DESCARTES AND BACON.

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essential conditions with firmness and precision. The discourse in which he simply narrates his own evolution is an unconscious description of the course of the human mind in general, and it will still be read with profit when Bacon's diffuse elaboration will retain only an historical interest. But, in another aspect, the superiority of Bacon is no less striking,-in the study of Man and Society. Descartes constituted the inorganic philosophy as well as the age allowed, and abandoned the moral and social field to the old methods: whereas Bacon aimed chiefly at the renovation of this second half of the philosophical system, which he foresaw to be the ultimate means of regenerating the human race altogether. These differences must be attributed partly to the diversity of their genius, and partly to the opportunity afforded to Descartes by his position of better estimating the revolutionary state of modern Europe. It must be observed that the tendency of the Cartesian school has been to correct the imperfections of its head, whose metaphysics did not rise in honour with his corpuscular theory; whereas, in England and elsewhere, the Baconian school has applied itself to restrict the noble social spirit of its founder, and exaggerate its abstract inconveniences, sinking his conception of observation into a kind of sterile empiricism, such as is always within the reach of patient mediocrity. Thus, when our men of science desire to give a philosophical appearance to their narrow specialities, they appeal to Bacon, and not to Descartes, whose scientific character they depreciate; and yet the precepts of Bacon are quite as hostile as the conceptions of Descartes to pursuits like theirs, which are completely opposed to the common aim of the two great philosophers. Important as were these two schemes, they were not sufficient, even when united, to constitute the positive philosophy. That philosophy had as yet scarcely touched Physics, and had not reached Chemistry; and its extension to moral and social conceptions, which was Bacon's noble aim, was impossible before the advent of biological science. The point of time was remarkable therefore as introducing a new philosophy, and vaguely disclosing the conditions of its development; and all that the two great philosophers proposed was a provisional method, which might render positive all the elements of speculation, in preparation for an ultimate system, which they knew to be unattainable without. such preparation. The transitional state of the human mind must therefore endure till Chemistry and Biology should have taken their place among the sciences. Till that should happen, there was really nothing to be done but to modify once more the original separation, decreed by Aristotle and Plato, between natural and moral philosophy, by bringing each of them forward one stage, and thus showing their difference to be more marked than ever; for there is wider difference when natural philosophy is in the positive stage and moral philosophy in the metaphysical stage,

VOL. II.

Ꮓ

than when one was in the metaphysical and the other in the theological. Descartes saw the state of things more clearly and deeply than Bacon, and he applied himself to the extension of positivity to the utmost limit that could be then ventured, even including in it the intellectual and moral study of animals, under his famous hypothesis of the automatism of brutes, thus leaving to metaphysics only the domain which could not be emancipated from it in those days-the study of Man, moral and social. In doing this, he made useless efforts to invest the last functions of the old philosophy with more rationality than really belonged to an expiring doctrine; and therefore the second part of his work was less adapted to his time, and less successful than the first. Bacon's object being, not the distribution of the sciences, but the regeneration of moral and social science, he did not fall under the same liability; but the impossibility of rendering moral philosophy positive at that time compelled his school to recognize the old division, modified by Descartes, provisionally, though not doctrinally. Any attempt at a premature union could merely have set back everything under metaphysical domination, as we see by the attempts of Malebranche and Leibnitz, who laboured to set up a consistent system,-the one with his monads and the other with his pre-established harmony. Neither of them succeeded, more or less, in effacing the distinction between natural and moral philosophy; and though we now see the really contradictory nature of that division, we also perceive how its temporary admission must have been absolutely necessary, since the genius of a Leibnitz failed to abolish it.

We thus see the first result of the philosophical stimulus imparted by Bacon and Descartes. The positive spirit obtained complete possession of natural philosophy, while the metaphysical spirit was left for awhile in possession of moral philosophy; and thus the reign of entities, which had been universal, was fatally encroached upon. In the intervening period it appears to me that the pursuit of specialities in study has broken up the metaphysical régime, thoroughly and finally. The best minds have, with a few exceptions, turned to science; and philosophy, released from the grave, preparatory study, which was once thought necessary, and floating between science and theology, has fallen into the hands of men of letters, who have made use of it for the demolition of the old system, thus concealing for awhile its organic impotence. It cannot be necessary to treat of the varieties of a philosophy which has no adaptation to the needs of the times. It is notorious that it contemplates the abstract action of the human understanding, in one case through the external conditions, and in another through the internal; and that thus two systems, or two modes, have arisen, equally vicious, because alike separating the two indispensable considerations of the medium and the organism, the combination of which furnishes the only sound basis of biological

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.

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speculation of any kind. It appears to me that the two errors represent the Catholic and Protestant aspects of the philosophy of Europe the Catholic metaphysics being more critical, and therefore more tending to the positive, and to the consideration of the external world; whereas, the Protestant metaphysics, incorporated with the governments, and tending to the theological state, must naturally take its stand in Man, and proceed thence to the study of the universe. In England however the school of Hobbes formed a memorable exception to this. This transitory school, represented by Locke, undertook, under the Baconian instigation, a direct regeneration of moral and social study, and began by a radical criticism, which was therefore of an Aristotelian character, and must be developed and propagated in another direction.

