on." He indulges the mind, in the
course of its investigation of "Instances," with a first "vintage" of
provisional generalisations. But of the way in which the living mind of
the discoverer works, with its ideas and insight, and thoughts that come
no one knows whence, working hand in hand with what comes before the eye
or is tested by the instrument, he gives us no picture. Compare his
elaborate investigation of the "Form of Heat" in the _Novum Organum_,
with such a record of real inquiry as Wells's _Treatise on Dew_, or
Herschel's analysis of it in his _Introduction to Natural Philosophy_.
And of the difference of genius between a Faraday or a Newton, and the
crowd of average men who have used and finished off their work, he takes
no account. Indeed, he thinks that for the future such difference is to
disappear.

"That his method is impracticable," says Mr. Ellis, "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. In all cases this process involves an
element to which nothing corresponds in the Tables of 'Comparence'
and 'Exclusion,' namely, the application to the facts of
observation of a principle of arrangement, an idea, existing in the
mind of the discoverer antecedently to the act of induction. It may
be said that this idea is precisely one of the _naturae_ into which
the facts of observation ought in Bacon's system to be analysed.
And this is in one sense true; but it must be added that this
analysis, if it be thought right so to call it, is of the essence
of the discovery which results from it. In most cases the act of
induction follows as a matter of course as soon as the appropriate
idea has been introduced."--Ellis, _General Preface_, i. 38.

Lastly, not only was Bacon's conception of philosophy so narrow as to
exclude one of its greatest domains; for, says Mr. Ellis, "it cannot be
denied that to Bacon all sound philosophy seemed to be included in what
we now call the natural sciences," and in all its parts was claimed as
the subject of his inductive method; but Bacon's scientific knowledge
and scientific conceptions were often very imperfect--more imperfect
than they ought to have been for his time. Of one large part of science,
which was just th