24 GENERAL PREFACE TO 



such that all men should be capable of employing it, are thus 

 two great features of the Baconian method. His system can 

 never be rightly understood if they are neglected, and any 

 explanation of it which passes them over in silence leaves un- 

 explained the principal difficulty which that system presents 

 to us. But another difficulty takes the place of the one which 

 is thus set aside. It becomes impossible to justify or to under- 

 stand Bacon's assertion that his method was essentially new. 

 " Nam nos," he says in the preface to the Novum Organum, "si 

 profiteamur nos meliora afferre quam antiqui, eandem quam illi 

 viam ingressi, nulla verborum arte efficere possimus, quin induca- 

 tur quaedam ingenii, vel excellentire, vel facultatis comparatio, sive 

 contentio. . . . Yerum cum per nos illud agatur, ut alia omnino 

 via intellectui aperiatur illis intentata et incognita, cominutata 



, tota jam ratio est," &c. He elsewhere speaks of himself as 

 being " in hac re plane protopirus, et vestigia nullius sequutus." * 



/ Surely this language would be out of place, if the difference 

 between him and those who had gone before him related merely 

 to matters of detail ; as, for instance, that his way of arranging 

 the facts of observation was more convenient than theirs, and 

 his way of applying an inductive process to them more syste- 

 matic. And it need not be remarked that induction in itself 

 was no novelty at all. The nature of the act of induction is 

 as clearly stated by Aristotle as by any later writer. Bacon's 

 design was surely much larger than it would thus appear to 

 have been. Whoever considers his writings without reference 

 to their place in the history of philosophy will I think be 

 convinced that he aimed at giving a wholly new method, a 

 method universally applicable, and in all~cases infallible. By 

 this method, all the knowledge which the human mind is capa- 

 ble of receiving might be attained, and attained without unne- 

 cessary labour. Men were no longer to wander from the truth 

 in helpless uncertainty. The publication of this new doctrine 

 was the Temporis Partus Masculus ; it was as the rising of a 

 new sun, before which " the borrowed beams of moon and stars" 

 were to fade away and disappear. 2 



(6.) That the wide distinction which Bacon conceived to 

 exist between his own method and any which had previously 



1 Nov. Org. i 113. 



2 Sec, for instance, the Prcefatio Gencralls, where Bacon compares his method to the 

 mariner's compass, until the discovery of which no wide sea could be crossed ; an 

 linage probably connected with his favourite device of a ship passing through the pillars 

 of Hercules, with the motto " Plus ultra." 