Before I go on to the next phase, I ought to point out that some preparation for the renovation of political philosophy Political was already made by Hobbes and Bossuet. Machiavel philosophy. had before made some able partial attempts to connect the explanation of certain political phenomena with purely natural causes, though he spoiled his work by a thoroughly vicious estimate of modern society, which he could never sufficiently distinguish from the ancient. Hobbes's famous view of primitive war and the supposed reign of force has been usually misunderstood; but, impartially considered, it will be granted to be a striking primitive view, statical and dynamical, of the preponderance of temporal influences among permanent social conditions, taken as a whole; and also, of the necessarily martial condition of primitive society. This was a sound view introduced in the midst of fantastic hypotheses about the state of nature and the social contract; and it was valuable accordingly. Bossuet's share in the work of preparation is more obvious and less disputed. I have before pointed out the value of his historical survey, where, for the first time, political phenomena are regarded as subject to invariable laws, which, by rational treatment, may be made to determine each other. The theological principle which prevails in this work impairs this very enlightened conception, but cannot altogether disguise its importance, nor intercept its beneficial influence on the historical studies of the ensuing period. It was the last great inspiration of Catholicism, which, as we have seen, was much more adapted than the negative philosophy to form an estimate of human progress, which indeed the negative philosophy could not justly appreciate at all. The nature of Bossuet's great service appears in its destination ; which was to propose systematic history as the necessary basis of political education.

The third phase of the period was, in this case again, simply a prolongation of the second. The Scotch school Third phase. appears here favourably circumstanced in regard to Morals, by the speculative independence which it enjoyed, both as

being Presbyterian in the midst of Anglicanism, and as having no sympathy of principle with either side of the controversy on external

The Scotch and internal conditions of mental development. The School. value of this school was solely in the merit of its individual thinkers, who had no systematic connection with each other. In an intellectual view, Hume, one of the chiefs of the illustrious group, treated of the theory of causation with great originality and boldness, but with the imperfection inseparable from a sundering of philosophy from science. He here proposed the true character of positive conceptions; and notwithstanding its serious defects, this work appears to me to be the only great step that the human mind has taken towards understanding the relative character of sound philosophy, since the great controversy between the Realists and the Nominalists. In this connection I must point out again the able survey, by Adam Smith, of the history of the sciences, and of astronomy particularly, in which he perhaps approaches even nearer than his friend Hume to the true sense of rational positivity. It gratifies me to record here my special gratitude to these two eminent thinkers, whose influence was very useful to my early philosophical education, before I discovered the great law which necessarily guided it from that time forward.

Political philosophy made a great advance during the last Political century, inasmuch as social development became philosophy. more and more the express object of historical treatment. The process was defective, of course, from the absence of all theory of evolution, by which alone any scientific dignity can be given to works which, without it, remain essentially literary. One class of students were at work whose labours have obtained too little credit, the scholars who employed themselves during the second phase as well as the third in elucidating separate points of history by antiquarian and literary research. These labours are, in regard to positive sociology, analogous to those which at a former time accumulated provisional material for the future formation of chemistry and biology; and it is only by means of the lights thus afforded that sociology can begin to rise out of that preparatory state through which every science has passed on its way to its station in systematic positivism.

It

The one great conception which belongs to this third phase is Idea of that of human progress, as an express view. Progression. could only arise from the scientific evolution as a whole; for the idea of true progression could no otherwise be so clearly conveyed as by the succession of terms through an unquestionable filiation. Pascal, who first expressed the philosophical conception of human progress in the maxim which I quoted before, certainly derived it from the general history of the mathematical sciences. The innovation however could not produce any effect while only one kind of evolution was studied; for two are required

IDEA OF PROGRESSION.

357 for generalization on the simplest subjects of speculation; and then a third case is indispensable to confirm the prior comparison. The first condition was fulfilled through the evident conformity between scientific and industrial progression; but no third case was ready: for the spirit of the times caused a strange misjudgment of the merit of the aesthetic movement, which was supposed to be retrograde when it was much otherwise. From a comparison of modern with ancient Art, the discussion extended to other social aspects, and the result was that, though the original question remained doubtful, the idea of human progress, sustained by the universal instinct of modern civilization, was established as systematically as it could be before the clearing up of the apparent anomaly of the Middle Ages, -a difficulty which I may hope to have now removed. Political Economy afforded an indirect aid towards the close of the period, by fixing general attention on the industrial life of modern society, and by marking out the temporal differences between our civilization and that of the ancients, which again favoured a political understanding of the intermediate social state, according to the logical rule that a mean condition can be judged of only from a comparison of the extremes. We have seen the result in the enterprises of Turgot, Condorcet, and Montesquieu, whose merits and imperfections I pointed out in the first chapter of this volume.

At the close of our review of philosophical progress, from its origin in the Middle Ages to the beginning of the great French crisis, we cannot but see that, in the aggregate, made up as it is of a mass of remains, with a few rare and desultory materials of value, it is a merely preliminary affair, which can issue only in a direct institution of human regeneration. Though this conclusion has resulted from each of the several kinds of progress that I have treated of, its vast importance compels me to educe Gaps to be it again from their general approximation, by pointing out the chasms which remain to be filled, and which are common to and characteristic of them all.

supplied.

In each kind of progression, pursued without a sense of its connection with the whole, an instinct of speciality must prevail, exalting the spirit of detail, at the expense of a more general In Industry. view. This partial and desultory development was obviously the only one possible at a time when all systematic views related to a system which must pass away, and when it was only in such special pursuit that the new forces could manifest their character and tendency. Such a course, however inevitable, could not but produce the anti-social dispositions proper to those preparatory progressions, out of which the elements of future combinations could arise only very gradually,-not having even yet attained any real association. This dispersive empiricism did not come to an end when its destination was fulfilled; and it is now the great obstacle in the way of final regeneration. It insists that neither