1894.] Professor Nichol on Bacon's Key to Nature. 189 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, February 16, 1894. 



Sir James Crichton-Browne, M.D. LL.D. F.R.S. Treasurer and 

 Vice-President, in the Chair. 



Professor Niohol, M.A. LL.D. 

 Bacon's Key to Nature. 



No English writer of equal eminence is so inadequately known 

 by the mass of his countrymen as Lord Bacon. Every man and 

 woman of culture is more or less familiar with the Essays : few have 

 turned ten pages of ' Organum,' glanced at the ' De Sapientia 

 Veterum,' or ventured into one grove of the ' Sylva Syl varum.' Save 

 as a writer of fine sentences, Bacon has been generally judged by 

 Pope's lampooning line, Lord Campbell's shallow summary, and 

 the farthest adrift of Lord Macaulay's estimates. The moral charges 

 brought against him are at least plausible, though often gross, 

 exaggerations, but the popular travesty of his system set forth by 

 his most eloquent English critic is ludicrous. The writer's diffuse- 

 ness of illustration permits the whole gist of fifty bright and delusive 

 pages to be given in two. " Bacon," says Macaulay, " was neither a 

 philosopher nor a logician, but a reformer. The peculiarity of his 

 work lay in the fact of its object being altogether different from any 

 which his predecessors had proposed. They had wasted their dialectic 

 on labours like those spent on a treadmill. He strove not to solve 

 enigmas, but to enrich man's estate. The ancient philosophy disdained 

 to be useful, and was content to be stationary. The reviewer finds 

 on the tree which Socrates planted and Plato watered, flowers but no 

 fruit. To the revolving questions of the Schools he answers, " Cur 

 quis non prandeat hoc est." " The aim of Plato," he concludes, " was 

 to exalt man into a god ; that of Bacon, to supply him with what 

 he wants as a man. The one drew a good bow, but shot at the stars ; 

 the other fixed his eye on a common target, and hit it in the white. 

 While the world was resounding with doctrinal disputes, the traitorous 

 friend and pure philanthropist (!), leaving the windy war to those 

 who liked it, was content to add to the sum of human happiness." 

 Macaulay often talks of the absolute originality of the ' Novum 

 Organum,' of the new era it opened up, but, in flat contradiction of 

 himself, he asserts in his essay that the author's benevolent aim 

 was the sum and substance of his philosophy. The notion that he 

 invented a new method of arriving at truth by induction he takes 



