on friend.

_April, 1864._

XI. BACON IN GERMANY.(35)

"If our German philosophy is considered in England and in France as German
dreaming, we ought not to render evil for evil, but rather to prove the
groundlessness of such accusations by endeavoring ourselves to appreciate,
without any prejudice, the philosophers of France and England, such as
they are, and doing them that justice which they deserve; especially as,
in scientific subjects, injustice means ignorance." With these words M.
Kuno Fischer introduces his work on Bacon to the German public; and what
he says is evidently intended, not as an attack upon the conceit of
French, and the exclusiveness of English philosophers, but rather as an
apology which the author feels that he owes to his own countrymen. It
would seem, indeed, as if a German was bound to apologize for treating
Bacon as an equal of Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, and Schelling. Bacon's name is
never mentioned by German writers without some proviso that it is only by
a great stretch of the meaning of the word, or by courtesy, that he can be
called a philosopher. His philosophy, it is maintained, ends where all
true philosophy begins; and his style or method has frequently been
described as unworthy of a systematic thinker. Spinoza, who has exercised
so great an influence on the history of thought in Germany, was among the
first who spoke slightingly of the inductive philosopher. When treating of
the causes of error, he writes, "What he (Bacon) adduces besides, in order
to explain error, can easily be traced back to the Cartesian theory; it is
this, that the human will is free and more comprehensive than the
understanding, or, as Bacon expresses himself in a more confused manner,
in the forty-ninth aphorism, 'The human understanding is not a pure light,
but obscured by the will.' " In works on the general history of
philosophy, German authors find it difficult to assign any place to Bacon.
Sometimes he is classed with the Italian school of natural philosophy,
sometimes he is contrasted with Jacob Boehme. He is named as one of the
many who helped to deliver mankind from the thralldom of scholasticism.
But any account of what he really was, what he did to immortalize his
name, and to gain that prominent position among his own countrymen which
he has occupied to the present day, we should look for in vain even in the
most complete and systematic treatises on the history of philosophy
published in G