an "Instauration" of the sciences, of a
"Clavis" which should unlock the difficulties which had hindered
discovery, was not a new one. This attempt at a method which should be
certain, which should level capacities, which should do its work in a
short time, had a special attraction for the imagination of the wild
spirits of the South, from Raimond Lulli in the thirteenth century to
the audacious Calabrians of the sixteenth. With Bacon it was something
much more serious and reasonable and business-like. But such a claim has
never yet been verified; there is no reason to think that it ever can
be; and to have made it shows a fundamental defect in Bacon's conception
of the possibilities of the human mind and the field it has to work in.

In the next place, though the prominence which he gave to the doctrine
of Induction was one of those novelties which are so obvious after the
event, though so strange before it, and was undoubtedly the element in
his system which gave it life and power and influence on the course of
human thought and discovery, his account of Induction was far from
complete and satisfactory. Without troubling himself about the theory of
Induction, as De Remusat has pointed out, he contented himself with
applying to its use the precepts of common-sense and a sagacious
perception of the circumstances in which it was to be employed. But even
these precepts, notable as they were, wanted distinctness, and the
qualities needed for working rules. The change is great when in fifty
years we pass from the poetical science of Bacon to the mathematical and
precise science of Newton. His own time may well have been struck by
the originality and comprehensiveness of such a discriminating
arrangement of proofs as the "Prerogative Instances" of the _Novum
Organum_, so natural and real, yet never before thus compared and
systematized. But there is a great interval between his method of
experimenting, his "_Hunt of Pan_"--the three tables of Instances,
"_Presence_," "_Absence_" and "_Degrees, or Comparisons_," leading to a
process of sifting and exclusion, and to the _First Vintage_, or
beginnings of theory--and say, for instance, Mill's four methods of
experimental inquiry: the method of _agreement_, of _differences_, of
_residues_, and of _concomitant variations_. The course which he marked
out so laboriously and so ingeniously for Induction to follow was one
which was found to be impracticable, and as barren of results a