-should have been on a
level with Newton in physical discovery? Bacon asks this belief of us, and
does not get it. But it may be said, Your business is with what he _did_
leave, and with its consequences. Be it so. Mr. Ellis says: "That his
method is impracticable cannot, I think, be denied, if we reflect not only
that it never has produced any result, but also that the process by which
scientific truths have been established cannot be so presented as even to
appear to be in accordance with it." That this is very true is well known
to all who have studied the history of discovery: those who deny it are
bound to establish either that some great discovery has been made by
Bacon's method--we mean by the part peculiar to Bacon--or, better still, to
show that some new discovery can be made, by actually making it. No general
talk about _induction_: no reliance upon the mere fact that certain
experiments or observations have been made; let us see where _Bacon's
induction_ has been actually used or can be used. Mere induction,
_enumeratio simplex_, is spoken of by himself with contempt, as utterly
incompetent. For Bacon knew well that a thousand instances may be
contradicted by the thousand and first: so that no enumeration of
instances, however large, is "sure demonstration," so long any are left.

The immortal Harvey, who was _inventing_--we use the word in its old
sense--the circulation of the blood, while {79} Bacon was in the full flow
of thought upon his system, may be trusted to say whether, when the system
appeared, he found any likeness in it to his own processes, or what would
have been any help to him, if he had waited for the _Novum Organum_. He
said of Bacon, "He writes philosophy like a Lord Chancellor." This has been
generally supposed to be only a sneer at the _sutor ultra crepidam_; but we
cannot help suspecting that there was more intended by it. To us, Bacon is
eminently the philosopher of _error prevented_, not of _progress
facilitated_. When we throw off the idea of being _led right_, and betake
ourselves to that of being _kept from going wrong_, we read his writings
with a sense of their usefulness, his genius, and their probable effect
upon purely experimental science, which we can be conscious of upon no
other supposition. It amuses us to have to add that the part of Aristotle's
logic of which he saw the value was the book on _refutation of fallacies_.
Now is this not the notion of things to which the bias