Suppose that Justinian, when he closed the schools of Athens, had called on the last few sages who still haunted the Portico, and lingered round the ancient plane-trees, to show their title to public veneration: suppose that he had said: "A thousand years have elapsed since, in this famous city, Socrates posed Protagoras and Hippias; during those thousand years a large proportion of the ablest men of every generation has been employed in constant efforts to bring to perfection the philosophy which you teach, that philosophy has been munificently patronised by the powerful; its professors have been held in the highest esteem by the public; it has drawn to itself almost all the sap and vigour of the human intellect: and what has it effected? What profitable truth has it taught us which we should not equally have known without it? What has it enabled us to do which we should not have been equally able to do without it?"Such questions, we suspect, would have puzzled Simplicius and Isidore.Ask a follower of Bacon what the new philosophy, as it was called in the time of Charles the Second, has effected for mankind, and his answer is ready; "It has lengthened life; it has mitigated pain; it has extinguished diseases; it has increased the fertility of the soil; it has given new securities to the mariner; it has furnished new arms to the warrior; it has spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of form unknown to our fathers; it has guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth; it has lighted up the night with the splendour of the day;it has extended the range of the human vision; it has multiplied the power of the human muscles; it has accelerated motion; it has annihilated distance; it has facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all despatch of business;it has enabled man to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to traverse the land in cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean in ships which run ten knots an hour against the wind.These are but a part of its fruits, and of its first fruits.For it is a philosophy which never rests, which has never attained, which is never perfect.Its law is progress.Apoint which yesterday was invisible is its goal to-day, and will be its starting-post to-morrow."Great and various as the powers of Bacon were, he owes his wide and durable fame chiefly to this, that all those powers received their direction from common sense.His love of the vulgar useful, his strong sympathy with the popular notions of good and evil, and the openness with which he avowed that sympathy, are the secret of his influence.There was in his system no cant, no illusion.He had no anointing for broken bones, no fine theories de finibus, no arguments to persuade men out of their senses.He knew that men, and philosophers as well as other men, do actually love life, health, comfort, honour, security, the society of friends, and do actually dislike death, sickness, pain, poverty, disgrace, danger, separation from those to whom they are attached.He knew that religion, though it often regulates and moderates these feelings, seldom eradicates them; nor did he think it desirable for mankind that they should be eradicated.
The plan of eradicating them by conceits like those of Seneca, or syllogisms like those of Chrysippus, was too preposterous to be for a moment entertained by a mind like his.He did not understand what wisdom there could be in changing names where it was impossible to change things; in denying that blindness, hunger, the gout, the rack, were evils, and calling them apoproegmena in refusing to acknowledge that health, safety, plenty, were good things, and dubbing them by the name of adiaphora.In his opinions on all these subjects, he was not a Stoic, nor an Epicurean, nor an Academic, but what would have been called by Stoics, Epicureans, and Academics a mere idiotes, a mere common man.And it was precisely because he was so that his name makes so great an era in the history of the world.It was because he dug deep that he was able to pile high.It was because, in order to lay his foundations, he went down into those parts of human nature which lie low, but which are not liable to change, that the fabric which he reared has risen to so stately an elevation, and stands with such immovable strength.
We have sometimes thought that an amusing fiction might be written, in which a disciple of Epictetus and a disciple of Bacon should be introduced as fellow-travellers.They come to a village where the smallpox has just begun to rage, and find houses shut up, intercourse suspended, the sick abandoned, mothers weeping in terror over their children.The Stoic assures the dismayed population that there is nothing bad in the smallpox, and that to a wise man disease, deformity, death, the loss of friends, are not evils.The Baconian takes out a lancet and begins to vaccinate.They find a body of miners in great dismay.An explosion of noisome vapours has just killed many of those who were at work; and the survivors are afraid to venture into the cavern.The Stoic assures them that such an accident is nothing but a mere apoproegmenon.The Baconian, who has no such fine word at his command, contents himself with devising a safety-lamp.
They find a shipwrecked merchant wringing his hands on the shore.
His vessel with an inestimable cargo has just gone down, and he is reduced in a moment from opulence to beggary.The Stoic exhorts him not to seek happiness in things which lie without himself, and repeats the whole chapter of Epictetus pros tous ten aporian dediokotas.The Baconian constructs a diving-bell, goes down in it, and returns with the most precious effects from the wreck.It would be easy to multiply illustrations of the difference between the philosophy of thorns and the philosophy of fruit, the philosophy of words and the philosophy of works.