374 FALLACIES. 



of heat, or of cold, or of whatever other phenomenon 

 he is considering; the only difficulty being to find 

 what it is; which accordingly he tries to do by a 

 process of elimination, rejecting or excluding, by 

 negative instances, whatever is not the forma or cause, 

 in order to arrive at what is. But, that this forma 

 or cause is one thing, and that it is the same in all 

 hot objects, he has no more doubt of, than another 

 person has that there is always some cause or other. 

 In the present state of knowledge it could not be 

 necessary, even if we had not already treated so fully 

 of the question, to point out how widely this supposi- 

 tion is at variance with the truth. It is particularly 

 unfortunate for Bacon that, falling into this error, he 

 should have fixed almost exclusively upon a class of 

 inquiries in which it was particularly fatal; namely, 

 inquiries into the causes of the sensible qualities of 

 objects. For his assumption, groundless in every 

 case, is false in a peculiar degree with respect to those 

 sensible qualities. In regard to scarcely any of them 

 has it been found possible to trace any unity of cause, 

 any set of conditions invariably accompanying the 

 quality. The conjunctions of such qualities with one 

 another constitute the variety of Kinds, in which, as 

 already remarked, it has not been found possible to 

 trace any law. Bacon was seeking for what did not 

 exist. The phenomenon of which he sought for the 

 one cause has oftenest no cause at all, and when it 

 has, depends (as far as hitherto ascertained) upon an 

 unassignable variety of distinct causes. 



And upon this rock every one must split, who, 

 like Bacon, represents to himself as the first and 

 fundamental problem of science to ascertain what is 

 the cause of a given effect, rather than what are the 

 effects of a given cause. It was shown, in an early 



