his knowledge of the
limits and resources of the human understanding. It would be difficult
to find another writer, prior to Locke, whose works are enriched with so
many just observations on mere intellectual phenomena. What he says of
the laws of memory, of imagination, has never been surpassed in
subtlety. No man ever more carefully studied the operation of his own
mind and the intellectual character of others." Nor did Bacon despise
metaphysical science, only the frivolous questions that the old
scholastics associated with it, and the general barrenness of their
speculations. He surely would not have disdained the subsequent
inquiries of Locke, or Berkeley, or Leibnitz, or Kant. True, he sought
definite knowledge,--something firm to stand upon, and which could not
be controverted. No philosophy can be sound when the principle from
which deductions are made is not itself certain or very highly probable,
or when this principle, pushed to its utmost logical sequence, would
lead to absurdity, or even to a conflict with human consciousness. To
Bacon the old methods were wrong, and it was his primal aim to reform
the scientific methods in order to arrive at truth; not truth for
utilitarian ends chiefly, but truth for its own sake. He loved truth as
Palestrina loved music, or Raphael loved painting, or Socrates
loved virtue.

Now the method which was almost exclusively employed until Bacon's time
is commonly called the _deductive_ method; that is, some principle or
premise was assumed to be true, and reasoning was made from this
assumption. No especial fault was found with the reasoning of the great
masters of logic like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, for it never has
been surpassed in acuteness and severity. If their premises were
admitted, their conclusions would follow as a certainty. What was wanted
was to establish the truth of premises, or general propositions. This
Bacon affirmed could be arrived at only by _induction_; that is, the
ascending from ascertained individual facts to general principles, by
extending what is true of particulars to the whole class in which they
belong. Bacon has been called the father of inductive science, since he
would employ the inductive method. Yet he is not truly the father of
induction, since it is as old as the beginnings of science. Hippocrates,
when he ridiculed the quacks of his day, and collected the facts and
phenomena of disease, and inferred from them the proper treatment of