1620. In this year, Francis Bacon[110] published his _Novum Organum_,[111] which was long held in England--but not until the last century--to be the work which taught Newton and all his successors how to philosophize. That Newton never mentions Bacon, nor alludes in any way to his works, passed for nothing. Here and there a paradoxer ventured not to find all this teaching in Bacon, but he was pronounced blind. In our day it begins to be seen that, great as Bacon was, and great as his book really is, he is not the philosophical father of modern discovery.
But old prepossession will find reason for anything. A learned friend of mine wrote to me that he had discovered proof that Newton owned Bacon for his master: the proof was that Newton, in some of his earlier writings, used the {76} phrase _experimentum crucis_, which is Bacon's. Newton may have read some of Bacon, though no proof of it appears. I have a dim idea that I once saw the two words attributed to the alchemists: if so, there is another explanation; for Newton was deeply read in the alchemists.
I subjoin a review which I wrote of the splendid edition of Bacon by Spedding,[112] Ellis,[113] and Heath.[114] All the opinions therein expressed had been formed by me long before: most of the materials were collected for another purpose.
The Works of Francis Bacon. Edited by James Spedding, R. Leslie Ellis, and Douglas D. Heath. 5 vols.[115]
No knowledge of nature without experiment and observation: so said Aristotle, so said Bacon, so acted Copernicus, Tycho Brahe,[116] Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, etc., before Bacon wrote.[117] No derived knowledge _until_ experiment and observation are concluded: so said Bacon, and no one else. We do not mean to say that he laid down his principle in these words, or that he carried it to the utmost extreme: we mean that Bacon's ruling idea was the {77} collection of enormous masses of facts, and then digested processes of arrangement and elimination, so artistically contrived, that a man of common intelligence, without any unusual sagacity, should be able to announce the truth sought for. Let Bacon speak for himself, in his editor's English:
"But the course I propose for the discovery of sciences is such as leaves but little to the acuteness and strength of wits, but places all wits and understandings nearly on a level. For, as in the drawing of a straight line or a perfect circle, much depends on the steadiness and practice of the hand, if it be done by aim of hand only, but if with the aid of rule or compass little or nothing, so it is exactly with my plan.... For my way of discovering sciences goes far to level men's wits, and leaves but little to individual excellence; because it performs everything by the surest rules and demonstrations."
To show that we do not strain Bacon's meaning, we add what is said by Hooke,[118] whom we have already mentioned as his professed disciple, and, we believe, his only disciple of the day of Newton. We must, however, remind the reader that Hooke was very little of a mathematician, and spoke of algebra from his own idea of what others had told him:
"The intellect is not to be suffered to act without its helps, but is continually to be assisted by some method or engine, which shall be as a guide to regulate its actions, so as that it shall not be able to act amiss. Of this engine, no man except the incomparable Verulam hath had any thoughts and he indeed hath promoted it to a very good pitch; but there is yet somewhat more to be added, which he seemed to want time to complete. By this, as by that {78} art of algebra in geometry, '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 any are left.
The immortal Harvey, who was _inventing_--we use the word in its old sense--the circulation of the blood, while {79} 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 wrong_, we read his writings with a sense of their usefulness, his genius, and their probable effect upon purely experimental science, which we can be conscious of upon no other supposition. It amuses us to have to add that the part of Aristotle's logic of which he saw the value was the book on _refutation of fallacies_. Now is this not the notion of things to which the bias of a practised lawyer might lead him? In the case which is before the Court, generally speaking, truth lurks somewhere about the facts, and the elimination of all error will show it in the residuum. The two senses of the word _law_ come in so as to look almost like a play upon words. The judge can apply the law so soon as the facts are settled: the physical philosopher has to deduce the law from the facts. Wait, says the judge, until the facts are determined: did the prisoner take the goods with felonious intent? did the defendant give what amounts to a warranty? or the like. Wait, says Bacon, until all the facts, or all the obtainable facts, are brought in: apply my rules of separation to the facts, and the result shall come out as easily as by ruler and compasses. We think it possible that Harvey might allude to the legal character of Bacon's notions: we can hardly conceive so acute a man, after seeing what manner of writer Bacon was, meaning only that he was a lawyer and had better stick to his business. We do ourselves believe that Bacon's philosophy {80} more resembles the action of mind of a common-law judge--not a Chancellor--than that of the physical inquirers who have been supposed to follow in his steps. It seems to us that Bacon's argument is, there can be nothing of law but what must be either perceptible, or mechanically deducible, when all the results of law, as exhibited in phenomena, are before us. Now the truth is, that the physical philosopher has frequently to conceive law which never was in his previous thought--to educe the unknown, not to choose among the known. Physical discovery would be very easy work if the inquirer could lay down his this, his that, and his t'other, and say, "Now, one of these it must be; let us proceed to try which." Often has he done this, and failed; often has the truth turned out to be neither this, that, nor t'other. Bacon seems to us to think that the philosopher is a judge who has to choose, upon ascertained facts, which of known statutes is to rule the decision: he appears to us more like a person who is to write the statute-book, with no guide except the cases and decisions presented in all their confusion and all their conflict.
