_Novum Organon_, and the mechanical methods which he
propounded as certain to evolve truth if patiently pursued; for this is
what he thought he was doing--giving to the world an infallible recipe
for discovering truth, with which any ordinarily industrious man could
make discoveries by means of collection and discrimination of instances.
You will take my statement for what it is worth, but I assert this: that
many of the methods which Bacon lays down are not those which the
experience of mankind has found to be serviceable; nor are they such as
a scientific man would have thought of devising.

True it is that a real love and faculty for science are born in a man,
and that to the man of scientific capacity rules of procedure are
unnecessary; his own intuition is sufficient, or he has mistaken his
vocation,--but that is not my point. It is not that Bacon's methods are
useless because the best men do not need them; if they had been founded
on a careful study of the methods actually employed, though it might be
unconsciously employed, by scientific men--as the methods of induction,
stated long after by John Stuart Mill, were founded--then, no doubt,
their statement would have been a valuable service and a great thing to
accomplish. But they were not this. They are the ideas of a brilliant
man of letters, writing in an age when scientific research was almost
unknown, about a subject in which he was an amateur. I confess I do not
see how he, or John Stuart Mill, or any one else, writing in that age,
could have formulated the true rules of philosophizing; because the
materials and information were scarcely to hand. Science and its methods
were only beginning to grow. No doubt it was a brilliant attempt. No
doubt also there are many good and true points in the statement,
especially in his insistence on the attitude of free and open candour
with which the investigation of Nature should be approached. No doubt
there was much beauty in his allegories of the errors into which men
were apt to fall--the _idola_ of the market-place, of the tribe, of the
theatre, and of the den; but all this is literature, and on the solid
progress of science may be said to have had little or no effect.
Descartes's _Discourse on Method_ was a much more solid production.

You will understand that I speak of Bacon purely as a scientific man. As
a man of letters, as a lawyer, a man of the world, and a statesman, he
is beyond any criticism of mine. I spea