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order to act, all was transformed; for we cannot act, without certain and precise knowledge. Forces, before they can be employed, must be measured and verified; before we can build a house, we must know exactly the resistance of the beams, or the house will collapse; before we can cure a sick man, we must know with certainty the effect of a remedy, or the patient will die. Practice makes certainty and exactitude a necessity to science, because practice is impossible when it has nothing to lean upon but guesses and approximations. How can we eliminate guesses and approximations ? How introduce into science solidity and precision? We must imitate the cases in which science, issuing in practice, has proved to be precise and certain, and these cases are the industries. We must, as in the industries, observe, essay, grope about, verify, keep our mind fixed on sensible and particular things, advance to general rules only step by step; not anticipate experience, but follow it; not imagine nature, but interpret it. For every general effect, such as heat, whiteness, hardness, liquidity, we must seek a general condition, so that in producing the condition we may produce the effect. And for this it is necessary, by fit rejections and exclusions, to extract the condition sought from the heap of facts in which it lies buried, construct the table of cases from which the effect is absent, the table where it is present, the table where the effect is shown in various degrees, so as to isolate and bring to light the condition which produced it. Then we shall have, not useless universal axioms, but efficacious mediate axioms, true laws from which we can derive works, and which are the sources of power in the same degree as the sources

1 Novum Organum, ii. 15 and 16.

of light.1 Bacon described and predicted in this modern science and industry, their correspondence, method, resources, principle; and after more than two centuries, it is still to him that we go even at the present day to look for the theory of what we are attempting and doing.

Beyond this great view, he has discovered nothing. Cowley, one of his admirers, rightly said that, like Moses on Mount Pisgah, he was the first to announce the promised land; but he might have added quite as justly, that, like Moses, he did not enter there. He pointed out the route, but did not travel it; he taught men how to discover natural laws, but discovered none. His definition of heat is extremely imperfect. His Natural History is full of fanciful explanations.2 Like the poets, he peoples nature with instincts and desires; attributes to bodies an actual voracity, to the atmosphere a thirst for light, sounds, odours, vapours, which it drinks in; to metals a sort of haste to be incorporated with acids. He explains the duration of the bubbles of air which float on the surface of liquids, by supposing that air has a very small or no appetite for height. He sees in every quality, weight, ductility, hardness, a distinct essence which has its special cause; so that when a man knows the cause of every quality of gold, he will be able to put all these causes together, and make gold. In the main, with the alchemists, Paracelsus and Gilbert, Kepler himself, with all the men of his time, men of imagination, nourished on Aristotle, he represents nature as a compound of secret and living energies, inexplicable and primordial forces, distinct and indecom

1 Novum Organum, i. i. 3.

• Natural History, 800, 24, etc. De Augmentis, iii. 1.

posable essences, adapted each by the will of the Creator to produce a distinct effect. He almost saw souls endowed with latent repugnances and occult inclinations, which aspire to or resist certain directions, certain mixtures, and certain localities. On this account also he confounds everything in his researches in an undistinguishable mass, vegetative and medicinal properties, mechanical and curative, physical and moral, without considering the most complex as depending on the simplest, but each on the contrary in itself, and taken apart, as an irreducible and independent existence. Obstinate in this error, the thinkers of the age mark time without advancing. They see clearly with Bacon the wide field of discovery, but they cannot enter upon it. They want an idea, and for want of this idea they do not advance. The disposition of mind which but now was a lever, is become an obstacle: it must be changed, that the obstacle may be got rid of. For ideas, I mean great and efficacious ones, do not come at will nor by chance, by the effort of an individual, or by a happy accident. Methods and philosophies, as well as literatures and religions, arise from the spirit of the age; and this spirit of the age makes them potent or powerless. One state of public intelligence excludes a certain kind of literature; another, a certain scientific conception. When it happens thus, writers and thinkers labour in vain, the literature is abortive, the conception does not make its appearance. In vain they turn one way and another, trying to remove the weight which hinders them; something stronger than themselves paralyses their hands and frustrates their endeavours. The central pivot of the vast wheel on which human affairs move must be displaced one notch, that all may

At this moment the pivot was

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move with its motion.
moved, and thus a revolution of the great wheel begins,
bringing round a new conception of nature, and in
consequence that part of the method which was lacking.
To the diviners, the creators, the comprehensive and
impassioned minds who seized objects in a lump and in
masses, succeeded the discursive thinkers, the systematic
thinkers, the graduated and clear logicians, who, dis-
posing ideas in continuous series, lead the hearer grad-
ually from the simple to the most complex by easy and
unbroken paths. Descartes superseded Bacon; the
classical age obliterated the Renaissance; poetry and
lofty imagination gave way before rhetoric, eloquence,
and analysis. In this transformation of mind, ideas
were transformed. Everything was drained dry and
simplified. The universe, like all else, was reduced to
two or three notions; and the conception of nature,
which was poetical, became mechanical. Instead of
souls, living forces, repugnances, and attractions, we have
pulleys, levers, impelling forces. The world, which
seemed a mass of instinctive powers, is now like a
mere machinery of cog-wheels. Beneath this adventur-
ous supposition lies a large and certain truth: that
there is, namely, a scale of facts, some at the summit
very complex, others at the base very simple; those
above having their origin in those below, so that the
lower ones explain the higher; and that we must seek
the primary laws of things in the laws of motion. The
search was made, and Galileo found them. Thenceforth
the work of the Renaissance, outstripping the extreme
point to which Bacon had pushed it, and at which he
had left it, was able to proceed onward by itself, and
did so proceed, without limit.

1

CHAPTER II.

The Theatre.

WE must look at this world more closely, and beneath the ideas which are developed seek for the living men; it is the theatre especially which is the original product of the English Renaissance, and it is the theatre especially which will exhibit the men of the English Renaissance. Forty poets, amongst them ten of superior rank, as well as one, the greatest of all artists who have represented the soul in words; many hundreds of pieces, and nearly fifty masterpieces; the drama extended over all the provinces of history, imagination, and fancy,-expanded so as to embrace comedy, tragedy, pastoral and fanciful literature-to represent all degrees of human condition, and all the caprices of human invention to express all the perceptible details of actual truth, and all the philosophic grandeur of general reflection; the stage disencumbered of all precept and freed from all imitation, given up and appropriated in the minutest particulars to the reigning taste and public intelligence: all this was a vast and manifold work, capable by its flexibility, its greatness, and its form, of receiving and preserving the exact imprint of the age and of the nation.1

1 "The very age and body of the time, his form and pressure. Shakspeare.

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