PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS' OF LORD BACON. 397 



Some of its members being soon thereafter appointed to Profes- 

 sorships in the University of Oxford, a similar Society was 

 established by them in that place. In the year 1659, the prin- 

 cipal members of the Oxford branch having returned to Lon- 

 don, the two Societies were united; and having, on the Resto- 

 ration, extended their views to the obtaining a public esta- 

 blishment, they, in 1662, succeeded in accomplishing that ob- 

 ject, by being erected into a corporate body, under the title of 

 the Royal Society. 



There can be no doubt whatever, of the influence of Bacon's 

 suggestions, as to the utility of such an institution, upon the 

 minds of those who planned the establishment of this illus- 

 trious Society. Its earliest panegyrists and historians bear tes~ 

 timony to this fact. "Solomons House, in t\\e New Atlantis, was 

 " a prophetic scheme of the Royal Society." These are the 

 words of Glanvill, in his address to that body, prefixed to his 

 Scepsis Scientifica, published in 1665*. Bishop Sprat, whose 



History , 



* The Scepsis Scientifica is a republication, with same additions, of-GLAN- 

 vili/s first philosophical work, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, published in 1661. 

 The 20th chapter of this work contains a very distinct statement of the import- 

 ant doctrine so often ascribed to Mr Hume, — that we never perceive causation in 

 the succession of physical events; a doctrine which fixes the object of physical 

 science to be, not the investigation of the efficient causes of phenomena, but of 

 the general laws by which they are regulated; and for which statement of its le- 

 gitimate objects, it is always to be remembered, that physics is indebted to meta- 

 physics. The Aristotelians were provoked by the free spirit of inquiry, and 

 disregard of the authority of their Master, which N^is work disclosed ; and an 

 answer to it appeared in 1663, in a book entitled Sciri, sive Sceptices et Sceptico- 

 rum a jure disputationis exclusio. The author was Thomas Albius, (White), 

 a secular priest of the Romish Church, and a noted Aristotelian. " Hobbes," 

 says A. Wood, " had a great respect for White, and when he lived in West- 

 minster, he would often visit him, and he Hobbes ; but they seldom parted in 

 cool blood : for they would wrangle, squabble and scold about philosophical 

 matters like young sophisters, though either of them was eighty years of age. 



Hobbes 



