THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

FRANCIS BACON 109
be accepts the world blithely enough; he is not consumed with the reconstructive
vision that ennobled Plato, or Nietzsche, or Bacon.
Now the greatness and the weakness of Bacon lay precisely in his pas-
sion for unity, his desire to spread the wings of his coordinating geniu?
over a hundred sciences. He aspired to be like Plato, "a man of sublime
genius, who took a view of everything as from a lofty rock." He broke
down under the weight of the tasks he had laid upon himself; he failed
forgivably because he undertook so much. He could not enter the
promised land of science, but as Cowley's epitaph expressed it, he could
at least stand upon its border and point out its fair features in the
distance.
His achievement was not the less great because it was indirect. His
philosophical works, though little read now, "moved the intellects which
moved the world." 109 He made himself the eloquent voice of the optimism
and resolution of the Renaissance. Never was any man so great a stimulus
to other thinkers. King James, it is true, refused to accept his suggestion
for the support of science, and said of the Novum Organum that "it was
like the peace of God, which passeth all understanding." But better men,
in 1662, founding that Royal Society which was to become the greatest
association of scientists in the world, named Bacon as their model and
inspiration; they hoped that this organization of English research would
lead the way toward that Europe-wide association which the Advancement
of Learning had taught them to desire. And when the great minds
of the French Enlightenment undertook that masterpiece of intellectual
enterprise, the Encyclopedic, they dedicated it to Francis Bacon. "If,"
said Diderot in the Prospectus, "we have come of it successfully, we shall
owe most to the Chancellor Bacon, who threw out the plan of an universal
dictionary of sciences and arts, at a time when, so to say, neither arts nor
sciences existed. That extraordinary genius, when it was impossible to
write a history of what was known, wrote one of what it was necessary
to learn." D'Alembert called Bacon "the greatest, the most universal, and
the most eloquent of philosophers." The Convention published the works
of Bacon at the expense of the state. 110 The whole tenor and career of
British thought have followed the philosophy of Bacon. His tendency to
conceive the world in Democritean mechanical terms gave to his secretary,
Hobbes, the starting-point for a thorough-going materialism; his induc-
tive method gave to Locke the idea of an empirical psychology, bound by
observation and freed from theology and metaphysics; and his emphasis
on "commodities" and "fruits" found formulation in Bentham's identifi-
cation of the useful and the good.
Wherever the spirit of control has overcome the spirit of resignation,
Bacon's influence has been felt. He is the voice of all those Europeans who
have changed a continent from a forest into a treasure-land of art and
""Macaulay, p. 49 i*
UX)
Nichol, ii, 235.