of Newton, it is because he kept back his discoveries till they were nearly perfected, and therefore withheld the successive steps of his inquiries.

(ABBOTT, Francis Bacon, pp. 333-339.)

Although Bacon always speaks of his own philosophy as quite new and different from all philosophic systems that had gone before, yet he was at least partially aware that, on its negative side, and in its protest against excessive deference to the authority of Aristotle, his work had been anticipated. He had entered into the fruits of the labors of many predecessors, some of whom are mentioned in his pages; and without a brief review of their work, it would be difficult to realize the nature of the task he undertook.

As early as the thirteenth century his namesake, Roger Bacon (born about 1214), had protested against the Aristotelian despotism, in behalf of a new learning which should be based on experience and should produce fruit. In language which reminds us of Francis Bacon's Idols, he imputes human ignorance to four causes: authority, custom, popular opinion, and the pride of supposed knowledge. Nor could the author of the Novum Organum have uttered a more confident prediction of the results to be expected from the practical application of the New Learning than is found in the passage where Roger Bacon declares that, as Aristotle by ways of wisdom gave Alexander the kingdom of the world, so Science can enable the Church to triumph over Antichrist by disclosing the secrets of nature and art.

But the Schoolmen were too strong for Roger Bacon. Beginning with John Scotus Erigena in the ninth century, and ending with William of Ockham in the fourteenth, these philosophers made it their endeavor to arrange and support the orthodox doctrine of the Church in accordance

with the rules and methods of the Aristotelian dialectics; and at the very time when Roger Bacon was rebelling against the yoke, Thomas Aquinas was riveting it more firmly than ever by fashioning the tenets of Aristotle into that fixed form in which they became the great impediments to the progress of knowledge. The adoption of the Aristotelian philosophy by the Dominican and Franciscan Orders in the form in which Aquinas had systematized it, helped to defer for three centuries the reform which Roger Bacon was already urging as a crying necessity. Pasturing, and content to pasture, on Aristotle instead of Nature, the Schoolmen despised experiment and observation. It was such students as these whom Francis Bacon likened, not to the bees, who mold what they gather, nor even to the ants, who at least collect, but to the spiders, evolving unsubstantial theory from self-extracted argument.

Yet during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries theoretical innovation and practical reform were in secret mutiny, preparing the way for the open revolt against Aristotle and his viceroy of Aquinum. During these two centuries the fundamental doctrines of mechanics, hydrostatics, optics, magnetism, and chemistry were established and promulgated; and their startling and irrefutable results forced on men's minds the power given to mankind over nature by the New Philosophy. Over these fresh provinces of learning, since Aristotle had not discovered. them, Aristotle could claim no dominion. In this revolution the principal part was played by a class described by Whewell as the 'Practical Reformers'; but to Francis Bacon they were comparatively unknown and unappreciated, and we will therefore give precedence to that other class which receives more frequent and prominent mention in his works, and which may be called the class of 'Theoretical Innovators.'

SWIFT

Telesius (Bernardinus), born in 1508, in his treatise on the Nature of Things (1565), says: 'The construction of the world, and the magnitude and nature of the bodies in it, are not to be investigated by reasoning, as was done by the ancients; but they are to be apprehended by the sense, and collected from the things themselves.' He complains that his predecessors in philosophy, during their laborious examinations of the world, 'appear never to have looked at it, but to have made an arbitrary world of their own. We then, not relying on ourselves, and of a duller intellect than they, propose to turn our regard to the world itself and its facts.' But the execution of his work was not equal to his conception of it; and we find him deserting the path of experiment, and falling into the old track of assumptions. Ramus (born in 1515) maintained as his thesis, when proceeding to his degree of Master of Arts in Paris (1535), that 'all that Aristotle has said is not true.' In 1543 he published his System of Logic, with animadversions upon Aristotle. After being deprived of his professorship and restored, he was put to death in 1572, during the massacre of St. Bartholomew's day. Campanella (who was born in 1568, and died in 1639) warns men against mere books and definitions, proclaiming his own resolution to 'compare books with that first and original writing, the world,' and declaring that men must begin to reason from sensible things: 'definition is the end and epilogue of Science.'

Among the Practical Reformers,' Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is the first who took the true view of the laws of equilibrium of the lever in the most general case. He anticipates Francis Bacon in his remarks on experiment The interpreter of the artifices of Nature is Experience, who is never deceived. We must begin from experiment, and try to discover the reason.' Copernicus (1543), in his Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies,

introduced the heliocentric theory, though (and this must be borne in mind when we discuss Bacon's rejection of the Copernican system) he nowhere asserts that it is a certain truth, but merely describes it as 'a better explanation of the revolution of the celestial orbs.'

Tycho Brahé (1560-1601), the prince of observers, without a telescope, and with a globe no bigger than his fist, detected the errors of existing astronomical tables, and by his mechanical skill in the construction of instruments discovered the means of remedying these errors; and to his observations we owe the deduction of the real laws of a planet's motion by Kepler (1609–1618), and of the fundamental law of attraction by Newton (1687). Though he rejected the Copernican theory (a very different theory then from the theory as modified by Newton) he discovered that the old Ptolemaic spheres of the planets and of the Primum Mobile could not possibly be solid; and thus he struck the first decisive blow against the Ptolemaic system.

Napier (1550-1617) by the publication (1614) of his Logarithmic Tables - on which he was busied before 1594, but of which Francis Bacon never appears to have had any knowledge-bestowed on astronomy a benefit which has been described by Laplace as 'doubling the life of astronomers by reducing to a few days the labor of many months.’

Galileo (1564-1642), by his experiment from the leaning tower of Pisa (before 1592), disproved the Aristotelian doctrine that bodies fall quickly or slowly in proportion to their weight. Rebuking the 'paper philosophers' who thought that philosophy could be studied like the Æneid or the Odyssey, he employs the same language as Campanella concerning the Book of the Universe: 'Philosophy is written in that great book, I mean the Universe, which is constantly open before our eyes; but it cannot be

understood except we first know the language and learn the characters in which it is written.' But more effective than his sublimest denunciations of paper philosophy was his invention of the thermometer (before 1597), and the construction of his wonder-working telescope in 1609.

Gilbert (1540-1603), physician to Queen Elizabeth and author of a treatise On the Magnet (1600), deserves special attention as being not only the contemporary, but also the countryman, of Francis Bacon. Like Bacon, he strongly maintains the superiority of experimental knowledge; like Bacon, he desires to see more fruit from philosophy; and, like him, he also inveighs against Aristotle and Galen as the two Lords of Philosophy, worshiped as false gods; but he differs from Bacon in consistently adhering to the Copernican system of astronomy, rejecting the Ptolemaic as absurd. Galileo writes of him, ‘I extremely admire and envy this author,' and Whewell (from whom this sketch is taken) declares that his work 'contains all the fundamental facts of Magnetism so fully stated that we have at this day little to add to them'; but to Francis Bacon, impatiently aspiring after vast and general conclusions, Gilbert's researches seemed petty and narrow; and for some faint praise of this original worker he takes ample compensation by declaring that Gilbert has so lost himself in his subject that 'he has himself become a magnet.'

From this brief summary of the thoughts and works of the Theoretical Innovators and the Practical Reformers, it will be seen that Francis Bacon (1561-1626), being in his early manhood the contemporary of Galileo, Tycho Brahé, and Kepler, and of his own countrymen, Gilbert and Napier, was living in the midst of an intellectual revolution which had already almost shaken off the yoke of the tyrant Aristotle, and was preparing to set up Experience on the vacated throne.