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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    condemnation which has so often been passed upon Bacon’s career as a statesman. As Gardiner has said, c No one to whom the history of that half-century [the half- century following the period of Bacon’s political activity] is present can agree with those numerous writers who speak of Bacon’s political work as inferior to his scientific.’1 The primary cause of his failure as a statesman is to be sought rather in the conditions which beset his political activity than in essential defects either of insight or of character. (An intellectual unity,’ says the same writer, ‘ pervades the whole of the advice which he gave. He may sometimes have held his tongue when he knew that his counsel would be disregarded, but he never prophesied smooth things to suit the wishes of those by whom his counsel was required.’ The truth is that he was too much in advance of his time on all the deeper questions of statesmanship to get the ear either of the sovereign or of parliament, or even to convince his colleagues in authority of the wisdom of his measures. Without fit instruments it is impossible for the ablest to achieve political success, and no statesman can command the instruments. Even the worse than questionable methods to which he had recourse in his endeavours to compass his political ends were, to a considerable extent, dictated to him by the conditions of his activity. As Gardiner has pointed out, 4 Bacon must look to achieve a statesman’s ends by the means of a courtier.’ And when we remember that the Court was that of Elizabeth and of James, we shall not be so ready to blame Bacon for the subserviency of his language or for the Machiavel- lism of his policy as those have been who have forgotten to make allowance for this limiting condition. Much which we should not tolerate in a statesman of our own day was practically inevitable in that age. Doubtless the lower tendencies of Bacon’s moral nature, as they are revealed to us in the Essays, and still more nakedly in the Commentarius Solutus, to which he seems to have confided 1 Art. ‘ Bacon,’ Diet, of Nat. Biog.