Bacon's Essays with Annotations by Richard Whately (Essay Index Reprint Series)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 edition. Excerpt: ...that, although the animals themselves are, in some sort, agents, they could not originally have designed the effects they produced, but that even afterwards they have no notion of the combination by which these are brought about. But when human conduct tends to some desirable end, and the agents are competent to perceive that the end is desirable, and the means well adapted to it, they are apt to forget that, in the great majority of instances, those means were not devised, nor those ends proposed, by the persons themselves who are thus employed. The workman, for instance, who is employed in casting printing-types, is usually thinking only of producing a commodity by the sale of which he may support himself; with reference to this object, he is acting, not from any impulse that is at all of the character of instinct, but from a rational and deliberate choice: but he is also, in the very same act, contributing most powerfully to the diffusion of knowledge; about which, perhaps, he has no anxiety or thought; in reference to this latter object, therefore, his procedure corresponds to those operations of various animals which we attribute to instinct; since they, doubtless, derive some immediate gratification from what they are doing. Indeed, in all departments connected with the acquisition and communication of knowledge, a similar procedure may be traced. The greater part of it is the gift, not of human, but of divine benevolence, which has implanted in Man a thirst after knowledge for its own sake, accompanied with a sort of instinctive desire, founded probably on sympathy, of communicating it to others as an ultimate end. This, and also the love of display, are no doubt inferior motives, and will be superseded by a higher principle, in proportion...