vitrum calendare, or thermometer, which was just then coming into use. His reflections, after finishing his enumeration of facts, show how sensible he was of the imperfect state of his own knowledge.” The arrangement of the instances, indeed, trivial and wholly insignificant as a great many of them are, is not a little elaborate and imposing. But, even without reference to the visionary character of the object sought, it is plain that no process of physical discovery ever can have been, or ever will be, successfully conducted in the fashion here exemplified.

Mr. Coleridge, in The Friend (Vol. III., Essay IX.), and also in the Introduction to the Encyclopædia Metropolitana (p. 27), has contended that Bacon demands in all philosophic experiment, as its motive and guide, what may be called "the intellectual or mental initiative;' that is, 66 some well-grounded purpose, some distinct impression of the probable results, some self-consistent anticipation, as the ground of the prudens quaestio, the forethoughtful query, which he affirms to be the prior half of the knowledge sought, dimidium scientiæ." And there are undoubtedly some expressions in his writings which show that this view had not altogether escaped him. One passage which Coleridge quotes is in the Distributio, or Plan, of the Instauratio Magna, and will be found translated in our abstract at the beginning of the present volume. He there says, in asserting what he calls the far greater subtility of experiments than of the senses, "We speak of such experiments as are skilfully and artistically imagined and applied in accordance with the design of the inquiry" (ad intentionem ejus quod quaeritur). He then proceeds :-"Itaque perceptioni sensus immediatæ ac propriæ non multum tribuimus; sed eo rem deducimus, ut sensus tantum de experimento, experimentum de re judicet." "This last sentence," observes Coleridge, "is, as the attentive reader will have himself detected, one of those faulty verbal antitheses not unfrequent in Lord Bacon's writings. Pungent antitheses, and the analogies of wit, in which the resemblance is too often more indebted to the double or

equivocal sense of a word than to any real conformity in the thing or image, form the dulcia vitia of his style, the Dalilahs of our philosophical Samson. But in this instance, as indeed throughout all his works, the meaning is clear and evident; namely, that the sense can apprehend, through the organs of sense, only the phænomena evoked by the experiment: vis vero mentis ea, quæ experimentum excogitaverat, de re judicet:* that is, that power which out of its own conceptions had shaped the experiment must alone determine the true import of the phænomena." About the correctness of the view here taken by Coleridge of the nature and necessary method of philosophical investigation, there can be no question. To transcribe a few words that we have used elsewhere upon this subject:-"Whenever a discovery is made without being anticipated, we say that it has been made by chance. The history of all discoveries that have been arrived at by what can with any propriety be called philosophical investigation and induction attests the necessity of the experimenter proceeding in the institution and management of his experiments upon a previous idea of the truth to be evolved. This previous idea is what is properly called an hypothesis, which means something placed under as a foundation or platform on which to institute and carry on the process of investigation. A theory is a completed view of an harmonious system of truths, evolved and proved by calculation or induction. As the latter is the necessary completion of every philosophical inquiry, so the former is its equally indispensable beginning." But, if this was Bacon's view, certainly not a trace of it is to be found in the present investigation into the form or nature of Heat; or, it may be added, of any of his other experimental inquiries. His method of procedure, as here developed, sets out simply with a blind accumulation of instances, no more collected under the guidance of any

* But whence are these words? Are they Bacon's or Coleridge's own?

Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties, II., 255 (in Weekly Volume, No. 31.)

kind of anticipation or hypothesis than are the fishes, great and small, that the net brings up when cast into the sea. Whatever chances to come to hand is laid hold of. It is no doubt probable that in this way all the necessary instances will usually be obtained; we do not assert that the method would prove positively ineffectual in any case in which it should be employed; what we say is, that is not the shortest method, nor the method which ever has been or ever will be employed in the actual business of investigation and discovery. It has been employed indeed by Bacon himself, who never invented or discovered any thing in physics: but by no other human being. If Bacon had laid it down as one of the rules or principles of his method, that, in the course of conducting any investigation according to it, a man should walk a certain number of measured miles on all fours, or with peas in his shoes; or if he had required that every one of his instances should be set down in all the languages of Europe; the method might still have served its purpose, notwithstanding the useless trouble thus imposed by

it.

