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WHAT is truth? said jesting Pilate ;a and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be that delight in giddiness; and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits, which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labour which men take in finding out of truth; nor again, that when it is found, it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favour; but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself. One of the later schools of the Grecians examineth the matter, and is at a stand to think what should be in it, that men should love lies; where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets; nor for advantage, as with the merchant, but for the lie's sake. But I cannot tell this same truth is a naked and open daylight, that doth not show the masks, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day, but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth

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He refers to the following passage in the Gospel of St. John, xviii. 38: "Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all."

He probably refers to the "New Academy," a sect of Greek philosophers, one of whose moot questions was, "What is truth?" Upon which they came to the unsatisfactory conclusion that mankind has no criterion by which to form a judgment.

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him attributes above humanity, to ascribe to his work the defects of his situation.

The Instauratio Magna, it must be admitted, is deficient in method. Bacon could not penetrate at once to the essential attributes of things, and divide them according to their distinguishing difference. It does not appear to have occurred to him that in the production of every creation of intellect, memory, imagination, and reason harmoniously concur, and that it is impossible to achieve the slightest triumph of genius without calling into simultaneous action the agency of these faculties, and blending their variegated resources in the elaboration of thought. Memory and reason are the woof and the warp of the intellectual tissue; and no such thing as consecutive judgment can be produced if they perform their functions apart, and refuse to interlace their resources. Of course each of the triune faculties will more or less preponderate according to the nature of the subject in which they are engaged. Imagination plays an inferior part to memory in the historian, as reason to imagination in the philosopher, but still in due subordination to the severe canons of judgment which sits as the controlling umpire in every grand operation of genius. Imagination may be more exercised by the poet who creates, than by the historian who narrates; but the thought will not be entertained for a moment, that memory is the presiding faculty in the historian, and imagination in the fabulist. In proportion as men are endowed with these faculties, they require the augmentation of the power, which weighs and balances facts, refines images, and gives to the shadows which their memory or fancy calls up, a graphic and life-breathing motion. If all the ordinary men of our day were provided with prodigious memories, without any increase of the rationalistic faculty, the number of diners-out with a ready stock of composed matter on subjects political, religious, scientific, and legendary, might be increased, but history could not be benefited by the addition of a single page worth the reading. Men would become so many parrots; the world would certainly retrograde, and the rationalistic element, which now tolerably manages to keep up with every man's accumulation of facts, would be entirely overpowered by a deluge of useless particularities. Imagination stands in the same relation to the poet as memory to the historian; and if all men were blessed with the command of ideality which Dante and Milton enjoyed, without a proportionate influx of judgment and memory, we might have an endless flood of legends, but not one epic. So strict is the union of these three powers, even in productions of opposite tendencies, that it may be doubted whether imagination is not as necessary to the geometrician who invents, as to the poet who creates; and whether memory may

not play a more distinguished part in the productions of the philosopher than of the historian.

The human mind for nearly two thousand years, had been lulled into an entire forgetfulness of objective facts, during all that period regarding the Aristotelian physics as the highest fruits that reason could reap from scientific inquiry; and it required a man of Bacon's breadth of capacity and spirit-stirring eloquence, to throw all the energy of his nature into the opposite element, and by showing how the splendid treasures it contained might be reaped, and the errors of the Greeks retrieved, to awaken the world from its slumbers, and set it on the road of physical discovery. If his nomenclature was logically incorrect the empirical views out of which it arose gave men's minds, perverted by speculative reasoning, a strong objective bent. If his scientific method was defective, it led men to abandon pure rationalistic inquiry, which had produced all the fruit it was capable of yielding, and to explore the fields of nature, where treasures undreamt of lay concealed. If he placed the end of philosophy in the discovery of visionary and chimerical objects, the pursuit led men to the detection of the laws of phenomena, which has already tripled man's power over nature, and enriched the intellect with the possession of a new world.— Science can afford to overlook errors which balanced the onesided tendencies of the human mind, turned the vessel aside from a barren coast, and shot it right into the harbour of discovery. The triumph to which his spirit led, rectified the mistakes with which it was accompanied, and left mankind nothing to gather from the mine of nature which he opened, but the pure ore of truth. His fervent appeals still thunder in the ear of every generation, irrespective of creed or nation; while the trains of light which they leave behind them stimulate every succeeding race to renewed efforts in the path of discovery. The human mind had never been so profoundly stirred since the times of Archimedes and Aristotle, as on the day when this mighty magician spake the wheels of science, which had stood still for two thousand years, impelled by his breath, began to move, and the spirit of Europe was evoked on all sides to impart to them accelerated velocity. Pascal and Torricelli, guided by his rules, established the properties of air, and Newton, in the spirit of his method, and directed by his hints, threw back the curtain of the heavens, revealed the laws of light, explained the phenomena of the tides, and peopled space with worlds! Nurtured in his school, Boyle transformed hydrostatics from a loose assemblage of facts into a deductive science: Watt constructed the steam-engine, which has annihilated space and economized the labour of millions; and Franklin rivalled the glories of the ancient Prometheus, in snatching the electric fire

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xo, unshackled and independent, ds; and learned societies in every y banks of the Wolga, the Po, and the 4t his name, or reconstructed their plans Fa collective wits of the brightest of as little inclined as the Greeks to look out excellencies,-have paid homage to him as the scicuce, and founded upon his partition of the clopedia, which was once the marvel and the ature. The tribes of every age and nation regard of modern philosophy with the reverence and devolen; and so loud and universal has been the acclaim, testimony of our own epoch falls on the ear like the child closing the shout of a multitude. He has estaschool in metaphysics, which, whatever may be its keeps alive a due attention to facts in a science where thy ate too apt to be neglected; while nearly all the pracd improvements introduced into education, statesmanship, pol gocial policy, may be traced in a great degree to the philosophie tone ho gave to the introduction of the same element. Pc, politicians and legists, as well as philosophers, moulded to las councils, have placed themselves at the head of their esprodive sciences in Europe; and the pedantic tyrants and origpt ministers, before whom he crouched, have been removed to die works which they patronized, and a monarchy rendered impossible, otherwise than as the personification of the ganized will and reason of the nation. The splendid fanes of Bienes, which he only saw in vision, are rising on every side, and from the lofty cupolas man may already catch glimpses of the internal splendour of the universe; and winding round their turrols, the scaly intellectus extends its steps to the skies, and chables men to carry the rule and compass to the boundaries of Creation! Pofected by such triumphs, and fitted to embrace the complete expansion of natural, moral, and intellectual science, the human mund may expect to trace their mutual blendings and intricate comifications, and behold the day when “Truth, Though now hewn, like the mangled body of Osiris, into a thousand pieces, and scattered to the four winds of heaven, shall be eathered limb to hub, and moulded with every joint and member Gro an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.”

The great Brouch Binnyalapadia, edited by Diderot and D'Alembert, arranged upon his aching at the sciences

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