52 DISSERTATION SECOND. [parti. 



2. Novum Organum. 



The defects which have been ascribed to the ancient phy- 

 sicks were riot likely to be corrected in the course of the 

 middle ages. It is true, that, during those ages, a science 

 of pure experiment had made its appearance in the world, 

 and might have been expected to remedy the greatest of 

 these defects, by turning the altention of philosophers to 

 experience and observation. This effect, however, was far 

 from being immediately produced ; and none who professed 

 to be in search of truth ever wandered over the regions of 

 fancy, in paths more devious and eccentrick, than the first 

 experimenters in chemistry. They had become acquainted 

 with a series of facts so unlike to any thing already known, 

 that the ordinary principles of belief were shaken or sub- 

 verted, and the mind laid open to a degree of credulity far 

 beyond any with which the philosophers of antiquity could 

 be reproached. An unlooked for extension of human pow- 

 er had taken place ; its limits were yet unknown; and the 

 boundary between the possible and the impossible was no lon- 

 ger to be distinguished. The adventurers in an unexplored 

 country, given up to the guidance of imagination, pursued 

 objects which the kindness, no less than the wisdom of na- 

 ture, have rendered unattainable by man ; and in their spe- 

 culations peopled the air, the earth, and all the elements, 

 with spirits and genii, the invisible agents destined to con- 

 nect together all the facts which they knew, and all those 

 which they hoped to discover. Chemistry, in this state, 

 might be said to have an elective attraction for all that was 

 most absurd and extravagant in the other parts of knowledge ; 

 alchemy was its immediate offspring, and it allied itself in 

 succession with the dreams of the Cabbalists, the Rosicru- 

 cians, and the Theosophers. Thus a seience, founded in 

 experiment, and destined one day to afford such noble 



