1894.] on Bacon's Key to Nature. 197 



given to the Table of Exclusions their conclusive force, was impossible ; 

 and his Forms were evasive. 



A few words only on these two heads, before a closing summary 

 of his work and its results. It goes without saying that Macaulay's 

 travesty and that of his Philistine centurions is a consummate 

 ignoratio elenchi. Like the chamberlain in Tennyson's " Day Dream," 

 he dallied with his golden chime and " smiling put the question by." 

 To confound the instinctive induction of all ages with the inductive 

 process is to contend that because the burnt dog dreads the fire, it is 

 idle to inquire into the nature of heat, or that mensuration and 

 trigonometry are useless because for practical purposes a man can 

 divine the height of most maypoles with his eyes and the breadth of 

 most fields with his legs. 



As irrelevant is the criticism that Bacon's Method was latent in 

 his Age. So no doubt the law of gravity was latent in the age of Newton 

 and the steam engine in the age of Watt. The characteristic of 

 originality is to be first born in the new thought. 



Yet more absurd is the contention that Bacon had been forestalled. 

 We might as well assert that Newton was anticipated by the ancients 

 because they recorded the phenomenon of attraction. The Induction 

 of Socrates was a mere process of leading the mind to moral convic- 

 tions by the use of Example and Analogy. Plato's view comes nearer 

 to our own ; but his progress is from thought to higher thought, not 

 from Observation to Law. Aristotle's Induction is a mere summary 

 reasserting of the whole that which had previously been asserted of 

 all the parts. Bacon's deals with facts so as to elicit a law out of 

 them : it is a process of discovery and yet in a sense geometrical, 

 as it would give to the old inductive syllogism an immense and 

 in point of fact impossible extension. 



The heat in a b c is an expansive motion. 



„ „ all heat. 



All heat is an expansive motion. 



Where the minor is unattainable. The process of his exclusion 

 fails because the list of negatives can never be complete. It was 

 something, as he asserts, which had never been attempted before, but 

 it was also something which will never be attempted again. Eecent 

 induction — that of Mill, Whewell, Herschel, Faraday and Darwin — 

 is the means by which the great sequences of Nature, called Laws, are 

 investigated by the aid of apt conjecture, and by careful verification 

 established. But Bacon thought to accomplish more than this. By 

 aid of a Method, which, from its exhaustiveness, he held to be as 

 certain in its results as a demonstration of Euclid, so mechanical that 

 when once understood all men might employ it, yet so startling that 

 it was to be a new sun to the borrowed beams of stars, he aspired to 

 penetrate into the inner nature of things and so hold them in com- 

 mand. 



I can only say a few words about those Forms which are the 



