Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/697

Rh brilliant school of thought to which belonged Ramus, Patricius, and Bruno. His relations were far closer with the Cosentine than with the Lyncean Academy. As far as he was the disciple of any man, he was the disciple of Telesius, its founder. Although his name was commonly associated with that of the Tuscan astronomer as inventor of the philosophy of nature, he was in reality the English Campanella rather than the English Galileo. He was Campanella with a sounder understanding, a deeper insight, and a larger humanity. To Campanella's prophetic zeal he united incomparable practical sagacity. He not only preached a millennium of universal knowledge, but endeavored to guide men's halting footsteps toward the goal, and to bridge the gulf between the future toward which he pointed and the present to which he belonged. Hence his profound and persistent design was to establish a method, not to found a school. The message that he had it in him to deliver related to men's works, not to their thoughts. His speculative teaching not only was subordinate to his physical precepts, but was suggested by them, and displays the characteristic defects due to such an origin.

Thus his intellectual progeny divided itself into two classes—those who developed the philosophical principles implied rather than professed in his writings, and those who adopted, or endeavored to adopt, the scientific method of which the "Novum Organum" exhibits the majestic torso. Among the first we reckon Hobbes, Locke, and Hume in this country, and abroad, Bayle, Condillac, and the Encyclopedists—all of whom, while setting themselves problems which Bacon had ignored, and solving them, for the most part, after a fashion which Bacon would have repudiated, carried out, nevertheless, to their extreme conclusions doctrines in some degree countenenced by his great name. To the second class belonged Boyle, Hooke, Wren, and the other early members of the Royal Society. These men inherited the labors and the spirit of those who had worked while Bacon taught—of Harriot, Gilbert, Napier, and Harvey; but they were born while the air still vibrated to the mighty words of Verulam. They then enrolled themselves under the banner which he had unfurled, and silently followed the examples which he had condemned. They identified him with a system which he had disowned, and with acclamation proclaimed him leader of a movement which he had emphatically declared to be unfruitful. While professing to follow where he led, they in truth carried his authority captive with them along the paths they themselves chose. This, indeed, was the result, not of insubordination, but of necessity. They were compelled to seek a modus vivendi between the conflicting claims of Nature and her interpreter, and they found the conciliation that they sought not very far from the modest courses of their predecessors.

It is not too much to say that what was distinctive in Bacon's system was impracticable, and that what was practicable was already