited the Queen's
confidence by the follies from which Bacon had earnestly striven to
deter him, and finally plunged into wanton and reckless rebellion,
Bacon, with whom loyalty to his sovereign had always been the
supreme duty, accepted a retainer from the Crown, and assisted Coke
in the prosecution. The crime of Essex was the greatest of which a
subject was capable; it lacked no circumstance of aggravation; if the
most astounding instance of ingratitude and disloyalty to friendship
ever known is to be sought in that age, it will be found in the con-
duct of Essex to Bacon's royal mistress. Yet writers of eloquence
have exhausted their rhetorical powers in denouncing Bacon's faith-
lessness to his friend. But no impartial reader of the full story in
the documents of the time can doubt that throughout these events
Bacon did his duty and no more, and that in doing it he not merely
made a voluntary sacrifice of his popularity, but a far more painful
sacrifice of his personal feelings.
In 1603 James I. came to the throne, and in spite of the efforts of
his most trusted ministers to keep Bacon in obscurity, soon discov-
ered in him a man whom he needed. In 1607 he was made Solicitor-


## p. 1161 (#587) ###########################################

FRANCIS BACON
1161
General; in 1613 Attorney-General; in March 1617, on the death of
Lord Ellesmere, he received the seals as Lord Keeper; and in Janu-
ary following was made Lord Chancellor of England. In July 1618
he was raised to the permanent peerage as Baron Verulam, and in
January 1621 received the title of Viscount St. Albans. During these
three years he was the first subject in the kingdom in dignity, and
ought to have been the first in influence. His advice to the King,
and to the Duke of Buckingham who was the King's king, was always
judicious. In certain cardinal points of policy, it was of the high-
est statesmanship; and had it been followed, the history of the
Stuart dynasty would have been different, and the Crown and the
Parliament would have wrought together for the good and the honor
of the nation, at least through a generation to come. But the upstart
Buckingham was supreme. He had studied Bacon's strength and
weakness, had laid him under great obligations, had at the same time
attached him by the strongest tie of friendship to his person, and
impressed upon his consciousness the fact that the fate of Bacon was
at all times in his hands. The new Chancellor had entered on his
great office with a fixed purpose to reform its abuses, to speed and
cheapen justice, to free its administration from every influence of
wealth and power. In the first three months of service he brought
up the large arrears of business, tried every cause, heard every peti-
tion, and acquired a splendid reputation as an upright and diligent
judge. But Buckingham was his evil angel. He was without sense
of the sanctity of the judicial character; and regarded the bench,
like every other public office, as an instrument of his own interests
and will. On the other hand, to Bacon the voice of Buckingham was
the voice of the King, and he had been taught from infancy as
the beginning of his political creed that the king can do no wrong.
Buckingham began at once to solicit from Bacon favors for his friends
and dependants, and the Chancellor was weak enough to listen and
to answer him. There is no evidence that in any one instance the
favorite asked for the violation of law or the perversion of justice;
much less that Bacon would or did accede to such a request.
But
the Duke demanded for one suitor a speedy hearing, for another a
consideration of facts which might not be in evidence, for a third all
the favor consistent with law; and Bacon reported to him the result,
and how far he had been able to oblige him. This persistent tamper-
ing with the source of justice was a disturbing influence in the Chan-
cellor's court, and unquestionably lowered the dignity of his attitude
and weakened his judicial conscience.
Notwithstanding this, when the Lord Chancellor opened the Par-
liament in January, 1621, with a speech in praise of his King and
in honor of the nation, he seemed to be at the summit of earthly


## p. 1162 (#588) ###########################################

1162
FRANCIS BACON
prosperity. No voice had been lifted to question his purity and
worth. He was the friend of the King, one of the chief supports of
the throne, a champion indeed of high prerogative, but an orator of
power, a writer of fame, whose advancement to the highest dignities
had been welcomed by public opinion. Four months later he was
a convicted criminal, sentenced for judicial corruption to imprison-
ment at the King's pleasure, to a fine of £40,000, and to perpetual
incapacity for any public employment. Vicissitudes of fortune are
commonplaces of history. Many a man once seemingly pinnacled on
the top of greatness has "shot from the zenith like a falling star,”
and become a proverb of the fickleness of fate. Some are torn down
by the very traits of mind, passion, or temper, which have raised
them: ambition which overleaps itself, rashness which hazards all
on chances it cannot control, vast abilities not great enough to
achieve the impossible. The plunge of Icarus into the sea, the mur-
der of Cæsar, the imprisonment of Coeur de Lion, the abdication of
Napoleon, the apprehension as a criminal of Jefferson Davis, each
was a startling and impressive contrast to the glory which it fol-
lowed, yet each was the natural result of causes which lay in the
character and life of the sufferer, and made his story a consistent
whole. But the pathos of Bacon's fall is the sudden moral ruin of a
life which had been built up in honor for sixty years. An intellect
of the first rank, which from boyhood to old age had been steadfast
in the pursuit of truth and in the noblest services to mankind, which
in a feeble body had been sustained in vigor by all the virtues of
prudence and self-reverence; a genial nature, winning the affection
and admiration of associates, hardly paralleled in the industry with
which its energies were devoted to useful work, a soul exceptional
among its contemporaries for piety and philanthropy - this man is
represented to us by popular writers as having habitually sold justice.
for money, and as having become in office "the meanest of man-
kind. "
But this picture, as so often drawn, and as seemingly fixed in the
popular mind, is not only impossible, but is demonstrably false. Το
review all the facts which correct it in detail would lead us far
beyond our limits. It must suffice to refer to the great work of
Spedding, in which the entire records of the case are found, and
which would long ago have made the world just to Bacon's fame, but
that the author's comment on his own complete and fair record is
itself partial and extravagant. But the materials for a final judg-
ment are accessible to all in Spedding's volumes, and a candid
reading of them solves the enigma. Bacon was condemned without
a trial, on his own confession, and this confession was consistent
with the tenor of his life. Its substance was that he had failed to


