THE AIM AND ACHIEVEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD. 75 



the rest. Bacon's criticism is, as a matter of fact, only directed 

 upon the assumption of definite modes of motion for the atoms,* 

 which modes are admittedly drawn from observation of bodies 

 on the earth's surface, but the spirit of his objection is the same 

 as that which I have expressed to the notion that hypotheses 

 have a real as distinguished from a psychological value. 



27. 



It is well known that Bacon's general approval of the 

 methods and views of the ancient atomists was part of the 

 positive aspect of his rejection of the Aristotelian 'scholastic 

 system of philosophy, and that his own method of Forms 

 did not show that he had found in his study of the neglected 

 work of the laughing philosopher the clue that would lead men 

 out of the labyrinth of their ignorance of the world about them. 

 Nor did the Lord Chancellor, who " wrote on Science like a 

 Lord Chancellor," perform the service of pointing out to 

 others the way to the Promised Land which he was himself not 

 qualified by temperament to enter. That function fell to the 

 lot of Gassendi, who, turning to the atomic philosophy as he 

 found it expressed in the luscious hexameters of Lucretius, " not 

 by accident, nor out of mere love of opposition .... embraced 

 with a sure glance exactly what was best suited to modern 

 times and to the empirical tendency of his age. Atomism, by 

 his means drawn again from antiquity, attained a lasting 

 importance, however much it was gradually modified as it 

 passed through the hands of later inquirers."! 



The interests of Gassendi, like those of his friend, our own 

 Thomas Hobbes, were in problems of a philosophical as opposed 

 to a scientific character ; but in an age when the notion of a 

 division of intellectual labour had not yet arisen, and men still 

 essayed the task of encompassing a knowledge of the answers 



* "Debuit enim motum heterogeneuui atomo tribuere, non minus 

 quam corpus heterogeneum et virtutem heterogeneam." Loc. cit. 

 t Lange, History of Materialism, Eng. trans., 1877, i, p. 255. 



