The advice, so often associated with Francis Bacon, to get rid of all false pre-conceptions, of all _idola,_ is one which it is easy to mistake in an over-zeal to follow it. That mere negation of prejudices which we call childish innocence is no match for the craft by which Nature seeks to keep or disguise her secrets. The free consciousness, the unbiassed mind, is not the easy result of one great act of renunciation, but the work of continued self-discipline, self-conquest, self-realisation. If you are not to impose upon the thing a pre-conception alien to it, neither must you rashly give yourself away to the thing, or to the first whims which accident puts upon you as the thing. What seems a fact or thing is only a candidate for the post of thing or fact: and its credentials need to be examined, and compared with other evidences. To detect a fact, therefore, is only possible for a tried and tested consciousness which by patience and self-mastery has won the key of interpretation. What Bacon apparently meant--though, as often happens, in his eagerness to combat a prevailing folly, he sometimes overshot himself in statement--was to insist on the eternal wedlock of the mind and things, of things and the mind, as the sole and sufficient condition for the reality of knowledge and truth. The mind may not presume to do without things, or things to domineer the mind;--or the result is a windy and frothy vanity. And the wedlock is eternal: in his own eloquent words, 'the mind itself is but an accident to knowledge[7],' and he might have added, so also are things: for, as he says, 'the truth of being and the truth of knowing is all one': only in the bond of knowledge are things true and real,--being otherwise only 'permanent possibilities,' or possibilities barely even permanent--or not even possibilities. Yet he scarcely realised that his 'due rejections and exclusions' and negations were a fundamental _constitutive_ element in those facts of which he habitually emphasises only the positive side.
He therefore who would understand--or would write--the history of Greece must really in his studies begin at both ends--both at the Greece of to-day, and at the Greece of Solon, or what earlier period may be taken as the start of Greek history. With perhaps the least qualified dogmatism, one may assert that he will begin with the Greece of to-day; or if he deals solely with Ancient Greece he will begin with the full blaze of Hellenic civilisation which still has a pale reflection in the modern world, and gradually work back to the beginnings. It is no doubt customary to begin Greek history, say, with the Homeric Age, and work downwards, as it is customary to begin a formal treatise on geography with the general features of the earth's shape and surface. But that beginning represents really the temporarily accredited and accepted result of a process which, starting from the other end, has worked backwards to commencements or origins. And the teacher, in particular, will do well not to imitate too slavishly the method of the formal treatise. A day may come--or may have come--for example, for Greek history to start from periods long anterior to the supposed or traditional date of the wars around the wall of Troy. But when it does so, it will have done so by more thoroughly ransacking the Greece of to-day: and so disclosing the secrets of what is termed pre-historic Greece. Then, conversely, when modern diggings on Greek soil reveal the features of an earlier than what was erewhile to older historians its earliest past, the reconstruction of that early people's life reflects a new light on the directions and the limitations of its subsequent civilisation. We see better into the reality of Homer, and even of Demosthenes--into their ideal glory and their historical limitations, when we explore the cradle in which their race's life was erst fostered, and the rock out of which they and nature hewed them. And this is no peculiarity of Greece. The deepest research into the social institutions which control the England of to-day is the best propaedeutic for the study of Anglo-Saxon times; and the same is true _vice versa_.