«ct. ii] DISSERTATION SECOND. 55 



" But whence," said Bacon, " can arise such vagueness 

 and sterility in all the. physical systems which have hrther- 

 to existed in the world ? It is not certainly from any thing in 

 nature itself; for the steadiness and regularity of the laws 

 by which it is governed clearly mark them out as objects 

 of certain and precise knowledge. Neither can it arise from 

 any want of ability in those who have pursued such inqui- 

 ries, many of whom have been men of the highest talent 

 and genius of the ages in which they lived ; and it can» 

 therefore, arise from nothing else but the perverseness and 

 insufficiency of the methods that have been pursued. 

 Men have sought to make a world from their own con- 

 ceptions, and to draw from their own minds all the mate- 

 rials which they employed ; but if, instead of doing so, 

 they had consulted experience and observation, they would 

 have had facts, and not opinions, to reason about, and 

 might have ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the 

 laws which govern the material world." 



" As things are at present conducted," he adds, " a sud- 

 , den transition is made from sensible objects and particular 

 facts to general propositions, which are accounted princi- 

 ples, and round which, as round so many fixed poles, dis- 

 putation and argument continually revolve. From the pro- 

 positions thus hastily assumed, all things are derived, by a 

 process compendious and precipitate, ill suited to discovery, 

 but wonderfully accommodated to debate. The way that 

 promises success is the reverse of this. It requires that 

 we should generalize slowly, going from particular things 

 to those that are but one step more general ; from those to 

 others of still greater extent, and so on to such as are uni- 

 versal. By such means, we may hope to arrive at princi- 

 ples, not vague and obscure, but luminous and well defined, 

 such as nature herself will not refuse to acknowledge." 



