ceed in. And it may strike any one with astonishment who duly considers it, that no mortal should hitherto have taken care to open and prepare a way for the human understanding, from sense and a well-conducted experience; but that all things should be left either to the darkness of tradition, the giddy agitation and whirlwind of argument, or else to the uncertain waves of accident, or a vague and uninformed experience. Let any one soberly consider what the way is which men have accustomed themselves to, in the inquiry and discovery of anything, and he will doubtless find that the manner of invention most commonly used is simple and unartful: or on no other than this, viz.: when a person goes upon an inquiry, in the first place he searches out and peruses what has been said upon it by others; in the next place, adds his own thoughts thereto; and lastly, with great struggle of the mind, solicits and invokes, as it were, his own spirit to deliver him oracles which is a method entirely destitute of foundation, and rolls wholly upon opinions. Others may call in the assistance of logic; but this is only a nominal assistance, for logic does not discover the principles and capital axioms upon which arts are built, but only such as seem agreeable thereto; and when men are curious and earnest with it, to procure proofs, and discover principles or first axioms, it refers them to faith, or puts them off with this trite and common answer-that every artist must be believed in his own art.'

Dugald Stewart * well says, "that the idea of the object of physical science (which may be justly In the excellent chapter on Induction, Mind,' vol. ii. chap. iv. sect. 1.

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regarded as the groundwork of Bacon's Novum Organum) differs essentially from what was entertained by the ancients, according to whom Philosophy is the science of causes.' If indeed by causes they had meant merely the constant forerunners or antecedents of events, the definition would have coincided nearly with the statement which I have given. But it is evident that by causes they meant such antecedents as were necessarily connected with the effects, and from the knowledge of which the effects might be foreseen and demonstrated. And it was owing to this confusion of the proper objects of physics and metaphysics that, neglecting the observation of facts exposed to the examination of their senses, they vainly attempted, by synthetical reasoning, to deduce as necessary consequences from their supposed causes the phenomena and laws of nature."

Dugald Stewart also quotes Aristotle's express declaration that to know the physical cause is also to know the efficient cause; and observes, that from this disposition to confound efficient with physical causes may be traced the greater part of the theories recorded in the history of philosophy. It is this which has given rise to the attempts, both in ancient and modern times, to account for all the phenomena of moving bodies by impulse; and it is this also which has suggested the simpler expedient of explaining them by the agency of minds united with the particles of matter. To this last class of theories may also be referred the explanations of physical phenomena by such causes as sympathies, antipathies, nature's horror of a vacuum, &c., and other phrases borrowed by analogy from the attributes of animated beings.

It was Bacon's constant endeavour, as it has been his enduring fame, to teach men the real object of science and the scope of their faculties and to furnish them with a proper method whereon these faculties might be successfully employed.

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He thus not only stands clearly out in history as the exponent of the long-agitated antagonism to all the ancient and scholastic thinkers, but also as the exponent of the rapidly increasing tendency towards positive science.

He is essentially modern. All his predecessors, even in their boldest attacks upon ancient philosophy, were themselves closely allied to the spirit of that which they opposed. Ramus is the child of Aristotle, though he raised his hand against his father. But Bacon was modern in culture, in object, and in method. He attacked the ancient philosophy without having thoroughly understood it: he attacked it because he saw that a method which conducted great intelligences to such absurd conclusions as those then in vogue must necessarily be false.

"Whence can arise," he asks, "such vagueness and sterility in all the physical systems which have hitherto existed in the world? It is not certainly from any thing in nature itself; for the steadiness and regularity of the laws by which it is governed clearly mark them out as objects of precise and certain knowledge.

"Neither can it arise from any want of ability in those who have pursued such inquiries, many of whom have been men of the highest talent and genius of the ages in which they lived; and it can therefore arise from nothing else but the perverseness and insufficiency of the methods which have

been pursued. Men have sought to make a world from their own conceptions, and to draw from their own minds all the materials which they employed; but if, instead of doing so, they had consulted experience and observation, they would have had facts and not opinions to reason about, and might have ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the laws which govern the material world.

"As things are at present conducted a sudden transition is made from sensible objects and particular facts to general propositions, which are accounted principles, and round which, as round so many fixed poles, disputation and argument continually revolve. From the propositions thus hastily assumed all things are derived by a process compendious and precipitate, ill suited to discovery, but wonderfully accommodated to debate.

"The way that promises success is the reverse of this. It requires that we should generalize slowly, going from particular things to those that are but one step more general; from those to others of still greater extent, and so on to such as are universal. By such means we may hope to arrive at principles not vague and obscure, but luminous and well defined, such as Nature herself will not refuse to acknowledge."

In this pregnant passage he has clearly enough pointed out the position which his philosophy was to occupy. Many other philosophers, as Professor Macvey Napier remarks, "both ancient and modern, had referred to observation and experiment in a cursory way, as furnishing the materials of physical knowledge; but no one before him had attempted to systematize the true method of discovery; or to prove that the inductive is the only method by

which the genuine office of philosophy can be exercised, and its genuine ends accomplished. It has sometimes been stated that Galileo was, at least, in an equal degree with Bacon, the father of the Inductive Logic; but it would be more correct to say that his discoveries furnished some fortunate illustrations of its principles. To explain these principles was no object of his; nor does he manifest any great anxiety to recommend their adoption with a view to the general improvement of science. The Aristotelian disputant, in his celebrated Dialogues, is made frequently to appeal to observation and experiment; but the interlocutor through whom Galileo himself speaks, nowhere takes occasion to distinguish between the flimsy inductions of the Stagyrite in regard to the objects in dispute, and which he himself had instituted, or to hint at the very different complexion which philosophy must assume, according as the one kind or the other is resorted to."*

*On the Scope and Influence of the Philos. Writings of Bacon.'-Trans. of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1818. By far the best dissertation on this subject we have met with; full of curious matter and recondite research.