and all of being, God; "for," says he, "there cannot be in nature (for we always except God) any cause of the first matter, and of its proper influence and action, for there is nothing prior in time to the first matter." The first matter is the thinking essence or power of God, and, as such, is older than time itself. This person, and first essence of all things, is represented in the fable as born of an egg. This birth was a mere figure of speech, and it had reference to "the proofs," the mode of thinking out the fact of the existence of such person. The egg was the whole problem. Night represented "the negatives and exclusions"; Light, "the affirmatives"; the brooding, "the mature incubation,” was the true method and process of philosophical inquiry; and Cupid was to be at last the hatched conception of the all of being, God, in the complete antithesis of light against darkness; affirmation against negation; being against nonentity; all actuality against all possibility; that is to say, an essential living power of the nature of the power of thought itself, a thinking essence, a thinking person, and the All.

In Plato, the same conception, dropping somewhat of the poetical dress of the fable, stands forth in the more naked form of philosophical expression. According to him, the Divine Soul, the primal existence, comprehending under itself "motion and standing" all in one, is "that which moves itself," is "the beginning of motion," is "the oldest and most divine of all things," is "nothing else but power (of the nature of thinking power), and "imparts an everflowing existence," in the perpetual work of creating a universe.1 "The mode of this thing which is uncaused," continues Bacon, in the Fable of Cupid, " is likewise very obscure, which indeed the fable elegantly hints in Cupid being hatched beneath the brooding wing of Night." The inspired philosopher had felt the same difficulty, when he

1 Phædrus, Works of Plato (Bohn), I. 321; Sophist, lb. III. 151–6; Laws, [b. V. 543.

said, "God hath made all things beautiful in their seasons: He hath also set the world in their heart, yet so that no man can find out the work that God worketh from the beginning unto the end. For the great law of essence and nature cuts and runs through the vicissitudes of things, (which law seems to be described in the compass of the words, the work which God wrought from the beginning even to the end,) the power lodged by God in the primitive particles, from the multiplication of which, the whole variety of things might spring forth and be composed, may indeed just strike, but cannot enter deeply the mind of man.” But the philosopher must constantly bear in mind that Cupid is without parents, and endeavor to grasp the whole fact as a universal perception and conception and the final all, not permitting "his understanding to turn aside to empty questions," and must therewith rest satisfied; for, as he says again, "it would argue levity and inexperience in a philosopher to require or imagine a cause for the last and positive power and law of nature." Precisely herein lies the difficulty, that in attempting to grasp "universal perceptions of this kind, the human mind becomes diffusive, and departs from the right use of itself and of its objects, and whilst it tends toward things more distant, falls back upon those that are nearer." And when, through its own limited capacity, "it stretches itself toward those things, which, according to experience, are for the most part universal, and, nevertheless, is unwilling to rest satisfied, then, as if desiring something more within the reach of its knowledge, it turns itself to those things which have most affected or allured it, and imagines them to be more causative and palpable than those universals." And in the Wisdom of the Ancients, he says again: "Nor need we wonder that Pan's horns touch heaven; since the summits, or universal forms of nature, do in a manner reach up to God; the passage from metaphysic to natural theology being ready and short"; that is to say, these universal

forms, or conceptions, and laws of thought, must be referred to the Divine Mind itself. Again, interpreting this same myth, he says, that Pan, as the name itself imports, represents the Universe or All of Things; and after giving the threefold narration of the ancients concerning the creation of Pan, he concludes by saying, that "the story might appear to be true, if we rightly distinguished times and things; for this Pan (as we now see and comprehend him) has his origin from the Divine Word, through the medium of confused Matter, (which is yet itself the work of God,) Sin ("Prevaricatio") creeping in, and through it Corruption." 1 So also Plato taught that God created, first, the primary forms of matter; though it would seem that Bacon here supposed that Plato, like Aristotle, believed in a primal matter "wholly waste, formless, and indifferent to forms " (a sort of dead substratum?) on which God worked; an opinion, to which the Phædo alone might seem to give some countenance, if it did not distinctly appear otherwise in other parts of his writings; and perhaps they all three really contemplated this waste and formless matter, as being, like the Scriptural matter that was "without form and void," the secondary condition of matter only, which was then under consideration.

