TWELFTH LETTER



ON LORD BACON



It is not long since the ridiculous and threadbare question was discussed in 

a celebrated assembly; who was the greatest man, Cæsar or Alexander, 

Tamerlane or Cromwell?



Somebody said that it must undoubtedly be Sir Isaac Newton. This man was 

right; for if true greatness consists in having received from heaven a 

powerful genius, and in using it to enlighten one's self and others, a man 

like Newton — and such a one is hardly to be met with in ten centuries — is 

surely the greatest man; and those statesmen and conquerors which no age has 

ever been without, are commonly but so many illustrious villains. It is the 

man who sways our minds by the prevalence of reason and the native force of 

truth, not they who make slaves through violence; the man who knows the 

universe, not those who disfigure it, that claims our respect.



Therefore, as you desire to be informed of the great men that England has 

produced, I shall begin with the Bacons, the Lockes, and the Newtons. The 

generals and ministers will come after them in their turn.



I must begin with the celebrated baron Verulam, known to the rest of Europe 

by the name of Bacon, which was his family name. He was the son of a keeper 

of the seals, and was for a considerable time chancellor under James I. 

Notwithstanding the intrigues of court and the occupations of his office, 

which would have required his whole attention, he found the time to be a 

great philosopher, a good historian, and an elegant writer; and what is yet 

more wonderful is that he lived in an age where the art of writing well was 

hardly known, and where sound philosophy was still less so. As is the way 

among mankind, he was more valued after his death than while he lived. His 

enemies were at the court of London; his admirers were in all of Europe.



When Marquis d'Effiat brought Princess Mary, daughter of Henry the Great, 

over to be married to King Charles, this minister paid Bacon a visit, who 

being then ill in bed, received him with close curtains. "You are like the 

angels," said d'Effiat to him; "we hear much talk of them, and while 

everybody thinks them quite superior to men, we are never favored with a 

sight of them."



You have been told in what manner Bacon was accused of a crime which is very 

far from being the sin of a philosopher; of being corrupted by money; and 

how he was sentenced by the house of peers to pay a fine of about four 

hundred thousand livres of our money, besides losing his office of 

chancellor and the rank of a peer.



At present the English revere his memory to such a degree that they will not 

admit that he was guilty. Should you ask me what I think of it, I will make 

use of a saying I heard from Lord Bolingbroke. They happened to be talking 

of the avarice of which the duke of Marlborough had been accused, and cited 

several instances of it, for the truth of which they appealed to Lord 

Bolingbroke, who being his sworn enemy, might, perhaps, quite properly say 

what he thought. "He was," said he, "so great a man that I have forgotten 

his vices."



I shall, therefore, limit myself to those qualities which have acquired for 

Chancellor Bacon the esteem of all Europe.



The most singular, as well as the best of all his works, is that which is 

now the least read, and the most useless: I mean his Novum Scientiarum 

Organum. This is the scaffold by means of which the edifice of the new 

philosophy was built; and when the building was at least partially 

completed, the scaffold was no longer of any use.



Chancellor Bacon was unacquainted with nature, but he knew and pointed out 

all the paths which lead to her. He had very early despised what the 

Universities call philosophy; and he did everything in his power that those 

bodies, instituted for the perfection of human reason, might cease to mar 

it, by their "quiddities," their "honor of a vacuum," their "substantial 

forms," with the rest of that jargon which ignorance and a ridiculous 

combination of religion had consecrated.



He is the father of experimental philosophy. It is true that wonderful 

discoveries had been made before his time: the mariner's compass, the art of 

printing, that of engraving, the art of painting in oil, that of making 

glass, the art of restoring in some measure sight to old men, by means of 

spectacles, the secret of making gunpowder, etc. They had gone in search of, 

discovered, and conquered a new world. Who would not have thought that these 

sublime discoveries had been made by the greatest philosophers, and in times 

much more enlightened than ours? By no means; for these great changes took 

place in the age of the most stupid barbarity. Chance alone brought forth 

almost all these inventions, and it is even possible that chance had a great 

share in the discovery of America; it least, it has been believed that 

Christopher Columbus undertook this voyage on the faith of a captain of a 

ship who had been cast by a storm on one of the Caribbean islands.



