44 PART I. THE PROBLEM. 



sheepishly, an adventurous delight in entrusting the bark of 

 science to good fortune, and a desire of reaching conclusions 

 rapidly, may have much to do with the prevalent neglect of 

 consciously employing, even in part, Bacon's method-in-chief. 

 Methodologists, however, may in time return to it, seeing that 

 they, through John Stuart Mill's Canons, have adopted, almost 

 in its entirety, the skeleton of the method, only separating it 

 into independent parts and neglecting the subsequent processes 

 of exact definition of the comprehensive conclusion or state- 

 ment arrived at and the theoretical and practical deductions 

 which are to be drawn therefrom. Indirectly Bacon thus con- 

 tinues to hold the field, and the sole alternative to adopting 

 his comprehensive and synthetic method of investigation is to 

 substitute an equally comprehensive and synthetic method of 

 a more modern character. It is inconceivable that educated 

 men and women will much longer tolerate the farrago of 

 blurred and inarticulated half-rules which now passes under the 

 name of methodology. They will ask that we either return to 

 Bacon, or that we transcend him through a method even more 

 comprehensive than his. (See Conclusion 2 for such a method.) 



As we have seen, exception could hardly be taken to the 

 example analysed by Bacon, were it not that it is only an 

 example, and that an example which is not succeeded by a 

 number of other examples and a series of conclusions, is liable 

 to be interpreted in more ways than one, and cannot illustrate 

 every possible case. The nature of observation, experimen- 

 tation, generalisation, definition, deduction, and the process of 

 forming hypotheses as well as the mode of verifying them, in 

 conjunction with sundry other matters, including the categories 

 into which phenomena can be profitably divided, should have 

 been determined as precisely as possible by Bacon; and pro- 

 bably if his life had not been abruptly terminated through ex- 

 cessive scientific zeal, and if he had not attempted to achieve 

 what is beyond the powers of an isolated individual, he might 

 have given his Novum Organum a systematic form. 



Bacon, as we shall endeavour to show in the sequel, was sub- 

 stantially right in respect of the method of science. His numer- 

 ous allusions to experiments undertaken by himself in order to 

 verify some conjecture, demonstrate his respect for the ex- 

 perimental method, whilst his fierce attacks on the deductive 

 mode of enquiry are really directed against utilising propositions 

 which are not based on a study of facts and are not succeeded 

 by scrupulous verification. Even an uncompromising critic like 

 Miss Naden admits that "his error is not the rejection, but the 

 postponement, of deduction". (Induction and Deduction, p. 45.) 



1 "My directions for the interpretation of nature embrace two generic 

 divisions: the one, how to educe and form axioms from experience; the 

 other, how to deduce and derive new experiments from axioms." (Novum 

 Organnm, bk. 2, 10.) 



