The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

his nervous pen is forever inditing prayers to tranquillity and peace. One pictures him as a timid soul whose youth had been darkened with religious fears; for he never tires of telling his readers that there is no hell, except here, and that there are no gods except gentlemanly ones who live in a garden of Epicurus in the clouds, and never intrude in the affairs of men.

There is a remarkable passage in Lucretius

which describes the decay of agriculture in the Roman state, and attributes it to the exhaustion of the soil. Whatever the cause, the wealth of Rome passed into poverty, the organization into disintegration, the power and pride into decadence and apathy. Cities faded back into the undistinguished hinterland; the roads fell into disrepair and no longer hummed with trade;

Paper now came cheaply from Egypt, replacing the costly parchment that had made learning the monopoly of priests; printing, which had long awaited an inexpensive medium, broke out like a liberated explosive, and spread its destructive and clarifying influence everywhere.

In the Proem to The Interpretation of Nature, he discusses this fateful decision that turned him from philosophy to politics. It is an indispensable passage:

Whereas, I believed myself born for the service of mankind, and reckoned the care of the common weal to be among those duties that are of public right, open to all alike, even as the waters and the air, I therefore asked myself what could most advantage mankind, and for the performance of what tasks I seemed to be shaped by nature. But when I searched, I found no work so meritorious as the discovery and development of the arts and inventions that tend to civilize the life of man...

I mean the recognition of similitudes—and at the same time sufficiently steady and concentrated for the observation of subtle shades of difference.

a passion for research, a power of suspending judgment with patience, of meditating with pleasure, of assenting with caution, of correcting false impressions with readiness, and of arranging my thoughts with scrupulous pains. I had no hankering after novelty, no blind admiration for antiquity. Imposture in every shape I utterly detested.

I also thought that my duty towards my country had special claims upon me, such as could not be urged by other duties of life. Lastly, I conceived the hope that, if I held some honorable office in the state, I might have secure helps and supports to aid my labors, with a view to the accomplishments of my destined task. With these motives I applied myself to politics.

at the age of eighteen, fatherless and penniless. He had become accustomed to most of the luxuries of the age, and he found it hard to reconcile himself now to a forced simplicity of life.

He had a terse and vivid eloquence in debate, and was an orator without oratory. “No man,” said Ben Jonson, “ever spoke more neatly, more (com)pressedly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of its own graces. His hearers could not cough or look aside from him without loss. He commanded where he spoke... No man had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man that heard him was lest that he should make an end.”

His insatiable ambition left him no rest; he was ever discontent, and always a year or so ahead of his income. He was lavish in his expenditures; display was to him a part of policy. When, at the age of forty-five, he married, the pompous and costly ceremony made a great gap in the dowry which had constituted one of the lady’s attractions. In 1598 he was arrested for debt. Nevertheless, he continued to advance. His varied ability and almost endless knowledge made him a valuable member of every important committee;

III. The Essays

“To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar... Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation.”

“without philosophy I care not to live”;

How many things be there which we imagine are not? How many things do we esteem and value more than they are?

Is there then any such happiness as for a man’s mind to be raised above the confusion of things, where he may have a respect of the order of nature and the error of men?

In books “we converse with the wise, as in action with fools.” That is, if we know how to select our books. “Some books are to be tasted,” reads a famous passage, “others to be swallowed, and some to be chewed and digested”; all these groups forming, no doubt, an infinitesimal portion of the oceans and cataracts of ink in which the world is daily bathed and poisoned and drowned.

Bacon abhors padding, and disdains to waste a word; he offers us infinite riches in a little phrase; each of these essays gives in a page or two the distilled subtlety of a master mind on a major issue of life.

Their lavish array is the one defect of Bacon’s style: the endless metaphors and allegories and allusions fall like whips upon our nerves and tire us out at last. The Essays are like rich and heavy food, which cannot be digested in large quantities at once; but taken four or five at a time they are the finest intellectual nourishment in English.

What shall we extract from this extracted wisdom?

“Nature is often hidden; sometimes overcome; seldom extinguished. Force maketh nature more violent in the return; doctrine and discourse maketh nature less importune; but custom only doth alter or subdue nature... But let not a man trust his victory over his nature too far; for nature will lay buried a great time, and yet revive upon the occasion or temptation. Like as it was with Æsop’s damsel, turned from a cat to a woman, who sat very demurely at the board’s end, till a mouse ran before her. Therefore let a man either avoid the occasion altogether, or put himself often to it, that he may be little moved with it.”

the body should be inured to excesses as well as to restraint; else even a moment of unrestraint may ruin it. (So one accustomed to the purest and most digestible foods is easily upset when forgetfulness or necessity diverts him from perfection.) Yet “variety of delights rather than surfeit of them”; for “strength of nature in youth passeth over many excesses which are owing a man till his age”;

a man’s maturity pays the price of his youth. One royal road to health is a garden; Bacon agrees with the author of Genesis that “God Almighty first planted a garden”; and with Voltaire that we must cultivate our back yards.

