August 25, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



237 



its ordered branches. He points out de- 

 ficiencies and gaps ; not a few of his recom- 

 mendations of studies, at his day remain- 

 ing untouched, have since become great 

 branches of human thought and human in- 

 quiry. But what concerns us most here is 

 his attitude towards natural philosophy, 

 all the more remarkable because of the state 

 of knowledge of that subject in his day, 

 particularly in England. It is true that 

 Gilbert had published his discovery of ter- 

 restrial magnetism some five years earlier, 

 a discovery followed only too soon by his 

 death ; but that was the single considerable 

 English achievement in modern science 

 down to Bacon's day. 



In order to estimate the significance of 

 Bacon's range of thought let me recite a 

 few facts, as an indication of the extreme 

 tenuity of progressive science in that year 

 (1605). They belong to subsequent years, 

 and may serve to show how restricted were 

 the attainments of the period, and how 

 limited were the means of advance. The 

 telescope and the microscope had not yet 

 been invented. The simple laws of planet- 

 ary motion were not formulated, for Kep- 

 ler had them only in the making. Log- 

 arithms were yet to be discovered by 

 Napier, and to be calculated by Briggs. 

 Descartes was a boy of nine and Fermat a 

 boy of only four, so that analytical 

 geometry, the middle-life discovery of both 

 of them, was not yet even a dream for either 

 of them. The Italian mathematicians, of 

 whom Cavalieri is the least forgotten, were 

 developing Greek methods of quadrature by 

 a transformed principle of indivisibles ; 

 but the infinitesimal calculus was not 

 really in sight, for ivTewton and Leibnitz 

 were yet unborn. Years were to elapse be- 

 fore, by the ecclesiastical tyranny over 

 thought, Galileo was forced to make a 

 verbal disavowal of his adhesion to the 

 Copernican system of astronomy, of which 



he was still to be the protagonist in pro- 

 pounding any reasoned proof. Some 

 mathematics could be had, cumbrous arith- 

 metic and algebra, some geometry lumber- 

 ing after Euclid, and a little trigonometry ; 

 but these were mainly the mathematics of 

 the Renaissance, no very great advance upon 

 the translated work of the Greeks and the 

 transmitted work of the Arabs. Even our 

 old friend the binomial theorem, which now 

 is supposed to be the possession of nearly 

 every able schoolboy, remained unknown to 

 professional mathematicians for more than 

 half a century yet to come. 



Nor is it merely on the negative side that 

 the times seemed unpropitious for a new 

 departure ; the spirit of the age in the posi- 

 tive activities of thought and deed was not 

 more sympathetic. Those were the days 

 when the applications of astronomy had 

 become astrology. Men sought for the 

 elixir of life and pondered over the trans- 

 mutation of baser metals into gold. Shake- 

 speare not long before had produced his 

 play ' As You Like It,' where the strange 

 natural history of the toad which, 



Ugly and venomous, 

 Bears yet a precious jewel in his head, 



is made a metaphor to illustrate the sweet- 

 ening uses of adversity. The stiffened 

 Elizabethan laws against witchcraft were 

 to be sternly administered for many a year 

 to come. It was an age that was pulsating 

 with life and illuminated by fancy, but the 

 life was the life of strong action and the 

 fancy was the fancy of ideal imagination; 

 men did not lend themselves to sustained 

 and abstract thought 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. 



