THE ENGLISH PRECURSORS OF NEWTON. 781 



told to expand their souls to the measure of the universe, and they 

 were unwilling to confess their inadequacy to the effort required of 

 them. They were like men groping in the darkness for a door which 

 they had but to throw wide, in order to find themselves in the full 

 blaze of daylight ; and they learned with reluctance that only by pain- 

 ful and prolonged exertions could they expect to open a chink here 

 and there for a ray of twilight to enter. 



This insensible change of front, as regards scientific method, is very 

 clearly discernible in Hooke's writings. He began life with hopes as 

 large as and more defined than those of Bacon himself. Even before 

 he left Oxford, he had provided himself with what he called a "me- 

 chanical algebra," which he regarded as an infallible guide to inven- 

 tion. This he afterward expanded into an elaborate engine of discov- 

 ery, competent, as he believed, to construct with certainty and swift- 

 ness an edifice of knowledge, heretofore unmatched for vastness and 

 durability. The scheme, like all his more ambitious designs, remained 

 incomplete, or, at most, was completed only in the mind of its author ; 

 and the tract in which he describes it breaks off just as the momen- 

 tous secret is about to be disclosed. Whether it was that the difficul- 

 ties in the way became more clear to him as he advanced, and that he 

 lost faith in his own means of removing them, or whether it was that 

 his jealousy of disclosure overbalanced, at the critical moment, his 

 appetite for fame, we shall never know. We do know, however, enough 

 to show us that the revelation would have been valuable only as a 

 gratification of our curiosity, and as throwing a singular light on the 

 visions which haunted the morning of experimental science. 



The following extract from his essay on " The Present State of 

 Natural Philosophy " briefly exposes his ideal of a method. He at- 

 tempted, as will be seen, to come to closer quarters with the problem 

 than Bacon had done, and succeeded thereby in more clearly defining 

 its insolubility. 



" Some other kind of art for inquiry," he writes,* " than what hath been hith- 

 erto made use of, must be discovered; the intellect is not to be suffered to act 

 without its helps, but is continually to be assisted by some method or engine, 

 which shall be as a guide to regulate its actions, so as that it shall not be able to 

 act amiss. Of this engine, no man except the incomparable Verulam hath had 

 any thoughts, and he indeed hath promoted it to a very good pitch ; but there is 

 yet somewhat more to be added, which he seemed to want time to complete. 

 By this, as by that art of Algebra in Geometry, 'twill be very easy to proceed in 

 any natural inquiry, regularly and certainly : and indeed it may not improperly 

 be called a Philosophical Algebra, or an art of directing the mind in the search 

 after philosophical truths." 



The first part only of this "Algebra of Discovery," "containing 

 the manner of preparing the mind, and furnishing it with fit materials 

 to work on," was written ; the second, which should have set forth " the 



* " Posthumous Works," p. 6. 



