of the fallacies by which the intellect is deceived and
misled, and from which it must be purged in order to attain final truth,
and of the new doctrine of "prerogative instances," or crucial
observations and experiments in the work of discovery.

In short, Bacon's entire achievement in science is a plan for an
impossible universe of knowledge. As far as he attempted to advance
particular sciences by applying his method to their detailed phenomena,
he wrought with imperfect knowledge of what had been done, and with
cumbrous and usually misdirected efforts to fill the gaps he recognized.
In a few instances, by what seems an almost superhuman instinct for
truth, rather than the laborious process of investigation which he
taught, he anticipated brilliant discoveries of later centuries. For
example, he clearly pointed out the necessity of regarding heat as a
form of motion in the molecules of matter, and thus foreshadowed,
without any conception of the means of proving it, that which, for
investigators of the nineteenth century, has proved the most direct way
to the secrets of nature. But the testimony of the great teachers of
science is unanimous, that Bacon was not a skilled observer of
phenomena, nor a discoverer of scientific inductions; that he
contributed no important new truth, in the sense of an established law,
to any department of knowledge; and that his method of research and
reasoning is not, in its essential features, that which is fruitfully
pursued by them in extending the boundaries of science, nor was his mind
wholly purged of those "idols of the cave," or forms of personal bias,
whose varying forms as hindrances to the "dry light" of sound reason he
was the first to expose. He never appreciated the mathematics as the
basis of physics, but valued their elements mainly as a mental
discipline. Astronomy meant little to him, since he failed to connect it
directly with human well-being and improvement; to the system of
Copernicus, the beginning of our insight into the heavens, he was
hostile, or at least indifferent; and the splendid discoveries
successively made by Tycho Brahe, Galileo, and Kepler, and brought to
his ears while the 'Great Instauration' filled his mind and heart, met
with but a feeble welcome with him, or none. Why is it, then, that
Bacon's is the foremost name in the history of English, and perhaps, as
many insist, of all modern thought? Why is it that "the Baconian
philosophy" is another phra