o live long
enough to see a new doctrine accepted by the world at large.

It is, I believe, a cherished belief of Englishmen that Francis Bacon,
Viscount St. Albans and sometime lord chancellor of England, invented
that "inductive philosophy" of which they speak with almost as much
respect as they do of church and state; and that, if it had not been for
this "Baconian induction," science would never have extricated itself
from the miserable condition in which it was left by a set of
hair-splitting folk known as the ancient Greek philosophers. To be
accused of departing from the canons of the Baconian philosophy is
almost as bad as to be charged with forgetting your aspirates; it is
understood as a polite way of saying that you are an entirely absurd
speculator.

Now the _Novum Organon_ was published in 1620, while Harvey began to
teach the doctrine of the circulation, in his public lectures, in 1619.
Acquaintance with the Baconian induction, therefore, could not have had
much to do with Harvey's investigations. The _Exercitatio_, however, was
not published till 1628. Do we find in it any trace of the influence of
the _Novum Organon_? Absolutely none. So far from indulging in the
short-sighted and profoundly unscientific depreciation of the ancients
in which Bacon indulges, Harvey invariably speaks of them with that
respect which the faithful and intelligent study of the fragments of
their labors that remain to us must inspire in everyone who is
practically acquainted with the difficulties with which they had to
contend, and which they so often mastered. And, as to method, Harvey's
method is the method of Galen, the method of Realdus Columbus, the
method of Galileo, the method of every genuine worker in science either
in the past or the present. On the other hand, judged strictly by the
standard of his own time, Bacon's ignorance of the progress which
science had up to that time made is only to be equalled by his
insolence toward men in comparison with whom he was the merest sciolist.
Even when he had some hearsay knowledge of what has been done, his want
of acquaintance with the facts and his abnormal deficiency in what I may
call the scientific sense, prevent him from divining its importance.
Bacon could see nothing remarkable in the chief contributions to
science of Copernicus or of Kepler or of Galileo; Gilbert, his
fellow-countryman, is the subject of a sneer; while Galen is bespattered
with a shower of impertinen