## p. 1163 (#589) ###########################################

FRANCIS BACON
1163
put a stop effectually to the immemorial custom in his court of
receiving presents from suitors, but that he had never deviated from
justice in his decrees. There was
no instance in which he was
accused of yielding to the influence of gifts, or passing judgment for
a bribe.
No act of his as Chancellor was impeached as illegal, or
reversed as corrupt. Suitors complained that they had sent sums of
money or valuable presents to his court, and had been disappointed
in the result; but no one complained of injustice in a decision.
Bacon was a conspicuous member of the royal party; and when the
storm of popular fury broke in Parliament upon the court, the King
and the ministry abandoned him. He had stood all his life upon the
royal favor as the basis of his strength and hope; and when it was
gone from under him, he sank helplessly. and refused to attempt a
defense. But he still in his humiliation found comfort in the reflec-
tion that his ruin would put an end to "anything that is in the
likeness of corruption" among the judges. And he wrote, in the
hour of his deepest distress, that he had been "the justest Chancellor
that hath been in the five changes that have been since Sir Nicho-
las Bacon's time. " Nor did any man of his time venture to contra-
dict him, when in later years he summed up his case in the words,
"I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years. But
it was the justest censure in Parliament that was these two hundred
years. "
No revolution of modern times has been more complete than that
which the last two centuries have silently wrought in the customary
morality of British public life, and in the standards by which it is
judged. Under James I. every office of state was held as the private
property of its occupant. The highest places in the government
were conferred only on condition of large payments to the King.
He openly sold the honors and dignities of which he was the source.
"The making of a baron," that is, the right to sell to some rich ple-
beian a patent of nobility, was a common grant to favorites, and
was actually bestowed on Bacon, to aid him in maintaining the state
of his office. We have the testimony of James himself that all the
lawyers, of whom the judges of the realm were made, were "so bred
and nursed in corruption that they cannot leave it. " But the line
between what the King called corruption and that which he and all
his ministers practiced openly and habitually, as part of the regular
work of government, is dim and hard to define. The mind of the
community had not yet firmly grasped the conception of public office.
as a trust for the public good, and the general opinion which stimu-
lates and sustains the official conscience in holding this trust sacred
was still unformed. The courts of justice were the first branch
of the government to feel the pressure of public opinion, and to


## p. 1164 (#590) ###########################################

1164
FRANCIS BACON
respond to the demand for impersonal and impartial right. But this
process had only begun when Bacon, who had never before served
as judge, was called to preside in Chancery. The Chancellor's office
was a gradual development: originally political and administrative
rather than judicial, and with no salary or reward for hearing causes,
save the voluntary presents of suitors who asked its interference with
the ordinary courts, it step by step became the highest tribunal of
the equity which limits and corrects the routine of law, and still the
custom of gifts was unchecked. A careful study of Bacon's career
shows that in this, as every other branch of thought, his theoretic
convictions were in advance of his age; and in his advice to the
King and in his inaugural promises as Chancellor, he foreshadows
all the principles on which the wisest reformers of the public service
now insist.
But he failed to apply them with that heroic self-sacri-
fice which alone would have availed him, and the forces of custom
and example continually encroached upon his views of duty. Having
through a long life sought advancement and wealth for the purpose
of using leisure and independence to carry out his beneficent plans.
on the largest scale, he eagerly accepted the traditional emoluments
of his new position, in the conviction that they would become in his
hands the means of vast good to mankind. It was only the public
exposure which fully awakened him to a sense of the inconsistency
and wrong of his conduct; and then he was himself his severest
judge, and made every reparation in his power, by the most unre-
served confession, by pointing out the danger to society of such
weakness as his own in language to whose effectiveness nothing
could be added, and by devoting the remainder of his life to the
noblest work for humanity.
During the years of Bacon's splendor as a member of the govern-
ment and as spokesman for the throne, his real life as a thinker,
inspired by the loftiest ambition which ever entered the mind of
man, that of creating a new and better civilization, was not inter-
rupted. It was probably in 1603 that he wrote his fragmentary
'Prooemium de Interpretatione Naturæ,' or 'Preface to a Treatise on
Interpreting Nature,' which is the only piece of autobiography he
has left us. It was found among his papers after his death; and its
candor, dignity, and enthusiasm of tone are in harmony with the
imaginative grasp and magnificent suggestiveness of its thought.
Commending the original Latin to all who can appreciate its elo-
quence, we cite the first sentences of it in English:-
"Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding
the care of the Commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the
air and water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way


