ONE:Another and profounder characteristic of Plato, as distinguished from Aristotle, is his thorough-going opposition of reality to appearance; his distrust of sensuous perception, imagination, and opinion; his continual appeal to a hidden world of absolute truth and justice. We find this profounder principle also grasped and applied to poetical purposes in our Elizabethan literature, not only by Spenser, but by a still greater masterShakespeare. It is by no means unlikely that Shakespeare may have looked into a translation of the Dialogues; at any rate, the intellectual atmosphere he breathed was so saturated with their spirit that he could easily absorb enough of it to inspire him with the theory of existence which alone gives consistency to his dramatic work from first to last. For the essence of his comedies is that they represent the ordinary world of sensible experience as a scene of bewilderment and delusion, where there is nothing fixed, nothing satisfying, nothing true; as something which, because of its very unreality, is best represented by the drama,371 but a drama that is not without mysterious intimations of a reality behind the veil. In them we have the
TWO:The value of experimentation as such had, however, scarcely dawned on Bacon. His famous Prerogative In379stances are, in the main, a guide to simple observation, supplemented rather than replaced by direct interference with the phenomena under examination, comparable to that moderate use of the rack which he would have countenanced in criminal procedure. There was, perhaps, a deeper meaning in Harveys remark that Bacon wrote about Nature like a Lord Chancellor than the great physiologist himself suspected. To Bacon the statesman, science was something to be largely endowed out of the public treasury in the sure hope that it would far more than repay the expenditure incurred, by inventions of priceless advantage to human life. To Bacon the lawyer, Nature was a person in possession of important secrets to be wrested from her by employing every artifice of the spy, the detective, the cross-examiner, and the inquisitorial judge; to Bacon the courtier, she was a sovereign whose policy might be discovered, and, if need be, controlled, by paying judicious attention to her humours and caprices. And, for this very reason, he would feel drawn by a secret affinity to the Aristotelian dialectic, derived as it was through Socrates and Plato from the practice of the Athenian law-courts and the debates of the Athenian assembly. No doubt the Topics was intended primarily for a manual of debate rather than of scientific enquiry; and the English Chancellor showed true philosophic genius in his attempt to utilise it for the latter purpose. Nevertheless the adaptation proved a mistake. It was not without good grounds that the Socratic dialectic had been reserved exclusively by its great founder, and almost exclusively by his successors, for those human interests from the discussion of which it was first derived. And the discoverers, who in Bacons own lifetime were laying the foundations of physical science, employed a method totally different from his, because they started with a totally different conception of the universe. To them it was not a living whole, a Form of Forms, but a sum of forces to be analysed, isolated, and recombined, in fact or in idea, with a sublime disregard380 for the conditions under which they were presented to ordinary experience. That very extension of human power anticipated by Bacon came in a manner of which he had never dreamed. It was gained by studying, not the Forms to which he attached so much importance, but the modes of motion which he had relegated to a subordinate place in his classification of natural causes.543
Duis bibendum diam non erat facilaisis tincidunt. Fusce leo
neque, lacinia at tempor vitae, porta at arcu. Vestibulum
varius non dui at pulvinar. Ut egestas orci in quam
sollicitudin aliquet.
