in that submission, he invoked the example of Quintus Maximus: "who being upon the point to be sentenced, by the intercession of some principal persons of the Senate, was spared"; in which "the discipline of war was no less established by the questioning of Quintus Maximus, than by the punishment of Titus Manlius." But the Lords would not relent a victim was demanded. In like manner, in this play, Alcibiades, a principal senator, becomes "an humble suitor" to the "virtues" of the Athenian Senate for the pardon of a friend of his, who had

"stepp'd into the law, which is past depth
To those that without heed do plunge into 't.
He is a man, setting his fate aside,

Of comely virtues:

Nor did he soil the fact with cowardice;

(An honour in him which buys out his fault)
But, with a noble fury, and fair spirit,

Seeing his reputation touch'd to death,
He did oppose his foe. . . . .

1 Sen. You cannot make gross sins look clear:

To revenge is no valour, but to bear.

Alcib. My lords, then, under favour, pardon me,

If I speak like a captain:

and after pleading the soldier's valor and noble spirit in extenuation of his offence, he declares the felon,

Loaden with irons, wiser than the judge,
If wisdom be in suffering. O, my lords'
As you are great, be pitifully good.
In vain? his service done

At Lacedæmon and Byzantium

Were a sufficient briber for his life. . . .

2 Sen. He hath been known to commit outrages, And cherish factions. 'T is inferr'd to us,

His days are foul, and his drink dangerous.

1 Sen. He dies.

Alcib. Hard fate! he might have died in war.

My lords, if not for any parts in him,

Though his right arm might purchase his own time,

The law is strict, and war is nothing more. . . .

1 Sen. We are for law: he dies; urge it no more, On height of our displeasure.

Alcib. Call me to your remembrances.

Alcib. I cannot think but your age has forgot me;
It could not else be, I should prove so base,
To sue, and be deni'd such common grace.

Banish your dotage, banish usury,

That makes the Senate ugly.

1 Sen. If, after two days' shine Athens contain thee,

Attend our weightier judgment.

Alcib. Now the gods keep you old enough; that you may live Only in bone, that none may look on you! . . .

It comes not ill; I hate not to be banish'd:

It is a cause worthy my spleen and fury,

That I may strike at Athens.". -Act III. Sc. 5.

There is nothing here, perhaps, that can be specially noted, more than the allusion to "the discipline of war" as in Bacon's "Submission," which is certainly not a little remarkable, together with the general tenor of the ideas and sentiment, especially if they can be considered as having been imparted to this play, after his own fall and banishment from London. At any rate, it may be truly said of himself, that his own banishment came not ill; for besides that he had struck, it is true that he continued to strike, at Athens, in a way scarcely to be dreamed of in Athens itself for a long time to come; nor felt otherwise than as the blows travelled along down and transverberated the ages as they rolled up, with scarcely diminishing force of vibration, and so to continue until they shall be lost, if ever, in the deeper concussions of still more powerful strokes; and every vibration still sweeps some part of the old Athens into oblivion and mere fossil bone.

CHAPTER VI.

PHILOSOPHICAL EVIDENCES.

"God hath framed the mind of man as a mirrour or glass, capable of the image of the universal world."- -BACON.

§ 1. BACON A PHILOSOPHER.

FRANCIS BACON had surveyed with the eye of a master the whole field of the Greek Philosophy, and had carried his studies, beyond almost any other of his time and country, into the deepest profundities of human thought. Standing where Plato stood, long before him, and Des Cartes and Leibnitz, immediately after him, essentially, on the solid platform of fact and universal method, he endeavored to instaurate, revive, and renew the higher philosophy as well as physical science. He attempted, not without great effect, to organize the experimental and inductive method of inquiry and a true method of interpreting Nature, and urged them upon the consideration of the world of science as the best, if not the only, means of obtaining that broad and sure "foundation" in observed and ascertained fact, on which alone he considered it possible to raise, in an adequate manner, the eternal superstructure of philosophy itself, which he was also undertaking, as the chiefest concern, to erect and constitute, or at least to initiate; and to this end, he would begin at the fountain head, and constitute one Universal Science as the science of sciences and mother of all the rest, which was to be as the trunk to the branches of the tree. This science he called Philosophia Prima, or indeed" Sapience," which had been "anciently defined as the knowledge of all things divine and human":

"What may be sworn by, both divine and human,
Seal what I end withal."- Cor., Act III. Sc. 1.

He was not a man of physics merely, but understood metaphysics to be one part even of natural philosophy, in theory necessarily preceding physics, and in time and practice necessarily following on physics, the other part, "as a branch or descendant of natural science," and as affording the only safe passage into that Summary or Higher Philosophy, which he recognized as reigning supreme over sciences as "the parent or common ancestor to all knowledge." He divided all philosophy into three divisions, concerning God, Nature, and Man; and he said there was a "three-fold ray of things; for Nature strikes the intellect by a direct ray; but God, by a ray refracted, by reason of the unequal medium (the creation); and Man as shown and exhibited to himself, by a ray reflected." He seemed also, in accordance with the ideas and spirit of that age, in some measure to admit "Divinity or Inspired Theology," resting on Scriptural authority, as a department of inquiry distinct from philosophy; and he spoke of divinity as “the book of God's word," and of philosophy as "the book of God's works." "Physique," says he, "inquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; and the other, which is Metaphysique, handleth the formal and final causes, that which supposes in nature a reason, understanding, and platform"; that is to say, something like the vous or intellect of Anaxagoras and Plato. And again he says, "let the investigation of forms, which (in reasoning at least and after their own laws) are eternal and immutable, constitute metaphysics, and let the investigation of the efficient cause of matter, latent process, and latent conformation (which all relate merely to the ordinary course of nature, and not to the eternal and fundamental laws) constitute physics."

1 Adv. of Learn., Works (Mont.), II. 134.

2 De Aug. Scient., L. III. c. 1.

8 Nov. Org., II. § 9.

8

He was able to see through physics into metaphysics, and he drew the line between them distinctly enough. Since the giant Kant grappled with these "forms" or laws of the understanding or reason, and began to make a clearer opening into the true nature of Time and Space, his students and successors, more profoundly penetrating the subject, and, especially, Cousin, more thoroughly studying the critical method of scientific thinking taught by Plato, in a masterly elimination of the errors of Locke and Kant, have contributed much toward making Kant's " narrow foot-path" to be in truth "a high road of thought"; and since all together have still further cleared up these "fundamental and eternal laws" of all thinking, divine or human, it has become easier for others to grasp the profound conceptions of Bacon, which, however obscurely expressed, were nevertheless distinctly defined in the vast comprehension of his mighty intellect. "It is best," he says, "to consider matter, its conformation, and the changes of that conformation, its own action, and the laws of this action or motion; for forms are a mere fiction of the human mind, unless you will call the laws of action by that name." 1 That he referred these laws of action to the one thinking substance or essence, "the Mind of Nature," and considered them as eternal and immutable laws of the Divine Mind, thinking a universe, if a little uncertain here, is made plain enough in other parts of his writings. He says again: "Those which refer all things to the glory of God are as the three acclamations: Sancte! Sancte! Sancte! holy in the description or dilatation of his works; holy in the connection or concatenation of them; and holy in the union of them in a perpetual and uniform law. And therefore the speculation was excellent in Parmenides and Plato, although but a speculation in them, that all things by scale did ascend to unity" in himself, it was an absolute belief, and in this author's Malcolm

1 Nov. Org., I. § 51.

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