## p. 1165 (#591) ###########################################

FRANCIS BACON
1165
mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted
by nature to perform.
"Now, among all the benefits that could be conferred upon mankind, I
found none so great as the discovery of new arts for the bettering of human
life. For I saw that among the rude people of early times, inventors and
discoverers were reckoned as gods. It was seen that the works of founders
of States, law-givers, tyrant-destroyers, and heroes cover but narrow spaces
and endure but for a time; while the work of the inventor, though of less
pomp, is felt everywhere and lasts forever. But above all, if a man could, I
do not say devise some invention, however useful, but kindle a light in
nature-a light which, even in rising, should touch and illuminate the borders
of existing knowledge, and spreading further on should bring to light all that
is most secret—that man, in my view, would be indeed the benefactor of
mankind, the extender of man's empire over nature, the champion of freedom,
the conqueror of fate.
"For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study
of Truth: as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to discern resem-
blances in things (the main point), and yet steady enough to distinguish the
subtle differences in them; as being endowed with zeal to seek, patience to
doubt, love of meditation, slowness of assertion, readiness to reconsider, care-
fulness to arrange and set in order; and as being a man that affects not the
new nor admires the old, but hates all imposture. So I thought my nature
had a certain familiarity and kindred with Truth. »
During the next two years he applied himself to the composition
of the treatise on the Advancement of Learning,' the greatest of
his English writings, and one which contains the seed-thoughts and
outline principles of all his philosophy. From the time of its publi-
cation in 1605 to his fall in 1621, he continued to frame the plan
of his 'Great Instauration' of human knowledge, and to write out
chapters, books, passages, sketches, designed to take their places in
it as essential parts. It was to include six great divisions: first, a
general survey of existing knowledge; second, a guide to the use of
the intellect in research, purging it of sources of error, and furnish-
ing it with the new instrument of inductive logic by which all the
laws of nature might be ascertained; third, a structure of the phe-
nomena of nature, included in one hundred and thirty particular
branches of natural history, as the materials for the new logic;
fourth, a series of types and models of the entire mental process of
discovering truth, "selecting various and remarkable instances"; fifth,
specimens of the new philosophy, or anticipations of its results, in
fragmentary contributions to the sixth and crowning division, which
was to set forth the new philosophy in its completeness, comprehend-
ing the truths to be discovered by a perfected instrument of reason-
ing, in interpreting all the phenomena of the world. Well aware that
the scheme, especially in its concluding part, was far beyond the


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1166
FRANCIS BACON
power and time of any one man, he yet hoped to be the architect
of the final edifice of science, by drawing its plans and making them
intelligible, leaving their perfect execution to an intellectual world
which could not fail to be moved to its supreme effort by a com-
prehension of the work before it. The Novum Organum,' itself
but a fragment of the second division of the 'Instauration,' the key
to the use of the intellect in the discovery of truth, was published
in Latin at the height of his splendor as Lord Chancellor, in 1620,
and is his most memorable achievement in philosophy. It contains
a multitude of suggestive thoughts on the whole field of science,
but is mainly the exposition of the fallacies by which the intel-
lect is deceived and misled, and from which it must be purged in
order to attain final truth, and of the new doctrine of "prerogative
instances," or, crucial observations and experiments in the work of
discovery.
In short, Bacon's entire achievement in science is a plan for
an impossible universe of knowledge. As far as he attempted to
advance particular sciences by applying his method to their detailed
phenomena, he wrought with imperfect knowledge of what had been
done, and with cumbrous and usually misdirected efforts to fill the
gaps he recognized. In a few instances, by what seems an almost
superhuman instinct for truth, rather than the laborious process of
investigation which he taught, he anticipated brilliant discoveries of
later centuries. For example, he clearly pointed out the necessity
of regarding heat as a form of motion in the molecules of matter,
and thus foreshadowed, without any conception of the means of
proving it, that which, for investigators of the nineteenth century,
has proved the most direct way to the secrets of nature. But the
testimony of the great teachers of science is unanimous, that Bacon
was not a skilled observer of phenomena, nor a discoverer of scien-
tific inductions; that he contributed no important new truth, in the
sense of an established law, to any department of knowledge; and
that his method of research and reasoning is not, in its essential feat-
ures, that which is fruitfully pursued by them in extending the bound-
aries of science, nor was his mind wholly purged of those "idols
of the cave," or forms of personal bias, whose varying forms as hin-
drances to the "dry light" of sound reason he was the first to expose.
He never appreciated the mathematics as the basis of physics, but
valued their elements mainly as a mental discipline. Astronomy
meant little to him, since he failed to connect it directly with human
well-being and improvement; to the system of Copernicus, the begin-
ning of our insight into the heavens, he was hostile, or at least
indifferent; and the splendid discoveries successively made by Tycho
Brahe, Galileo, and Kepler, and brought to his ears while the 'Great


