142 ' Notices respecting, New Books. d 
«‘The merits of Bacon, as the father of experimental pht-— 
losophy, are so universally acknowledged, that it would be su- 
perfluous to touch upon them here. The lights which he has 
struck out in various branches of the philosophy of mind, have 
been much less attended to; although the whole scope and te- 
nor of his speculations show, that to ¢his study his genius was 
far more strongly and happily turned, than to that of the ma- 
terial world. It was not, 4s some seem to have imagined, by 
sagacious anticipations of particular discoveries afterwards to be 
made in physics, that his writings have had so powerful an in-, | 
fIuence in accelerating the advancemeut of that science. In the * 
extent and accuracy of his physical knowledge, he was far in- 
ferior to many of his predecessors; but he surpassed them all 
in his knowledge of the laws, the resources, and the limits of 
the human understanding. The sanguine expectations with — 
which he looked forward to the future, were founded solely on 
his confidence in the untried capacities of the mind; and on a — 
conviction of the possibility of invigorating and guiding, by means _ 
of logical rules, those faculties which, in all our reséarches after 
truth, are the organs or instruments tobe employed. ‘Such — 
rules,’ as he himself has observed, ‘do in some sort equal — 
men’s wits, and leave no great advantage or pre-eminence to the 
perfect and excellent motions of the spirit. To draw a straight 
fine, or to describe a circle, by aim of hand only, there must be 
a great difference between an unsteady and unpraetised hand, ~ 
and a steady and practised; but to do it by rule or compass it 
is much alike.’ 
¢ Nor is it merely as a logician that Bacon is entitled to no- 
tice on the present oceasion. It would be difficult to name an- 
other writer prior to Locke, whose works are enriched with so 
many just observations on the intellectual phenomena. Among — 
these, the most valuable relate to the laws of memory, and of | 
imagination ; the latter‘ of which subjects he seems to have ~ 
studied with peculiar care. In one short but beantifal paragraph 
concerning poetry (under which title may be comprehended all 
the various creations of this faculty) he has exhausted every 
thing that philosophy and good sense have yet had to offer, on 
what has been since called the Beau Ideal; a topic, which has 
fiirnished occasion to so many over-refinements among the French 
critics, and to so much extravagance and mysticism in the clau@-_ 
capt metaphysics of the new German school, In considering 
imagination as connected with the nervous system, more parti- 
cularly as connected with that species of sympathy to which me-— 
dical writers have given the name of imitation, he has suggested - 
some very important hints, which none of his successors have 
hitherto prosecuted ; and has, at the same time, left an example 
of 
4 
~ 
