BACON'S INFLUENCE ON ELECTRICAL PROGRESS. 331 



circle than the best draftsman can without it, and which is 

 to level all abilities, and eliminate intellectual acuteness 

 and the play of genius in the solution of the problems of 

 nature. If such be the Baconian inductive method, Gilbert 

 never practiced it, and it may be questioned whether any 

 one has ever done so. That Gilbert, however, pursued the 

 inductive method as truly, in kind, as it is followed in the 

 scientific thought of to-day, seems beyond dispute. 



It has been suggested, in order to account for Bacon's 

 attitude not only toward Gilbert but toward Copernicus 

 and Harvey, that he did not, in reality, initiate modern 

 philosophy, but closed the philosophy of the Middle Ages. 1 

 Nor is this altogether at variance with the view taken by 

 Lord Brougham in his fine summing up of the Baconian 

 achievements, 2 with direct reference to Roger Bacon, Da 

 Vinci and Gilbert, as the generalization and extension 

 of their modes of investigation "to all matters of contin- 

 gent truth, exploding the errors, the absurd dogmas and 

 fantastic subtleties of the schools." So, in estimating 

 Bacon's part in the intellectual rise in electricity, we find 

 him near the boundary between the old and the new phil- 

 osophy, and apparently influenced by the old mode of 

 thought as well as by the new. Toward the science as 

 Gilbert begun it, his position appears to have been inter- 

 preted by his contemporaries and immediate successors as 

 one of disparagement, and for a time this acted to retard 

 progress; while his failure to do Gilbert justice, certainly 

 savors of mediaeval intolerance. But in so far as he led 

 the world to the investigation of all physical phenomena 

 by direct experiment and correct induction, he became 

 ultimately a power mightily working for the advancement 

 of knowledge in the new field. 



1 Erdmann, History of Philosophy, London, 1890. 



2 Brougham, Address on Unveiling of Newton's Statue, 1855. 



