THE ARBITER OF ETHICS 231 



which would be in accord with the phenomena dis- 

 covered by experiment. Naturally the division was not 

 sharp; even to Galileo, and especially to Descartes, 

 much of the Aristotelian method still clung. 



Just as the Or g anon of Aristotle absorbed the sci- 

 entific spirit of the Greeks, so we have in the Novum 

 Organum of Bacon an explicit attempt to crystallize 

 the new knowledge into a scientific method. To make 

 his purpose quite clear he invented for it a new name, 

 natural philosophy, so as to separate it from the meta- 

 physical philosophy of the Greeks. This natural 

 philosophy, if carried out logically, would limit us to 

 the laborious and careful accumulation of experimental 

 facts, out of which would grow true natural laws. 

 And, further to show the break he would make with 

 the Peripatetic school, he states that any further gen- 

 eralization which would lead to the consideration of 

 formal and final causes must require a hypothetical 

 method proper only to metaphysics. His criticism 

 of Greek philosophy is characteristic of his attitude. 

 Thus he gives his well-known opinion that the Greeks 

 were a vain and disputatious people, whose desire to 

 shine, whose taste for dispute, and whose mania for 

 new systems of thought multiplied error, leading them 

 to forsake observation for the more facile triumphs 

 of speculation. Nor did he spare the greatest, when 

 he declared that Plato subordinated the world to ideas ; 

 and Aristotle, ideas to words. The one corrupted sci- 



