4 INTRODUCTORY. 



held his followers in contempt. It has been said that Lord 

 Bacon knew little of Aristotle s works first-hand, but this 

 was a common fault among the scholars of his time. He 

 said that no weight should be given to the fact that Aristotle, 

 in some of his works, deals with experiments, for he had 

 formed his conclusions before, and made experiments con 

 form with what r he wished ;* and, commenting on the 

 fewness of the authors referred to in Aristotle s works, 

 Lord Bacon said that Aristotle, on whom the philosophy 

 of his day chiefly depended, never mentioned an author 

 except to confute and reprove him.t The chief effects of 

 Lord Bacon s antagonism, however, were ultimately seen 

 in the replacement, to a large extent, of the Aristotelian 

 philosophy by the &quot; New or Experimental Philosophy,&quot; 

 expounded chiefly in the Novum Organum. 



The Aristotelians facilitated the success of their oppo 

 nents by their own excessive zeal. They adopted, to a 

 greater extent than Aristotle did, the Platonic ideas about 

 the supreme importance of abstract speculation, and the in 

 tellectual degradation associated with the work of artizans 

 and others who provide for the common wants of mankind ; 

 they neglected Aristotle s advice to make sure of the facts 

 before trying to explain the causes ; they often put a forced 

 construction on Aristotle s words ; they went too far in 

 their attempts to show that Aristotle was infallible. Their 

 position was difficult in the fifteenth century, when the 

 Revival of Learning was in progress, accompanied by a 

 great increase in commercial prosperity and t^.e growth of 

 affluence and power among the very classes whom they pre 

 tended to despise. In later times, when they were opposed 

 by men who were both scholars and experimentalists, their 

 position became almost untenable. The interest taken in 

 Aristotle s works became less and less until, during the first 

 half of the eighteenth century, most of his writings were 

 very much neglected. 



It is interesting to find that, during this period of 

 comparative neglect of the study of Aristotle, the interest 

 taken in his zoological works became greater perhaps than 

 it had ever been. Conrad Gesner, Belon of Le Mans, 

 Rondelet, and others wrote large treatises, much of the 

 groundwork of which was obtained from Aristotle, and 



* Novum Organum, Aphorism 63. 

 f Filum Labyrinthi, &c., part i. 8. 



