The aphorismi and a discourse of laws: Bacon, cavendish, and hobbes 1615–1620

Historical Journal

Volumn 47, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 399-412

  Huxley, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 84884083507     PISSN: 0018246X     EISSN: 14695103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X04003735     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. Anonymous, Horae subsecivae: observations and discourses (London, 1620), pp. 505–541.
2. I cite the text of the modern edition (Thomas Hobbes, Three discourses, a critical modern edition of newly identified work, of the young Hobbes, ed. Noel B. Reynolds and Arlene W. Saxonhouse (Chicago, 1995), pp. 105–19), but will refer to the 1620 pagination (which is also indicated in the modern edition).
3. Hardwick MS 51, located at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire. The text of the Aphorismi may be found (with translation and commentary) in Mark Neustadt, ‘The making of the instauration: science, politics and law in the career of Francis Bacon’ (PhD thesis, Johns Hopkins University, 1987), pp. 239–71. I have not altered Neustadt's text, though it contains several eccentric spellings (such as virietas, imoderatae and destutione) and at least one mistaken gender (nostros machinas).
4. Arlene W. Saxonhouse, ‘Hobbes and the beginnings of modern political thought’, in Reynolds and Saxonhouse, eds., Three discourses, p. 152.
5. A discourse, pp. 516–517.
6. Aphorismi, Aph. 10
7. Neustadt, ‘Making of instauration’, pp. 253–254.
8. A discourse, pp. 523–524.
9. Aphorismi, Aph. 8
10. Neustadt, ‘Making of instauration’, pp. 252–253.
11. A discourse, pp. 524–525.
12. Aphorismi, Introduction
13. Neustadt, ‘Making of instauration’, p. 248. The English of A discourse becomes less faithful as it proceeds. A more literal translation of Bacon's second sentence would be: ‘In just the same way, each ius civilis (and the study of it) adds taste and colour to the natural equity according to the local variations, such as its geographic situation, the nature and disposition of its people and its state-structure.’
14. A discourse, p. 525 n. 23.
15. cf. Bacon III: 475, Advancement of learning.
16. References in this form are to J. Spedding, R. Ellis, and D. Heath, eds., The works of Francis Bacon (7 vols., London, 1861–1872)
17. J. Spedding, ed., The letters and the life of Francis Bacon (7 vols., London, 1862–1874. The Roman numeral (from I to XIV) denotes the volume in question.)
18. A discourse, pp. 527–528.
19. Aphorismi, Aph. 5
20. Neustadt, ‘Making of instauration’, pp. 250–1. I translate: ‘Changes in the laws happen either by reception from abroad or for internal, historical, reasons. Neither is unproblematic. In the former it is the novelty and in the latter the antiquity that brings about friction and opens the door to disorder. Equally as risky as novelty is the lacklustre retention of custom when the times call for change.’
21. ‘Larding’ is Warren Motte's translation of le tireur à la ligne, the compositional procedure for-malized by Jacques Duchateau. See Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie, Oulipo compendium (London, 1998), pp. 68, 163.
22. A discourse, pp. 529–530.
23. Aphorismi, Aph. 11
24. Neustadt, ‘Making of instauration’, p. 254.
25. Bacon III: 521. Temporis partus masculus was not published during Bacon's lifetime. Nor was it copied into Hardwick MS 51, a selection from Bacon's unpublished works acquired by Chatsworth library during the 1610s.
26. Richard Tuck ‘Hobbes and Tacitus’, in G. Rogers and Tom Sorell, eds., Hobbes and history (London, 2000), p. 109.
27. A discourse, pp. 530–531.
28. Aphorismi, Aph. 9
29. Neustadt, ‘Making of instauration’, p. 253.
