Learning from Experience, or Not: From Chrysippus to Rasselas

Learning from Experience, or Not: from Chrysippus to Rasselas JEFFREY BARNOUW In Reflections on the Revolution in France Edmund Burke "appeal[s] to what is so much out of fashion in Paris, I mean to experience .... By a slow but well-sustained progress, the effect of each step is watched; the good or ill success of the first, gives light to us in the second; and so, from light to light, we are conducted with safety through the whole series."(281).1 What is meant by 'experience' in this context involves the continuity suggested by 'slow but well-sustained' and 'through the whole series', but it hinges on the light to be gained from good or ill success of our efforts at each step. More about this 'light' can be gleaned from the passages leading up to this appeal to experience, where Burke emphasizes the value of difficulty. This suggests that we leam more from ill than from good success. Burke argues that the untested rationalist schemes of the French revolutionaries have abandoned "the public interests ... wholly to chance; I say to chance, because their schemes have nothing in experience to prove their tendency beneficial" (277). Their purpose every where seems to have been to evade and slip aside from difficulty. This it has been the glory of the great masters in all the arts to confront, and to overcome; 313 314 / BARNOUW and when they had overcome the first difficulty, to turn it into an instrument for new conquests over new difficulties; thus to enable them to extend the empire of their science . . . He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations (278). It is this inability to wrestle with difficulty which has obliged the arbitrary assembly of France to commence their schemes of reform with abolition and total destruction (279). No difficulties occur in what has never been tried. Criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what has not existed; and eager enthusiasm, and cheating hope, have all the wide field of imagination in which they may expatiate with little or no opposition (280). Particularly the last passage sounds Johnsonian in resonance, but the principle which Burke is setting out is itself pervasive in Johnson's writing . But, as here in Burke, it is more often observed in the breach in Johnson, that is, observed or dramatized in its absence in others' ways of acting. I want eventually to pursue aspects of the idea of'learning from experience, or not' in writings of Johnson. Let me first rum to a writer who seems to me to have had seminal subliminal influence on Johnson in this respect, Francis Bacon, and then to a key antecedent of Bacon. Bacon was a main (if largely unrecognized) source of a moral psychology flourishing in eighteenth-century Britain, exemplified in Johnson and Burke, but also Hume and others, which drew at the same time on a form of Stoicism and on the experimentalist frame of mind of the New Science. This psychology, with its strong moral implications, is a significant component of what is coming to be recognized as a distinctive English Enlightenment , or, if we were to co-opt the well-established Scottish Enlightenment , a distinctive British Enlightenment.2 The present paper is meant as a contribution to this recognition. Bacon understood his idea of experimental science as a discipline, a self-disciplining of the mind. The human mind is prone to project its own wishes on what it perceives, both within perception itself and as it makes the world over imaginatively, for example in poetry and in metaphysics.3 Two aphorisms from the New Organon spell this out. XLV. The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the Leaming from Experience, or Not / 315 world than it finds . . .4 XLVI. The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else...