460 MEMOIR OF DANIEL TKEADWELL. 



■nisdoiii of the ancient world was not confined to the philosophers ; there were ether men free to 

 follow the devices of their genius. It is written upon the whole face of Greece and of the Em- 

 pire in the magnificent hieroglyphics, formed by temples, aqueducts, roads, and bridges, that 

 Pericles, Flaminius, Agrippa, and Trajan would have beheld not without emotions of admira- 

 tion and delight a steamer breasting the Atlantic, a train flying across the Connecticut, or a 

 whole people, from Louisiana to ilaine, receiving together as one man words as they once fell 

 from the lips of the great statesmen in Washington. ... To Galileo belongs the merit of build- 

 ing up that system of experimental inquiry, the common sense system of investigation, which 

 is the foundation of the inductive philosophy. . . . Bacon, nearly contemporary with Galileo in 

 birth, but subsequent to him as a writer, an' admirer of the useful arts, perceived, perhaps more 

 vividly than any man of his class or time, the great power that mankind might attain over 

 nature by the successful cultivation of the arts, and he gave utterance to his perceptions in 

 language that no other man of his time save one could use. But this is by no means a merit 

 sufficient to warrant the mighty reputation that has been assigned to liim ; and this reputation 

 rests mainly, not upon the ground that he was a patron, eulogist, or admirer of the arts, but 

 that he was what he distinctly churned to be, namely, an inventor of a new art of inventing 

 them. He fully expounded his system of invention as resting upon three things : first, upon 

 experiment by which facts were to be collected ; second, the subjecting of these facts to an 

 examination by an elaborate mental process, which he details at great length ; by this induction 

 we were to arrive at the third, or last, matter of the system, namely, a discovery of the forms 

 or essences of all bodies. 



"But is there in these three great constituents of the system proper, the experiment, the 

 induction, or the conclusion, one or all, that should give Bacon his worship ? First, for the 

 experiment ; leaving out all reference to the priority of Galileo, when was the time that man 

 did not depend upon experiment for his knowledge? Before Bacon taught him otherwise, it is 

 said that man rested entirely, for what he knew, upon dialectics and logic. As though there 

 was no knowledge out of the schools ! Were the Pyramids reared and edified by logic ? Did 

 the Romans learn to subdue cities and build aqueducts by dialectics? Did the alchemists make 

 their great discoveries without experiment ? Why, one of these sages distilled over the same 

 subject, spirits of wine, three hundred times, merely to see what it would come to at last. Was 

 not this a patient interrogation of nature ? 



" Next, for the induction : it would be useless to say that Bacon over examined an experi- 

 ment, or the phenomena resulting from it, after the exact method pointed out by him. General 

 principles and laws had been arrived at, by reasoning from particular instances, by civilized, and 

 even barbarous men, in all ages. 'Without an experiment,' said Galileo to his opponents at 

 Pisa, 'you could not tell that a stone thrown up would ever come down again.' The general 

 truth had been discovered by the observation of a sufficient number of instances of falling stones. 

 No better philosophical induction was ever made than that of Archimedes in the principle of 

 specific gravity, from observing the diminished weight of his own body in water." 



Lastly, for the character of the conclusion or object to be attained by the experiment and 

 induction. Bacon supposed it would lay open to us the essences of bodies, that which makes 

 heat heat, color color, hardness hardness ; and knowing these, we should be able to make, by 

 transmutation, gold, silver, or any other simple body. Indeed, he gives directions at length for 

 making silver, not being quite certain that he had yet attained the exact knowledge of making 

 gold. " Now it is not necessary to remind you that no such knowledge as this has ever been 

 attained by man. We cannot say that it will not be, but can only say that in all that has been 