But returning to the method of Democritus, we should proceed in a rigidly scientific manner by negatives and exclusions on the one hand, and by affirmatives on the other, until both should be exhausted, when the all of truth would stand forth clear to the comprehension as bounded over, as it were, against sheer blank nothingness; the whole actuality against all possibility. But until Cupid should be thus fully "sprung from Night," some degree of ignorance must attend the side of exclusions, and to us it would continue to be "a kind of night" as to what of actual truth remained included still under that ignorance. Democritus had remarked "that it is requisite that the elements in the

1 De Aug. Scient., L. II. c. 13.

work of creation should put forth a secret and dark nature, lest any contrarious and opposing principle should arise." But when the elements should be brought out of ignorance into the light of truth, that "secret and dark nature" would be reduced to nothing, would vanish and disappear, leaving only a certain blank region of mere possibility beyond; and it would then be seen, that no "contrarious and opposing principle" actually existed other than such blank possibility. Democritus was still struggling with the heterogeneous character of atoms, almost like another Dalton, and vainly endeavoring to ascend to "the primitive motion" and cause of all atoms; but he had not attained to it, and his philosophy had been overwhelmed by the barbarians. Bacon would still pursue it with "the parable." Night was not to brood over the egg forever: the inquiry must not stop. But, he continues, "it is certainly proper to the Deity, that in an inquiry into his nature by means of the senses, exclusions should not terminate in affirmatives"; that is, should not stop short in any incomplete body of affirmations, but "that after due exclusions and negations something should be affirmed and settled, and that the egg should be produced by a seasonable and mature incubation; not only that the egg should be brought forth by Night, but also that the person of Cupid should be delivered of the egg: that is, that not only should an obscure notion upon this subject be originated, but one that is distinct." And he adds: “I think in accordance with the parable."

It is clear enough that to the mind of Bacon the Cupid of the fable represented the First Cause and essence of all things, the one substance, neither an abstract matter nor a dead substratum, but a living, thinking essence and power, a personal God and Creator of the Universe, as cause running through the links of Nature's chain, as essence cutting and running through the vicissitudes of things, in the creation which God works from the beginning to the end, not stopping with any six days' works; cause eternally passing

into effect and subsisting in it as unity in variety; the one and the many; the particulars and the whole; being against nonentity; actuality against possibility; thinking on the one hand, and forgetting on the other; creation and destruction; remembrance and oblivion; for, as he says, again, "it is most evident that the elements themselves, and their products, have a perpetuity not in individuo, but by supply and succession of parts. For example, the vestal fire, that was nourished by the virgins at Rome, was not the same fire still, but was in perpetual waste, and in perpetual renovation." 1 And so, it would seem that he had arrived at that last outcome of all philosophy, ancient or modern; wherein it is found that God exists as a necessary fact, and a truth which is to be intellectually observed and seen by all those having eyes to see, resting for proof, not on any few petty Paley-evidences merely, but on all evidence at once, not as learning, but as "sapience," and as a power of the nature of the power of thought, eternally thinking a universe, and being thus the first cause of all created things and the ultimate fact of all actuality, bounded over, as it were, against all possibility, motion and standing in one; beyond which it would be absurd to inquire for a further cause, or a more ultimate fact:- there being no need of another to shoot this gun.

gun

In this Fable of Cupid, he speaks of three opinions concerning the nature of matter: first, that which held an original chaos of unformed matter, "stripped and passive," but subsisting of itself from the beginning. This kind of matter he considered as "altogether an invention of the human mind": and next, a second, that "forms existed more than matter or action," so that the primitive and common matter seemed as it were an accessary, and to be in the place of a support to them; but every sort of action only an emanation from the form, action or power from matter as something distinct from it;

thus wholly separating

1 Works (Boston), XV. 39.