THE PARASCEVE. 379 



reported upon the authority of a very eminent modern writer upon 

 these subjects. 



B. 



So have I. And I can well believe that the use of Bacon's 

 " Prerogatives of Instances," in the way they have been used, is not .. 

 much ; and for the reason given by Herschel, viz., because the same 

 judgment which enables you to assign the Instance its proper class, 

 enables you, without that assignation, to recognize its proper value. 

 Therefore so long as the task of gathering his Instances as they 

 grow wild in the woods is left to the Interpreter of Nature himself, 

 there is little use in a formal classification ; he knows exactly what 

 he wants ; what is not to his purpose he need not trouble himself 

 with ; what is to his purpose he can apply to that purpose at once. 

 And each several man of genius will no doubt acquire a knack of 

 his own by which he will arrive at his results faster than by any 

 formal method. But suppose the Interpreter wants to use the help v 

 of other people, to whom he cannot impart his own genius or his pe- 

 culiar gift of knowing at first sight what is to the purpose and what 

 not. He wants them to assist him in gathering materials. How 

 shall he direct them in their task so that their labours may be 

 available for himself ? I take it, he must distribute the work among 

 several and make it pass through several processes. One man may /. 

 be used to make a rough and general collection, what we call an 

 omnium gatherum. Another must be employed to reduce the con- < 

 fused mass into some order fit for reference. A third to clear it ,*- 

 of superfluities and rubbish. A fourth must be taught to classify ^ 

 and arrange what remains. And here I cannot but think that Ba- 

 con's arrangement of Instances according to what he calls their 

 Prerogatives, or some better arrangement of the same kind which 

 experience ought to suggest, would be found to be of great value ; 

 especially when it is proposed to make through all the regions of 

 Nature separate collections of this kind such as may combine into s 

 one general collection. For though it be true that as long as each 

 man works only for himself, he may trust to the usus uni rei deditus 

 for finding out the method of proceeding which best suits the trick of 

 his own mind, and each will probably pursue a different method, 

 yet when many men's labours are to be gathered into one table, 

 any collector of statistics will tell you that they must all work ac- 

 cording to a common pattern. And in the subject we are speaking 

 of which is coextensive with the mind of man on one side and the 

 nature of things on the other, that will undoubtedly be the best 

 pattern which is framed upon the justest theory of the human under- 

 standing; for which distinction Bacon's would seem to be no 

 unlikely candidate. 



