The Orphic Voice, page 39
5. Buffon, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Piveteau (Paris, 1954), p. 9: “L’inconvénient est . . . de vouloir soumettre à des loix arbitraires les loix de la Nature, de vouloir la diviser dans des points oü elle est indivisible.” Cuvier, Le Règne Animal distribué d’après son Organisation (Paris, 1817), p. 4.
6. Problems of Life (London, 1952), pp. 155–59.
7. See particularly Max Wertheimer in A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, ed. Willis D. Ellis (London, Routledge, 1938), p. 3: “The problem has not merely to do with scientific work—it is a fundamental problem of our times. Gestalt theory is not something suddenly and unexpectedly dropped upon us from above; it is, rather, a palpable convergence of problems ranging throughout the sciences and the various philosophic standpoints of modern times.” See also pp. 10, 15.
8. In Zur Morphologie: Die Absicht eingeleitet.
9. Goethe puts the point well: “A man born and bred up to the so-called exact sciences does not find it easy to realize, perched as he is on the heights of his own rationality, that there might also exist an exactitude of the imagination working through the senses, without which art would be simply unthinkable” (Aphorismen und Fragmente, Werke, Zürich, 1952, 17, 779).
10. See Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London, Routledge, 1958), passim. Also Woodger, Biology and Language, p. 60: “In view of the popularity of science in these days it is deplorable that it is so little understood, even by those actively engaged in it.”
11. Particularly The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 2, Mythical Thought, Yale, 1955; and The Problem of Knowledge, Yale, 1950.
12. Seventh ed. (Paris, 1922), pp. 79, 448.
13. These phrases are from Max Planck, The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics (London, 1937), p. 61; Fred Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe (New York, 1950), p. 6; Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, pp. 123 ff.
14. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 2, 55: “All mere properties or attributes must for myth ultimately become bodies”; also p. 59: “while the true tendency of scientific, analytic-critical thinking is toward liberation from this substantial approach, it is characteristic of myth that despite all the spirituality of its objects and contents, its ‘logic’—the form of its contents—clings to bodies.” Cf. also William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (London, Black, 1927), p. 18: “It may be affirmed with confidence that in almost every case the myth was derived from the ritual, and not the ritual from the myth.”
15. Cf. Schelling (n. 1 above), p. 58: “Wir gehen auf die Meinung zurück, dass die Mythologie überhaupt eine Erfindung sey.”
16. Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine adopts this as a working principle from the theological point of view.
17. The development of this kind of thinking is one of the great themes of Bergson. See for instance La Pensée et le mouvant (Paris, Alcan, 1934), p. 164: “Nous disons que le changement existe, que tout change, que le changement est la loi même des choses . . . mais ce ne sont là que des mots, et nous raisonnons et philosophons comme si le changement n’existait pas.” This essay is dated 1911.
18. Ed. Nicolini (Bari, 1936), pp. 318–19. The Latin is as follows: “Hinc nos, si non felici, certe pio ausu, de principiis humanitatis, cuius studium philologia est, ex necessariis argumentis a corrupti hominis natura desumptis disserere hoc libro decrevimus, et ita philologiam ad scientiae normam exigere.” There is a plea for philology in this same sense in Renan, L’Avenir de la science; Renan is familiar with Vico, of course, and mentions him.
19. “Perception was accounted for until fairly recently in terms of sensation and association, but now perceptions are viewed as organized mental structures selectively taken from the unstructured stimulus field.” Aubrey Lewis, quoted by Woodger, Biology and Language, p. 266.
20. See Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, on the act lying behind all assertions, on which they ultimately depend.
21. In Crise de vers, Divagations.
22. L’Avenir de la science, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Psichari (Paris, 1949), 3, 830. He goes on: “Depuis que nous avons dressé une carte de la science, nous nous obstinons à donner une place à part à la philologie, à la philosophie; et pourtant ce sont là moins des sciences spéciales que des façcons diverses de traiter les choses de l’esprit.”
23. Cf. Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction (London, Faber, 1928), pp. 88–89: “There is a strong tendency in the Greek language . . . to make itself felt as a living, muscular organism rather than as a structure; and it is quite in harmony with this that the terminology of grammar, most of which is derived from the Greek, should have originated in so many cases as physical or physiological metaphor.”
