tion to Bacon. Archimedes, and the Alexandrians, and the
Arabians, and Leonardo da Vinci did very well before he was born;
the discovery of America by Columbus and the circumnavigation by
Magellan can hardly be attributed to him, yet they were the
consequences of a truly philosophical reasoning. But the
investigation of Nature is an affair of genius, not of rules. No
man can invent an _organon_ for writing tragedies and epic poems.
Bacon's system is, in its own terms, an idol of the theatre. It
would scarcely guide a man to a solution of the riddle of AElia
Laelia Crispis, or to that of the charade of Sir Hilary.

"Few scientific pretenders have made more mistakes than Lord Bacon.
He rejected the Copernican system, and spoke insolently of its
great author; he undertook to criticize adversely Gilbert's
treatise _De Magnete_; he was occupied in the condemnation of any
investigation of final causes, while Harvey was deducing the
circulation of the blood from Aquapendente's discovery of the
valves in the veins; he was doubtful whether instruments were of
any advantage, while Galileo was investigating the heavens with the
telescope. Ignorant himself of every branch of mathematics, he
presumed that they were useless in science but a few years before
Newton achieved by their aid his immortal discoveries.

"It is time that the sacred name of philosophy should be severed
from its long connection with that of one who was a pretender in
science, a time-serving politician, an insidious lawyer, a corrupt
judge, a treacherous friend, a bad man."

This seems to me a depreciation as excessive as are the eulogies
commonly current. The truth probably lies somewhere between the two
extremes. It is unfair to judge Bacon's methods by thinking of physical
science in its present stage. To realise his position we must think of a
subject still in its very early infancy, one in which the advisability
of applying experimental methods is still doubted; one which has been
studied by means of books and words and discussion of normal instances,
instead of by collection and observation of the unusual and irregular,
and by experimental production of variety. If we think of a subject
still in this infantile and almost pre-scientific stage, Bacon's words
and formulae are far from inapplicable; they are, within their
limitations, quite