forms, or conceptions, and laws of thought, must be referred to the Divine Mind itself. Again, interpreting this same myth, he says, that Pan, as the name itself imports, represents the Universe or All of Things; and after giving the threefold narration of the ancients concerning the creation of Pan, he concludes by saying, that "the story might appear to be true, if we rightly distinguished times and things; for this Pan (as we now see and comprehend him) has his origin from the Divine Word, through the medium of confused Matter, (which is yet itself the work of God,) Sin ("Prevaricatio") creeping in, and through it Corruption." 1 So also Plato taught that God created, first, the primary forms of matter; though it would seem that Bacon here supposed that Plato, like Aristotle, believed in a primal matter "wholly waste, formless, and indifferent to forms" (a sort of dead substratum?) on which God worked; an opinion, to which the Phædo alone might seem to give some countenance, if it did not distinctly appear otherwise in other parts of his writings; and perhaps they all three really contemplated this waste and formless matter, as being, like the Scriptural matter that was "without form and void," the secondary condition of matter only, which was then under consideration.

But returning to the method of Democritus, we should proceed in a rigidly scientific manner by negatives and exclusions on the one hand, and by affirmatives on the other, until both should be exhausted, when the all of truth would stand forth clear to the comprehension as bounded over, as it were, against sheer blank nothingness; the whole actuality against all possibility. But until Cupid should be thus fully "sprung from Night," some degree of ignorance must attend the side of exclusions, and to us it would continue to be "a kind of night" as to what of actual truth remained included still under that ignorance. Democritus had remarked "that it is requisite that the elements in the

1 De Aug. Scient., L. II. c. 13.

work of creation should put forth a secret and dark nature, lest any contrarious and opposing principle should arise.” But when the elements should be brought out of ignorance into the light of truth, that "secret and dark nature " would be reduced to nothing, would vanish and disappear, leaving only a certain blank region of mere possibility beyond; and it would then be seen, that no "contrarious and opposing principle" actually existed other than such blank possibility. Democritus was still struggling with the heterogeneous character of atoms, almost like another Dalton, and vainly endeavoring to ascend to "the primitive motion" and cause of all atoms; but he had not attained to it, and his philosophy had been overwhelmed by the barbarians. Bacon would still pursue it with "the parable." Night was not to brood over the egg forever: the inquiry must not stop. But, he continues, "it is certainly proper to the Deity, that in an inquiry into his nature by means of the senses, exclusions should not terminate in affirmatives"; that is, should not stop short in any incomplete body of affirmations, but "that after due exclusions and negations something should be affirmed and settled, and that the egg should be produced by a seasonable and mature incubation; not only that the egg should be brought forth by Night, but also that the person of Cupid should be delivered of the egg: that is, that not only should an obscure notion upon this subject be originated, but one that is distinct." And he adds: "I think in accordance with the parable."

It is clear enough that to the mind of Bacon the Cupid of the fable represented the First Cause and essence of all things, the one substance, neither an abstract matter nor a dead substratum, but a living, thinking essence and power, a personal God and Creator of the Universe, as cause running through the links of Nature's chain, as essence cutting and running through the vicissitudes of things, in the creation. which God works from the beginning to the end, not stopping with any six days' works; cause eternally passing

"1

into effect and subsisting in it as unity in variety; the one and the many; the particulars and the whole; being against nonentity; actuality against possibility; thinking on the one hand, and forgetting on the other; creation and destruction; remembrance and oblivion; for, as he says, again, "it is most evident that the elements themselves, and their products, have a perpetuity not in individuo, but by supply and succession of parts. For example, the vestal fire, that was nourished by the virgins at Rome, was not the same fire still, but was in perpetual waste, and in perpetual renovation." And so, it would seem that he had arrived at that last outcome of all philosophy, ancient or modern, wherein it is found that God exists as a necessary fact, and a truth which is to be intellectually observed and seen by all those having eyes to see, resting for proof, not on any few petty Paley-evidences merely, but on all evidence at once, not as learning, but as "sapience," and as a power of the nature of the power of thought, eternally thinking a universe, and being thus the first cause of all created things and the ultimate fact of all actuality, bounded over, as it were, against all possibility, motion and standing in one; beyond which it would be absurd to inquire for a further cause, or a more ultimate fact: there being no need of another gun to shoot this gun.

