THE RENAISSANCE 121 



feasible experiments, and then by collecting and 

 tabulating the results, it would be possible to determine 

 what phenomena varied together, and thus to discover 

 the true and inevitable relations between them. 



The obvious criticism of Bacon's method is that, 

 while partially applicable to purely descriptive sciences 

 like natural history, it is never applicable elsewhere. 

 The numbers of phenomena and possible experiments 

 are too numerous to be treated thus. At an early 

 stage of the enquiry, scientific insight and imagination 

 must come into play to exercise a selective action ; 

 a tentative hypothesis must be framed, and the 

 multitude of possible experiments reduced to the 

 manageable number needed to confirm or refute the 

 hypothesis. Hypothesis plays an essential part in 

 science, and research seldom or never proceeds on 

 pure Baconian lines. 



Many years later, the method of Bacon was criti- 

 cized by T. H. Huxley in the following words : 

 " Those who refuse to go beyond fact," he wrote, 

 " rarely get as far as fact ; and any one who has 

 studied the history of science knows that almost every 

 great step therein has been made by the ' anticipation 

 of nature,' that is, by the invention of hypotheses, 

 which, though verifiable, often had very little founda- 

 tion to start with ; and, not unfrequently, in spite 

 of a long career of usefulness, turned out to be wholly 

 erroneous in the long run." 



There is much that compels our assent in this 

 nineteenth-century criticism of the Baconian method ; 

 but we must remember that up to the time in which 

 Bacon wrote, the world had listened to many theories 

 and hypotheses, and had seen no corresponding 



