sense or perceiving at all; but shows and species virtutibus similes serve best with them"; and so, according to Hamlet, the groundlings were, for the most part, " capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise."

§ 9. REMEMBRANCE AND OBLIVION.

The doctrine of Plato, that human knowledge is but reminiscence, seems to have taken strong hold of Bacon's mind. In the way in which this doctrine is generally stated and received, it would appear that Plato conceived the human soul to have had an existence, as such, previous to its birth into this world, and that, in that former state of existence, it was in possession of all knowledge; and so, that the acquisition of knowledge in this world was simply a process of recollection or reminiscence of what had been better known before. So Origen and some learned fathers of the Church seem to have understood him. Burton expounds him thus: "Plato in Timæo and in his Phædon (for aught I can perceive) differs not much from this opinion, that it [the soul] was from God at first, and knew all, but being inclosed in the body, it forgets, and learns anew, which he calls reminiscentia, or recalling, and that it was put into the body for a punishment." It may be doubted whether Plato has been correctly interpreted in this his expression is somewhat obscure. Bacon states the doctrine a little differently, thus: "That all knowledge is but remembrance, and that the mind of man by nature knoweth all things, and hath but her own native and original motions (which by the strangeness and darkness of this tabernacle of the body are sequestered) again revived and restored."? Here the idea is, that it is the nature of the mind to know all things, and what is wanting is, that its native and original powers, for a time overshadowed and repressed, should be restored to activity, whereby the strangeness and dark1 Anat. of Mel., I. 217 (Boston, 1862). 2 Adv. of Learn., Works (Mont.), II. 4.

:

ness of the tabernacle might be cleared up and ignorance disappear. Something of the sound and quality of this statement may be discovered as a sort of ground-swell rolling underneath the dialogue of the Bishops concerning young Henry V., the late wicked Prince Hal, who had all at once begun to reason in divinity, and debate of commonwealth affairs, war, and any cause of policy:

"Cant. Since his addiction was to courses vain;

His companies unletter'd, rude, and shallow;
His hours fill'd up with riots, banquets, sports;
And never noted in him any study,
Any retirement, any sequestration

From open haunts and popularity.

Ely. The strawberry grows underneath the nettle,
And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best,
Neighbour'd by fruit of baser quality:

And so the Prince obscur'd his contemplation
Under the veil of wildness; which, no doubt,
Grew like the summer grass, fastest by night,
Unseen, yet crescive in his faculty.

Cant. It must be so; for miracles are ceas'd;
And therefore we must needs admit the means
How things are perfected."- Hen. V., Act 1. Sc. 1.

And when Prospero is sounding the youthful Miranda as to her remembrance of her origin, we have this dialogue:

A time before we came into this cell?

I do not think thou canst; for then thou wast not
Out three years old.

Pros. By what? by any other house, or person?
Of any thing the image tell me, that

Hath kept with thy remembrance.

And rather like a dream than an assurance

That my remembrance warrants. Had I not

Four or five women once, that tended me?

Pros. Thou hadst, and more, Miranda. But how is it,
That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

If thou remember'st aught, ere thou cam'st here,
How thou cam'st here, thou may'st.

Mir.

But that I do not." Act I. Sc. 2.

