ETHOLOGY. 525 



immensely numerous. In the importance, therefore, 

 which Bacon assigns, in every science, to the middle 

 principles, it is impossible not to agree with him. 

 But I conceive him to have been radically wrong in 

 his doctrine respecting the mode in which these 

 axiomata media should be arrived at; although there is 

 no one proposition laid down in his works for which 

 he has been so extravagantly eulogised. He enun- 

 ciates as an universal rule, that induction should pro- 

 ceed from the lowest to the middle principles, and 

 from those to the highest, never reversing that order, 

 and consequently leaving no room for the discovery of 

 new principles by way of deduction at all. It is not 

 to be conceived that a man of Bacon's sagacity could 

 have fallen into this mistake, if there had existed in 

 his time, among the sciences which treat of successive 

 phenomena, one single instance of a deductive science, 

 such as mechanics, astronomy, optics, acoustics, &c., 

 now are. In those sciences it is evident that the 

 higher and middle principles are by no means derived 

 from the lowest, but the reverse. In some of them 

 the very highest generalizations were those earliest 

 ascertained with any scientific exactness ; as, for 

 example (in mechanics), the laws of motion. Those 

 general laws had not indeed at first the acknow- 

 ledged universality which they acquired after having 

 been successfully employed to explain many classes of 

 phenomena to which they were not originally seen to 

 be applicable ; as when the laws of motion were em- 

 ployed in conjunction with other laws to explain 

 deductively the celestial phenomena. Still, the fact 

 remains, that the propositions which were afterwards 

 recognized as the most general truths of the science, 

 were, of all its accurate generalizations, those earliest 

 arrived at. Bacon's greatest merit cannot therefore 



