I From Plato to Bacon

“As I read Plato,” writes Professor Dewey, “philosophy began with some sense of its essentially political basis and mission—a recognition that its problems were those of the organization of a just social order. But it soon got lost in dreams of another world.”¹ Plato and Aristotle are the crura cerebri of Europe. But in Aristotle, along with a wealth of acute observation of men and institutions, we find a diminishing interest in reconstruction; the Stagirite spent too much of his time in card-cataloguing Plato, and allowed his imagination to become suffocated with logic. With the Stoics and Epicureans begin that alienation of ethics from politics, and that subordination of philosophy to religious needs, which it is part of the task of present thinking to undo. Alexander had conquered the Orient, only to have Orientalism conquer Greece. Under Scholasticism it was the fate of great minds to retrace worn paths in the cage of a system of conclusions determined by external authority; and the obligation to uphold the established precluded any practical recognition of the reconstructive function of thought. With the Renaissance—that Indian summer of Greek culture—the dream of a remoulded world found voice again. Campanella, through the darkness of his prison cell, achieved the vision of a communist utopia; and other students of the rediscovered Plato painted similar pictures. Indeed this reawakening of Plato’s influence gave to the men of the Renaissance an inspiriting sense of the wonders that lay potential in organized intelligence. Again men faced the task of replacing with a natural ethic the falling authoritarian sanctions of supernatural religion; and for a time one might have hoped that the thought of Socrates was to find at last its due fruition. But again men lost themselves in the notion of a cultured class moving leisurely over the backs of slaves; and perhaps it was well that the whole movement was halted by the more Puritan but also more democratic outburst of the Reformation. What the world needed was a method which offered hope for the redemption not of a class, but of all. Galileo and Roger Bacon opened the way to meeting this need by their emphasis on the value of hypothesis and experiment, and the necessity of combining induction with deduction; it remained for Francis Bacon to lay out the road for the organized employment of these new methods, and to inspire all Europe with his warm vision of their social possibilities.