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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    he writes to Sir Toby Matthew, 4 will at one time or another play the bank-rowte with books, and since I have lost much time with this age, I would be glad to recover it with posterity.’ In this conviction he either wrote all his greater works in Latin or afterwards trans¬ lated them into that language. Of the Advancement of Learning alone he says : ‘It is a book that will live, and be a citizen of the world, as English books are not.’ On the other hand, he seems to have felt profoundly the new danger which beset the learning of his time from the tendency to set choiceness of phrase above exactness of thought and expression, £that first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter,’ and think rather of 4 the choiceness of the phrase . . . and the sweet fall¬ ing of the clauses,’ than of the sense. This new verbalism of the Renaissance writers was, in his eyes, no less fatal than the older verbalism of the Schoolmen ; and he speaks of himself, on the contrary, 4 as being one that accounted words to be subservient or ministerial to matter.’ Yet he himself, it has been truly said, writes 4 the finest English of the days when its tones were finest ’ ; his prose is the prose of 4 a man who had in himself all of the poet save the poet's heart ’; his is 4 a fancy among the masters of prose equalled by Plato alone.’ The literary form, which Bacon especially favours, lends itself to striking and picturesque expression. It is the Aphorism, which he prefers to 4 methodical delivery ’ chiefly because it answers to the incompleteness of knowledge as he conceives it, but also from the unerring instinct of the literary artist that it is best calculated to arouse attention and create interest in what he has to say. 4 Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite to enquire farther.’1 Of this species of writing the great example is the Essayj, or, as he describes them, 4 dispersed medita¬ tions,’ which, 4 of all my other works, have been most current ; for that, as it seems, they come home to men’s businesse and bosomes.’ Of the third edition he says that 4 the Latin volume of them (being in the universal 1 Works, iii. 405.