310 REPORT—1905. 
concerning the nature of the universe. When we contemplate the spirit that such 
a state of knowledge might foster towards scientific learning, and when we recall 
the world into which Bacon’s treatise was launched, we can well be surprised at 
his far-reaching views, and we can marvel at his isolated wisdom. 
Let me select a few specimens of his judgments, chosen solely in relation to 
our own subjects. When he says: 
‘ All true and fruitful natural philosophy hath a double scale or ladder, 
ascendent and descendent, ascending from experiments to the invention of 
causes, and descending from causes to the invention of new experiments ; 
therefore I judge it most requisite that these two parts be severally con- 
sidered and handled ’— 
he is merely expounding, in what now is rather archaic phrase, the principles of 
the most ambitious investigations in the natural philosophy of subsequent cen- 
turies. When he speaks of 
‘the operation of the relative and adventive characters of essences, as 
quantity, similitude, diversity, possibility, and the rest ; with this distinction 
and provision, that they be handled as they have efticacy in nature, and not 
logically "— 
I seem to hear the voice of the applied mathematician warning the pure mathe- 
matician off the field. When, after having divided natural philosophy into 
physic and metaphysic (using these words in particular meanings, and including 
mathematics in the second of the divisions), he declares 
‘ physic should contemplate that which is inherent in matter, and therefore 
transitory, and metaphysic that which is abstracted and fixed; . . . physic 
describeth the causes of things, but the variable or respective causes; and 
metaphysic the fixed and constant causes ’— 
there comes before my mind the army of physicists of the present day, who 
devote themselves unwearyingly to the properties of matter and willingly cast 
aside elaborate arguments and calculations. When he argues that 
‘many parts of nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtilty, nor 
demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with 
sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics ’— 
he might be describing the activity of subsequent generations of philosophers, 
astronomers, and engineers. And in the last place (for my extracts must have 
some end), when he expresses the opinion 
‘that men do not sufliciently understand the excellent use of the pure mathe- 
matics, in that they do remedy and cure many defects in the wit and faculties 
intellectual. For if the wit be too dull, they sharpen it; if too wandering, 
they fix it; if too inherent in the sense, they abstract it; ... in the mathe- 
matics, that which is collateral and intervenient is no less worthy than that 
which is principal and intended ’— 
T seem to hear an advocate for the inclusion of elementary mathematics in any 
scheme of general education. At the same time, I wonder what Bacon, who held 
such an exalted estimate of pure mathematics in its grey dawn, would have said by 
way of ampler praise of the subject in its fuller day. 
It was a splendid vision of inductive science as of other parts of learning: it 
contained a revelation of the course of progress through the centuries to come. 
Yet the facts of to-day are vaster than the vision of that long-ago yesterday, and 
human activity has far outstripped the dreams of Bacon’s opulent imagination. 
He was the harbinger (premature in many respects it must be confessed, but still 
the harbinger) of a new era. At atime when we are making a new departure in 
‘the fulfilment of the purpose of our charter, which requires us ‘to promote the 
intercourse of those who cultivate Science in different parts of the British Empire, 
