PHILOSOPHER. SCIENTISTS 



ners he handleth than those instances which he al- 

 legeth." 1 



These were his opinions, formed while a young 

 man in college, repeated at intervals through his 

 maturer years, and reiterated and emphasized in 

 his old age. Masses of facts were to be obtained by 

 observing nature at first hand, and from such ac- 

 cumulations of facts deductions were to be made. 

 In short, reasoning was to be from the specific to the 

 general, and not vice versa. 



It was by his teachings alone that Bacon thus con- 

 tributed to the foundation of modern science; and, 

 while he was constantly thinking and writing on scien- 

 tific subjects, he contributed little in the way of actual 

 discoveries. " I only sound the clarion," he said, "but 

 I enter not the battle." 



The case of Descartes, however, is different. He 

 both sounded the clarion and entered into the fight. 

 He himself freely acknowledges his debt to Bacon for 

 his teachings of inductive methods of study, but 

 modern criticism places his work on the same plane 

 as that of the great Englishman. "If you lay hold 

 of any characteristic product of modern ways of think- 

 ing," says Huxley, "either in the region of philosophy 

 or in that of science, you find the spirit of that thought, 

 if not its form, has been present in the mind of the 

 great Frenchman." 2 



Descartes, the son of a noble family of France, was 

 educated by Jesuit teachers. Like Bacon, he very 

 early conceived the idea that the methods of teaching 

 and studying science were wrong, but he pondered the 

 matter well into middle life before putting into writing 



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