24. Man on his Nature (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 269, 185.
25. Ibid., p. 179: “The mind is utilitarian. By evolution it is bound to be so. Each step of its development has had to justify itself ad hoc.”
26. Chapter 3 of Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature (New York, 1949) is helpful on this subject.
27. New York, Harper, 1930, p. 125.
28. Romanticism and the Modern Ego (Boston, Little Brown, 1943), p. 76.
29. GOD: Being an Introduction to the Science of Metabiology (London, Cape, 1929), p. 45.
30. The Itinerant Ivory Tower (Yale, 1953), p. 243.
31. GOD, p. 46.
Part II
1. See D. G. James, The Dream of Learning, An Essay on “The Advancement of Learning,” “Hamlet” and “King Lear” (Oxford, 1951), p. 35: “Bacon . . . was one of the first of the moderns; his vision of things was creative of, and is better understood in the light of, what came after him . . . And so it is, I think, with Shakespeare.”
2. For details about this consult J. A. K. Thomson, Shakespeare and the Classics, London, 1952; and, more generally on mythology, Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry, Minnesota, 1932; and Franck L. Schoell, Études sur l’humanisme continental en Angleterre a la fin de la renaissance, Paris, 1926.
3. Benjamin Farrington in his preface to Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1951), protests rightly: “The book which Francis Bacon called The Great Instauration came to be called by the name of one of its parts, Novum Organum. As I have urged, this is a serious distortion.”
4. The translation is Spedding’s. The edition used throughout is The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon (hereafter referred to as Philosophical Works), ed. Robertson, London, 1905.
5. He has been claimed by Marx and others as one who “anticipated an alteration in the means of production, and the practical subjugation of nature by man, as a result of the altered mode of thought.” Farrington, Francis Bacon, pp. 174–75.
6. “He was not, after all, clear as to what he was about,” James says in The Dream of Learning, p. 8. Cf. Macaulay in his essay “Lord Bacon,” in Critical and Historical Essays (1843): “we think that the nature of his services is often mistaken, and was not fully understood even by himself.”
7. The views of Ellis and Spedding are to be found in the Philosophical Works, in the general introduction and the preface to the Parasceve respectively. The other sources are Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society of London, 4th ed. London, 1734, to which Cowley’s Ode serves as preface; Joseph de Maistre, Examen de la philosophie de Bacon, Paris, 1836; Thomas Fowler, Bacon’s Novum Organum, Oxford, 1878; Dean Church, Bacon, London, 1888; J. M. Robertson, editor’s introduction to Philosophical Works; L. L. Whyte, Accent on Form, London, 1955.
8. Examen, p. 365.
9. By de Maistre, Macaulay, James, and Fowler by implication.
10. As in Sir Samuel Garth’s preface to the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
11. Cf. Robertson’s Note, Philosophical Works, p. 820: “To the anthropological or psychological study of myth the best modern guides are Tylor, Mannhardt, Frazer . . .”; and Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Penguin Books, 1955), I, 22: “A true science of myth should begin with a study of archaeology, history and comparative religion, not in the psycho-therapist’s consulting room.”
12. Walter Pater in his essay on Pico in The Renaissance (1873) claims that Bacon’s phrase of man as the interpreter of nature really belongs to Pico.
13. See Hymne an die Götter Griechenlands.
14. Michael Polanyi, “The Stability of Beliefs,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 3 (1952), 218–19, says: “I hold that the propositions embodied in natural science are not derived by any definite rule from the data of experience, and that they can neither be verified nor falsified by experience according to any definite rule. Discovery, verification and falsification proceed according to certain maxims which cannot be précisely formulated and still less proved or disproved, and the application of which relies in every case on a personal judgment exercised (or accredited) by ourselves. These maxims and the art of interpreting them may be said to constitute the premisses of science, but I prefer to call them our scientific beliefs.” Goethe says in the Aphorismen und Fragmente that in science nothing can really be known, it all has to be done.
15. See Rachel Trickett, “The Augustan Pantheon: Mythology and Personification in Eighteenth Century Poetry,” Essays and Studies (London, 1953), pp. 71–87.
16. There is also of course a Catholic tradition of hostility to myth. Prynne found the Early Fathers of the Church very helpful in this respect.
