Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/696

678

Their offices, it is true, were not so sharply defined, nor the division of labor so strictly enforced, as in the ideal "College of the Six Days' Works"; but the actual never fails to blur the dividing lines of the imaginary. What it is important to observe is that Bacon's "prophetic scheme" did in truth kindle the fancy of the generation which succeeded him, and that his maxims swayed their purposes. What it is equally important to observe is that, in so far as they followed his method in its larger bearings, they were on the track of discovery, and already began to pick up stragglers from the great army of discoverable truths; but the moment they descended to particulars, and took him, as it were, at his word, they found themselves in a cul-de-sac. It was as if an astronomer, not content with imparting a means of taking the longitude, should attempt to prescribe rules for managing the ship, and the sailors, finding that flapping sails and fouled rigging invariably followed upon a literal compliance, should finally come to the conclusion to steer their course on scientific principles, but handle the ropes as nautical experience might suggest.

What, then, is the truth as regards the vexed question of Bacon's influence on the progress of science? We take it to be this: His capacious imagination enabled him to grasp, and his vast powers enabled him to guide, a movement which he had not originated. He caught up the floating ideas of his time, spread them abroad by his eloquence, sank them deep by his enthusiasm, gave them universality and consistence by his sagacity, and thus not unworthily earned the title of the "Father of the Inductive Philosophy." It must be confessed, indeed, that the great "Secretary of Nature" was entirely deficient in what we may call official training. His lucid thoughts and splendid diction were not coupled with exact knowledge or scientific experience. He was innocent of mathematics. He was grossly ignorant of astronomy. He knew nothing of Kepler. He despised Galileo. He passed over in silence the most fruitful discovery in physiological, and the most striking invention in numerical, science that had been made since the world began, although both were made in his own time. He ranked among the "idols" besetting the human mind that orderly instinct which recommends, prima facie, the harmonious simplicity of the Copernican hypothesis in preference to the outrageous complexity of the Ptolemaic system. He cumbered his phraseology and confused his argument by the adoption into physical reasoning of the metaphysical abstractions of the schools, and weakened his philosophy by the rejection of their deepest wisdom.

Bacon was in truth the English representative of that abortive but