Be this as it may, men had learned to go from one end of the world to the 

other; they learned how to destroy cities with an artificial thunder much 

more terrible than the real; but they were still ignorant of the circulation 

of the blood, the weight of the air, the laws of motion, light, the number 

of our planets, etc. And a man capable enough to maintain a thesis on the 

"Categories of Aristotle," the universale a parte rei, or some other 

foolishness, was considered as a prodigy.



The most wonderful and useful inventions are by no means those which do most 

honor to the human mind.



It is to a mechanical instinct which exists in most men that we owe the 

arts, and in no way whatever to sound philosophy.



The discovery of fire, the arts of making bread, of melting and working 

metals, of building houses, the invention of the shuttle, are infinitely 

more useful than printing and the compass; yet these arts were invented by 

men who were still savages.



What astonishing things have the Greeks and Romans since done in mechanics? 

Yet men believed, in their time, that the heavens were of crystal, and the 

stars were little lamps that sometimes fell into the sea; and one of their 

greatest philosophers, after much research, had at length discovered that 

the stars were pebbles that had become detached from the earth.



In a word, there was not a man who had any idea of experimental philosophy 

before Chancellor Bacon; and of all the physical experiments which have been 

made since his time, there is hardly a single one which has not been pointed 

out in his book. He had even made a good number of them himself. He 

constructed several sort of pneumatic machines, by which he discovered the 

elasticity of the air; he had long attempted the discovery of its weight, 

and was even at times very near to it, when it was laid hold of by 

Torricelli. A short time after, experimental physics began to be cultivated 

in almost all parts of Europe. This was a hidden treasure, which Bacon had 

suspected, and which all the philosophers, encouraged by his promises tried 

to unearth.



But what surprises me most is to see in his book a discussion, in specific 

terms, of that new attraction of which Newton passes for the inventor.



"We must inquire," said Bacon, "whether there be not a certain magnetic 

force, which operates reciprocally between the earth and other heavy bodies, 

between the moon and the ocean, between the planets, etc."



In another place he says: "Either heavy bodies are impelled toward the 

centre of the earth, or they are mutually attracted by it, and in this 

latter case it is evident that the nearer falling bodies approach the earth, 

the more forcibly are they attracted by it. We must try to see," he 

continues, "if the same pendulum clock goes faster on the top of a mountain, 

or at the bottom of a mine. If the force of the weight diminishes on the 

mountain, and increases in the mine, it is probable the earth has a real 

attracting quality."



This precursor in philosophy was also an elegant writer, a historian, and a 

wit.



His moral essays are in high regard; but they are made rather to instruct 

than to please; and as they are neither a satire on human nature, like the 

Maxims of La Rochefoucauld, nor a school of skepticism, like Montaigne; they 

are less read than these two ingenious books.



His History of Henry VII passed for a masterpiece; but I am much mistaken if 

it can be compared with the history of our illustrious M. de Thou.



In speaking of that famous impostor Perkin, a Jew by birth, who assumed so 

boldly the name of Richard IV, king of England, encouraged by the duchess of 

Burgundy, and who disputed the crown with Henry VII, the Chancellor Bacon 

expresses himself in these terms: "About this time King Henry was beset with 

evil spirits, by the magic of the duchess of Burgundy, who conjured up from 

hell the ghost of Edward IV, in order to torment King Henry. When the 

duchess of Burgundy had instructed Perkin, she began to consider in what 

region of Heaven she should make this comet appear, and resolved immediately 

that it should burst forth on the horizon of Ireland."



I think our sage de Thou seldom gives in to this hocus-pocus, which used 

formerly to pass for the sublime, but which at present is properly called 

"nonsense."