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FRANCIS BACON
1167
Instauration filled his mind and heart, met with but a feeble welcome
with him, or none. Why is it, then, that Bacon's is the foremost
name in the history of English, and perhaps, as many insist, of all
modern thought? Why is it that "the Baconian philosophy" is
another phrase, in all the languages of Europe, for that splendid
development of the study and knowledge of the visible universe
which since his time has changed the life of mankind?
A candid answer to these questions will expose an error as wide
in the popular estimate of Bacon's intellectual greatness as that
which has prevailed so generally regarding his character. He is
called the inventor of inductive reasoning, the reformer of logic, the
lawgiver of the world of thought; but he was no one of these.
His
grasp of the inductive method was defective; his logic was clumsy
and impractical; his plan for registering all phenomena and selecting
and generalizing from them, making the discovery of truth almost a
mechanical process, was worthless. In short, it is not as a philoso-
pher nor as a man of science that Bacon has carved his name in the
high places of enduring fame, but rather as a man of letters; as on
the whole the greatest writer of the modern world, outside of the
province of imaginative art; as the Shakespeare of English prose.
Does this seem a paradox to the reader who remembers that Bacon
distrusted all modern languages, and thought to make his 'Advance-
ment of Learning' "live, and be a citizen of the world," by giving
it a Latin form? That his lifelong ambition was to reconstruct meth-
ods of thought, and guide intellect in the way of work serviceable
to comfort and happiness? That the books in which his English
style appears in its perfection, the 'History of Henry VII. ,' the
'Essays,' and the papers on public affairs, were but incidents and
avocations of a life absorbed by a master purpose?
But what is literature? It is creative mind, addressing itself in
worthy expression to the common receptive mind of mankind. Its
note is universality, as distinguished from all that is technical, lim-
ited, and narrow. Thought whose interest is as broad as humanity,
suitably clothed in the language of real life, and thus fitted for
access to the general intelligence, constitutes true literature, to the
exclusion of that which, by its nature or by its expression, appeals
only to a special class or school. The Opus Anglicanum' of Duns
Scotus, Newton's 'Principia,' Lavoisier's treatise Sur la Combus-
tion,' Kant's 'Kritik der Reinen Vernunft' (Critique of Pure Reason),
each made an epoch in some vast domain of knowledge or belief; but
none of them is literature. Yet the thoughts they, through a limited
and specially trained class of students, introduced to the world, were
gradually taken up into the common stock of mankind, and found
their broad, effective, complete expression in the literature of after


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1168
FRANCIS BACON
generations. If we apply this test to Bacon's life work, we shall find
sufficient justification for honoring him above all special workers in
narrower fields, as next to Shakespeare the greatest name in the
greatest period of English literature.
It was not as an experimenter, investigator, or technical teacher,
but as a thinker and a writer, that he rendered his great service to
the world. This consisted essentially in the contribution of two mag-
nificent ideas to the common stock of thought: the idea of the utility
of science, as able to subjugate the forces of nature to the use of
man; and the idea of continued and boundless progress in the com-
fort and happiness of the individual life, and in the order and dignity
of human society. It has been shown how, from early manhood, he
was inspired by the conception of infinite resources in the material
world, for the discovery and employment of which the human mind
is adapted. He never wearied of pointing out the imperfection and
fruitlessness of the methods of inquiry and of invention hitherto in
use, and the splendid results which could be rapidly attained if a
combined and systematic effort were made to enlarge the bounda-
ries of knowledge. This led him directly to the conception of an
improved and advancing civilization; to the utterance, in a thousand
varied, impressive, and fascinating forms, of that idea of human
progress which is the inspiration, the characteristic, and the hope of
the modern world.
Bacon was the first of men to grasp these ideas
in all their comprehensiveness as feasible purposes, as practical aims;
to teach the development of them as the supreme duty and ambition
of his contemporaries, and to look forward instead of behind him
for the Golden Age. Enforcing and applying these thoughts with a
wealth of learning, a keenness of wit, a soundness of judgment, and
a suggestiveness of illustration unequaled by any writer before him,
he became the greatest literary power of modern times to stimulate
minds in every department of life to their noblest efforts and their
worthiest achievements.
Literature has a twofold aspect: its ideal is pure truth, which is
the noblest thought embodied in perfect beauty of form. It is the
union of science and art, the final wedding in which are merged the
knowledge worthy to be known and the highest imagination present-
ing it. There is a school calling itself that of pure art, to which
substance is nothing and form is everything. Its measure of merit
is applied to the manner only; and the meanest of subjects, the
most trivial and even the most degraded of ideas or facts, is wel-
comed to its high places if clothed in a satisfying garb. But this
school, though arrogant in the other arts of expression, has not yet
been welcomed to the judgment-seat in literature, where indeed it is
passing even now to contempt and oblivion. Bacon's instinct was for


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FRANCIS BACON
1169
substance. His strongest passion was for utility. The artistic side
of his nature was receptive rather than creative. Splendid passages
in the Advancement' and 'De Augmentis' show his profound appre-
ciation of all the arts of expression, but show likewise his inability
to glorify them above that which they express. In his mind, lan-
guage is subordinate to thought, and the painting to the picture, just
as the frame is to the painting or the binding to the book. He
writes always in the grand style. He reminds us of "the large
utterance of the early gods. " His sentences are weighted with
thought, as suggestive as Plato, as condensed as Thucydides. Full
of wit, keen in discerning analogies, rich in intellectual ornament, he
is yet too concentrated in his attention to the idea to care for the
melody of language. He decorates with fruits, not with flowers.
For metrical movement, for rhythmic harmony, he has no ear nor
sense. Inconceivable as it is that Shakespeare could have written
one aphorism of the 'Novum Organum,' it would be far more absurd
to imagine Bacon writing a line of the Sonnets. With the loftiest
imagination, the liveliest fancy, the keenest sense of precision and
appropriateness in words, he lacks the special gift of poetic form,
the faculty divine which finds new inspiration in the very limitations
of measured language, and whose natural expression is music alike
to the ear and to the mind. His powers were cramped by the fetters
of metre, and his attempts to versify even rich thought and deep
feeling were puerile. But his prose is by far the weightiest, the
most lucid, effective, and pleasing of his day. The poet Sprat justly
says:-
"He was a man of strong, clear, and powerful imaginations; his genius was
searching and inimitable; and of this I need give no other proof than his
style itself, which as for the most part it describes men's minds as well as
pictures do their bodies, so it did his above all men living. "
And Ben Jonson, who knew him well, describes his eloquence in
terms which are confirmed by all we know of his Parliamentary
career:
"One, though he be excellent and the chief, is not to be imitated alone;
for no imitator ever grew up to his author: likeness is always on this side
truth. Yet there happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of
gravity in his speaking. His language (when he could spare or pass by a
jest) was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more rightly,
more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness in what he uttered.
No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could
not cough or look aside from him without loss. He commanded when he
spoke, and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man had
their affections more in his power. The fear of every man that heard him
was lest he should make an end. "
II-74


