Condillac, D'Alembert in France; Vico in Italy; Comenius, Puffendorf, Leibnitz, Huygens, Morhof, Boerhaave, Buddæus in Germany; and, in England, the group of men who founded or were amongst the earliest members of the Royal Society, such as Wallis, Oldenburg, Glanvill, Hooke, and Boyle. Not only do these writers speak with approbation of Bacon's method, but most of them also furnish evidence of the impulse which he gave to scientific inquiry, and the direction which he impressed upon it. Indeed there can be little doubt that the foundation of the Royal Society in England and possibly the same origin may be assigned to some similar societies on the Continent was due to the impulse given by Bacon to the study of experimental science, and the plans which he had devised for its prosecution. A review of the whole evidence leads me to the conclusion that there can be no question as to the reality of his influence on the progress of science in the generation immediately succeeding his own, though as to the extent and nature of that influence there is room for considerable difference of opinion. When we arrive at the end of the seventeenth century, a generation later, we are, in England at least, in the full tide of experimental research, and at that time, I believe, the value and influence of Bacon's writings had come to be universally acknowledged. . . .

To all these sources of influence we must add the marvelous language in which Bacon often clothes his thoughts. His utterances are not infrequently marked with a grandeur and solemnity of tone, a majesty of diction, which renders it impossible to forget, and difficult even to criticize them. He speaks as one having authority, and it is impossible to resist the magic of his voice. Whenever he wishes to be emphatic, there is a true ring of genius about all that he says. Hence, perhaps, it is that there is no author, unless it be Shakespeare, who is so easily

Styli

remembered or so frequently quoted. His phraseology, when most quaint, as in the case of the 'Idols' and the 'Instances,' is often most attractive to the reader, and most persistent in its hold on the memory. Hence, too, perhaps, it is that there is no author so stimulating. Bacon might well be called the British Socrates. Even had his individual precepts been utterly worthless, many men must have owed their first impulse to the study of nature, or to independent investigation in general, to the terse and burning words, issuing, as it were, from the lips of an irresistible commander, with which he urges them to the work.

scorn.

(CHURCH, Bacon, pp. 182-184, 190-193.)

The course which he marked out so laboriously and so ingeniously for Induction to follow was one which was found to be impracticable, and as barren of results as those deductive philosophies on which he lavished his He has left precepts and examples of what he meant by his cross-examining and sifting processes. As admonitions to cross-examine and to sift facts and phenomena they are valuable. Many of the observations and classifications are subtle and instructive. But in his hands nothing comes of them. They lead at the utmost to mere negative conclusions; they show what a thing is not. But his attempt to elicit anything positive out of them breaks down, or ends at best in divinations and guesses, sometimes as in connecting Heat and Motion

very near to later and more carefully grounded theories, but always unverified. He had a radically false and mechanical conception, though in words he earnestly disclaims it, of the way to deal with the facts of nature. He looked on them as things which told their own story, and suggested the questions which ought to be put to them; and with this idea half his time was spent in collecting huge masses of indigested facts of the most various

authenticity and value, and he thought he was collecting materials which his method had only to touch in order to bring forth from them light and truth and power. He thought that, not in certain sciences, but in all, one set of men could do the observing and collecting, and another be set on the work of Induction and the discovery of 'axioms.' Doubtless in the arrangement and sorting of them his versatile and ingenious mind gave itself full play; he divides and distinguishes them into their companies and groups, different kinds of Motion, 'Prerogative' instances, with their long tale of imaginative titles. But we look in vain for any use that he was able to make of them, or even to suggest. Bacon never adequately realized that no promiscuous assemblage of even the most certain facts could ever lead to knowledge, could ever suggest their own interpretation, without the action on them of the living mind, without the initiative of an idea. In truth he was so afraid of assumptions and anticipations' and prejudices - his great bugbear was so much the intellectus sibi permissus,' the mind given liberty to guess and imagine and theorize, instead of, as it ought, absolutely and servilely submitting itself to the control of facts-that he missed the true place of the rational and formative element in his account of Induction. He does tell us, indeed, that 'truth emerges sooner from error than from confusion.' He indulges the mind, in the course of its investigation of 'Instances,' with a first 'vintage' of provisional generalizations. But of the way in which the living mind of the discoverer works, with its ideas and insight, and thoughts that come no one knows whence, working hand in hand with what comes before the eye or is tested by the instrument, he gives us no picture. Compare his elaborate investigation of the 'Form of Heat,' in the Novum Organum, with such a record of real inquiry as Wells' Treatise on Dew, or Herschel's analysis of it in his Introduction to Natural Philosophy. And

of the difference of genius between a Faraday or a Newton and the crowd of average men who have used and finished off their work, he takes no account. Indeed, he thinks that for the future such difference is to disappear. . . .

...

Two men stand out, 'the masters of those who know,' without equals up to their time, among men - the Greek Aristotle and the Englishman Bacon. They agree in the universality and comprehensiveness of their conception of human knowledge; and they were absolutely alone in their serious practical ambition to work out this conception. In the separate departments of thought, of investigation, of art, each is left far behind by numbers of men, who in these separate departments have gone far deeper than they, have soared higher, have been more successful in what they attempted. But Aristotle first, and for his time more successfully, and Bacon after him, ventured on the daring enterprise of 'taking all knowledge for their province'; and in this they stood alone. This present scene of man's existence, this that we call Nature, the stage on which mortal life begins and goes on and ends, the faculties with which man is equipped to act, to enjoy, to create, to hold his way amid or against the circumstances and forces round him- this is what each wants to know, as thoroughly and really as can be. It is not to reduce things to a theory or a system that they look around them on the place where they find themselves with life and thought and power; that were easily done, and has been done over and over again, only to prove its futility. It is to know, as to the whole and its parts, as men understand knowing in some one subject of successful handling, whether art or science or practical craft. This idea, this effort, distinguishes these two men. The Greeks predecessors, contemporaries, successors of Aristotle were speculators, full of clever and ingenious guesses, in which the amount of clear and certain fact

was in lamentable disproportion to the schemes blown up from it; or they devoted themselves more profitably to some one or two subjects of inquiry, moral or purely intellectual, with absolute indifference to what might be asked, or what might be known, of the real conditions under which they were passing their existence. Some of the Romans, Cicero and Pliny, had encyclopædic minds; but the Roman mind was the slave of precedent, and was more than satisfied with partially understanding and neatly arranging what the Greeks had left. The Arabians looked more widely about them; but the Arabians were essentially sceptics, and resigned subjects to the inevitable and the inexplicable; there was an irony, open or covert, in their philosophy, their terminology, their transcendental mysticism, which showed how little they believed that they really knew. The vast and mighty intellects of the schoolmen never came into a real grapple with the immensity of the facts of the natural or even of the moral world; within the world of abstract thought, the world of language, with its infinite growths and consequences, they have never had their match for keenness, for patience, for courage, for inexhaustible toil; but they were as much disconnected from the natural world, which was their stage of life, as if they had been disembodied spirits. The Renaissance brought with it not only the desire to know, but to know comprehensively and in all possible directions; it brought with it temptations to the awakened Italian genius, renewed, enlarged, refined, if not strengthened by its passage through the Middle Ages, to make thought deal with the real, and to understand the scene in which men were doing such strange and wonderful things; but Giordano Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, and their fellows, were not men capable of more than short flights, though they might be daring and eager ones. It required more thoroughness, more humble-minded industry, to match the