BOOK III. Chapter II. Systems. thekwissenschaft." Its arrangement of classes runs thus: Classificatory I. Civil Law; II. Canon Law; III. Casuistry; IV. and V. Dictionaries, etc.; VI. and VII. Hagiography, Chronography, and Topography; VIII., IX. and X. Theology; XI. Philosophy; XII. Oratory and Rhetoric; XIII. Epistolography; XIV. Poetry; XV. Philology; XVI. Miscellanies (promiscue omnes quotquot superioribus non possint inseri); XVII. German books (libros Teutonicos). Trefler's treatise was already numbered amongst books of great rarity almost two hundred years ago. Both Zoller and Albert, (in common with Jöcher and Ziegelbauer) appear never to have seen the book itself, but describe it on the authority of an elaborate notice by Struve, in the Jena periodical Bibliotheca antiqua, for January, 1706. C. de Savigny's scheme. In 1587, Christofle de Savigny published, under the title of "Tableau accomplis de tous les arts libéraux contenans une générale et sommaire partition des dits arts, amassez et reduicts par ordre, etc.," a scheme which is substantially but a modification of Gesner's. The number of classes is sixteen, which are thus arranged:1. Grammar; 2. Rhetoric; 3. Dialectics; 4. Arithmetic; 5. Geometry; 6. Optics; 7. Music; 8. Cosmography; 9. Astrology; 10. Geography; 11. Physics; 12. Medicine; 13. Ethics; 14. Jurisprudence; 15. History; 16. Theology. Each class has its divisions and subdivisions, worked out with much elaboration, and, in a second edition of the work, published in 1619; two additional classes are introduced, namely, 17. Poetry; and 18. Chronology. DE SAVIGNY'S AND BACON'S SCHEMES. 765 If literary history did not present us with so many instances of the eagerness with which petty attacks are made upon great names, as if in the hope of nibbling off, as it were, some fragment of that fame which cannot be openly contested, we might feel surprise that any writer should have adduced this scheme of Savigny's as being "certainly an anticipation and probably a source" of the famous "Encyclopædical tree" of our illustrious Bacon, to which, in truth, it bears scarcely any resemblance. Strange as it may seem, however, this has actually been done, and that by the eminent bibliographer Brunet, in the introduction (already quoted) to the "Manuel du libraire." It would have been much more to the purpose to have pointed out the very obvious similarity which exists between the classification of Savigny and that of Gesner, which had preceded it by forty years. BOOK III. Chapter II. Classificatory Systems. That well-known survey of all human knowledge by Bacon's scheme. which Bacon at the same time recorded the discoveries that had been already effected, and traced the courses which yet remained to be explored by the enterprise of many succeeding ages, was first given to the world in 1605. Human learning he regards as issuing from the three fountains of Memory, of Imagination, and of Reason; HISTORY being the emanation of the first; POESY of the second; PHILOSOPHY of the third; and 1 Brunet's words are: "C'est un système figuré de toutes nos connaissances, antérieur de près de vingt ans, remarquons-le bien, l'Arbre Encyclopédique de Bacon, dont il a pu être le modèle." M. Albert quietly overlooks Bacon altogether. BOOK III. Chapter II. there can be, he adds, "no other, nor no more; for Classificatory History and Experience we take for one and the same, as we do Philosophy and Science." Systems. To quote the whole of the "Partitio universalis doctrinæ humanæ," can scarcely be needed for the purpose in view. But a brief recital of its main divisions may be useful. They run thus: Here we have an intellectual chart which, as Dugald Stewart has said, (in the preface to the preliminary dissertations of the Encyclopædia Britannica,) “is, with all its imperfections, the only one of which modern philosophy has yet to boast." This remark is still substantially true. Bacon's scheme is admirable for comprehensiveness, for lucid arrangement, and for a terminology, at once striking and precise, which the memory can easily and firmly grasp. But it is far better adapted to the purposes of the Historian of Learning and of the Sciences than to those of the Librarian. It is fitter for the classification of ideas than 1 F. Baconi Partitio universalis doctrinæ humanæ, etc. (De Diyn. et Aug. Scientiarum, lib. 2.) Works, by Montagu, viii, 87, ad finem, 8vo. 1828. BACON'S INTELLECTUAL CHART. 767 for that of books. In his third class the illustrious BOOK V. Chapter VII. Systems. author seizes the substance, and disregards the form: Classificatory -"By Poesie, in this place," he says, "we understand nothing else but original history or fables," ("fiction" as we now say, whether in prose or verse.) As for verse, that is only a style of expression;" whilst in his first class he makes Natural History and Civil History to be correlatives, and thus lays down a rule which, (if it could be carried out) would sever the narratives of what has been observed concerning the workings of nature, from those treatises on what we call the laws of nature, which are but deductions from such observation. D'Alembert's elaboration of Accordingly, in D'Alembert's Elaboration of Bacon's scheme we find the "Natural History of Minerals," to Bacon's scheme. be a section of the fourth division of class I, and "Mineralogy" we find to be a section of the sixth division (Physics) of class II, and so it is with plants and with animals. But how, in practice, are we to demarcate Mineralogy from the history of minerals, or Botany from the history of plants? This system of D'Alembert is so entirely an amplification of Lord Bacon's that it will be more fitly noticed here than in the order of its date (1767). The three main classes he retains, but increases the number of divisions and sub-divisions, and alters their arrangement. Briefly it may be thus stated: BOOK III. Chapter II. Classificatory Systems. Other modifications of Bacon's scheme. Class I. HISTORY: 1. Sacred History. Class II.-PHILOSOPHY:- Ontology. 2. Science of God—(i.) Na- 3. Science of Man-(i.) 4 The system of Bacon has also been made the groundwork of other schemes by Regnault Warin,' by Laire,' and by Peignot. These, however, I pass by, with the remark that many of the alterations they propose will not, on close examination, establish themselves as improvements, and that in some instances the later writer expunges the additions or substitutes of his immediate 1 D'Alembert, Discours préliminaire à l'Encyclopédie Méthodique (Mélanges, i, 239, et seqq. 8vo., Amst., 1767). 2 Tableau de l'entendement humain.—Introduction aux études encyclopédiques (8vo, Paris, 1798). 3 Peignot, Dictionnaire raisonné de Bibliologie (8vo, Paris, 1802), ii, 235, (referring to MSS. preserved at Besançon). 4 Ibid., ii, 271-280. |