The Orphic Voice, page 15
“A kind of logic”— the phrase stirs the mind, and we need to acknowledge at once the extraordinary nature of this endeavor, this recognition by a great mind that something new is to be attempted with the very workings of mind itself. It is not a new field for thought that is proposed, but a new instrument of thinking. (This indeed is the theme of Bacon’s great “Proœmium” to the whole work.) He calls it, in that first quotation, an art. In the next paragraph he refers to it as a science; and to science he directs it. What we might call it is an attempt to discover a new myth for thought.
There is an admirable statement of it in the De Augmentis: “And this is the very thing which I am preparing and labouring at with all my might,— to make the mind of men by help of art a match for the nature of things.” The nature of things consisted in those forms which were laws of action and motion. To this the mind must offer a match, not in the sense of opposition but in that of a wedding. What is needed, as Bacon indicates, is a mental process more dynamic, subtle and precise than the logic then in use (see his reference to “living axioms” in the Organum, 1.104; to the need for greater subtlety in his preface to the Instauration; and to a process “just and methodical” in the Organum, 1.26). It is an Orphic vision, the matching of two moving processes, one in nature, one in the mind and language, whereby reality may be altered and controlled. Could this be achieved, there might result what Bacon sets out in a very beautiful passage of the “Plan,” the match or marriage indeed:
The explanation of which things, and of the true relation between the nature of things and the nature of the mind, is as the strewing and decoration of the bridal chamber of the Mind and the Universe, the Divine Goodness assisting; out of which marriage let us hope (and be this the prayer of the bridal song) there may spring helps to man, and a line and race of inventions that may in some degree subdue and overcome the miseries and necessities of humanity.
If a man means to make a new myth to replace old ones, he must show why he thinks this necessary, and so Bacon attacks the Aristotelian method, as he conceived it, of reasoning from first principles to particulars, and proposes instead his notion of induction, or reasoning which starts with observation of a number of particular cases and from these moves on to infer general principles. The current logic seemed to Bacon too far removed from the nature of things, the syllogism “acting too confusedly and letting nature slip out of its hands.” Induction, for him, “upholds the sense and closes with nature, and comes to the very brink of operation, if it does not actually deal with it.”
This abstractness in formal logic which in his view rendered it useless in operation has for him something to do with words.
The syllogism consists of propositions; propositions of words; and words are the tokens and signs of notions. Now if the very notions of the mind (which are as the soul of words and the basis of the whole structure) be improperly and over-hastily abstracted from facts, vague, not sufficiently definite, faulty in short in many ways, the whole edifice tumbles.
Bacon clearly saw the tendency of formal logic toward those extremes of formalism to which it has since been taken. He is too sweeping in his condemnation, for of course formal logic is useful, and beautiful, precisely because it can abstract and formalize so completely. But the important thing is that Bacon sees another possibility, a logic holding to things, a logic of content as well as form; postlogic in fact. And words for him are in a highly ambivalent position between these two logics or myths, the old one and the new one he is proposing.
He thinks of Aristotelian logic as tending to disputation rather than reality, to dialectic or one of the three subdivisions of the trivium, only one-third of the total task of language. In De Principiis, for example, he praises the pre-Socratic philosophers for their concept of their task, saying of them, “Therefore all these submitted their minds to the nature of things. Whereas Plato made over the world to thoughts; and Aristotle made over thoughts to words; men’s studies even then tending to dispute and discourse, and forsaking the stricter enquiry of truth.” The answer to this, for Bacon’s logic, would be to develop as far as possible the countertendency in words, their content and closeness to things, their mythical and poetic quality. There is a hint of such a possibility in the De Augmentis, where in Books V and VI Bacon extends logic to cover the whole domain of intellectual activity, apart from that covered by ethics. In Book VI the working of the mind with language, i.e. logic, is freed entirely from that assimilation with dialectic for which he condemns the current logic. The other two divisions of the trivium, grammar and rhetoric, are given their meed of attention. There are interesting passages on philosophical grammar, and on rhetoric as a form of demonstration directed toward the imagination and of a more flexible nature than the demonstrations of logic—subjects which he discusses more fully in the Advancement and Valerius Terminus.
Language does not enter only here in Bacon’s system. A great language metaphor runs right through his work of inquiry into the point where nature may be made to speak in and through forms which are also method. In passages in the Advancement and De Augmentis, the forms are expressly compared with the letters of the alphabet. Nature in this figure appears in her elements at the level of letters, in her higher organizations or organisms as words and sense, in her totality as a corpus of language or a book. Bacon is known to have written an Abecedarium Naturae which is lost. The metaphor appears most clearly in all its levels in his introduction to the “Natural and Experimental History,” Part III of the Magna Instauratio:
we must exhort men again and again . . . to approach with humility and veneration to unroll the volume of Creation, to linger and meditate therein, and with minds washed clean from opinions to study it in purity and integrity. For this is that sound and language which went forth into all lands, and did not incur the confusion of Babel; this should men study to be perfect in, and becoming again as little children condescend to take the alphabet of it into their hands, and spare no pains to search and unravel the interpretation thereof.
