CHILDHOOD OF SCIENCE. 193 



liis insolence as a professor bordered on madness. He did not 

 stop with contemning the time-honored authorities in learning, 

 but he harangued his crowds of hustling students around fires 

 that were fed with the books of the schoolmen. With an unspar- 

 ing hand he laid bare the tricks of pharmacy, the delusions of 

 astrology, and many assumptions of alchemy. With an insight 

 as clear as Chancellor Bacon's, he exposed the sophistries of 

 scholasticism, the futile methods of inquiry, and the utter emp- 

 tiness of all the philosophy that had gone before. But high 

 above his practice of physic, his experiments in science, and his 

 criticisms of the school systems, there seems ever to have flitted 

 that vague wild conception of something yet unattained some 

 potent, dark-hidden essence of matter, which once found would 

 compel nature to deliver over her riches. 



Such was the man who for a time, with his fascinating 

 eloquence, his inane egotism, and his mad pranks, kept up such 

 a storm in poor little Bale that the magistrates were forced to 

 banish him from his chair. Having soon after abandoned him- 

 self to vice, he sank into infamy, and died wretched and forsaken 

 at an obscure tavern in Salzburg. But his work was done ; his 

 errand as a public agitator was accomplished. He was the lump 

 of acid thrown into the crucible of alkali that had been filling 

 up for a thousand years, and which ceased not to effervesce till 

 all was neutralized and purified. 



As we approach the dividing line between the old-school and 

 the new-school philosophers, it will be well to understand fully 

 the difference between the principles and the modes of thought 

 that characterized each. We will therefore for a moment com- 

 pare and contrast the new or inductive method with the old or 

 deductive system. 



It is now well understood that there is but one true way of 

 prosecuting physical research. Facts, observations and experi- 

 ments must first of all be gathered together and classified. 

 From these, conclusions may be formed such as explain or com- 

 prise each different class of phenomena. From these conclusions, 

 more general principles may be predicated ; and from these 

 principles we may step, it may be, to the one law that binds them 



