114 COSMIC FIlILOSOrilY. [pt. i 



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, impressing it upon men's minds with that majestic 

 eloquence 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 misconception of the nature of Bacon's 

 achievements rests upon a not unnatural confusion between 

 the subjective and the deductive methods. The subjective 

 method is indeed mainly deductive, but that is not the 

 source of its weakness. It is not in reasoning downward 

 from a general proposition to a special conclusion that the 

 danger lies. The danger is in reasoning from an unverified 

 premise to a conclusion which you do not stop to verify. 

 Here we come iipon the weak point in the system of 

 Descartes. A mathematician whose genius and achieve- 

 ments have perhaps never been equalled save by Newton, 

 Leibnitz, and Lap;range, — Descartes was not likely to under- 

 rate the value of deduction ; but he overlooked the necessity 

 for constant verification. Though his scientific career was 

 far more brilliant than Bacon's — if, indeed, the latter can be 

 said to have had any scientific career — his conception of 



