English philosophers and schools of philosophy / by James Seth.

  • James Seth
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: English philosophers and schools of philosophy / by James Seth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    political life. His moral shortcomings are the defects of his intellectual qualities ; it is because he was a great thinker that he was not a great man. Even so careful a writer as R. W. Church, solicitous as he was to do complete justice to the character of Bacon as a statesman, allows the dualism and contradiction to remain, and sees in his political career nothing more than the effort to provide himself with the wherewithal to pursue the higher ends of the intellectual life, and even the constant temptation to abandon the life of the student of nature for that of the self-seeking man of affairs. In that political activity which formed so large a part of Bacon’s life, he recognises only 4 the distraction of his mind between the noble work on which his soul was bent, and the necessities of that a civil ” or professional and political life by which he had to maintain his estate.’1 Yet he admits that Bacon’s political life had its own worthy ideals and aspirations, no less than his intellectual life. 4 So ended a career, than which no other in his time had grander and nobler aims, aims, however mistaken, for the greatness and good of England, aims for the enlargemen of knowledge and truth, and for the benefit of mankind.’ 2 While we must admit that Bacon’s true greatness is intellectual rather than moral, and that there is an element of truth in the view of the writers just mentioned, yet it is mechanical and superficial to separate the two lives completely from one another, and to see in the one simply the opposite and the negation of the other. In spite of what he himself may have said, in moments of professional and political disappointment, in disparagement of the busy life of the lawyer, statesman, and courtier, and the assertion of his true vocation as that of the seeker after truth, it is impossible to contemplate his entire career without concluding from it that his interest was no less practical and political than intellectual and theoretic; that philosophy was, if the nobler occupation, still only the occupation of his leisure ; that, from first to last, he