Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/96

 Bacon recommended that a great collection of facts should be made regarding every branch of human knowledge, and conceived that, when this had been done by common observers, philosophers might extract scientific truth from these facts by the application of a right method. As an example of such an investigation Bacon collected facts bearing on the nature of heat and he arrived at the conclusion "That heat is an expansive, restrained motion, modified in certain ways, and exerted in the smaller particles of the body." This true conclusion was designated by Bacon as a "first vintage," in other words as a guess, but it was regarded by Whewell as an unfortunate conclusion, and he asks "Where is the motion in a red-hot iron?" Whewell made a great advance on the method of Bacon by claiming that ideas are as indispensable as the facts themselves, and that facts are collected in vain except they be duly unfolded by ideas; his defect was that he stopped short at ideas, instead of proceeding to theories and equations.

In 1841 he was president of the British Association for the meeting at Plymouth. His address was characteristic; he compared the Association to Solomon's House, imagined by Bacon in The New Atlantis, the principal difference being that the Association depended upon voluntary support, whereas the philosophers of Solomon's House were to be paid by the state. This House had caves and wells, chambers and towers, baths and gardens, parks and pools, dispensatories and furnaces, and other provisions for experiment and observation. "There were also many classes of persons to conduct the business of the college: merchants of light, mystery men, depredators, pioneers or miners, dowry men or benefactors, inoculators, and finally interpreters of nature who elevate the truths of experiment into general laws which are the highest form of human knowledge." The imaginary teacher who thus described Solomon's House to a traveler also said: "The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things." But Whewell said: "Knowledge is to be dealt with as the power of interpreting nature and using her forces,