This is more in keeping with Bacon's statement, and contains an implied negation of the received interpretation as teaching a former existence of the human soul as such; for, certainly, if a man could remember anything before he came here, he might also remember how he came. There is a certain ambiguity in Plato himself as well as in Bacon, Berkeley, and some more modern writers, on this point, which arises from the circumstance that they do not always clearly and expressly distinguish, when treating of the soul, whether they intend to speak of the human soul, or of the Divine Soul; and hence comes the misconception. The dialectic method of Plato, pursuing the logical path and process of scientific thinking, endeavored to arrive at all science in a critical exegesis of those fundamental laws of all thought, divine or human, which are the same for all souls. All science can be in the divine mind alone; but the human mind as partaker of the universal reason, and being endowed with a certain scope of intellectual vision and a certain power of thinking, might, by the exercise of that power, its native and original motion, in a critical analysis of that reason, and in a thorough contemplation of nature, approach, if not quite attain to all science, by coming thus to a conscious knowledge of all Nature and of the laws and modes of creative thought, so be only it were crescive in its faculty; and this method of attaining, or rather reviving, knowledge in the soul, was a mere process of recollection or reminiscence of what had been known before, not by any means by the human soul in any previous state of finite existence, but by the divine mind itself, in which is all knowledge always; as when, in another place, speaking of the finite mind only, Plato says, that "recollection is the influx of thoughts which had left us."1 Again, he says, "The whole of nature being of one kindred, and the soul [i. e. the Divine Soul] having heretofore known all things, there is nothing to prevent a person [i. e. a human soul], 1 Laws, Works (Bohn), V. 151.

only one thing,

who remembers - what men call learning from again discovering all the rest; if he has but courage and seeking faints not. For to search and to learn is reminiscence all." And so, he says, again, "This is a recollection of those things which our soul formerly saw, when journeying with deity [i. e. when identical with the Divine Soul itself, and previous to any existence as a special soul], despising the things which we now say are, and looking up to that which really is";" for while the divine mind contemplates only real existence and the actual truth of things, the human soul, sequestered as it is under the veil of wildness in the darkness of the tabernacle, in the short-sightedness of weak intellectual vision, and in the half-delusive purblindness of sense-perception, is, on all sides, limited, baffled, deceived, confused, and confounded, by mere appearances and illusions, and still more, by the fantasies of its own creation. Not, by any means, that it is impossible for the human mind, by pursuing in a scientific manner either the dialectic method of pure metaphysics, or the experimental, inductive, and interpretative method of physical science by travelling either road to compass, at length, "the order, operation, and Mind of Nature," and to arrive, at last, at a scientific knowledge of the actual constitution of the universe and of the order of divine Providence in it, in a sound and true philosophy, which shall amount to universal science, or Sapience. But in this the inductive method must be understood in Bacon's way; for, with him, it was not any form of syllogism, nor any system of logic, nor any mere experimentation, observation, or experience of isolated and heterogeneous facts, with endless descriptions and catalogues, but a method for the actual interpretation of nature, using both the senses and the intellect, by the help of which the observer should get to see the facts, whether by the senses, instruments, experi1 Meno, Works (Bohn), III. 20. 2 Phædrus, Works (Bohn), I. 325.

ments, analyses, scopes, or in any other way, and then should be enabled to read, conceive, understand, comprehend, and know, what they are, and what they mean; in which he would have need of the faculty of intellectual vision and metaphysical insight, if he would expect to become a true Interpreter of Nature. He takes especial care to make the distinction everywhere between nature considered in reference to the human observer, and nature in reference to the divine mind creating nature:

"There is an art which, in their piedness, shares
With great creating Nature";—

and he cautions the student against "that grand deception of the senses, in that they draw the lines of nature with reference to man and not with reference to the universe; and this is not to be corrected except by reason and universal philosophy."1

But in either way, illusions must be distinguished from realities, appearance from essence, sophism from logical thinking, truth from falsehood, external fact and eternal truth from the visionary creations of the uncritical fancy, until the intellectual eye shall come to see all science correctly, or until the eye of science and sense-perception, by thorough and complete observation, searching matter and phenomena to the bottom, shall come to see all the difference between reality and appearance, cause and effect, living substance and dead substratum (the last illusion that will vanish), and arrive at last by that road at a true knowledge of "the last and positive power and cause of nature," that self-existent and uncaused power that creates the whole and is all in all; when these physical eyes shall discover that they have been, or can be, nothing more than helps to the intellectual vision, which alone can clearly see, with Plato, that "all existences are nothing else but power," and power of the nature wholly of that power of thought, or

1 Works (Boston), VIII. 283.