404 



NA TURE 



[February 23, 1905 



After John Hunter had worked at human anatomy for 

 ten years, he manifested his intellectual growth by direct- 

 ing his thoughts to the higher and more scientific disci- 

 pline of comparative anatomy and physiology. He realised 

 that human anatomy alone was an insufficient guide to 

 pathology and surgery. He collected all manner of 

 animals at his house and grounds at Earl's Court in order 

 to study their ways and habits, and froin every available 

 source he acquired animals, living or dead, for the pur- 

 poses of observation, experimentation, or dissection. In 

 his use of the lower animals for the elucidation of physio- 

 logical problems he followed while amplifying the practice 

 of Harvey, who in his turn adduced the authority of Aris- 

 totle. There was, however, a striking and characteristic 

 difference between the use which .Aristotle made of the 

 dissection of animals with reference to human anatomy 

 and that of Hunter. There is no trustworthy evidence that 

 -Aristotle or Hippocrates or even Galen dissected the human 

 body, certainly not in the sense we understand by the term 

 " dissection." They dissected the bodies of animals instead 

 of those of man, and transferred their observations of 

 animals to the corporeal organisation of inan. Hunter, on 

 the other hand, practised the dissection of lower animals 

 in addition to that of man, ar)^ transferred his observations 

 to the embryology and morphology of man and to the 

 elucidation of the problems of human and comparative 

 physiology and pathology. 



John Hunter was a philosopher in the strict and primary 

 sense of the word. He had a passion for knowledge. 

 " Let no man presume to call himself wise," says Pytha- 

 goras; "God alone is wise. Man can never get beyond 

 the passion for wisdom." John Hunter had this passion. 

 He devoted himself to the pursuit of knowledge, searching 

 for it in every department of the organic world, animal and 

 vegetable. In one of his letters to Jenner he says : " I 

 have but one order to send you, which is, to send every- 

 thing you can get, either animal, vegetable, or mineral, 

 and the compound of the two, either animal or vegetable 

 mineralized." And, again: "Have you any large trees 

 of different kinds that you can make free with? If you 

 have, I will put you upon a set of experiments with regard 

 to the heat of vegetables." With respect to the observ- 

 ations and experiments which he directs Jenner to make, he 

 says, " Be as particular as you possibly can." These 

 sentences express briefly and in epitome, as it were. 

 Hunter's habits of mind and his attitude towards the 

 problems of organic life. 



_ John Hunter may have lacked the power of clear exposi- 

 tion, and he may have disliked routine teaching. He was, 

 however, full and overflowing with -ideas, new and 

 original, to which he often found it difficult to give dis- 

 tinct shape and utterance. In contrast with ""William 

 Hunter's didactic powers, John had the suggestive, the 

 constructive, the creative faculty, the faculty of discovery, 

 of coordinating knowledge, and he had the art of stimii- 

 latmg thought and calling forth effort from others. He 

 taught by example rather than bv precept. 



Ottley, the first and one of the best of Hunter's bio- 

 graphers, remarks that in pursuing his researches Hunter 

 strove, not like many of his more learned and less philo- 

 sophical predecessors, to unravel the mysteries of nature 

 by taking up principles a priori and seeking for facts to 

 support his theory, but that, on the contrary, he followed 

 m the strictest manner the inductive method' laid down by 

 Bacon as the only sure though arduous road to knowledge'; 

 and Babington, in his Hunterian oration, remarks of him : 

 " He had never read Bacon, but his mode of studying 

 nature was as strictly Baconian as if he had." Other 

 critics and historians of Hunter's work, and not a few 

 Hunterian orators, have written or spoken in a similar 

 strain. In my judgment this view is entirely erroneous 

 with respect to Hunter's method, and it is a complete mis- 

 mterpretation of the Baconian system. Bacon's eloquence 

 and influence undoubtedly did much to attract men to the 

 observation and study of natural phenomena. He directed 

 attention to the necessity of studying the powers and forces 

 of the world as a means of subjecting the world to the 

 human mind, and so far his message was appropriate and 

 opportune. The significance of that message is probably 

 greater now than at the time he delivered it. The future 

 belongs to the nation which understands best the forces 

 of nature, and which can most skilfullv and economically 

 NO. 1843, VOL 71] 



employ them. But Bacon himself neither knew nor under- 

 stood the physical sciences. His spirit was essentially 

 mediaeval, and much less modern than that of his illustrious 

 namesake Roger Bacon, who lived three hundred years 

 before him. Francis Bacon's aim was purely utilitarian. 

