, is the best in the
world: it is the best for providing us with the maximum of bread, beef,
beer, and means of buying bread, beer, and beef: and we have got it
because we have never--like those publicans the French--trusted to fine
sayings about truth and justice and human rights, but blundered on,
adding a patch here and knocking a hole there, as our humour prompted
us.

This sovereign contempt of all speculation--simply as
speculation--reaches its acme in the Essay on Bacon. The curious naivete
with which Macaulay denounces all philosophy in that vigorous production
excites a kind of perverse admiration. How can one refuse to admire the
audacity which enables a man explicitly to identify philosophy with
humbug? It is what ninety-nine men out of a hundred think, but not one
in a thousand dares to say. Goethe says somewhere that he likes
Englishmen because English fools are the most thoroughgoing of fools.
English 'Philistines,' as represented by Macaulay, the prince of
Philistines, according to Matthew Arnold, carry their contempt of the
higher intellectual interests to a pitch of real sublimity. Bacon's
theory of induction, says Macaulay, in so many words, was valueless.
Everybody could reason before it as well as after. But Bacon really
performed a service of inestimable value to mankind; and it consisted
precisely in this, that he called their attention from philosophy to the
pursuit of material advantages. The old philosophers had gone on
bothering about theology, ethics, and the true and beautiful, and such
other nonsense. Bacon taught us to work at chemistry and mechanics, to
invent diving-bells and steam-engines and spinning-jennies. We could
never, it seems, have found out the advantages of this direction of our
energies without a philosopher, and so far philosophy is negatively
good. It has written up upon all the supposed avenues to inquiry, 'No
admission except on business;' that is, upon the business of direct
practical discovery. We English have taken the hint, and we have
therefore lived to see when a man can breakfast in London and dine in
Edinburgh, and may look forward to a day when the tops of Ben-Nevis and
Helvellyn will be cultivated like flower-gardens, and when machines
constructed on principles yet to be discovered will be in every house.

The theory which underlies this conclusion is often explicitly stated.
All philosophy has produced mere futile logomachy. Greek sages and Roman
moralists an