17. Gosson says: “By writing of untruthes they are open liers.” Prynne says: “It is dangerous, it is sinfull, therefore, to applaude such Playes, admit such Poemes, which may withdraw us Christians from our God.” They are in his view, “a means to revive that Heathenism and propagate that Idolatrie, which the light and power of the Gospel hath long since abolished.” Later, however, Prynne puts in a saving clause for Ovid, or at least “some parts of Ovid where he is not obscene.” Addison in No. 523 of The Spectator says on the subject of mythology: “I do hereby strictly require every person who shall write on this subject to remember that he is a Christian, and not to sacrifice his catechism to his poetry.” And if that is half-jesting, the following is perfectly serious, “And it is no doubt a sad proof of universal degeneracy, that the Metamorphoses of an Ovid are preferred in our schools, to the sacred Realities of Moses and the Prophets.” This is C. de Coetlogon’s Introduction to Quarles’ Emblems, reissued London, 1777. Earlier this same writer speaks of the “fabulous knowledge . . . and frivolous tales of heathenish science.”
18. After Puttenham, not until Herder will Orpheus be given so central a place in learning. With Herder, Orpheus is the inventor of letters, music, the seven-stringed lyre, natural lore, magic, prophecy, astrology, and in especial, theology, poetry, and law. Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Suphan (Berlin, 1883), 6, 397.
19. Included in J. E. Spingarn’s Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, Oxford, 1908.
20. Goethe says very sensibly in the Farbenlehre (Historische Teil, Dritte Abteilung): “Man kommt zwar den wackern Personen früherer Zeiten darin zu Hilfe, dass man sie vom Verdacht der Zauberei zu befreien sucht; aber nun täte es gleich wieder Not, dass man sich auf eine andere Weise ihrer annähme, und sie aus den Händen solcher Exorzisten abermals befreite, welche, um die Gespenster zu vertreiben, sichs zur heiligen Pflicht machen, den Geist selbst zu verjagen.”
21. Sandys adds, “a way not untrod by the sacred Pen-men,” and says later, in his Commentary on the Tenth Book, “Such Moses among the Hebrewes, among the Grecians Orpheus.” So we come round to Pico’s synthesis again.
22. See L. P. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled (Cambridge, 1955), for a tracing of some of these influences. The writer says of Shakespeare in particular that he “draws on every book of the Metamorphoses, and there is scarcely a play which shows no trace of its influence, which is found particularly in the lighter scenes . . . All the Elizabethan poets borrowed from Ovid, but it was Shakespeare who knew best how to value him” (pp. 410, 423).
23. This is a favourite phrase of Bacon’s: it occurs three times—in the Advancement, Bk. II, the De Augmentis, Bk. II, chap. 13, and in the Preface to De Sapientia Veterum.
24. For this series of opinions see Macaulay’s essay on Bacon; Spedding’s preface to the De Sapientia Veterum in the Philosophical Works; C. D. Broad, quoted by Douglas Bush (n. 2 above), p. 241, “Bacon wasted much time and ingenuity in showing that some mute inglorious Newton had hidden the true principles of Natural Philosophy in the story of Pan.” The sympathetic commentator, as indeed nearly always, is Farrington, Francis Bacon, p. 76.
25. It is perhaps necessary to explain that the De Augmentis Scientiarum is Bacon’s enlarged version, in Latin, of what he had already set out, in English, in The Advancement of Learning. He made a bad guess in assuming that Latin would continue to be the language of scholarship, and so translated his work into it, adding to it as he went. The dates of the two publications are 1605 and 1623.
26. “Circumstances, and a certain bias of mind, have led me to take interest in such riddles, and it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve.” So says one of the characters in The Gold-Bug. Poe’s opening to The Murders in the Rue Morgue is interesting also in this connection.
27. Shakespeare’s Imagery (Cambridge, 1935), p. 17.
28. The Elizabethan taste for allegorical explanations of myth, catered to by works such as those of Natalis Comes, is to some extent responsible. Douglas Bush (n. 2 above), p. 31, quotes Marston,
Reach me some poets’ index that will show
Imagines Deorum, Book of Epithets,
Natalis Comes, thou I know recites
And makest anatomy of poesy.
