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minds, who, not having had the advantage of education, and being denied the means of accurate knowledge, exercise their faculties in a way quite satisfactory to themselves, but by no means conducive to the advancement of philosophical truth. They begin by guessing, and then from their scanty and inaccurate information, cull out such facts as may seem to favor their foregone conclusion. Such men are apt to be wise in their own eyes, and in the eyes of others no better informed, who are in the way of being infected with their crude notions. How many of those the world calls the Philosophers of antiquity were precisely in this condition! With their limited means of knowledge, there were but few subjects in regard to which they could do more than guess in the first instance; and then, having dignified their guesses with the name of philosophical tests," they went on to magnify such few facts as they could get hold of, into presumptions, and coin proofs of the correctness of their conjectures. This they did, because it was all they could do. It was not so much that they did not know how to reason, as that they had not, and could not obtain, the necessary data. Socrates alone had the sobriety and unpretending simplicity of mind and character to see the insufficiency of his data, and to declare that all his knowledge was "that he knew nothing." This saying alone is proof enough that he himself belonged to the Baconian school, and that, with the means of knowledge since vouchsafed to us, he would have reasoned as accurately as any disciple of that school could wish. It was not his fault that he could not experiment on the nature of God, the great problem that occupied his mind. That other minds in his day, wrought by accurate methods is proved by the unimpeachable correctness of their reasoning in Mathematics, the only science the axioms of which belong to all time, and are equally in the reach of all men every where. In that exact science men were not long in finding out, that, however, by knowing three of the six parts of a triangle, they could calculate the rest, yet the knowledge of two only could lead to no conclusion. They knew, as well as Lord Bacon himself, that, before they could begin to reason, they must resort to experiment, that is to mensuration, to get a third. Their misfortune was, that, in other sciences, it was not so easy to ascertain the number and quality of the necessary data, that the means of getting at them

were limited, and that the subjects which they most desired to investigate were too interesting to be dismissed from their thoughts, even when convinced that certainty was unattainable. They had nothing left for it but to muse—to dream-to conjecture, and, at last, to persuade, themselves that the probabilities in favor of what they desired to believe amounted to proof. Henc ethey learned to look into their own minds, and to seize upon their impulses, their desires themselves, as facts to reason from, in support of desired conclusions. This led to the ideal school. "The desire of immortality," said Plato, "proves the soul to be immortal." It was a grand thought, the offspring of other and grander thoughts. It implied a previous conviction of the existence and goodness of GOD; of his interest in his creatures, and his purpose 66 not to leave himself without a witness" in their hearts. Hence they insisted that this "longing after immortality" was implanted by him as the only means, without direct revelation, of giving man to know himself to be immortal. It awakened a wonder that such revelation had not been made a hope that God would some day reveal himself, and thus prepared the mind to expect a revelation and to believe it when made.

That altar at Athens "to the unknown God!" did it not import that they who erected it knew that the idols they bowed down to, in the eager cravings of the heart after a god to worship, were not gods; and that the only living and true God was not known to them? Even so said St. Paul. "The world, by wisdom, knew not God;" and this truth the Baconians of Athens had found out. They had ascertained the insufficiency of their data to determine the character of the Creator, and the nature of the case admitted of no experimentum crucis, or any other sort of experiment to supply the defect. They saw that reasoning was vain, and they ceased to reason, but they could still feed their hungry minds with speculation, and console themselves with the idea, that if they did not know God, it was because God had chosen not to make himself known to them. To us, it seems that it is precisely here that Lord Bacon himself would have rested.

But, though they had no means of making the much desired experiment, it was made for them, and it was literally the experimentum crucis. Armed with this, the Apostle was prepared to say to them, "whom therefore

ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you." "Life and immortality are now brought to light," and God revealed himself to be just the being that Socrates had worshipped, in fancy and in hope, and that all good men desired to find him to be. It was a triumph of Platonism. It was experimental proof that the conclusion drawn by Plato from the workings of the mind and the aspirations of the heart were true; and none received the new manifestation with more undoubting faith, than the disciples of that school. We will not go so far as to say that the reasonings by which they had arrived at the conclusion thus signally verified, were logical, analytic, inductive, or capable of being indicated on any sound principles of ratiocination. But the Baconian himself must admit that he would have had no sufficient data to pronounce the conclusion false. And even now, he who takes the instincts of his nature, his native sense of right and wrong, his impulses and desires as facts to reason from, will continue to do so; and the author of the Novum Organum himself would be bound to admit, on his own principles, that there are no sufficient data to prove such a one to be in error. If it be an error, it is one that has long been precious to us, and is every day more and more deeply rooted in our hearts and minds, as we approach the time when all error shall be corrected, and all delusion forever dispelled.