Let us take the well-known first aphorism of the _Novum Organum_:
"Man being the servant and interpreter of nature, can do and understand so much, and so much only, as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature: beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything."
This aphorism is placed by Sir John Herschel[119] at the head of his _Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy_: a book containing notions of discovery far beyond any of which Bacon ever dreamed; and this because it was written {81} after discovery, instead of before. Sir John Herschel, in his version, has avoided the translation of _re vel mente observaverit_, and gives us only "by his observation of the order of nature." In making this the opening of an excellent sermon, he has imitated the theologians, who often employ the whole time of the discourse in stuffing matter into the text, instead of drawing matter out of it. By _observation_ he (Herschel) means the whole course of discovery, observation, hypothesis, deduction, comparison, etc. The type of the Baconian philosopher as it stood in his mind, had been derived from a noble example, his own father, William Herschel,[120] an inquirer whose processes would have been held by Bacon to have been vague, insufficient, compounded of chance work and sagacity, and too meagre of facts to deserve the name of induction. In another work, his treatise on Astronomy,[121] Sir John Herschel, after noting that a popular account can only place the reader on the threshold, proceeds to speak as follows of all the higher departments of science. The italics are his own:
"Admission to its sanctuary, and to the privileges and feelings of a votary, is only to be gained by one means--_sound and sufficient knowledge of mathematics, the great instrument of all exact inquiry, without which no man can ever make such advances in this or any other of the higher departments of science as can entitle him to form an independent opinion on any subject of discussion within their range_."
How is this? Man can know no more than he gets from observation, and yet mathematics is the great instrument of all exact inquiry. Are the results of mathematical deduction results of observation? We think it likely that {82} Sir John Herschel would reply that Bacon, in coupling together _observare re_ and _observare mente_, has done what some wags said Newton afterwards did in his study-door--cut a large hole of exit for the large cat, and a little hole for the little cat.[122] But Bacon did no such thing: he never included any deduction under observation. To mathematics he had a dislike. He averred that logic and mathematics should be the handmaids, not the mistresses, of philosophy. He meant that they should play a subordinate and subsequent part in the dressing of the vast mass of facts by which discovery was to be rendered equally accessible to Newton and to us. Bacon himself was very ignorant of all that had been done by mathematics; and, strange to say, he especially objected to astronomy being handed over to the mathematicians. Leverrier and Adams, calculating an unknown planet into visible existence by enormous heaps of algebra, furnish the last comment of note on this specimen of the goodness of Bacon's views. The following account of his knowledge of what had been done in his own day or before it, is Mr. Spedding's collection of casual remarks in Mr. Ellis's several prefaces:
"Though he paid great attention to astronomy, discussed carefully the methods in which it ought to be studied, constructed for the satisfaction of his own mind an elaborate theory of the heavens, and listened eagerly for the news from the stars brought by Galileo's telescope, he appears to have been utterly ignorant of the discoveries which had just been made by Kepler's calculations. Though he complained in 1623 of the want of compendious methods for facilitating arithmetical computations, especially with regard to the doctrine of Series, and fully recognized the importance of them as an aid to physical inquiries--he does not say a word about Napier's Logarithms, which had been published only nine years before and reprinted more than once in the {83} interval. He complained that no considerable advance had made in geometry beyond Euclid, without taking any notice of what had been done by Archimedes and Apollonius. He saw the importance of determining accurately the specific gravity of different substances, and himself attempted to form a table of them by a rude process of his own, without knowing of the more scientific though still imperfect methods previously employed by Archimedes, Ghetaldus,[123] and Porta. He speaks of the [Greek: heureka] of Archimedes in a manner which implies that he did not clearly apprehend either the nature of the problem to be solved or the principles upon which the solution depended. In reviewing the progress of mechanics, he makes no mention of Archimedes himself, or of Stevinus,[124] Galileo, Guldinus,[125] or Ghetaldus. He makes no allusion to the theory of equilibrium. He observes that a ball of one pound weight will fall nearly as fast through the air as a ball of two, without alluding to the theory of the acceleration of falling bodies, which had been made known by Galileo more than thirty years before. He proposes an inquiry with regard to the lever--namely, whether in a balance with arms of different length but equal weight the distance from the fulcrum has any effect upon the inclination,--though the theory of the lever was as well understood in his own time as it is now. In making an experiment {84} of his own to ascertain the cause of the motion of a windmill, he overlooks an obvious circumstance which makes the experiment inconclusive, and an equally obvious variation of the same experiment which would have shown him that his theory was false. He speaks of the poles of the earth as fixed, in a manner which seems to imply that he was not acquainted with the precession of the equinoxes; and in another place, of the north pole being above and the south pole below, as a reason why in our hemisphere the north winds predominate over the south."
Much of this was known before, but such a summary of Bacon's want of knowledge of the science of his own time was never yet collected in one place. We may add, that Bacon seems to have been as ignorant of Wright's[126] memorable addition to the resources of navigation as of Napier's addition to the means of calculation. Mathematics was beginning to be the great instrument of exact inquiry: Bacon threw the science aside, from ignorance, just at the time when his enormous sagacity, applied to knowledge, would have made him see the part it was to play. If Newton had taken Bacon for his master, not he, but somebody else, would have been Newton.[127]
