Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/789

 proposed to make an automaton chess-player which should register mechanically the number of games lost and gained in consequence of every sort of move. Thus, the longer the automaton went on playing games, the more experienced it would become by the accumulation of experimental results. Such a machine precisely represents the acquirement of experience by our nervous organization.

But Erasmus Darwin doubtless meant by experiment something more than this unintentional heaping-up of experience. The part of wisdom is to learn to foresee the results of our actions, by making slight and harmless trials before we commit ourselves to an irrevocable line of conduct. We ought to feel our way, and try the ice before we venture on it to a dangerous extent. To make an experiment, in this more proper sense, is to arrange certain known conditions, or, in other words, to put together certain causal agents, in order to ascertain their aggregate outcome or effect. The experiment has knowledge alone for its immediate purpose. But he is truly happy, as the Latin poet said, who can discern the causes of things, for, these being known, we can proceed at once to safe and profitable applications.

It need hardly be said that it is to frequent and carefully planned appeals to experiment in the physical sciences that we owe almost all the progress of the human race in the last three centuries. Even moral and intellectual triumphs might often be traced back to dependence on physical inventions, and to the incentive which they give to general activity. Certainly, political and military success is almost entirely dependent on the experimental sciences. It is difficult to discover that, as regards courage, our soldiers in Afghanistan and Zoolooland are any better than the men whose countries they invade. But it is the science of the rifle, the shell, and the mountain-gun—science perfected by constant experimentation—which gives the poor savage no chance of successful resistance. To whom do we owe all this in its first beginning, but to the great experimentalist, the friar, Roger Bacon, of Oxford, our truest and greatest national glory, the smallest of whose merits is that he first mentions gunpowder; yet so little does this nation yet appreciate the sources of its power and greatness that the writings of Roger Bacon lie, to a great extent, unprinted and unexplored. It is only among Continental scholars that Roger Bacon is regarded as the miracle of his age and country.

No doubt it is to Francis Bacon, the Lord High Chancellor of England, that the world generally attributes the inauguration of the new inductive era of science. This is hardly the place to endeavor to decide whether the world has not made a great mistake. Professor Fowler, in his admirable critical edition of the "Novum Organum," has said about all that can be said in favor of Lord Bacon's scientific claims; yet I hold to the opinion, long since stoutly maintained by the late Professor De Morgan, not to speak of Baron Liebig and others,