The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)

The side on which Bacon has departed from the juste milieu has been precisely the opposite from that which prevented Kong-Tse from remaining there. The Chinese theosophist had been led astray by his excessive veneration for antiquity and the English philosopher, by his profound disdain for it. Warned against the doctrine of Aristotle, Bacon has extended his prejudice to everything that came from the ancients. Rejecting in a moment the labour of thirty centuries and the fruit of the meditation of the greatest geniuses, he has wished to admit nothing beyond what experience could confirm in his eyes." Logic to him has seemed useless for the invention of the sciences.* He has abandoned the syllogism, as an instrument too gross to penetrate the depths of nature.' He has thought that it could be of no avail either in expression of words or in the ideas which flow from it."* He has believed the abstract principles deprived of all foundation; and with the same hand with which he fights these false ideas he has fought the results of these principles, in which he has unfortimately found much less resistance.' Filled with contempt for the philosophy of the Greeks, he has denied that it had produced anything either useful or good^; so that after having banished the natural philosophy of Aristotle, which he called a jumble of dialectic terms,* he has seen in the metaphysics of Plato only a dangerous and depraved philosophy, and in the theosophy of Pythagoras only a gross and shocking superstition.* Here indeed is

" Novum Organum in Prasf. et Aph., I. * Ibid., Aph., 1 1.

' Ibid., Aph., 13. <* Ibid., Aph., 14 et 15. « Ibid., Aph., 38 et seq.

i Novum Organum in Pra^. et Aph., 73. « Ibid., Aph., 63. * Ibid., Aph., 65.

i8o The Golden Verses of Pythagoras 3a case of returning again to the idea of Basil, and of exclaiming with him, that no man is without sin.

Kong-Tse has been tmquestionably one of the greatest men who has honoured the earth, and Bacon one of the most judicious philosophers of Europe; both have, however, committed grave mistakes whose effect is more or less felt by posterity : the former, filling the Chinese literati with an exaggerated respect for antiquity, has made of it an immobile and almost inert mass, that Providence, in order to obtain certain necessary movements, has had to strike many times with the terrible scourge of revolutions; the latter, inspiring, on the contrary, a thoughtless contempt for everything that came from the ancients, demanding the proof of their principles, the reason for their dogmas, subjecting all to the light of experience, has broken the scientific body, has deprived it of unity, and has transformed the assemblage of thinkers into a tumultuous anarchy from whose irregular movement has sprung enough violent storms.

If Bacon had been able to effect in Europe the same influence that Kong-Tse had effected in China, he would have drawn philosophy into materialism and absolute empiricism. Happily the remedy is bom of the evil itself. The lack of unity has taken away all force from the anarchical colossus. Each supposing to be in the right, no one was. A hundred systems raised one upon the other clashed and were broken in turn. Experience, invoked by all parties, has taken all colours and its opposed judgments were self -destructive.