THE PARASCEVE. 377 



languages which he understands; immediately sets himself to guess 

 what they are ; and succeeds in puzzling out here a name and there 

 a date, with plausibility. Each succeeding guess, if it be right, 

 makes the next easier ; and there is no knowing precisely how much 

 may be made out in this manner, or with what degree of certainty. 

 The process is inductive, and the results, so far as they go, are dis- 

 coveries. John seeing him thus employed comes up and says : " This 

 is all very ingenious and clever, and far more than I could do by the 

 same process. But you are not going the right way to work. You 

 will never be able to decipher the manuscript in this way. I will 

 tell you what we must do. Here (you see) are certain forms of 

 character which continually recur. Here is one that comes more 

 than once in every line ; here another that comes once in every two 

 or three lines ; a third that comes only twice or thrice in a page ; 

 and so on. Let us have a list made of these several forms, with 

 an index showing where and how often they occur. In the 

 meantime I will undertake, upon a consideration of the general 

 laws of language, to tell you, by the comparative frequency of their 

 recurrence, what parts of speech most of these are. So we shall 

 know which of them are articles, which conjunctions, which rela- 

 tives, which auxiliaries, and so on. Setting these apart we shall be 

 better able to deal with the nouns and verbs ; and then by com- 

 paring the passages in which each occurs, we shall be able, with the 

 help of your language learning, to make out the meaning first of 

 one, then of another. As each is determined, the rest will be easier 

 to determine ; and by degrees we shall come to know them all. It 

 is a slow process compared with yours, and will take time and labour 

 and many hands. But when it is done we shall be able to read the 

 whole book." 



Here I think you have a picture in little of the difference between 

 Bacon's project for the advancement of philosophy and that which 

 was carried into effect (certainly with remarkable success) by the 

 new school of inductive science which flourished in his time. If we 

 want to pursue the parallel further, we have only to suppose that 

 John, after completing in a masterly manner a great portion of his 

 work on the universal laws of language ; after giving particular 

 directions for the collection, arrangement, and classification of the 

 index, and even doing several pages of it himself by way of ex- 

 ample ; is called away, and obliged to leave the completion of the 

 work to his successors ; and that his successors (wanting diligence 

 to finish, patience to wait, or ability to execute) immediately fall 

 back to the former method; in which they make such progress 

 and take such pride, that they never think of following out John's 

 plan, but leave it exactly where he left it. And here I think you 

 have a true picture of the state in which the matter now rests. 



