SCIENCE AND THE THOUGHT OF THE WORLD 



research, and so gave it the highest place as Domina 

 omnium scientiarum. The reasons which he gave for his 

 exaltation of experiment might have been written yester- 

 day, so modern is his standpoint. " Experimental science/' 

 he says, " has three great prerogatives over all other 

 sciences : it verifies their conclusions by direct experiment ; 

 it discovers truths which they could never reach ; and it 

 investigates the secrets of nature, and opens to us a know- 

 ledge of the past and of the future." 



To return to Francis Bacon : his philosophy was summed 

 up in the words Imperium hominis, the great destiny of 

 man as the ruler of Nature ; and he saw that man's rightful 

 sovereignty over Nature could only be attained through 

 the slow and laborious acquirement of a true understanding 

 of Nature. Bacon looked upon Nature as an overwhelm- 

 ingly complex congeries of phenomena; and as a filum 

 labyrinthi by which man might slowly find his way through 

 its mysteries to all knowledge, he put forward and ex- 

 pounded in the Novum Organum his new method, spes 

 est una in inductione vera. 



It must not be forgotten that Bacon's induction is 

 something more than the traditional induction of the 

 logicians, and practically became a new method, since 

 it includes the elimination of the non-essential. It is no 

 disparagement of the great and revolutionary work of 

 Bacon to acknowledge that the discoveries of science during 

 the last two centuries and a half have not been won by 



an exclusive following of his method. For example, he 



94 