Yet this is the same Bacon who seems so often opposed to words, which he includes among the “Idols of the Market Place” as insufficiently subtle for the investigation of nature, and leading men away from facts. The same division appears also in his commentator, Hooke, who likewise inveighs against language, but who yet saw the properties of bodies as “the first elements of Letters of Information,” gave to crystals the marvelous name of “the Elemental Figures, or the ABC of Nature’s working,” and who wrote the beautiful extended version of this metaphor with which this section is headed (above, p. 134). For both these Orphic thinkers language and the mind’s operations with it lie at the living center of natural structures where forms also may be supposed to be. This is what Bacon has in his hand— and he does with it exactly what we saw him do in his preface to the De Sapientia Veterum.
Spedding, in his interesting preface to the Parasceve,49 written in dialogue form, where he is trying to find out for himself what the real nature of Bacon’s innovation and importance might be, puts forward a metaphor of his own, closely akin to Bacon’s: nature as “a manuscript in a character unknown.” It is an image for the task of interpretation, and Spedding imagines two men at work on it by different methods, by whom he means to represent Galileo and Bacon. This opposition is, I think, mistaken to some extent, but the image is a good one. Spedding phrases the two possibilities as “expert maker-out of puzzles,” and “work on the laws of language.” If we translate this back into Baconian terms, we see the same dilemma that confronted Bacon when thinking about myths. Is nature’s book or language a code or a hieroglyphic?
Bacon makes the same answer he made then, and chooses the code, despite the fact that such a choice runs counter to the whole nature of his vision. To this his method of induction, such as we have it, is directed. It is because of this that it can be, he claims, exercised by any mind irrespective of ability. Decoding, as a system of operation, can be taught to anyone if they will obey the rules. So he tries to have it both ways, to construct postlogic out of formal logic, because he will not trust himself to poetry.
He describes in the Organum (1.105) the induction of which his logic or interpretation consists: “the induction which is to be available for the discovery and demonstration of sciences and arts, must analyse nature by proper rejections and exclusions; and then, after a sufficient number of negatives, come to a conclusion on the affirmative instances.” Priority is given to analysis and negation, and the only detailed exposition we have of it, Book II, Aphorisms 15 to the end, is in those terms. No room is to be left, as one commentator after another has pointed out, for that imaginative unity, call it hypothesis or hunch or what you will, which from the beginning must hold this kind of work together.50 What Bacon proposes is a rigorous analytic intellectual formalism for a situation whose essential nature he himself saw in his poetic moments as living and creative. No wonder the method never has worked and, as such, never will.
It is Hooke, Bacon’s Orphic commentator, who expresses the meaning of what happened: “Some other kind of Art for Inquiry than what hath been hitherto made use of must be discovered; of this Engine, no Man except the incomparable Verulam, hath had any thoughts, but there is yet somewhat more to be added, which he seem’d to want time to compleat . . . And indeed it may not improperly be call’d a Philosophical Algebra.”51 These letters which Bacon spoke of as the forms of nature and which ought to have made up a living language or book are turned by the mind in an opposite direction, and become not words and poetry but meaningless symbols for formal operation in a pattern system of analytics. We are back to formal logic after all, with only the orphaned postlogical titles in Bacon’s method, those wonderful imaginatively named “Instances,” to point us to the postlogic we might have had from his mind. Yet Hooke is right in this: he was the incomparable Verulam, who saw the possibility of postlogical thinking over and over again even if he was defeated in his realization of it, and who left everything open, with the plea that later ages should complete what he left undone. Spedding, one of his most devoted exponents, says, “I must think that the Baconian philosophy has yet to come.” I think so too; and we may remember that the Baconian philosophy is Orpheus himself. At least in New Atlantis, on the authority of its first pioneer, “they have excellent poesy.”
The last word here is not with Bacon, but with one who is in his own foolish way wiser. It is Bottom, in that admirable speech of his when he wakes, at the end of Act IV, Scene 1, who gives the clue to the method Shakespeare proposes for his interpretation of forms in nature—the answer Bacon was afraid to give. “I have had a most rare vision,” he says in one of the loveliest phrases in the play. At first he despairs of expressing this in any form at all, saying it was a dream. But after a time he says “I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream . . . and I will sing it in the latter end of a play.” It is poetry, allied with a play and a dream, which is put forward as the method we need.
