SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE METHODS 



great achievement was reserved for Comte and 

 Mill ; and indeed would have been utterly im- 

 possible at any time before the present century, 

 during which the methods of the two chief in- 

 ductive sciences, chemistry and molecular phy- 

 sics, have first been practically exemplified. All 

 this we may cheerfully admit, without feeling 

 called upon to abate our veneration for Bacon in 

 the least. For after all this has been granted, the 

 fact still remains that Bacon saw, more clearly 

 than any of his great contemporaries, that the 

 subjective method had been definitely weighed 

 in the balance and found wanting, and that 

 henceforth Verification must be insisted on as 

 the essential prerequisite for every trustworthy 

 conclusion. This was the all-important truth 

 which Bacon set forth again and again, impress- 

 ing it upon men's minds with that majestic elo- 

 quence and prodigious fertility of illustration 

 which characterize all his philosophical writings. 

 Nor was he blind to the inevitable results of 

 banishing the subjective method. Bacon saw 

 and declared that ontological inquiries, as not 

 admitting of verification, must be condemned 

 as fruitless ; and he was the first to form that 

 grand conception of philosophy, as an organic 

 whole of which the sciences and scientific 

 methods are the organs, which I endeavoured 

 to describe in the second chapter of this work. 

 The popular rnisconception of the nature of 



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