gave the
substance." There remains, therefore, but one place in Bacon's cyclopaedia
where we might hope to find some information on this subject,--namely,
where he treats on the faculties and functions of the mind, and in
particular, of understanding and reason. And here he dwells indeed on the
doubtful evidence of the senses as one of the causes of error so
frequently pointed out by other philosophers. But he remarks that, though
they charged the deceit upon the senses, their chief errors arose from a
different cause, from the weakness of their intellectual powers, and from
the manner of collecting and concluding upon the reports of the senses.
And he then points to what is to be the work of his life,--an improved
system of invention, consisting of the _Experientia Literata_, and the
_Interpretatio Naturae_.

It must be admitted, therefore, that one of the problems which has
occupied most philosophers,--nay, which, in a certain sense, may be called
the first impulse to all philosophy,--the question whether we can know
anything, is entirely passed over by Bacon; and we may well understand why
the name and title of philosopher has been withheld from one who looked
upon human knowledge as an art, but never inquired into its causes and
credentials. This is a point which M. Fischer has not overlooked; but he
has not always kept it in view, and in wishing to secure to Bacon his
place in the history of philosophy, he has deprived him of that more
exalted place which Bacon himself wished to occupy in the history of the
world. Among men like Locke, Hume, Kant, and Hegel, Bacon is, and always
will be, a stranger. Bacon himself would have drawn a very strong line
between their province and his own. He knows where their province lies;
and if he sometimes speaks contemptuously of formal philosophy, it is only
when formal philosophy has encroached on his own ground, or when it breaks
into the enclosure of revealed religion, which he wished to be kept
sacred. There, he holds, the human mind should not enter, except in the
attitude of the Semnones, with chained hands.

Bacon's philosophy could never supplant the works of Plato and Aristotle,
and though his method might prove useful in every branch of
knowledge,--even in the most abstruse points of logic and metaphysics,--yet
there has never been a Baconian school of philosophy, in the sense in
which we speak of the school of Locke or Kant. Bacon was above or below
philosophy. Philos