452 MODERN SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION : 
from the remotest antiquity, and with a degree of success 
which has left to modern investigators little more than 
the elaboration of the thoughts of their predecessors. In 
Metaphysics—which had claimed even a larger share of 
the attention of the scholars of antiquity—little progress 
had been made. Perhaps I am justified in saying little 
progress was possible, inasmuch as in the light of all 
the great material discoveries of modern times the meta- 
physicians of the present day are debating, with as little 
harmony of opinion, the same questions that divided the 
rival schools of the Greeks. Each successive generation 
has had its two parties of idealists and realists, who have 
discussed the intangible problems which absorbed the 
great minds of Plato and Aristotle with a degree of enthu- 
siasm and energy—and it may be of acrimony —which 
seems hardly compensated by any expansion of the human 
intellect or amelioration of the condition of mankind. 
Of the physical sciences we may say that, except As- 
tronomy, no one had an existence prior to the time of 
Bacon. There were men of vast learning, and much that 
was called science in the mass of apatio observation 
that had been accumulating from century to century, 
until it had become “rudis inchigemanice moles,” in which— 
though it constituted the pride of universities, the intel- 
lectual capital with which the savant thought himself rich, 
and that on which the professional man depended for suc- 
cess—there was far more error than truth, and of which 
_ the study was sure to mislead and likely to injure- ie 
these circumstances the task before the scientific reformer 
Was one far more difficult than that of clearing the Augean 
stables; no less, in fact, than to seat himself before this 
great heap of rubbish, this mass of truth and error,—of 
the sublimest philosophy with the wildest fiction, —to P® 