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FRANCIS BACON
1170
The speeches of Bacon are almost wholly lost, his philosophy is
an undeciphered heap of fragments, the ambitions of his life lay in
ruins about his dishonored old age; yet his intellect is one of the
great moving and still vital forces of the modern world, and he
remains, for all ages to come, in the literature which is the final
storehouse of the chief treasures of mankind, one of
"The dead yet sceptered sovereigns who still rule
Our spirits from their urns. "
Chatten. It has
OF TRUTH
From the Essays
WHA
WHAT is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for
an answer. Certainly there be that delight in giddiness;
and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will
in thinking, as well as in acting. And though the sects of phi-
losophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discours-
ing wits, which are of the same veins, though there be not so
much blood in them as was in those of the ancients. But it is
not only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out
of truth, nor again, that when it is found it imposeth upon
men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor: but a natural
though corrupt love of the lie itself. One of the later school
of the Grecians examineth the matter, and is at a stand to think
what should be in it, that men should love lies, where neither
they make for pleasure as with poets, nor for advantage as
with the merchant; but for the lie's sake. But I cannot tell:
this same truth is a naked and open daylight, that doth not show
the masks and mummeries and triumphs of the world half so
stately and daintily as candle-lights. Truth may perhaps come
to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not
rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best
in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.
Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men's
minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imagina-
tions as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds


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FRANCIS BACON
1171
of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy
and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves? One of the
fathers, in great severity, called poesy vinum dæmonum, because
it filleth the imagination, and yet it is but with the shadow
of a lie. But it is not the lie that passeth through the mind,
but the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it, that doth the hurt;
such as we spake of before. But howsoever these things are
thus in men's depraved judgments and affections, yet truth, which
only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which
is the love-making or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth,
which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the
enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature. The first
creature of God, in the works of the days, was the light of the
sense; the last was the light of reason; and his Sabbath work
ever since is the illumination of his Spirit.
The poet that
beautified the sect that was otherwise inferior to the rest, saith
yet excellently well:-"It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore,
and to see ships tossed upon the sea; a pleasure to stand in the
window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof
below; but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the
vantage ground of Truth" (a hill not to be commanded, and
where the air is always clear and serene), "and to see the errors,
and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below: "
so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swelling
or pride. Certainly, it is heaven upon earth, to have a man's
mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the
poles of truth.
To pass from theological and philosophical truth to the truth
of civil business: it will be acknowledged even by those that
practice it not, that clear and round dealing is the honor of
man's nature, and that mixture of falsehood is like alloy in coin
of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better,
but it embaseth it. For these winding and crooked courses are
the goings of the serpent; which goeth basely upon the belly,
and not upon the feet. There is no vice that doth so cover a
man with shame as to be found false and perfidious; and there-
fore Montaigne saith prettily, when he inquired the reason why
the word of the lie should be such a disgrace and such an
odious charge. Saith he, "If it be well weighed, to say that a
man lieth, is as much as to say that he is brave toward God
and a coward toward men. " For a lie faces God, and shrinks


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1172
FRANCIS BACON
from man. Surely the wickedness of falsehood and breach of
faith cannot possibly be so highly expressed, as in that it shall
be the last peal to call the judgments of God upon the genera-
tions of men; it being foretold, that when Christ cometh, "he
shall not find faith upon the earth. "
OF REVENGE
From the Essays'
RⓇ
EVENGE is a kind of wild justice; which the more man's
nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out. For as
for the first wrong, it doth but offend the law; but the
revenge of that wrong putteth the law out of office. Certainly,
in taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in
passing it over, he is superior: for it is a prince's part to pardon.
and Solomon, I am sure, saith, "It is the glory of a man to pass
by an offense. " That which is past is gone and irrevocable, and
wise men have enough to do with things present and to come;
therefore, they do but trifle with themselves that labor in past
matters. There is no man doth a wrong for the wrong's sake;
but thereby to purchase himself profit, or pleasure, or honor, or
the like. Therefore, why should I be angry with a man for lov-
ing himself better than me? And if any man should do wrong
merely out of ill-nature, why yet it is but like the thorn or
brier, which prick and scratch because they can do no other.
The most tolerable sort of revenge is for those wrongs which
there is no law to remedy; but then, let a man take heed the
revenge be such as there is no law to punish, else a man's
enemy is still beforehand, and it is two for one. Some, when
they take revenge, are desirous the party should know whence it
cometh. This is the more generous; for the delight seemeth to
be not so much in doing the hurt as in making the party repent.
But base and crafty cowards are like the arrow that flieth in the
dark. Cosmus, Duke of Florence, had a desperate saying against
perfidious or neglecting friends, as if those wrongs were unpar-
donable. "You shall read," saith he, "that we are commanded
to forgive our enemies; but you never read that we are com-
manded to forgive our friends. " But yet the spirit of Job was
in a better tune: "Shall we," saith he, "take good at God's
hands, and not be content to take evil also? » And so of friends


