Journal of the History of Philosophy

94 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Randall. The notion that induction provides principles for deduction is in any case a commonplace since Aristotle. The author's analyses depend on the Latin texts very closely, and seem sound in the main, but do not add very much to our understanding of Cremonini's philosophy . At times she ascribes an undeserved originality to Cremonini (cf. pp. 118, 129, 131), where he really is only following long-established traditional philosophic doctrines. Since Cremonini's works have been out of print since 1663, the chief value of this study is perhaps to make available again some texts of this last of the Renaissance Aristoteleans. PAUL J. W. MILLER University of Colorado Peace Among the Willows: The Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon. By Howard B. White (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968. Pp. x+266. G 33) Recent studies of Francis Bacon have wisely ignored the now exhausted problem of what he contributed to the methodology of science and have concentrated upon his meaning and his actual achievements. Peace Among the Willows addresses itself to both these latter topics in the relatively unexplored area of his political philosophy. Not only because it opens up new territory but also because it penetrates deeply into Bacon's thought and influence, no student of Bacon can afford to neglect it. For Bacon's influence Professor White establishes, if not a new claim, at least a new perspective and emphasis: "The vision of the future as the triumph of modern science and the faith in its essential beneficence are, to a large extent, the product of the deliberate effort of Francis Bacon" (p. 7). An attack upon this faith seems to be an important part of the unrest of the younger generation, and White looks back to John Dewey's political teaching as his major example of utopian thought based upon faith in the beneficence of science (p. 8). But most of us are still believers and will probably remain so. In details, too, the book offers new insights, even upon so hackneyed a topic as Bacon's handling of the final cause. "Bacon, who abandons the search for final causes in the cosmos, restores final causes in man, that is, in matters political. If man is the center of the world, what man makes of himself, or should make of himself, becomes the central problem of philosophy" (p. 14). In this sense "the New Atlantis is a search for final causes . . ." (p. 123). But if final causes in politics "are to become in Bacon the highest, indeed, the only final causes, the obvious difficulty is the absence of a standard by which those causes can be measured.., there can no more be a definitive morality in Bacon than there can be in John Dewey" (p. 221). Having recognized the very real merits of the book, one must enter major reservations about its methodology. It ,reveals, first of all, serious deficiencies in understanding aspects of Bacon's thought that are of his own time. To ask, "What is this faith that science will bring peace, or, to use Bacon's own broader terms: 'the relief of man's estate'?" (p. 1) is to substitute for Bacon's objectives, surely as broad as his terms, a contemporary preoccupation which, so far as this reviewer can judge, did not BOOK REVIEWS 95 have a major role in Bacon's thinking. The discussion of Bacon's defense of JUtiLlS Caesar (p. 61) obviously betrays a misunderstanding both of Bncon's monarchism and of complex renaissance attitudes toward Caesar. To speak of "the passions, or as Bacon preferred to call them, the 'affections' " (p. 23) is to ignore a vital distinction between terms for pathological emotional states and for the normal emotional drives necessary to man's functioning, or to overlook that a proper subordination of the affections to reason is for the renaissance thinker one of the conditions of virtuous conduct (p. 24). Bacon's distinction between a real and an apparent good as the mother respectively of virtue and passion (p. 224) may be a "foreshadowing of Hobbes," but it had been standard Christian psychology for centuries. Professor White recognizes that "More does not...