notion that method
and industry can make up for lack of motherwit, either in science or
in practical life; and it is strange that, with his knowledge of
mankind, Bacon should have dreamed that his, or any other, 'via
inveniendi scientias' would 'level men's wits' and leave little scope
for that inborn capacity which is called genius. As a matter of fact,
Bacon's 'via' has proved hopelessly impracticable; while the
'anticipation of nature' by the invention of hypotheses based on
incomplete inductions, which he specially condemns, has proved itself
to be a most efficient, indeed an indispensable, instrument of
scientific progress. Finally, that transcendental alchemy--the
superinducement of new forms on matter--which Bacon declares to be the
supreme aim of science, has been wholly ignored by those who have
created the physical knowledge of the present day.

Even the eloquent advocacy of the Chancellor brought no unmixed good
to physical science. It was natural enough that the man who, in his
better moments, took 'all knowledge for his patrimony,' but, in his
worse, sold that birthright for the mess of pottage of Court favor and
professional success, for pomp and show, should be led to attach an
undue value to the practical advantages which he foresaw, as Roger
Bacon and, indeed, Seneca had foreseen, long before his time, must
follow in the train of the advancement of natural knowledge. The
burden of Bacon's pleadings for science is the gathering of
fruit'--the importance of winning solid material advantages by the
investigation of Nature and the desirableness of limiting the
application of scientific methods of inquiry to that field.

[Sidenote: Hobbes.]

[Sidenote: Descartes.]

Bacon's younger contemporary, Hobbes, casting aside the prudent
reserve of his predecessor in regard to those matters about which the
Crown or the Church might have something to say, extended scientific
methods of inquiry to the phenomena of mind and the problems of social
organisation; while, at the same time, he indicated the boundary
between the province of real, and that of imaginary, knowledge. The
'Principles of Philosophy' and the 'Leviathan' embody a coherent
system of purely scientific thought in language which is a model of
clear and vigorous English style. At the same time, in France, a man
of far greater scientific capacity than either Bacon or Hobbes, Rene
Descartes, not only in his immortal 'Discours de la Methode' and
elsewher