BACONIAN PHILOSOPHY. 26S 
universe can disprove each other. The laws of life and chemistry may contend 
'in building up and pulling down an organism, but if one prevails the other is held 
in abeyance. We must, therefore, be willing to follow, fearless of conflict, whith- 
ersoever truth may lead. 
The spirit of the Inductive Philosophy is also fearless of human opinion. 
The most venerable errors of antiquity are to be removed. Systems that have 
been cherished and embalmed in the human heart for ages are to be overthrown. 
The most sacred shrines of the old world are to be desecrated, the idols in the 
•temple of science to be thrown down and the foundations of the temple itself 
ito be removed. Philosophies hoar with age, whose roots have been interwoven 
with all the past, and whose branches, like the Banyan tree, cover many nations, 
are to be rooted up. 
The Inductive Philosophy lays its fearless hand even on Revelation, and 
gives it a new interpretation. The rocky leaves of the book of nature are turned, 
and the foot-prints of the Creator are traced as he went forth of old to draw out 
the world. The Author of Revelation piled the rocks, and the two records must 
-agree. 
The results of the Baconian Philosophy are almost beyond belief. But one 
departmient of science had attained any considerable development prior to the 
time of Bacon. The mathematics both pure and applied had been cultivated 
from the remotest antiquity. Euclid had gathered up the scattered elements of 
geometry, and raised it to a liberal science. Pythagoras had discovered the 
property of the right-angled triangle, if it had not been known to earlier Hindoo 
and Chinese authors. Hipparchus, the father of Trigonometry and Astronomy, 
had catalogued the stars by means of the naked eye, and invented the planis- 
phere, and drawn parallels on the surface of the earth, leaving the results to 
Ptolemy his disciple. Archimedes had derived an approximate value of the 
quadrature of the circle. Thales had computed the length of the solar year and 
predicted eclipses. Even the Calculus, which has received such a wonderful 
development in modern times under Cauchy, Leibnitz, Newton, LaGrange, and 
Sir William Rowan Hamilton, is supposed to have had an Indian origin. The 
ancient world indeed contained nearly all the mathematical germs which have 
had such growth in modern times. 
In Metaphysics, which occupied even a larger share of the attention of the 
scholars of antiquity, little progress had been made. Each successive generation 
had its disciples of Plato and Aristotle, who debated from age to age the same 
problems which ever divided those two rival schools of the Greeks. The science 
of mind had not been laid upon a true foundation, and no enduring fabric could 
be built thereon. 
Of the Physical Sciences, not one except Astronomy had any real existence 
prior to the time of Bacon. Aristotle, the Plinys, and others had made vast 
■collections of reported observations, but they contained more error than truth. 
Immense stores of traditional knowledge had been handed down from generation 
to generation, the Talmuds of science, which formed the capital of the savans of 
