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 metry, 'twill be very easy to proceed in any natural inquiry, regularly and certainly…For as 'tis very hard for the most acute wit to find out any difficult problem in geometry without the help of algebra…and altogether as easy for the meanest capacity acting by that method to complete and perfect it, so will it be in the inquiry after natural knowledge.

Bacon did not live to mature the whole of this plan. Are we really to believe that if he had completed the 'Instauratio' we who write this—and who feel ourselves growing bigger as we write it—should have been on a level with Newton in physical discovery? Bacon asks this belief of us, and does not get it. But it may be said, Your business is with what he did leave, and with its consequences. Be it so. Mr. Ellis says: 'That his method is impracticable cannot, I think, be denied, if we reflect not only that it never has produced any result, but also that the process by which scientific truths have been established cannot be so presented as even to appear to be in accordance with it.' That this is very true is well known to all who have studied the history of discovery: those who deny it are bound to establish either that some great discovery has been made by Bacon's method—we mean by the part peculiar to Bacon—or, better still, to show that some new discovery can be made, by actually making it. No general talk about induction: no reliance upon the mere fact that certain experiments or observations have been made; let us see where Bacon's induction has been actually used or can be used. Mere induction, enumeratio simplex, is spoken of by himself with contempt, as utterly incompetent. For Bacon knew well that a thousand instances may be contradicted by the thousand and first: so that no enumeration of instances, however large, is 'sure demonstration,' so long as any are left.

The immortal Harvey, who was inventing— we use the word in its old sense—the circulation of the blood, while Bacon was in the full flow of thought upon his system, may be trusted to say whether, when the system appeared, he found any likeness in it to his own processes, or what would have been any help to him, if he had waited for the 'Novum Organum.' He said of Bacon, 'He writes philosophy like a Lord Chancellor.' This has been generally supposed to be only a sneer at the sutor ultra crepidam; but we cannot help suspecting that there was more intended by it. To us, Bacon is eminently the philosopher of error prevented, not of progress facilitated. When we throw off the idea of being led right, and betake ourselves to that of being kept from going