330 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



existence of other and wholly impersonal considerations 

 of ample strength. His suppression of Gilbert's manu- 

 script is a part of that "checkered spectacle of so much 

 jrlory and so much shame" which makes up his life. 



As to the statement that is often made that Gilbert prac- 

 ticed the inductive method before Bacon presented it to 

 the world, some discrimination is requisite. The greatest 

 philosophical critics have never agreed as to the exact 

 nature of the induction which Bacon sought to engraft 

 upon human thought, and therefore it would be presump- 

 tuous here to seek its definition. If his philosophy advo- 

 cates induction as a mode of reasoning only in a broad and 

 general way, it but follows Roger Bacon, and, more closely, 

 Leonardo da Vinci. Indeed, the words of the great Italian, 

 u My design is first to examine facts, and afterwards to 

 demonstrate how bodies are constrained to act. It is the 

 method that one must adhere to in all research into nature" 

 . . . find a better application in the experiments of Gil- 

 bert than in the aphorisms of Bacon. "Recent induction, 

 that of Mill and Whewell, Herschel, Faraday and Darwin," 

 says Professor Nichol, "is the means by which great se- 

 quences of nature, called laws, are investigated by the aid 

 of apt conjecture and by careful verification established;" 1 

 and such was the induction which led Gilbert to the con- 

 clusion that the earth is a great magnet. But this, accord- 

 ing to the same authority, is not Baconian induction, for 

 Bacon aspired to penetrate into the inner nature of things, 

 and so hold them in command by the aid of a method 

 which, from its exhaustiveness, he held to be as certain in 

 its results as a demonstration of Euclid ; a "conclusion of 

 necessity," so mechanical that when once understood all 

 men might employ it, yet so startling that it was to be as a 

 new sun to the borrowed beams of stars; a method compared 

 by its author to a compass which equalizes all hands, and 

 enables the most unpracticed person to draw a more correct 



1 Nichol: Francis Bacon, his life and his philosophy. Edinburgh, 

 1889, ii., 181. 