“We are beholden to Machiavel, and writers of that kind, who openly and unmasked declare what men do in fact, and not what they ought to do; for it is impossible to join the wisdom of the serpent and the innocence of the dove, without a previous knowledge of the nature of evil; as, without this, virtue lies exposed and unguarded.” “The Italians have an ungracious proverb, Tanto buon che val niente,”—so good that he is good for nothing.

Bacon accords his preaching with his practice, and advises a judicious mixture of dissimulation with honesty, like an alloy that will make the purer but softer metal capable of longer life.

He wants a full and varied career, giving acquaintance with everything that can broaden, deepen, strengthen or sharpen the mind. He does not admire the merely contemplative life; like Goethe he scorns knowledge that does not lead to action: “men ought to know that in the...

But Bacon’s value lies less in theology and ethics than in psychology. He is an undeceivable analyst of human nature, and sends his shaft into every heart. On the stalest subject in the world he is refreshingly original. “A married man is seven years older in his thoughts the first day.”

“It is often seen that bad husbands have good wives.”

Bacon seems to have worked too hard to have had time for love, and perhaps he never quite felt it to its depth.

Whoever hath his mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do clarify and break up in the communicating and discoursing with another; he tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshaleth them more orderly; he seeth how they look when they are turned into words; finally he waxeth wiser than himself; and that more by one hour’s discourse than by a day’s meditation.”

“Young men are fitter to invent than to judge, fitter for execution than for counsel, and fitter for new projects than for settled business; for the experience of age in things that fall within the compass of it, directeth them; but in new things abuseth them... Young men, in the conduct and management of actions, embrace more than they can hold, stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end without consideration of the means and degrees; pursue absurdly some few principles which they have chanced upon; care not to” (i.e., how they) “innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences...

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success. Certainly it is good to compel employments of both,... because the virtues of either may correct the defects of both.”

‘Sir, if any other come that hath better iron than you, he will be master of all this gold.’”

Like Aristotle, he has some advice on avoiding revolutions. “The surest way to prevent seditions... is to take away the matter of them; for if there be fuel prepared, it is hard to tell whence the spark shall come that shall set it on fire...

The matter of sedition is of two kinds: much poverty and much discontentment... The causes and motives of seditions are, innovation in religion; taxes; alteration of laws and customs; breaking of privileges; general oppression; advancement of unworthy persons, strangers; dearths; disbanded soldiers; factions grown desperate; and whatsoever in offending a people joineth them in a common cause.”

divide his enemies and to unite his friends. “Generally, the dividing and breaking of all factions... that are adverse to the state, and setting them at a distance, or at least distrust, among themselves, is not one of the worst remedies; for it is a desperate case, if those that hold with the proceeding of the state be full of discord and faction, and those that are against it be entire and united.”

A better recipe for the avoidance of revolutions is an equitable distribution of wealth: “Money is like muck, not good unless it be spread.” But this does not mean socialism, or even democracy; Bacon distrusts the people, who were in his day quite without access to education; “the lowest of all flatteries is the flattery of the common people”; and “P...

IV. The Great Reconstruction

“People are very apt to contemn truth, on account of the controversies raised about it, and to think those all in a wrong way who never meet.”

“The sciences... stand almost at a stay, without receiving any augmentations worthy of the human race;... and all the tradition and succession of schools is still a succession of masters and scholars, not of inventors... In what is now done in the matter of science there is only a whirling about, and perpetual agitation, ending where it began.”

It was a magnificent enterprise, and—except for Aristotle—without precedent in the history of thought. It would differ from every other philosophy in aiming at practice rather than at theory, at specific concrete goods rather than at speculative symmetry.

“It is not an opinion to be held... but a work to be done; and I... am laboring to lay the foundation not of any sector doctrine, but of utility and power.”

1. The Advancement of Learning

To produce works, one must have knowledge. “Nature cannot be commanded except by being obeyed.”

“to make the circuit of knowledge, noticing what parts lie waste and uncultivated, and abandoned by the industry of man; with a view to engage, by a faithful mapping out of the deserted tracts, the energies of public and private persons in their improvement.”

be the royal surveyor of the weed-grown soil, making straight the road, and dividing the fields among the laborers. It was a plan audacious to the edge of immodesty;

implying merely that his work would bring him into every field, as the critic and coördinator of every science in the task of social reconstruction.

So he ranges over the vast battle-ground in which human research struggles with natural hindrance and human ignorance; and in every field he sheds illumination. He attaches great importance to physiology and medicine; he exalts the latter as regulating “a musical instrument of much and exquisite workmanship easily put out of tune.” But he objects to the lax empiricism of contemporary doctors, and their facile tendency to treat all ailments with the same prescription—usually

“Our physicians are like bishops, that have the keys of binding and loosing, but no more.” They rely too much on mere haphazard, uncoördinated individual experience; let them experiment more widely, let them illuminate human with comparative anatomy, let them dissect and if necessary vivisect; and above all, let them construct an easily accessible and intelligible record of experiments and results.