5o6 THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



only historical value, but their scheme would have very 

 great interest as a map of the field already covered by 

 science and as a suggestion to the lay reader of the in- 

 numerable highways and byways by which we are gradu- 

 ally but surely reaching truth. 



^ 2. — Bacon's " Intellectual Globe " 



Failing such combined action on the part of our 

 scientific leaders, we are compelled to turn to what indi- 

 vidual thinkers have done by way of classifying the 

 sciences, and in the first place we ought at least to refer 

 to three well-known philosophers who have dealt with 

 this subject at length. I mean to Francis Bacon, Auguste 

 Comte, and Herbert Spencer. 



Bacon has given us a classification of the sciences in 

 his Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning, and in 

 his Description of the Intellectual Globe, which were origin- 

 ally intended as parts of that Instaiiratio Magna by which 

 human knowledge was to be revolutionised. But Bacon, 

 like many another reformer, was the product of the very 

 system he denounced. While he saw the evils of mediaeval 

 scholasticism, he could never quite free himself from their 

 modes of thought and expression. His classification, 

 however interesting historically, is thus wanting from the 

 standpoint of modern science, and we shall only briefly 

 summarise it here with a view of gaining insight from its 

 defects. 



Human learning, according to Bacon, takes its origin 

 in the three faculties of the understanding — Memory, 

 Imagination, and Reason ; and upon this basis Bacon 

 starts his analysis of knowledge. The accompanying 

 scheme, in which I have modernised some of the termin- 

 ology and omitted some of the details, represents Bacon's 

 classification. The reader will observe at once that there 

 are no clear distinctions drawn between the material of 

 knowledge and knowledge itself, between the real and 

 the ideal, or between the phenomenal world and the un- 

 real products of metaphysical thought. Man is not 