30. I translate: ‘To administer medicine is to innovate: and every change to a state's laws is like administering medicine. Forwhich reason the lesson must be learned that laws be not changed too easily or frequently. When ill, people frequently and freely shift their position and change their medicine; in just such a way, the weakenening states change their laws. They do so not because it will cure them, but because ofimpatience with their own condition. A heap of laws is for the most part caused by the craftiness of the times, as if a booby-trap were setting more booby-traps.’ Cf. his Essay of innovations (first published in the 1625 3rd edition of Bacon's Essays): ‘Surely every medicine is an innovation; and he that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils: for time is the greatest innovator’: Bacon VI: 433, Of innovations.
31. Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to fortune: the troubled life of Francis Bacon, 1561–1626 (London, 1998) pp. 506–508.
32. Seneca, Apocolocyntosis, 9, 6.
33. See further Archer Taylor, ‘The history of a proverbial pattern’, De Proverbio.com, 2 (1996), pp. 1–4.
34. Bacon VII: 417, Upon the statute of uses.
35. Bacon VI: 508, Of judicature.
36. A discourse, pp. 525–526.
37. Bacon III: 475, Advancement of karning.
38. Advancement of karning, p. 476.
39. Advancement of karning.
40. Bacon I: 805, De augmentis scientarum. I translate: ‘A law may be judged good which is certain in meaning, just in precept, convenient in execution, congruent with the political structure and productive of virtue in the ruled.’
41. A discourse, p. 505
42. cf. Inst. 1.1
43. A discourse, p. 517
44. cf. Inst. 1.1.2. pr.-1.
45. A discourse, p. 536–539
46. cf. Inst. 1.2.4–9.
47. Edward O'Brien ‘“Horae subsecivae”, 1620’, Notes and Queries, 10 S. XII (1909), pp. 101–3, 162–3. His only specific comment on A discourse of laws (that ‘a remarkable parallel might be instituted with the essays of Bacon’) is at p. 163.
48. For an account of Bacon's legal studies in Paris, see Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to fortune, pp. 60–61.
49. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Maurice Rat (Paris, 1948), III, p. 302: ‘que j'ay seulement faict icy un amas de fleures estrangeres, n'y ayant fourny du mien que le filet à les lier’.
50. ‘& meram inventionem in multis et quandam emendationem in singulis, vel rerum distinctione vel verborum proprietate, vel sensuum vigore, vel ordinis lumine vel aliqua alia certe donatione per Aphorismos istos meos pro captu suo quisque agnoscet & videbit’. From the Aphorismi, preface
51. Neustadt, ‘Making of instauration’, pp. 248–249.
52. Quentin Skinner, ‘Bringingback a new Hobbes’, New York Review of Books, 4 Apr. 1996, pp. 58–62, at p. 58.
53. Born after 1581, died about 1614. See: Dictionary of national biography, III, p. 161, sub nom. Brydges, Grey.
54. Noel B. Reynolds, ‘Statistical wordprinting’, in Reynolds and Saxonhouse, eds., Three discourses, p. 161.
55. Bacon III: 475, Advancement of learning.
56. Neustadt, ‘Making ofinstauration’, p. 242.
57. Noel B. Reynolds and Arlene W. Saxonhouse, ‘Hobbes and the Horae subsecivae’, in Reynolds and Saxonhouse, eds., Three discourses, p. 4.
58. Quentin Skinner, Reason and rhetoric in the philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1997), p. 219.
59. Noel Malcolm, De Dominis (1560–1624): Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist and relapsed heretic (London, (1984), p. 51.
60. De Dominis (1560–1624): Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist and relapsed heretic, p. 53.
61. ‘I found them, already translated, in the possession of Sir William Cavendish … who, with the Author's blessing, lent them to me … [Bacon], knowing that they were already translated, acceded to such demands as were made of him to allow them to be printed’: quoted in De Dominis (1560–1624): Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist and relapsed heretic, p. 47.
62. De Dominis (1560–1624): Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist and relapsed heretic, p. 51. It thanked him for setting up a direct correspondence with Bacon.
63. Daniel Coquillette, Francis Bacon (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 243.