PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS OF LORD BACON. 397 
Some of its members being soon thereafter appointed to Profes- 
sorships in the University of Oxford, a similar Society was 
established. by them in that place. In the year 1659, the prin- 
cipal members of the Oxford branch having returned. to, Lon- 
don, the two Societies were united ; and hese on the Resto- 
ration, extended their views to the obtaining a public esta- 
blishment, they, in. 1662, succeeded in accomplishing that ob- 
ject, by being erected into a corporate body, under the title of 
the Royal Society. Wy 
There can be no doubt Pe aerate of the influence pe Bacon’s 
suggestions, as to the utility of such an institution, upon the 
minds of those who planned the establishment of this illus- 
trious Society... Its earliest. panegyrists and historians bear, tes- 
timony to this fact. ‘“ Solomon’s House, in the New Ailantis, was 
“ a prophetic scheme of the Royal Society.” »These are the 
words of GuanviL1, in his address to that body, prefixed to, his 
Scepsis Scientifica, published in 1665*, . Bishop Srrar, whose 
ik? Pe reave / , . »History., 
' DD ae e188 | 
* ‘The Sepsis Seientifiea i is a republication, with some: adidion of : Guan- 
vitt's first philosophical work, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, ' published i in 1661. 
The 20th chapter of this work contains a very distinct statement of the import- 
ant doctrine so often ascribed to Mr Hume,—that we never percedve causation in 
the succession of physical events ; a-déoctrine which fixes the object of ‘physical 
science to be, not’ the inyestigation of the efficient causes of phenomena, but of 
the general laws by which they are regulated; and for which statement of its le- 
gitimate objects, it is always to be remembered, that physics is indebted to meta- 
physics. The Aristotelians were provoked by the free spirit of inquiry, and‘ 
disregard of the authority of their Master, wliich kis work disclosed ;- and an 
answer to it appeared in 1663, in a book entitled Sczrz, stve Sceptices et ‘Sceptico- . 
rum a@ jure disputationis exclusio. 'The author was Tuomas Axsius, (Wuite), 
a secular priest of the Romish Church, and a noted Aristotelian. ‘ Hosses,” 
says A. Woop, “ hada great respect for Waite, and when he lived in W est- 
minster, he would often visit him, and he Honses; but they seldom parted in 
cool blood: for they would wrangle, squabble and scold about. philosophical 
matters like young sophisters, though either of them was eighty years of age. 
Howses 