Chapman made considerable use of Comes.
29. He is of course sometimes identified with the rival poet in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. There is a reference to the School of Night in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Chapman’s The Shadow of Night came out in 1594; Love’s Labour’s Lost is conjecturally dated 1594–95, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1594–98.
30. This labyrinth which is at once question, evidence, and answer is a very profound figure. E. Louis Backman in Religious Dances in the Christian Church and in Popular Medicine (Allen and Unwin, London, 1952), says (p. 70) that on a labyrinth or puzzle pattern in the church of St. Savino, Piacenza, stood the inscription, “This labyrinth reveals the structure of the world.” Robert Hooke will use the image; so will Erasmus Darwin. See the discussion on the relationship between question and evidence in Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 30.
31. He originally called it Maximus, not Masculus, but toned the title down later. Bacon’s emblematic titles are part of his method and of his gifts. They are akin to the names he gives his Instances in Novum Organum, Bk. II—of the Door, of the Lamp, of the Twilight; or wonderful working phrases such as Circle Learning or the characterization of Memory as Pre-notion and Emblem. It has become customary among Bacon’s commentators to call these “quaint” (Fowler, Macaulay) or “fantastic” (Farrington). They are in fact imaginative and mythological in the most positive sense.
32. There is an interesting passage on what Bacon calls “Circle Learning” in Valerius Terminus, chap. 8, “that use by way of supply of light and information which the particulars and instances of one science do yield and present for the framing or correcting the axioms of another science in their very truth and notion.”
33. The adoption of this tone is usually held to have been an experiment on Bacon’s part. See Robertson, Philosophical Works, p. XV.
34. Complete Works, ed. Ellis and Spedding, 3, 329–30.
35. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled, connects the Metamorphoses particularly with A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. For Shakespeare as a thinker through sleep and dream, see Victor Hugo in his long essay on Shakespeare, Pt. II, Bk. IV, Oeuvres completes (Paris, Hetzel and Quantin, n.d.), Vol. 2 of Philosophic, p. 304: “Disons plus, là où il rêve, il pense encore; avec une profondeur autre, mais égale.” See also Donald Davie, Articulate Energy (London, Routledge, 1955), p. 51: “Sleep is seen, as Shakespeare sees it, to be an energy.”
36. Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton (London, 1883), p. 290.
37. In The Tempest too the spirit Ariel comes near to having human feelings as Puck could never do. See Act V, Scene 1. The loving friendship between Prospero and Ariel, compared with the colder connection between Oberon and Puck, is another of the added richnesses of the later play.
38. Another of Bacon’s wonderfully imaginative titles. It has the general meaning of “Preparative,” but a special one of the day of preparation for the Jewish Sabbath, and in that sense it appears in the Douay version of the New Testament.
39. Cf. Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique (Paris, 1809), p. 12: “La nécessité reconnue de bien observer les objets particuliers a fait naître l’habitude de se borner à la considération de ces objets et de leurs plus petits détails, de manière qu’ils sont devenus, pour la plupart des naturalistes, le sujet principal de l’étude. Ce serait cependant une cause réelle de retard pour les sciences naturelles . . . si ceux qui se livrent à une pareille étude dédaigneront de s’élever à des considérations supérieures.” The kind of natural history these minds descry may still be set down, as Bacon would say, as deficient. See also Teilhard de Chardin, Le Phénomène humain (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1955), p. 246, where the writer speaks of “ce point de vue, qui est celui de la future Histoire Naturelle du Monde.”
40. So Goethe says to Eckermann, “I think of the earth, with its encircling atmosphere, under the figure of a great living creature, engaged in an endless breathing in and breathing out” (Gespräche mit Eckermann, entry for April 11, 1827). Also Teilhard de Chardin, passim. This is probably a characteristic of the ways of working of Orphic minds in science.
41. See, for instance, the fable of Atalanta in De Sapientia Veterum; or Novum Organum, Bk. I, Aphorisms 95 and 99, where Bacon distinguishes between experiments of light and those of fruit and gives primacy to the former. There is a clear statement in Aphorism 5 of the Parasceve: “It would be an utter mistake to suppose that my intention would be satisfied by a collection of experiments of arts only with the view of thereby bringing the several arts to greater perfection.”
