VIII The Asiatics of Europe
BUT the place of Bacon in the continuum of history is hardly stated by connecting him with Plato. Conceive of him rather as a new protagonist in the long epic of intelligence; another blow struck in the seemingly endless war between magic and science, between supernaturalism and naturalism, between the spirit of worship and the spirit of control. Primitive man—and he lives everywhere under the name of legion—looks out upon nature as something to be feared and obeyed, something to be cajoled by ritual and sacrifice and prayer. In ages of great social disorder, such as the millennium inaugurated in Western Europe by the barbarian invasions, the primitive elements in the mental make-up of men emerge through the falling cultural surface; and cults rich in ritual and steeped in emotional luxury grow in rank abundance. It is in the character of man to worship power: if he feels the power without him more intensely than the power within, he worships nature with a humble fear, and leans on magic and supernatural rewards; if he feels the power within him more intensely than the power without, he sees divinity in himself and other centres of remoulding activity, and thinks not of worshipping and obeying nature, but of controlling and commanding her. The second attitude comes, of course, with knowledge, and action that expresses knowledge; it is quite human that nature should not be worshipped once she has been known. A man is primitive, then, when he worships nature and makes no effort to control her; he is mature when he stops worshipping and begins to control,—when he understands that “Nature is not a temple but a workshop,”1 not a barrier to divinity, but the raw material of Utopia.
Now the essence of Bacon is not the replacement of deduction by induction, but the change of emphasis from worship to control. This emphasis, once vivid in Plato but soon obscured by Oriental influence, is one of the two dominant elements in modern thought (the other being the puzzling over an artificial problem of knowledge); and unless the Baconian element finally subordinates the Cartesian, the word modern must no longer arrogate to itself a eulogistic connotation. Hence Bacon, and not Descartes, is the initiator of modern philosophy; part initiator, at least, of that current of thought which finds rebellious expression in the enlightenment of the eighteenth-century, and comes to supremacy in the scientific victories of the nineteenth. The vital sequence in modern philosophy is not Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, and Bergson (for these are the Asiatics of Europe), but Bacon, Hobbes, Condorcet, Comte, Darwin, and James.2
The hope of the world is in this resolute spirit of control,—control of the material without us, and of the passions within. Bit by bit, one is not afraid to say, we shall make for ourselves a better world. Shall we not find a way to eliminate disease, to control the increase of population, to find in plastic organization a substitute for revolution? Shall we perhaps even succeed in transmuting the lust for power over man into ambition to conquer the forces that impede man? Shall we make men understand that there is more potency of joy in the sense of having contributed to the power of men over nature than in any personal triumph of one over another man?—more glory in a conquest of bacteria than in all the martial victories that have ever spilled human blood? Here is the beginning of real civilization, and the mark of man. “The environment transforms the animal; man transforms the environment.”3 “Looking at the history of the world as a whole, the tendency has been in Europe to subordinate nature to man; out of Europe, to subordinate man to nature. Formerly the richest countries were those in which nature was most bountiful; now the richest countries are those in which man is most active.”4 Control is the sign of maturity, the achievement of Europe, the future of America. It is, one argues again, the drama of history, this war between Asia and Europe, between nature and man, between worship and control. Fundamentally it is the upward struggle of intelligence: Plato is its voice, Zeno its passing exhaustion, Bacon its resurrection. It was not an unopposed rebirth: there is still no telling whether East or West will win. Surrounded by the backwash of Oriental currents everywhere, the lover of the Baconian spirit needs constantly to refresh himself at the fount of Bacon’s inexhaustible inspiration and confidence. “I stake all,” he says, “on the victory of art over nature in the race.” And one needs to hold ever before oneself Bacon’s favorite device: A ship passing through the Pillars of Hercules out into the unknown sea, and over it the words, Plus ultra.