The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded. Bacon Delia Salter

he tells us it is necessary for the teacher to descend to the foundations of knowledge and consent, and so to transplant it into another as it grew in his own mind, 'whereas as knowledge is now delivered, there is a kind of contract of error between the deliverer and the receiver, for he that delivereth knowledge desireth to deliver it in such a form as may best be believed, and not as may best be examined: and he that receiveth knowledge desireth rather present satisfaction than expectant inquiry, and so rather not to doubt than not to err, glory making the author not to lay open his weakness, and sloth making the disciple not to know his strength.' Now, so very grave a defect as this, in the method of the delivery and tradition of Learning, would of course be one of the first things that would require to be remedied in any plan in which 'the Advancement' of it was seriously contemplated. And this method of the delivery and tradition of knowledge which transfers the root with them, that they may grow in the mind of the learner, is the method which this philosopher professes to find wanting, and the one which he seems disposed to invent. He has made a very thorough survey of the stores of the ancients, and is not unacquainted with the more recent history of learning; he knows exactly what kinds of methods have been made use of by the learned in all ages, for the purpose of putting themselves into some tolerable and possible relations with the physical majority; he knows what devices they have always been compelled to resort to, for the purpose of establishing some more or less effective communication between themselves and that world to which they instinctively seek to transfer their doctrine. But this method, which he suggests here as the essential condition of the growth and advancement of learning, he does not find invented. He refers to a method which he calls the enigmatical, which has an affinity with it, 'used in some cases by the discretion of the ancients,' but disgraced since, 'by the impostures of persons, who have made it as a false light for their counterfeit merchandises.' The purpose of this latter style is, as he defines it, 'to remove the secrets of knowledge from the penetration of the more vulgar capacities, and to reserve them to selected auditors, or to wits of such sharpness as can pierce the veil.' And that is a method, he tells us, which philosophy can by no means dispense with in his time, and 'whoever would let in new light upon the human understanding must still have recourse to it.' But the method of delivery and tradition in those ancient schools, appears to have been too much of the dictatorial kind to suit this proposer of advancement; its tendency was to arrest knowledge instead of promoting its growth. He is not pleased with the ambition of those old masters, and thinks they aimed too much at a personal impression, and that they sometimes undertook to impose their own particular and often very partial grasp of those universal doctrines and principles, which are and must be true for all men, in too dogmatical and magisterial a manner, without making sufficient allowance for the growth of the mind of the world, the difference of races, etc.

      But if any doubt in regard to the use of the method described, in the composition of the work now first produced as AN EXAMPLE of the use of it, should still remain in any mind; or if this method of unravelling it should seem too studious, perhaps the author's own word for it in one more quotation may be thought worth taking.

      'I can give no account of my life by MY ACTIONS, fortune has placed them too low; I must do it BY MY FANCIES. And when shall I have done representing the continual agitation and change of my thoughts as they come into my head, seeing that Diomedes filled six thousand books upon the subject of grammar.' [The commentators undertake to set him right here, but the philosopher only glances in his intention at the voluminousness of the science of words, in opposition to the science of things, which he came to establish.] 'What must prating produce, since prating itself, and the first beginning to speak, stuffed the world with such a horrible load of volumes. So many words about words only. They accused one Galba, of old, of living idly; he made answer that every one ought to give account of his actions, but not of his leisure. He was mistaken, for justice– [the civil authority] – has cognizance and jurisdiction over those that do nothing, or only PLAY at WORKING… Scribbling appears to be the sign of a disordered age. Every man applies himself negligently to the duty of his vocation at such a time and debauches in it.' From that central wrong of an evil government, an infectious depravity spreads and corrupts all particulars. Everything turns from its true and natural course. Thus scribbling is the sign of a disordered age. Men write in such times instead of acting; and scribble, or seem to perhaps, instead of writing openly to purpose.

      And yet, again, that central, and so divergent, wrong is the result of each man's particular contribution, as he goes on to assert. 'The corruption of this age is made up by the particular contributions of every individual man,' —

      He were no lion, were not Romans hinds. —Cassius.

      'Some contribute treachery, others injustice, irreligion, tyranny, avarice and cruelty, according as they have power; the WEAKER SORT CONTRIBUTE FOLLY, VANITY, and IDLENESS, and of these I am one.'

       Caesar loves no plays as thou dost, Antony. Such men are dangerous.

      Or, as the same poet expresses it in another Roman play: —

      This double worship,

       Where one part does disdain with cause, the other 

       Insult without all reason; where gentry, title, wisdom

        Cannot conclude but by the yea and no

        Of general ignorance, – it must omit

        Real necessities – and give way the while

        To unstable slightness; purpose so barred,

        It follows, nothing is done to purpose.

      And that is made the plea for an attempt to overthrow the popular power, and to replace it with a government containing the true head of the state, its nobility, its learning, its gentleness, its wisdom.

      But the essayist continues: – 'It seems as if it were the season for vain things when the hurtful oppress us; in a time when doing ill is common, to do nothing but what signifies nothing is a kind of commendation. 'Tis my comfort that I shall be one of the last that shall be called in question, – for it would be against reason to punish the less troublesome while we are infested with the greater. As the physician said to one who presented him his finger to dress, and who, as he perceived, had an ulcer in his lungs, "Friend, it is not now time to concern yourself about your finger's ends." And yet I saw some years ago, a person, whose name and memory I have in very great esteem, in the very height of our great disorders, when there was neither law nor justice put in execution, nor magistrate that performed his office, —no more than there is now, – publish I know not what pitiful reformations about clothes, cookery and law chicanery. These are amusements wherewith to feed a people that are ill used, to show that they are not totally forgotten. These others do the same, who insist upon stoutly defending the forms of speaking, dances and games to a people totally abandoned to all sorts of execrable vices – it is for the Spartans only to fall to combing and curling themselves, when they are just upon the point of running headlong into some extreme danger of their lives.

      'For my part, I have yet a worse custom. I scorn to mend myself by halves. If my shoe go awry, I let my shirt and my cloak do so too: when I am out of order I feed on mischief. I abandon myself through despair, and let myself go towards the precipice, and as the saying is, throw the helve after the hatchet.' We should not need, perhaps, the aid of the explanations already quoted, to show us that the author does not confess this custom of his for the sake of commending it to the sense or judgment of the reader, – who sees it here for the first time it may be put into words or put on paper, who looks at it here, perhaps, for the first time objectively, from the critical stand-point which the review of another's confession creates; and though it may have been latent in the dim consciousness of his own experience, or practically developed, finds it now for the first time, collected from the phenomena of the blind, instinctive, human motivity, and put down on the page of science, as a principle in nature, in human nature also.

      But