The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 38, December, 1860: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 38, December, 1860: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
height from which he beheld the mutual importance and relations of all
knowledge. We do not know where to find a clearer statement of the
connection of the sciences than in the following words:--"All sciences
are connected, and support each other with mutual aid, as parts of the
same whole, of which each performs its work, not for itself alone, but
for the others as well: as the eye directs the whole body, and the foot
supports the whole; so that any part of knowledge taken from the rest is
like an eye torn out or a foot cut off."[32]
Such, then, in brief, appears to have been Bacon's general system of
philosophy. He has nowhere presented it in a compact form; and his style
of writing is often so corrupt, and his use of terms so inexact, that
any exposition of his views, exhibiting them in a methodical
arrangement, is liable to the charge of possessing a definiteness of
statement beyond that which his opinions had assumed in his own mind.
Still, the view that has now been given of his philosophy corresponds as
nearly as may be with the indications afforded by his works. The details
of his system present many points of peculiar interest. He was not
merely a theorist, with speculative views of a character far in advance
of those of the mass of contemporary schoolmen, but a practical
investigator as well, who by his experiments and discoveries pushed
forward the limits of knowledge, and a sound scholar who saw and
displayed to others the true means by which progress in learning was to
be secured. In this latter respect, no parts of his writings are more
remarkable than those in which he urges the importance of philological
and linguistic studies. His remarks on comparative grammar, on the
relations of languages, on the necessity of the study of original texts,
are distinguished by good sense, by extensive and (for the time) exact
scholarship, and by a breadth of view unparalleled, so far as we are
aware, by any other writer of his age. The treatise on the Greek
Grammar--which occupies a large portion of the incomplete "Compendium
Studii Philosophiae," and which is broken off in the middle by the
mutilation of the manuscript--contains, in addition to many curious
remarks illustrative of the learning of the period, much matter of
permanent interest to the student of language. The passages which we
have quoted in regard to the defects of the translations of Greek
authors show to how great a degree the study of Greek and other ancient
tongues had been neglected. Most of the scholars of the day contented
themselves with collecting the Greek words which they found interpreted
in the works of St. Augustine, St. Jerome, Origen, Martianus Capella,
Boëthius, and a few other later Latin authors; and were satisfied to use
these interpretations without investigation of their exactness, or
without understanding their meaning. Hugo of Saint Victor, (Dante's "Ugo
di Sanvittore è qui con elli,") one of the most illustrious of Bacon's
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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