48. Stewart has praised with justice a short but beautiful paragraph concerning poetry (under which title may be comprehended all the various creations of the faculty of imagination) wherein Bacon “has exhausted everything that philosophy and good sense have yet had to offer on the subject of what has since been called the _beau idéal_.” The same eminent writer and ardent admirer of Bacon observes that D’Alembert improved on the Baconian arrangement by classing the fine arts with poetry. Injustice had been done to painting and music, especially the former, when, in the fourth book De Augmentis, they were counted as mere “artes voluptariæ,” subordinate to a sort of Epicurean gratification of the senses, and only somewhat more liberal than cookery or cosmetics.
49. In the third book, science having been divided into theological and philosophical, and the former, or what regards revealed religion, being postponed for the present, he lays it down that all philosophy relates to God, to nature, or to man. Under natural theology, as a sort of appendix, he reckons the doctrine of angels and superhuman spirits; a more favourite theme, especially as treated independently of revelation, in the ages that preceded Lord Bacon, than it has been since. Natural philosophy is speculative or practical; the former divided into physics, in a particular sense, and metaphysics; “one of which enquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; the other handleth the formal and final causes.” Hence, physics dealing with particular instances, and regarding only the effects produced, is precarious in its conclusions, and does not reach the stable principles of causation.
Limus ut hic durescit, et hæc ut cera liquescit Uno eodemque igni.
Metaphysics, to which word he gave a sense as remote from that which it bore in the Aristotelian schools, as from that in which it is commonly employed at present, had for its proper object the investigation of forms. It was “a generally received and inveterate opinion, that the inquisition of man is not competent to find out essential forms or true differences.” Formæ inventio, he says in another place, habetur pro desperata. The word _form_ itself, being borrowed from the old philosophy, is not immediately intelligible to every reader. “In the Baconian sense,” says Playfair, “form differs only from cause in being permanent, whereas, we apply cause to that which exists in order of time.” Form (_natura naturans_, as it was barbarously called) is the general law, or condition of existence, in any substance or quality (_natura naturata_), which is wherever its form is.[197] The conditions of a mathematical figure, prescribed in its definition, might in this sense be called its form, if it did not seem to be Lord Bacon’s intention to confine the word to the laws of particular sensible existences. In modern philosophy, it might be defined to be that particular combination of forces, which impresses a certain modification upon matter subjected to their influence.