ANTICIPATION AND INTERPRETATION 25 



great truths deductively. Giordano Bruno also 

 recommended induction to others, but found it 

 too tedious for his own purposes. 



During the long Middle Ages, men ceased to 

 observe Nature; they absorbed Aristotle's views 

 of Nature and were anchored fast to Greek sci- 

 ence by a traditional reverence. ''Bornons ce 

 respect que nous avons pour les anciens,'' said 

 Pascal in his Pensees, This is also the vein of one 

 of Bacon's Aphorisms:^ "Again, the reverence 

 for antiquity, and the authority of men who have 

 been esteemed great in philosophy, and general 

 unanimity, have retarded men from advancing in 

 science, and almost enchanted them." Bacon also 

 drew a satirical picture of the condition of nat- 

 ural science as it was early in the seventeenth 

 century: "If the natural history extant, though 

 apparently of great bulk and variety, were to be 

 carefully weeded of its fables, antiquities, quota- 

 tions, frivolous disputes, philosophy, ornaments, 

 it would shrink to a slender bulk." 



While Bacon (1561-1626) upheld induction 

 in his writings as the only true scientific method, 

 there is abundant evidence that it had been inde- 

 pendently established as the method of scientific 

 research by Harvey (1578-1657), who discov- 

 ered the circulation of the blood, by Mayo and 

 others, quite independently and even in advance 



^Novum Organurrii Aphorisms. Book I, Ixxxiv. 