## p. 1173 (#599) ###########################################

FRANCIS BACON
1173
in a proportion. This is certain, that a man that studieth
revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would
heal and do well. Public revenges are for the most part for-
tunate: as that for the death of Cæsar; for the death of Perti-
nax; for the death of Henry the Third of France; and many
more. But in private revenges it is not so. Nay, rather vin-
dictive persons live the life of witches; who, as they are mis-
chievous, so end they infortunate.
OF SIMULATION AND DISSIMULATION
From the Essays'
D
ISSIMULATION is but a faint kind of policy or wisdom; for it
asketh a strong wit and a strong heart to know when to
tell truth, and to do it. Therefore it is the weaker sort of
politicians that are the great dissemblers.
Tacitus saith, "Livia sorted well with the arts of her hus-
band and dissimulation of her son;" attributing arts of policy
to Augustus, and dissimulation to Tiberius. And again, when
Mucianus encourageth Vespasian to take arms against Vitel-
lius, he saith, "We rise not against the piercing judgment of
Augustus, nor the extreme caution or closeness of Tiberius. ”
These properties of arts or policy, and dissimulation or closeness,
are indeed habits and faculties several, and to be distinguished.
For if a man have that penetration of judgment as he can dis-
cern what things are to be laid open, and what to be secreted,
and what to be showed at half-lights, and to whom and when,
(which indeed are arts of state and arts of life, as Tacitus well
calleth them,) to him a habit of dissimulation is a hindrance and
a poorness. But if a man cannot obtain to that judgment, then
it is left to him generally to be close, and a dissembler. For
where a man cannot choose or vary in particulars, there it is
good to take the safest and wariest way in general; like the
going softly, by one that cannot well see. Certainly the ablest
men that ever were, have had all an openness and frankness of
dealing, and a name of certainty and veracity: but then they
were like horses well managed, for they could tell passing well
when to stop or turn; and at such times when they thought the
case indeed required dissimulation, if then they used it, it came


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FRANCIS BACON
1174
to pass that the former opinion spread abroad of their good
faith and clearness of dealing made them almost invisible.
There be three degrees of this hiding and veiling of a man's
self. The first, Closeness, Reservation, and Secrecy; when a man
leaveth himself without observation, or without hold to be taken,
what he is. The second, Dissimulation, in the negative; when a
man lets fall signs and arguments, that he is not that he is.
And the third, Simulation, in the affirmative; when a man indus
triously and expressly feigns and pretends to be that he is not.
For the first of these, Secrecy: it is indeed the virtue of a
confessor. And assuredly the secret man heareth many confes-
sions; for who will open himself to a blab or a babbler? But if
a man be thought secret, it inviteth discovery, as the more close
air sucketh in the more open; and as in confession the reveal-
ing is not for worldly use, but for the ease of a man's heart, so
secret men come to the knowledge of many things in that kind:
while men rather discharge their minds than impart their minds.
In few words, mysteries are due to secrecy.
Besides (to say
truth), nakedness is uncomely, as well in mind as body; and it
addeth no small reverence to men's manners and actions, if they
be not altogether open. As for talkers and futile persons, they
are commonly vain and credulous withal; for he that talketh
what he knoweth, will also talk what he knoweth not. Therefore
set it down, that a habit of secrecy is both politic and moral.
And in this part it is good that a man's face give his tongue.
leave to speak; for the discovery of a man's self by the tracts.
of his countenance is a great weakness and betraying, by how
much it is many times more marked and believed than a man's
words.
For the second, which is Dissimulation: it followeth many
times upon secrecy by a necessity; so that he that will be secret
must be a dissembler in some degree. For men are too cunning
to suffer a man to keep an indifferent carriage between both,
and to be secret, without swaying the balance on either side.
They will so beset a man with questions, and draw him on,
and pick it out of him, that without an absurd silence, he must
show an inclination one way; or if he do not, they will gather
as much by his silence as by his speech. As for equivocations,
or oraculous speeches, they cannot hold out long. So that no man
can be secret, except he give himself a little scope of dissimula-
tion; which is, as it were, but the skirts or train of secrecy.


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FRANCIS BACON
1175
But for the third degree, which is Simulation and false pro-
fession: that I hold more culpable and less politic, except it be
in great and rare matters. And therefore a general custom of
simulation (which is this last degree) is a vice rising either of a
natural falseness or fearfulness, or of a mind that hath some
main faults; which because a man must needs disguise, it mak-
eth him practice simulation in other things, lest his hand should
be out of use.
The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are.
three. First, to lay asleep opposition, and to surprise; for where
a man's intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all
that are against them. The second is, to reserve to a man's self a
fair retreat; for if a man engage himself by a manifest declara-
tion, he must go through or take a fall. The third is, the better
to discover the mind of another; for to him that opens himself
men will hardly show themselves adverse, but will fair let him
go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought.
And therefore it is a good shrewd proverb of the Spaniard,
"Tell a lie and find a troth; >> as if there were no way of dis-
covery but by simulation. There be also three disadvantages to
set it even. The first, that simulation and dissimulation commonly
carry with them a show of fearfulness; which in any business
doth spoil the feathers of round flying up to the mark. The
second, that it puzzleth and perplexeth the conceits of many that
perhaps would otherwise co-operate with him, and makes a man
walk almost alone to his own ends. The third and greatest is,
that it depriveth a man of one of the most principal instruments
for action; which is trust and belief. The best composition and
temperature is, to have openness in fame and opinion; secrecy
in habit; dissimulation in seasonable use; and a power to feign
if there be no remedy.
OF TRAVEL
From the Essays'
TRA
RAVEL, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder,
a part of experience. He that traveleth into a country
before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to
school, and not to travel. That young men travel under some
tutor or grave servant, I allow well: so that he be such a one


