s those
deductive philosophies on which he lavished his scorn. He has left
precepts and examples of what he meant by his cross-examining and
sifting processes. As admonitions to cross-examine and to sift facts and
phenomena they are valuable. Many of the observations and
classifications are subtle and instructive. But in his hands nothing
comes of them. They lead at the utmost to mere negative conclusions;
they show what a thing is not. But his attempt to elicit anything
positive out of them breaks down, or ends at best in divinations and
guesses, sometimes--as in connecting Heat and Motion--very near to later
and more carefully-grounded theories, but always unverified. He had a
radically false and mechanical conception, though in words he earnestly
disclaims it, of the way to deal with the facts of nature. He looked on
them as things which told their own story, and suggested the questions
which ought to be put to them; and with this idea half his time was
spent in collecting huge masses of indigested facts of the most various
authenticity and value, and he thought he was collecting materials
which his method had only to touch in order to bring forth from them
light and truth and power. He thought that, not in certain sciences, but
in all, one set of men could do the observing and collecting, and
another be set on the work of Induction and the discovery of "axioms."
Doubtless in the arrangement and sorting of them his versatile and
ingenious mind gave itself full play; he divides and distinguishes them
into their companies and groups, different kinds of Motion,
"Prerogative" instances, with their long tale of imaginative titles. But
we look in vain for any use that he was able to make of them, or even to
suggest. Bacon never adequately realised that no promiscuous assemblage
of even the most certain facts could ever lead to knowledge, could ever
suggest their own interpretation, without the action on them of the
living mind, without the initiative of an idea. In truth he was so
afraid of assumptions and "anticipations" and prejudices--his great
bugbear was so much the "_intellectus sibi permissus_" the mind given
liberty to guess and imagine and theorise, instead of, as it ought,
absolutely and servilely submitting itself to the control of facts--that
he missed the true place of the rational and formative element in his
account of Induction. He does tell us, indeed, that "truth emerges
sooner from error than from confusi