We have dwelt the longer on this topic, because we have long been satisfied, that though it is sometimes possible to beat conviction into the head of a dunce, there is no process by which he can be taught to reason out new conclusions for himself; and we are equally sure that it is impossible to keep a man of acute, inquiring mind from inverting and applying such processes without aid from others. He takes to the use of his faculties, as soon as they unfold themselves, as naturally as a child to the use of his teeth. Observe him, and you will see at once that, without waiting to be told, he knows that he has them, and knows why they were furnished. Supply him with facts, and he will put them together for himself, and arrive at his conclusions by the same process which Lord Bacon has shown to be natural. It may be well at first to check his instinctive propensity to do this, by admonishing him not to begin to reason too soon; but when his self-taught philosophy has prepared him to understand the teachings of the Baconian school, he will find himself

in the condition of the man who had been talking prose all his life without knowing it.

We hope not to be understood as disparaging Lord Bacon, or undervaluing the service rendered by him to the world. The latter we estimate as highly as one any can; and of Lord Bacon himself we are ready to speak in the words of General Hammond, as of "one to whom was vouchsafed the utmost intellectual capacity with which man, as far as we know, can be endowed." The merit of his achievements in the cause of truth and humanity is in his triumph over a false, artificial, scholastic logic, the fallacy of which was not more obvious to any than to them that used it. It was not that he convinced them. He disabused others. He exposed the fallacy of a cheating system, devised to conceal the falsehood of doctrines by which men were deluded and enslaved. Had Romanism needed no disguise, the logic of the schools would probably never have been invented, or never used but for amusement. But it was no laughing matter, when, under pain of fire and faggot, men were required to reject the evidence of their senses, and to yield a zealous assent to propositions condemned by that, and by inward consciousness, because supported by a sort of logic they might not know how to answer. Had Lord Bacon done no more than to shame such sophistry out of countenance, he would have deserved the gratitude of the age he lived in. He, doubtless, did more than this; but it is for this precisely that he is most praised by the sciolists who always have his name on their lips. This is what they call the introduction of a new method of reasoning, when, we have no doubt, it was no more than a restoration of the method used by Noah before the flood, and the exposure and suppression of an artificial juggle, devised to silence all, while convincing none. And this, too, was no new device. It was but the application of an old and innocent trick to a new and wicked purpose. It was as old as Eubulides, and no more disproved the soundness of syllogistic reasoning, than the sophisms of his school discredited the demonstrations of Euclid. And who, at this day, questions the justness of a conclusion deduced by regular syllogism, because a fallacy may be so presented, as to look like one to the unskilful? Let it contradict the evidence of his senses, or his inward consciousness, or any known truth, and not only will he reject it, but the logician himself will tell him how to

detect, expose and refute it. It was but the other day that we saw an algebraic equation so worked, as to prove three to be equal to nothing. It might have perplexed a learner, but whom would it have convinced? Is algebra, therefore, fallacious? No; and the professor who had prepared the puzzle was at hand to solve it. If, indeed, he had an end to answer by it, he might have withheld the explanation. He might have built on it a new argument in favor of the Trinity in Unity; for if, as all will admit, nothing is not greater than one, and if, as he had proved, three is not greater than nothing, then three is not greater than one. Such are the tricks that men play for their amusement. But is logic or algebra, therefore, answerable for the folly of those, who, on such grounds, would discredit either the evidence of their senses, or the great fundamental doctrine of revealed truth? When schoolmen thus imposed on the simplicity of the unlearned, Lord Bacon taught their dupes to laugh at them. But did he teach them to laugh at genuine logical reasoning?

Lord Bacon saw that men had not facts enough to reason from. They had begun their speculations too soon. He advised them to collect more facts. It was the same advice which, as the story goes, that merry monarch, Charles II., hinted to the royal society. He proposed, it is said, that they should investigate the cause "why a tub of water with a fish in it, weighs no more than the same tub and water without the fish." They wrote many learned treatises which were handed to him, but as he liked a joke better than learned disquisitions, instead of reading them, he asked if they had weighed the tub with and without the fish. Lord Bacon, too, seems to have thought that in seeking facts to reason from, it is best to resort, when practicable, to the evidence of the senses. We remember to have once heard this same suggestion made by a pert chap to a grave professor. The latter, in lecturing on the uses of the pendulum, had said that it might be employed to settle a point then in dispute about the height of the Natural Bridge. "Go on the bridge," said he, "let down a uniform rod to the bottom, make it vibrate, compare its vibrations with those of the second pendulum, and then, by calculation, you get the exact length." "Would it not do," said the youngster, "to measure the rod." In all but the modesty that characterized

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