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In this Fable of Cupid, he speaks of three opinions concerning the nature of matter: first, that which held an original chaos of unformed matter, "stripped and passive," but subsisting of itself from the beginning. This kind of matter he considered as 66 altogether an invention of the human mind" and next, a second, that "forms existed more than matter or action," so that the primitive and common matter seemed as it were an accessary, and to be in the place of a support to them; but every sort of action only an emanation from the form, thus wholly separating action or power from matter as something distinct from it;

1 Works (Boston), XV. 39.

an

and hence, also, a third, which "derived the kingdom of forms and ideas in essences by the addition of a kind of fantastic matter," "abstract matter," together with "abstract ideas and their powers." This last was a mere "superstition," and this "troop of dreamers had nearly overpowered the more sober class of thinkers." But in his view, "these assertions respecting abstract matter were as absurd as it would be to say the universe and nature were made out of categories and such dialectic notions." He agreed with the more ancient philosophy, that "the primitive matter (such as can be the origin of things "), the first entity, "ought no less to possess a real existence than those which flow from it; rather more. For it has its own peculiar essence, and from it come all the rest." In a word, there was no matter distinct from the causative thinking essence itself; and this only had a real existence. "Almost all the ancients," says he, " Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Anaximines, Heraclitus, Democritus, though disagreeing in other respects upon the prime matter, joined in this, that they held an active matter with a form, both arranging its own form, and having within itself the principle of motion." Thus it clearly appears, that matter was to be considered as power of the nature of the power of thought in perpetual activity, producing motion, moving itself, giving form, and being the only real substance, - a thinking essence; matter else being a mere figment of the brain.

all

But cloudy logomachies and visionary mystifications were to cease. Empty categories and syllogistic sophistries were to be swept away. Theological haze was to be cleared up. As touching Aristotle and the Church, the question between him and the ancient was not of "the virtue of the race, but of the rightness of the way": it was only "part of the same thing more large." He would have men return to the study of nature in a scientific manner, well knowing, doubtless, whither that course would lead them in the end. Physics and metaphysics were to go hand in hand together

as inseparable parts of natural philosophy. And when, in the course of time, a sufficiently ample foundation should be laid in a thorough knowledge of nature, the loftier superstructure of the Philosophia Prima, the Science of Sciences, Philosophy itself, might be raised and completed. He seems to have contemplated some statement of the final result in the Sixth Part of the Great Instauration; but he tells us that it was "both beyond his power and expectation to perfect and conclude it." He might make “no contemptible beginning"; and "men's good fortune would furnish the result; such as men could not easily comprehend, or define, in the present state of things and the mind." Nor was it to treat "only of contemplative enjoyment, but of the common affairs and fortune of mankind, and of a complete power of action." This part was not written, but enough appears in his writings to show, that it would have been no materialistic science of dead substratum, no economic science of practical fruit merely, nor any sort of machine philosophy.

§ 2. THE PHILOSOPHER A POET.

In the midst of these abstruse considerations of the nature of cause and form, we fall upon this passage in his discussion of the opinion of Parmenides, in this same Fable of Cupid, "That the first forms and first entities are active, and that so the first substances also, cold and heat; that these, nevertheless, exist incorporeally, but that there is subjoined to them a passive and potential matter, which has a corporeal magnitude," and that "there are four coessential natures, and conjoined, . . . light, heat, rarity, and motion; . . . for a true philosopher will dissect, not sever nature (for they, who will not dissect, must pull her asunder), and the prime matter is to be laid down joined with the primitive form, as also with the first principle of motion, as it is found." And so, in the play, Hamlet is made to say of the ghost:

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