190 Professor Nichol [Feb. 16, 



to be about as well founded as that of the people who, in the middle 

 ages, imagined that Virgil was a great conjuror. 



Induction has been practised since the beginning of the world, by 

 every human being. The Inductive method had been long before 

 analysed by Aristotle ; but it is an analysis of that which we are all 

 doing from morning till night. The man who infers that mince pies 

 have disagreed with him, because he was ill when he ate them, well 

 when he ate them not, most ill when he ate most, and least ill when 

 he ate least, has employed all the Tables of the * Novum Organum.' 



In the always superficial, generally second-hand view of Bacon's 

 work thus condensed, there are two flagrant defects : — 



1. It is an impudent travesty of the Greek schools. 



2. Stating, only with partial accuracy, what Bacon actually 

 achieved, it leaves us with hardly any conception of what he intended 

 to do. He was no mere Empiric ; an observer and experimentalist, he 

 was also a Philosopher, animated by a spirit far less removed from 

 that of the ancient thinkers than Macaulay imagines it to have been. 



I. 



On the theme of Bacon's relation to the "old age" which he calls 

 " the youth of the world," we can afford space but for a few explana- 

 tory paragraphs. He was born in an era of mental revolution and 

 shared to the full its enthusiasms, its inspiration and its excesses. 

 The great political liberal Conservative of his generation, he was on 

 matters more purely speculative the great Innovator. In his 

 youthful tractates he arraigns the most illustrious of his predecessors 

 with an audacity which he himself compares to that of Alexander, 

 and in language which recalls Milton's railing at Salmasius. No 

 part of Bacon's plan is more definite than his determination to break 

 with the Past, though no part of it was more incompletely fulfilled. 

 To the last, while dreaming dreams of a Utopia almost as ideal as 

 Plato's Bepublic, he yet himself was more than half an Aristotelian, 

 and constructed the world out of Categories to which he gave the 

 name of Forms. 



The motto prefixed to the ' Instauratio,' " Multi pertransibunt et 

 augebitur scientia," with the suggestion on its frontispiece of Colum- 

 bus and Drake, is as far as possible removed from the tc'aos rzkaov of 

 a Sophoclean play or an Aristotelian State. But he himself stood on 

 the confines of two worlds, and while consciously pressing toward the 

 future, was still unconsciously influenced by the spirit of the past. 

 His Ethics and Politics were largely those of the Greeks, and none 

 among his predecessors was more satisfied of having solved a problem 

 and found a key. The Greeks and their mediaeval copyists had 

 mixed Physics and Metaphysics. Bacon failed to disentangle them, 

 confused a priori and a posteriori truths, and hoped to deal with them 

 by a single method. The injustice of his criticisms would therefore 

 seem to be doubled ; but he lived in an uncritical age, an age of 