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It has been said, that in the constructing of Shakespeare’s Dramas there is, apart from all other “faculties” as they are called, an understanding manifested, equal to that in Bacon’s Novum Organum
Now, to hark back a moment, what was it that Bacon asked of his new logic or instrument or method or interpretation? That it be more subtle than the old, more exact, generative, analogous to the natural process it figures, universal, close to things and to reality. “Subtil, minutieux, fin, micro-scopique comme elle [la nature], immense . . . la virilité toujours, l’inspiration partout, autant de métaphores que la prairie, autant d’antithèses que le chêne, autant de contrastes et de profondeurs que l’univers, sans cesse la génération, l’éelosion, l’hymen, l’enfantement, l’ensemble vaste, le détail exquis et robuste, la communication vivante . . .” That is another of our Orphic line, speaking of poetry in general and of one poet in particular. It is from Victor Hugo’s great essay on Shakespeare.52
The later Orphic voices speak now. They are Vico, Herder, Goethe, Coleridge, and Hugo. They corroborate the Baconian postlogic in gross and in detail, in the vision of nature as a language to be interpreted, and in the three-fold scheme for the work, natural history, forms, and organon. Only when Bacon betrays his own vision do these commentators propose Shakespeare in his place, as another and greater interpreter of nature, who is to venture further into poetry, and so effect the transformation of man’s mind in its relation to nature which Bacon saw and could not carry through.
Nature as language appears in Vico as the central concept of ancient mythological thought: “All of nature was the language of Jupiter. Every pagan nation believed that it knew this language through divination, which the Greeks called theology, which is to say, knowledge of the speech of the Gods.”53 Goethe in his turn thinks of nature sometimes as a sibylline language,54 and makes the wonderful statement, “Man is the first speech that Nature holds with God.” This language is not language-as-science; nor is it a code. It is here given its full complement of metaphor and figure and myth: if nature is language, it is language-as-poetry. This is the speech which the human mind, gifted as it is with powers of speech of its own, has to apprehend and interpret. Insofar as man’s own language is poetic, it conforms to the workings of nature considered under this figure of language. The poet therefore resembles what he is trying to discover. So the Orphic voices say:
Le poète, nous l’avons dit, c’est la nature. [Hugo]
Nature, the greatest of poets. [Coleridge]
I had come to the point of thinking of my in-dwelling poetic talent as Nature pure and simple, all the more because I was disposed to view outward nature as its proper subject matter. [Goethe]55
This is not unlike Bacon’s position when he includes arts as part of his natural history. If we include poetry and myth among the arts he was considering, what he says holds good: that the arts are a part of nature, and that they are not passive analogies but active points of operation, the very points at which Nature can be made to speak. So in the phrase Homo naturae minister et interpres the “serving” becomes an active conforming to nature, and the interpretation becomes not a detached decoding but something much more like the “interpretation” of an actor, who interprets a character by uniting himself with it. Coleridge describes such an inclusive thinking process:
The groundwork, therefore, of all true philosophy is the full appreciation of the difference between the contemplation of reason, namely, that intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves as one with the whole, which is substantial knowledge, and that which presents itself when transferring reality to the negation of reality . . . we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing to thought, death to life. This is abstract knowledge, or the science of the mere understanding. By the former we know that existence is its own predicate, self-affirmation . . . It is an eternal and infinite self-rejoicing, self-loving, with a joy unfathomable, with a love all-comprehensive. It is absolute; and the absolute is neither that which affirms or that which is affirmed, but the identity and living copula of both. On the other hand, the abstract knowledge which belongs to us as finite beings, and which leads to a science of delusion then only when it would exist for itself instead of being the instrument of the former—instead of being, as it were, a translation of a living into a dead language, for the purposes of memory, arrangement and general communication,— it is by this abstract knowledge that the understanding distinguishes the affirmed from the affirming. Well if it distinguish without dividing!56
What might seem to be mere rhapsodizing by a poet turns out to be a sober and reliable exposition of the working of the mind in postlogical thought. This is in itself important, for if we fall back now into thinking of figurative language as merely figurative—ornamentation or word play or whimsy—we shall lose everything. Figures in postlogic and in Orphic minds are instruments of discovery, and we have to realize this now when we come to what the Orphic commentators say about Shakespeare himself. For he too is set in a figure: he is identified with nature.
Herder says of Shakespeare, in Von deutscher Art und Kunst, “The whole world is a body for this great spirit; all the phenomena of nature are limbs for this body.” He speaks, too, of Greek drama and Shakespearean drama as products of nature, and Novalis says the same thing of Shakespeare, “those dramas of his are products of nature too, deep as nature herself.”57 And in a remarkable passage from Shakespeare und kein Ende (1815), Goethe relates Shakespeare to the world-soul or Weltgeist, saying that whereas the latter has the task of keeping the secrets of nature, it is the poet’s task to discover them and speak them out. Goethe claims that in Shakespeare the whole of nature becomes articulate, inanimate things, the elements, the wild beasts, all the phenomena of the world. In effect he presents Shakespeare as Orpheus, and warns us against thinking that all this is merely figure and not a true part of the action.
What the Orphic voices are saying is that the poet and his work, particularly the supreme poet of all, is a part of natural history, that first Baconian category in postlogic. We are to think that in Shakespeare we see a process of nature experimenting, an individual process yet not wholly different from other such processes observable in the natural world. This idea of natural process operating in Shakespeare is developed more fully by Coleridge. He relates it to the second Baconian category, those forms which were also part of the work of interpretation and which Bacon thought of as the laws of action in matter and mind.