 He had no idea of knowledge for its own sake, and he 

 cherished the hope thai by increasing our knowledge of 

 nature the secret of the tr^msmutation of substances would 

 be learnt, and probably the knowledge of the making of 

 gold. He not only had no practical acquaintance with 

 natural science, but he lacked insight into the true methods 

 of its investigation. He understood very imperfectly the 

 value of e.^periment, and he assigned quite a subordinate 

 position to quantitative determination, the precise quality 

 which is the most striking characteristic of modern science, 

 and which constituted the most original and perhaps most 

 brilliant of the reasonings which Harvey employed in his 

 famous induction. So far from being the founder of the 

 modern scientific method. Bacon's writings were themselves 

 one of the products of the intellectual awakening which 

 began at the end of the sixteenth century. Notwithstand- 

 ing his affectation of scientific knowledge and scientific 

 methods, Bacon had an unscientific weakness for super- 

 stitions. He believed in natural and judicial astrology, 

 though not without some hesitation and discrimination. 

 He believed in the transmutability of elements and of the 

 metals, in charms and signatures as remedies, and so com- 

 pletely did he ignore Harvey's discovery of the circulation 

 of the blood that in one of the latest of his writings he 

 ascribes the pulsation of the heart and arteries to the 

 dilatation and contraction of the spirits. Well might 

 Harvey say, in disparagement of Bacon's scientific 

 writings: " He writes philosophy like a Lord Chancellor." 



Bacon's ruling idea was the collection of masses of facts 

 and then the employment of processes of arrangement, and 

 separation, and exclusion, so artificially contrived that a 

 man of common intelligence should be able to announce the 

 truth sought for. This method has been slightingly de- 

 scribed as a kind of scientific bookkeeping. " It is diffi- 

 cult," says Stanley Jevons. " to imagine a less likely wav 

 of arriving at great discoveries. The greater the array of 

 facts the less is the probability that they will by any 

 routine system of classification disclose the laws of nature." 

 The answer to the claim that Bacon was the philosophic 

 father of modern methods of scientific investigation is that 

 none of the scientific truths established, by the great 

 masters of science can be made even to appear in corre- 

 spondence with Bacon's methods. Whether we look to 

 Copernicus, who preceded him, or to Kepler, Galilei, 

 Torricelli, Pascal, Gilbert, and Harvey, or to Newton, 

 Descartes, or Huygens, or to Thomas Young, or to the 

 chemists Black, Priestley. Scheele, and Lavoisier, we find 

 that discovery was achieved by a method quite different 

 from that advocated by Bacon. So dispassionate a critic 

 of philosophy as John Grote remarks : " I have not the 

 smallest belief in Bacon's having reformed the method of 

 discovery, believing rather that if he had had any success 

 in that way, in the manner he wished, it would have been 

 most calamitous for science." And even with regard to 

 the claim of Bacon to be the founder of inductive philo- 

 sophy, Ellis, one of the ablest of his editors, asserts that 

 the nature of the act of induction is as clearly stated bv 

 .Aristotle as by any later writer, while .Aristotle himself 

 ascribes the credit to Socrates. Perhaps the Baconian claim 

 has never been more convincingly refuted than by .Augustus 

 De Morgan, at once one of the profoundest and subtlest 

 thinkers of the nineteenth century. " Modern discoveries," 

 he says, " have not been made by large collections of facts, 

 with subsequent discussion, separation, and resulting de- 

 duction of a truth thus rendered perceptible. .A few facts 

 have suggested an hypothesis which means a supposition 

 proper to explain them. The necessary results of this sup- 

 position are worked out, and then, and not till then, other 

 facts are examined to see if these ulterior results are found 

 in nature. . . . Wrong hypotheses rightly worked from 

 h.ive produced more useful results than unguided observ- 

 ation. But this is not the Baconian plan. . . . What arc 

 large collections of facts for? 'To make theories from,' 

 says Bacon ; ' To try ready-made theories by, ' says the 

 history of discovery." 



Bacon's plan was purely mechanical. He ignored the 

 work of the mind in the constitution of knowledge. He 