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1176
FRANCIS BACON
·
that hath the language, and hath been in the country before;
whereby he may be able to tell them what things are worthy to
be seen in the country where they go, what acquaintances they
are to seek, what exercises or discipline the place yielded. For
else young men shall go hooded, and look abroad little. It is a
strange thing, that in sea voyages, where there is nothing to be
seen but sky and sea, men should make diaries; but in land
travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part
they omit it; as if chance were fitter to be registered than ob-
servation. Let diaries therefore be brought in use. The things
to be seen and observed are, the courts of princes, specially
when they give audience to ambassadors; the courts of justice,
while they sit and hear causes; and so of consistories ecclesiastic;
the churches and monasteries, with the monuments which are
therein extant; the walls and fortifications of cities and towns,
and so the havens and harbors; antiquities and ruins; libraries;
colleges, disputations, and lectures, where any are; shipping and
navies; houses and gardens of state and pleasure, near great
cities; armories; arsenals; magazines; exchanges; burses; ware-
houses; exercises of horsemanship, fencing, training of soldiers,
and the like; comedies, such whereunto the better sort of persons
do resort; treasuries of jewels and robes; cabinets and rarities:
and, to conclude, whatsoever is memorable in the places where
they go.
After all which the tutors or servants ought to make
diligent inquiry. As for triumphs, masks, feasts, weddings,
funerals, capital executions, and such shows, men need not to be
put in mind of them: yet are they not to be neglected. If you
will have a young man to put his travel into a little room, and in
short time to gather much, this you must do. First, as was said,
he must have some entrance into the language before he goeth.
Then he must have such a servant or tutor as knoweth the coun-
try, as was likewise said. Let him carry with him also some card
or book, describing the country where he traveleth, which will
be a good key to his inquiry. Let him keep also a diary. Let
him not stay long in one city or town; more or less as the place
deserveth, but not long: nay, when he stayeth in one city or
town, let him change his lodging from one end and part of the
town to another; which is a great adamant of acquaintance. Let
him sequester himself from the company of his countrymen, and
diet in such places where there is good company of the nation
where he traveleth. Let him upon his removes from one place


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FRANCIS BACON
1177
to another, procure recommendation to some person of quality
residing in the place whither he removeth; that he may use his
favor in those things he desireth to see or know.
Thus he may
abridge his travel with much profit.
As for the acquaintance which is to be sought in travel: that
which is most of all profitable, is acquaintance with the secreta-
ries and employed men of ambassadors; for so in traveling in
one country he shall suck the experience of many. Let him also
see and visit eminent persons in all kinds, which are of great
name abroad; that he may be able to tell how the life agreeth
with the fame. For quarrels, they are with care and discretion.
to be avoided. They are commonly for mistresses, healths, place,
and words. And let a man beware how he keepeth company
with choleric and quarrelsome persons; for they will engage him
into their own quarrels. When a traveler returneth home, let
him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether
behind him, but maintain a correspondence by letters with those
of his acquaintance which are of most worth. And let his travel
appear rather in his discourse than in his apparel or gesture; and
in his discourse let him be rather advised in his answers, than
forward to tell stories; and let it appear that he doth not change
his country manners for those of foreign parts; but only prick in
some flowers of that he hath learned abroad into the customs of
his own country.
OF FRIENDSHIP
From the Essays >
I'
T HAD been hard for him that spake it to have put more truth
and untruth together in few words than in that speech,
"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast
or a god. " For it is most true that a natural and secret hatred
and aversion toward society in any man hath somewhat of the
savage beast; but it is most untrue that it should have any char-
acter at all of the divine nature, except it proceed, not out of a
pleasure in solitude, but out of a love and desire to sequester a
man's self for a higher conversation: such as is found to have
been falsely and feignedly in some of the heathen, as Epimen-
ides the Candian, Numa the Roman, Empedocles the Sicilian,
and Apollonius of Tyana; and truly and really in divers of the
ancient hermits and holy fathers of the Church. But little do


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FRANCIS BACON
men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a
crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures;
and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. The
Latin adage meeteth with it a little: "Magna civitas, magna
solitudo;" because in a great town friends are scattered, so that
there is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in less
neighborhoods. But we may go further, and affirm most truly
that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends,
without which the world is but a wilderness; and even in this
sense also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and
affections is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and
not from humanity.
A principal fruit of friendship is the ease and discharge of
the fullness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all
kinds do cause and induce. We know diseases of stoppings and
suffocations are the most dangerous in the body; and it is not
much otherwise in the mind. You may take sarza to open the
liver, steel to open the spleen, flower of sulphur for the lungs,
castoreum for the brain: but no receipt openeth the heart but a
true friend; to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes,
suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to
oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession.
It is a strange thing to observe how high a rate great kings
and monarchs do set upon this fruit of friendship whereof we
speak; so great, as they purchase it many times at the hazard of
their own safety and greatness. For princes, in regard of the
distance of their fortune from that of their subjects and servants,
cannot gather this fruit, except (to make themselves capable
thereof) they raise some persons to be as it were companions
and almost equals to themselves; which many times sorteth to
inconvenience. The modern languages give unto such persons
the name of favorites, or privadoes; as if it were matter of grace
or conversation. But the Roman name attaineth the true use and
cause thereof, naming them "participes curarum"; for it is that
which tieth the knot. And we see plainly that this hath been
done, not by weak and passionate princes only, but by the wisest
and most politic that ever reigned; who have oftentimes joined
to themselves some of their servants, whom both themselves
have called friends, and allowed others likewise to call them in
the same manner, using the word which is received between
private men.


