As Bacon expresses it, "all learning is knowledge acquired, and all knowledge in God is original"; that is, with him, thought and knowledge are one; and so, that "the truth. of being and the truth of knowing is all one." Plato, Philo Judaeus, Böethius, Thomas Aquinas, Bruno, Spinoza, Hooker, Berkeley, Swedenborg, and many others of the olden times as well as of these later days, seem to have conceived the matter much in the same way. So Bacon must have understood the creation: in fact, this is precisely what he meant, when he said he trusted his philosophy, when fully unfolded, "would plainly constitute a Marriage of the Human Mind to the Universe, having the Divine Goodness for bridesmaid."2 In no other way, perhaps, was it ever possible for any man to arrive at any comprehensible philosophy of the universe. Without such a philosophy, the observed facts of experimental science can present nothing to human intelligence but an incongruous, heterogeneous, and incomprehensible mass of particulars a world of facts tumbled together pell-mell; and hence all those absurd systems, theological, or atheistical, which have, in all times, beclouded the understandings of men. The English Astronomer Royal reports his magnetical and meteorological observations as obtained "with the utmost completeness and exactitude"; but he is absolutely "stopped from making further progress by the total absence of even empirical theory." His case may be hopeless; but he is certainly entitled to credit for not undertaking to make headway in that business by the help of any theory to be derived from Biblical theology, the properties of dead substratum, Comtean positivism, or any Queckett-figuring of probabilities, or other sort of Babbage-machine philosophy, however useful such machinery may be in other matters.

Even the sixty-two or more simple "undecomposable substances," of which, thus far, the globe appears to chem

1 Praise of Knowl., Works (Mont.), I. 251.
2 Delineatio, Works (Boston), VII. 55.

1

istry to be constructed, being to the eye of mere physica, science more or less dense compactions and crystallizations of the supposed final elementary atoms into certain mathematical forms, proportions, and equivalents, called bodies, under the processes of analysis, are increasing in number in the chemical catalogue, or sometimes diminishing, some of them being from time to time resolved into other elements, as nitrogen is reported to have been, lately; thus diminishing, or increasing, the number of simples, until we are left in absolute uncertainty whether the sum total will finally diminish to unity, or increase to infinity; and all these simple substances, if no further resolvable into kinds, are yet divisible into parts, as some electricians decompose electricity into infinitely little spheres, that spontaneously take on a motion of rotation on an axis, and divide each sphere into axis, poles, equator, centre, circumference, tropics, parallels, meridians, hemispheres; but, admitting the spheres, we have only arrived at a more primary stage of the proximate materials of construction, being as yet only secondary forms and modes of substance, even in the invisible, imponderable, indecomposable, indivisable ethers. And here ends, it would seem, the entire scope of physical science, for the present, as to these materials. But then we have, further, light, heat, electricity (according to some), magnetism, nervous force, gravitation, and mechanical power, which are neither ethers, gases, nor clouds of ethereal spheres, at all, but, as it seems, merely correlated and convertible forces exponents of different forms of force," say the Academicians, that is, we may suppose, degrees and modes of power, which yet acts under laws which are found to be mathematical, and, for that matter, identical with the laws of power as thought; and the power itself would seem to be identical in nature with the power of thought as cause. And so, in the last physical analysis,

2

66

1 De La Rive's Treatise on Electricity, by Walker, London, 1856.
Trans. Roy. Soc., Lond. 1850, p. 62.

and at the last stage of the forms and modes of substance, the resolvability, as well as the divisibility, of matter is found passing into an actual totality of power, at the point of beginning of creation, at the very top of Pan's pyramid, where the transition is so easy to things divine; and that power, into which all matter is thus resolved, is found to be of the nature wholly and absolutely of the power of thought as the primal thinking essence and cause of all created things. An actual experimental resolution of these simple elements into this next stage of degrees and modes of power, and these, again, into the still further and last stage of the totality of all power, has not as yet been quite effected, perhaps, by physical science alone; though some late experimentation would seem to amount almost to a sensible dem. onstration that the fact must be so. The demonstration is rather by the methods of metaphysical science, which transcends the limits of sensible experience, rises into the region of this totality of all power, and beholds the subject from the point of view of the one Eternal Power of Thought; for man can do this, being the image of his Maker, and his soul being so framed as to be "capable of the image of the universal world."

And so, going out with Bacon through physics into metaphysics, we arrive, at last, in the unity and continuity of all science, at Philosophy itself, and at the Divine Soul of the universe, in an eternal state of living activity in the perpetual distribution of variety in the total unity of the creation, in the universal flow of the Providential order; for, says Bacon, "the matter is in a perpetual flux," or as Plato says, again, "Soul is the oldest and most divine of all things, of which a motion, by receiving the generation [taking on generation], imparts an ever flowing existence."1 Certainly, nothing less than this can give any rational and conceivable philosophy of the universe. All science leads directly to such a philosophy; all facts prove its truth; and 1 Laws, Works (Bohn), V. 543.

this comprehensible conception is, at least, better than any incomprehensible absurdity that ever was, or can be, invented. The Baconian caution is a good one: that we are not to give out "a dream of our fancy for an exemplar of the world," but rather, "under divine favor, an apocalyptic revelation and true vision of the tracks and ways of the Creator in Nature and His creatures." 1

§ 8. SCIENCE IN POETRY.

That the author of these plays had arrived at a similar view of the constitution of the universe, is made clear in many passages. How else can we understand those remarkable lines of the "Tempest," in which, having brought upon the stage a scene among the gods, and made Juno, Ceres, and Iris enact a play before mortal eyes, when all at once they vanish at the bidding of the magician, Prospero, he makes him say:

"These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all that it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made of; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep."— Act IV. Sc. 1.

For, this vision of a world and this vision of the stage are made essentially in the same manner and of the same stuff, are both alike substantial; and yet, they may vanish, like an insubstantial pageant, into oblivion, at the bidding of the Great Magician, when his time shall come.

Again, says Bacon, in the De Augmentis, "This Janus of the imagination has too different faces; for the face towards reason hath the print of truth, but the face towards action hath the print of goodness"; an expression, which

1 Lectori, Works (Boston), VII. 161.

appears again in a letter, in which he prays that, living or dying, "the print of the goodness of King James " may be in his heart; but all Calibans, or other human monsters, "turn'd to barnacles, or to apes

With foreheads villainous low,"

and all Stephanos and Trinculos, " abhorred slaves," that "steal by line and level," and

"Which any print of goodness will not take,

Being capable of all ill,"

this magician, by the help of his invisible Ariel, would soundly hunt out of his kingdom, when his "Genius" should have "the air of freedom"; and his labors would not cease until all his enemies were laid at his feet. And he was able to make this speech :

"Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;
And ye, that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him,
When he comes back; you demi-puppets, that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid
(Weak masters though ye be) I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt: the strong-bas'd promontory
Have I made shake; and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves, at my command,
Have wak'd their sleepers; oped, and let them forth
By my so potent art. - But this rough magic
I here abjure; and when I have requir'd

The "Tempest" was nearly the last play written, or perhape

1 Letter of July 30, 1624, Works (Philad.), III. 24.