Modern discoveries have not been made by large collections of facts, with subsequent discussion, separation, and {86} resulting deduction of a truth thus rendered perceptible. A few facts have suggested an _hypothesis_, which means a _supposition_, proper to explain them. The necessary results of this supposition are worked out, and then, and not till then, other facts are examined to see if these ulterior results are found in nature. The trial of the hypothesis is the _special object_: prior to which, hypothesis must have been started, not by rule, but by that sagacity of which no description can be given, precisely because the very owners of it do not act under laws perceptible to themselves.[130] The inventor of hypothesis, if pressed to explain his method, must answer as did Zerah Colburn,[131] when asked for his mode of instantaneous calculation. When the poor boy had been bothered for some time in this manner, he cried out in a huff, "God put it into my head, and I can't put it into yours."[132] {87} Wrong hypotheses, rightly worked from, have produced more useful results than unguided observation. But this is not the Baconian plan. Charles the Second, when informed of the state of navigation, founded a Baconian observatory at Greenwich, to observe, observe, observe away at the moon, until her motions were known sufficiently well to render her useful in guiding the seaman. And no doubt Flamsteed's[133] observations, twenty or thirty of them at least, were of signal use. But how? A somewhat fanciful thinker, one Kepler, had hit upon the approximate orbits of the planets by trying one hypothesis after another: he found the _ellipse_, which the Platonists, well despised of Bacon, and who would have despised him as heartily if they had known him, had investigated and put ready to hand nearly 2000 years before.[134] The sun in the focus, the motions of the planet more and more rapid as they approach the sun, led Kepler--and Bacon would have reproved him for his rashness--to imagine that a force residing in the sun might move the planets, a force inversely as the distance. Bouillaud,[135] upon a fanciful analogy, rejected the inverse distance, {88} and, rejecting the force altogether, declared that if such a thing there were, it would be as the inverse _square_ of the distance. Newton, ready prepared with the mathematics of the subject, tried the fall of the moon towards the earth, away from her tangent, and found that, as compared with the fall of a stone, the law of the inverse square did hold for the moon. He deduced the ellipse, he proceeded to deduce the effect of the disturbance of the sun upon the moon, upon the assumed theory of _universal_ gravitation. He found result after result of his theory in conformity with observed fact: and, by aid of Flamsteed's observations, which amended what mathematicians call his _constants_, he constructed his lunar theory. Had it not been for Newton, the whole dynasty of Greenwich astronomers, from Flamsteed of happy memory, to Airy whom Heaven preserve,[136] might have worked away at nightly observation and daily reduction, without any remarkable result: looking forward, as to a millennium, to the time when any man of moderate intelligence was to see the whole explanation. What are large collections of facts for? To make theories _from_, says Bacon: to try ready-made theories _by_, says the history of discovery: it's all the same, says the idolater: nonsense, say we!
Time and space run short: how odd it is that of the three leading ideas of mechanics, time, space, and matter, the first two should always fail a reviewer before the third. We might dwell upon many points, especially if we attempted a more descriptive account of the valuable edition before us. No one need imagine that the editors, by their uncompromising attack upon the notion of Bacon's influence common even among mathematicians and experimental philosophers, have lowered the glory of the great man whom it was, many will think, their business to defend through thick and thin. They have given a clearer notion of his {89} excellencies, and a better idea of the power of his mind, than ever we saw given before. Such a correction as theirs must have come, and soon, for as Hallam says--after noting that the _Novum Organum_ was _never published separately in England_, Bacon has probably been more read in the last thirty years--now forty--than in the two hundred years which preceded. He will now be more read than ever he was. The history of the intellectual world is the history of the worship of one idol after another. No sooner is it clear that a Hercules has appeared among men, than all that imagination can conceive of strength is attributed to him, and his labors are recorded in the heavens. The time arrives when, as in the case of Aristotle, a new deity is found, and the old one is consigned to shame and reproach. A reaction may afterwards take place, and this is now happening in the case of the Greek philosopher. The end of the process is, that the opposing deities take their places, side by side, in a Pantheon dedicated not to gods, but to heroes.