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1179
L. Sylla, when he commanded Rome, raised Pompey (after
surnamed the Great) to that height that Pompey vaunted himself
for Sylla's overmatch. For when he had carried the consulship for
a friend of his against the pursuit of Sylla, and that Sylla did a
little resent thereat, and began to speak great, Pompey turned
upon him again, and in effect bade him be quiet; "for that more
men adored the sun rising than the sun setting. " With Julius
Cæsar, Decimus Brutus had obtained that interest, as he set him
down in his testament for heir in remainder after his nephew;
and this was the man that had power with him to draw him forth
to his death. For when Cæsar would have discharged the Senate
in regard of some ill presages, and specially a dream of Calpur-
nia, this man lifted him gently by the arm out of his chair, telling
him he hoped he would not dismiss the Senate till his wife had
dreamt a better dream. And it seemeth his favor was so great as
Antonius, in a letter which is recited verbatim in one of Cicero's
Philippics, calleth him "venefica » "witch"; as if he had en-
chanted Cæsar. Augustus raised Agrippa (though of mean birth)
to that height as, when he consulted with Mæcenas about the
marriage of his daughter Julia, Mæcenas took the liberty to tell
him, "that he must either marry his daughter to Agrippa or take
away his life: there was no third way, he had made him so great. "
With Tiberius Cæsar, Sejanus had ascended to that height as
they two were termed and reckoned as a pair of friends. Tibe-
rius in a letter to him saith, "Hæc pro amicitia nostra non occul-
tavi" [these things, from our friendship, I have not concealed
from you]; and the whole Senate dedicated an altar to Friendship,
as to a goddess, in respect of the great dearness of friendship
between them two. The like, or more, was between Septimius
Severus and Plautianus. For he forced his eldest son to marry
the daughter of Plautianus; and would often maintain Plautianus
in doing affronts to his son; and did write also, in a letter to the
Senate, by these words: "I love the man so well, as I wish he
may over-live me. " Now, if these princes had been as a Trajan
or a Marcus Aurelius, a man might have thought that this had
proceeded of an abundant goodness of nature; but being men so
wise, of such strength and severity of mind, and so
so extreme
lovers of themselves, as all these were, it proveth most plainly
that they found their own felicity (though as great as ever hap-
pened to mortal men) but as an half-piece, except they might
have a friend to make it entire: and yet, which is more, they


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FRANCIS BACON
were princes that had wives, sons, nephews; and yet all these
could not supply the comfort of friendship.
It is not to be forgotten what Comineus observeth of his
first master, Duke Charles the Hardy; namely, that he would.
communicate his secrets with none, and least of all those secrets
which troubled him most. Whereupon he goeth on and saith,
that toward his latter time "that closeness did impair and a little
perish his understanding. " Surely Comineus mought have made
the same judgment also, if it had pleased him, of his second.
master Louis the Eleventh, whose closeness was indeed his tor-
mentor. The parable of Pythagoras is dark, but true: "Cor ne
edito," "Eat not the heart. " Certainly, if a man would give it
a hard phrase, those that want friends to open themselves unto
are cannibals of their own hearts. But one thing is most ad-
mirable (wherewith I will conclude this first fruit of friendship),
which is, that this communicating of a man's self to his friend
works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth
griefs in halves. For there is no man that imparteth his joys to
his friend, but he joyeth the more; and no man that imparteth
his griefs to his friend, but he grieveth the less. So that it is,
in truth, of operation upon a man's mind of like virtue as the
alchymists use to attribute to their stone for man's body; that
it worketh all contrary effects, but still to the good and benefit
of nature. But yet without praying in aid of alchymists, there is
a manifest image of this in the ordinary course of nature: for
in bodies, union strengtheneth and cherisheth any natural action,
and on the other side, weakeneth and dulleth any violent im-
pression; and even so it is of minds.
The second fruit of friendship is healthful and sovereign for
the understanding, as the first is for the affections. For friend-
ship maketh indeed a fair day in the affections, from storm and
tempests, but it maketh daylight in the understanding, out of
darkness and confusion of thoughts. Neither is this to be under-
stood only of faithful counsel, which a man receiveth from his
friend; but before you come to that, certain it is that whosoever
hath his mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and under-
standing do clarify and break up in the communicating and dis-
coursing with another; he tosseth his thoughts more easily; he
marshaleth them more orderly; he seeth how they look when
they are turned into words; finally, he waxeth wiser than him-
self; and that more by an hour's discourse than by a day's medi-


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tation. It was well said by Themistocles to the King of Persia,
"That speech was like cloth of Arras, opened and put abroad;
whereby the imagery doth appear in figure: whereas in thoughts
they lie but as in packs. " Neither is this second fruit of friend-
ship, in opening the understanding, restrained only to such
friends as are able to give a man counsel (they indeed are best);
but even without that, a man learneth of himself, and bringeth
his own thoughts to light, and whetteth his wits as against
a stone, which itself cuts not. In a word, a man were better
relate himself to a statue or picture, than to suffer his thoughts
to pass in smother.
Add now, to make this second fruit of friendship complete,
that other point which lieth more open, and falleth within vulgar
observation; which is faithful counsel from a friend. Heraclitus
saith well in one of his enigmas, "Dry light is ever the best;"
and certain it is, that the light that a man receiveth by counsel
from another, is drier and purer than that which cometh from
his own understanding and judgment; which is ever infused and
drenched in his affections and customs.