..... take such things as are green all winter: holly, ivy; . . . . . rosemary; germander; and myrtles, if they be stoved; and sweet lavender; ..... "And trial would be made of grafting of rosemary, and bays, and box, upon a holly-stock; because they are plants that come all winter."— Nat. Hist., § 592. ..... "There followeth, for the latter part of January and February, the mezereon-tree, which then blossoms; primroses; anemones; the early tulippa; . . For March, there come violets, specially the single blue, which are the earliest; the yellow daffodil; the daisy; sweet briar. In April follow the double white violet; the wall-flower; the stock gilliflower; the cowslip; flower-de-luces, and lilies of all natures; rosemary-flowers; the tulippa; the double piony; the pale daffodil;" "Per. ..... ..... Out, alas! You'd be so lean, that blasts of January Would blow you through and through. - Now, my fair'st friend, I would I had some flowers o' th' Spring, that might Become your time of day; and yours; and yours; "In May and June come pinks of all sorts, specially the bluish pink; roses of all kinds, except the musk which comes later; . . . . . the French marigold; .. of all varieties; "Per. lavender in flowers. ..... In July come gilliflowers Sir, the year growing ancient, — Not yet on Summer's death, nor on the birth Are our carnations, and streak'd gilliflowers, Which some call Nature's bastards: of that kind Our rustic garden 's barren; and I care not Here's flowers for you; Hot lavender, mint, savory, marjoram ; The marigold, that goes to bed with th' sun: And as another instance of the source of Bacon's metaphors, it may be noted that in a letter to Burghley he uses this expression: "though it bear no fruit, yet it is one of the fairest flowers of my poor estate; "1 which is repeated in another letter of the same year thus: "I will present your Lordship with the fairest flower of my estate, though it yet bear no fruit." 2 Mr. Spedding notices these resemblances, and observes, that if this Essay had been contained in the earlier edition, some expressions would have made him suspect that Shakespeare had been reading it: and well they might. But it was not printed until 1625, and, of course, William Shakespeare could never have seen it. Nor is it at all probable that Bacon would have anything to learn of William Shakespeare concerning the science of gardening. In short, when the Essay and the play are read together, written as they both are, in that singular style of elegance, brevity, and beauty, and depth of science, which is so markedly characteristic of this author, whether in verse or prose, it becomes next to impossible to doubt of his identity. § 3. THE GREATER PROVIDENCE. Whence it may be understood how it must be impossible that any knowledge out of the foreknowledge of God, or through angels, dæmons, or spirits, or any information of his actual thoughts, intentions, purposes, or future providence, through divination, influxion, inspiration, or any kind of special illumination, can be imparted, or directly 1 Letter (1597), II. Spedding, 52. 2 Letter to Egerton (1597), Ibid. 62. communicated, to man from within, behind, and beyond the origin and source of his own soul. Indeed, in this sense of foreknowledge, there is none possible with God himself, within the power of human conception; for, with him, to think and know is to create and bring into actual existence what is thought and known. The actual present state of his thought, in any instant, is the real universe that lies before us and around us. His purposes therein are revealed to us only in the providential order and scientific history of the past and present universe. The future continuity of the creation must depend, for the actual details thereof, upon his future thought and the plan and purpose that may be therein, in the freedom of his power or will; and it must be forever impossible to be foreknown to Him, or revealed to us. Man premeditates: God creates. His thought, his word, is his deed. Though man's thought be his deed, in respect of his own creative thinking, and his imaginations, his conceptions, according to Spinoza, “regarded in themselves, contain no error," it is not always so, when regarded with reference to things external to them, nor in his execution of his thought into outward act, nor in his judgment of the works of other men; much less, in his conceptions of the works and providence of God. The difference between the human mind and the divine mind must no more be lost sight of than their identity, in so far as identical. The common conception of Deity as of a being who reasons, deliberates, premeditates, and thinks within himself, before acting and creating; who frames ideals, types, and archetypes in his mind, first, and then moulds the chaos of dead matter into some degree of conformity with them, and gradually builds up a universe upon a preconceived and well-considered plan, like a common carpenter, who is angry and pleased, is offended and propitiated, and rewards and punishes, after the manner of men, is a weak invention, a mere waking dream, and the offspring of superficial and uncritical thinking. Nor much better is that other view, that takes the universe, indeed, to have been "the free conception of the Almighty Intellect," but as having been "matured in his thought before it was manifested in tangible forms," as if there had been "premeditation prior to the act of creation," 1 and concludes from a consideration of the entire order of the animal kingdom, that "the whole was devised in order to place man at the head," and that "millions of ages ago, his coming was seen as the culmination of the thought, which devised the fishes and the lowest radiata." 2 For, duly considered, there is here no other anticipation necessarily, or logically, to be inferred than this: that when the first ideal type, for instance, the cell, wherein is the fundamental unity of type of the whole animal kingdom, was conceived and executed as one act in the actual creation of the first animal cell that was created, the entire ideal architectonic of the whole kingdom, man included, was then, as it may truly be said, merely within the bounds of the possible for the creative power, acting under the necessary laws of thought and in accordance with the divine nature and in consistency with his attributes of wisdom and goodness, within the scope and scheme of that most general type, whenever it should please the Divine Majesty further to conceive and execute other less general types in other actual details (still falling under that most general type, if it should so please him), in the order of his providence in the work of creating an animal kingdom. But until so actually conceived and brought into existence as a part of his thought, for the rest uncreated, it need be considered only as being as yet in possibility, and still lying in all the possibilities of his thinking existence, not yet thought out of non-existence even into the divine contemplation in any sense of preliminary premeditation; for He is that absolute Power of Thought, with whom "being and knowing" are 1 Agassiz's Contrib. to Nat. Hist. of N. Amer., I. 9. one, whose knowledge is that Sapience which is at once both knowledge and wisdom in all that is, or will be, created, and with whom, to think is to create just so far and no further; and so, in like manner, of any secondary and subordinate type, or less general ideal plan, in any branching direction, in time and space, of Branch, Class, Order, Genus, Species, or Individual, even to the minutest details, in the actual order of their creation and succession, existence and disappearance, in geological consecutiveness and progression; individuals, only, having actual existence in time and space, form and cause conjoined, so as to present" tangible forms" and physical existence in nature, recognizable to human senses, scopes, instruments, and all the methods of experimental science, and copyable and conceivable to the human mind, no less and no more than those intangible ideal and more general forms, types, and archetypes, which fall within the scope of the intellectual vision and metaphysical science only; for this science alone can discover, or see, the transcendental architectonic of the universe. And we have on the geological tablets and in living nature a record sufficient, when thoroughly studied, to enable us to penetrate the mystery, to see through nature up to nature's author, and finally to grasp a true science of the whole creation by that way, whenever we shall have arrived with Bacon at a knowledge of " the order, operation, and Mind of Nature" and that truth which, by the oath of Lear, was to be Cordelia's dower: "Lear. So young, and so untender? Cor. So young, my lord, and true. Lear. Let it be so: thy truth, then, be thy dower: For, by the sacred radiance of the sun, The mysteries of Hecate, and the night, By all the operation of the orbs, From whom we do exist, and cease to be, Hold thee from this forever."- Lear, Act I. Sc. 1. |