A RATIONAL WORLD CONCEPTION 215 



" Few scientific pretenders have made more mistakes than 

 Lord Bacon. He rejected the Coppernican system, and spoke 

 insolently of its great author ; he undertook to criticise adversely 

 Gilbert's treatise, De Magnete ; he was occupied in the con- 

 demnation of any investigation of final causes, while Harvey 

 was deducing the circulation of the blood from Aquapendente's 

 discovery of the valves in the veins ; he was doubtful whether 

 instruments were of any advantage, while Galileo was investigat- 

 ing the heavens with the telescope. Ignorant himself of every 

 branch of mathematics, he presumed that they were useless in 

 science but a few years before Newton achieved by their aid 

 his immortal discoveries. 



"It is time that the sacred name of philosophy should be 

 severed from its long connection with that of one who was a 

 pretender in science, a time-serving politician, an insidious 

 lawyer, a corrupt judge, a treacherous friend, a bad man." 1 



It might be urged in Bacon's defence that, in truth, he was 

 born too early % to take in the full character of the revolution 

 going on around him a revolution whose consequences he did 

 grasp with a prophetic insight, and which he sketched in pages 

 which are among the enchantments of the English tongue. He 

 was forty-eight the year that Kepler issued his New Astro- 

 nomy and that Galileo's discoveries with the telescope began. 

 He died a year before Harvey's treatise on the circulation came 

 from the press, though he knew something of his work. 



But the defence does not stand in the light of the parallel 

 career of his contemporary, Gilbert of Colchester. The author 

 of the New Physiology of the Magnet was born twenty 

 years before the author of The Advancement of Learning, 

 yet he could accept the Coppernican doctrine where Bacon 

 could not. In the midst of a busy life he could make a multi- 

 tude of new observations and lay the foundations of a new 

 science, as Bacon never did. 



The pages of The Advancement of Learning and the Novum 

 Organum are filled with foolish jeers of Gilbert's work ; of 

 Harvey's, too. He could neither make discoveries himself 

 nor appreciate those of others. He was as jealous as he was 

 ignorant. Compared with the great thinkers of his time, he 

 appears, moreover, as a mediocre philosopher whose reasoning 

 ofttimes is simply childish. He who looks now through the two 

 1 History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, vol. ii. 



