THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
with the proceeding of the state be full of discord and faction, and those
that are against it be entire and united." 39 A better recipe for the avoidance
of revolutions is an equitable distribution of wealth: "Money is like
40
muck, not good unless it be spread." But this does not mean socialism,
or even democracy; Bacon distrusts the people, who were in his day quite
without access to education; "the lowest of all flatteries is the flattery of
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the common people" and "Phocion took it ;
right, who, being applauded
by the multitude, asked, What had he done amiss?" 42 What Bacon wants
is first a yeomanry of owning farmers; then an aristocracy for administra-
tion; and above all a philosopher-king.
"It is almost without instance that
any government was unprosperous under learned governors." 43 He mentions
Seneca, Antoninus Pius and Aurelius; it was his hope that to their
names posterity would add his own.
IV. THE GREAT RECONSTRUCTION
Unconsciously, in the midst of his triumphs, his heart was with philos-
ophy. It had been his nurse in youth, it was his companion in office, it
was to be his consolation in prison and disgrace. He lamented the ill-
repute into which, he thought, philosophy had fallen, and blamed an arid
scholasticism. "People are very apt to contemn truth, on account of the
controversies raised about it, and to think those all in a wrong way who
never meet." 44 "The sciences . . . stand almost at a stay, without receiv-
ing any augmentations worthy of the human race;
. . . and all the
tradition and succession of schools is still a succession of masters and
scholars, not of inventors. ... In what is now done in the matter of
science there is only a whirling about, and perpetual agitation, ending
where it
45
began." All through the years of his rise and exaltation he
brooded over the restoration or reconstruction of philosophy; "Meditor
6
Instaurationem philosophiae"*
He planned to centre all his studies around this task. First of all, he
tells us in his "Plan of the Work," he would write some Introductory
Treatises, explaining the stagnation of philosophy through the posthumous
persistence of old methods, and outlining his proposals for a new
beginning. Secondly he would attempt a new Classification of the
Sciences, allocating their material to them, and listing the unsolved
problems in each field. Thirdly, he would describe his new method for the
Interpretation of Nature. Fourthly, he would try his busy hand at actual
natural science, and investigate the Phenomena of Nature. Fifthly, he
would show the Ladder of the Intellect, by which the writers of the
""Of Seditions and Troubles." "Ibid.
*In Nichol, ii, 149. ^Adv. of L., vi, 3.
"Ibid., i. "Ibid.
^Preface to Magna Instauratio. "Redargutio Philosophiarum.