38 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC 



Place (due to public catch-cries, shibboleths, etc.), (&amp;lt;/) of the 

 Theatre (due to fashion) he goes on to expound his own 

 &quot; method &quot;. He appears to have regarded all physical phenomena 

 as collections and combinations of sensible properties of matter, 

 each of the latter being a simple thing, a &quot; simple nature,&quot; and 

 each due to some &quot;form,&quot; i.e. to some essential constitutive 

 principle 1 of the material agencies in which such sensible pro 

 perties are revealed. This is merely a statement of the scholastic 

 principle that the properties of an agent reveal its specific nature 

 or &quot; formal cause &quot;. But Bacon conceived it to be the duty of 

 the scientist to draw up a complete catalogue of all the sensible 

 properties exhibited throughout all nature, and of all the &quot;forms&quot; 

 to which these could be due : an utterly impracticable under 

 taking. Next, in order to facilitate the process of tracing each 

 property to its &quot; form,&quot; or cause, tables or catalogues were to be 

 drawn up, exhibiting the relations of conjunction or concomitance, 

 separation, and variation, between the forms and the properties : 

 a still more arduous and unpromising task. Bacon never at 

 tempted to carry out these schemes himself. The first grave 

 defect of his &quot; method &quot; is, therefore, its inutility. 



Next, assuming the possibility of compiling such data, he 

 pointed out that the cause, or &quot; form,&quot; of a given sensible 

 property could be best detected by a process that would suc 

 cessively eliminate all the other rival &quot; forms,&quot; and thus bring to 

 light the proper one. Every &quot;form* which is present when the 

 property in question is absent, or absent when the latter is present, 

 or which does not increase and decrease concomitantly with the 

 latter, is to be rejected as not being the &quot;form &quot; causally connected 

 with the latter. Such is the principle on which the method pro 

 ceeds, the principle of elimination, or exclusion of the non-causal 

 or casual concomitants of a phenomenon. It is theoretically 

 sound: &quot;where you cannot (as in mathematics) see that a pro 

 position must universally be true, but have to rely for the proof 

 of it on the facts of your experience, there is no other way of 

 establishing it than by showing that facts disprove its rivals&quot;. 2 



1 The tendency of the science of Bacon s time to substitute for the qualitative 

 conceptions of the Scholastics, quantitative, picturable, measurable conceptions, is 

 revealed in his changing and uncertain ways of conceiving &quot; form &quot;. He appears 

 to have finally fixed upon the notion of something measurable in terms of &quot; spatial 

 and temporal relations of bodies &quot; (WELTON, op. cit., ii., p. 36), something which has 

 been described in present-day scientific language as a &quot; principle of corpuscular 

 structure&quot; (JOSEPH, Logic, p. 364). 



a JOSEPH, op. cit., p. 366. 