But the indiscriminating and unreflecting rapacity with which he gathers in his instances from all quarters, and of all kinds, only encumbers and bewilders the investigation. The sagacity, or species of prescience, which is a part of the inventive faculty, dispenses with all this labour and all this parade. Instead of all kinds of instances, a few judiciously selected instances, sometimes only a single instance, will be all it requires. From those few, or that one, it will work its way to its end much more expeditiously and more surely than if it had started with the advantage of having previously made a formal survey of all the instances in nature. The notion of any one seriously setting about a philosophical investigation by means of Bacon's three tables of Essence and Presence, of Declination, and of Degrees, is ludicrous. It reminds one of the "project for improving speculative knowledge by practical mechanical operations" of the professor in the Grand Academy of Lagado, the frame with the forty iron handles, by which "the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily

labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study." It might almost indeed be suspected that Swift here had Bacon in his eye. Other

things in the irreverent satire seem to glance at the very words of the illustrious author of the Instauratio Magna; as when the professor is made to declare that his invention "had employed all his thoughts from his youth,” and to say "he flattered himself that a more noble, exalted thought never sprang in any other man's head." At any rate, the description of the invention is hardly an exaggeration of what appears to have been Bacon's own notion of the efficacy of his Novum Organum, or new instrument of discovery. It was to be almost literally a machine in men's hands. It was to level intellects, and enable the weakest to do the work of the strongest. So far from its requiring any guiding idea or anticipation in the mind of the experimenter, it was to make all inventive sagacity unnecessary and useless.

We now enter upon what may be called the second part of this Second Book, in which the author proposes to consider the remaining helps necessary for the understanding in the work of the Interpretation of Nature, and of a true and perfect Induction. He will treat, he says, respecting, first, the Prerogatives among Instances (Prærogativæ Instantiarum): secondly, the Aids or Props (Adminicula) of Induction; thirdly, the Rectification of Induction; fourthly, the Varying of the Investigation according to the nature of the subject; fifthly, the Praerogative ones among Natures, in so far as regards investigation, or what should be investigated first, what last sixthly, the Limits of Investigation, or a synopsis of all the natures in the universe; seventhly, the Reduction to Practice, or what relates to man; eighthly, the Præparations (Parasceuae) for investigation; lastly, the Ascending and Descending Ladder or Stair (Scala) of Axioms. Of this extensive design, however, all that we have actually executed is the first head.

Anciently, when the Roman people voted by centuries, the century to whose lot it fell to give its vote

(rogari) first was called Praerogativa, literally, the first consulted century. By the Praerogativæ Instantiarum, therefore, Bacon means merely those instances that deserve first or principally to be attended to. It will be more convenient in English to vary the form of the expression, and to call them, as has been usually done, Prerogative Instances.

The remainder of this Second Book of the Novum Organum consists of an enumeration of twenty-seven different kinds of Prerogative Instances, accompanied with elaborate expositions and illustrative exemplifications. The account will not admit of any intelligible abridgment. We will preserve the list of names complete; but all that we shall attempt further will be to extract some of the more interesting and important passages, which we shall give as translated by Shaw.

1. Solitary Instances.-

Among the prerogative instances for interpreting nature, in first place come the solitary kind; that is, those which exhibit the nature inquired after, in such subjects as have nothing common with others besides that very nature; or, those that exhibit the nature inquired after, in such subjects as are every way similar to others, excepting in that very nature. For it is manifest, that such instances as these will shorten the inquiry, and promote and hasten the exclusion; so that a few of them may do the service of many.

For example, if the inquiry be about the nature of colour, solitary instances are prisms, and crystal gems, or glasses, which represent colours, not only in themselves, but also externally upon a wall, &c. Understand the same of dews, &c. For these have nothing in common with the fixed colours of flowers, coloured gems, coloured glass, metals, various woods, &c. besides the colour itself. Whence it may be easily inferred, that colour is nothing more than an alteration in the rays of light, occasioned, in the first case, by different degrees of incidence; and, in the second, by the different texture or structure of the body, and so reflected to the eye. But these instances are solitary, or single, in point of likeness.

Again, in the same inquiry, the distinct veins of black and white in marble, and the variegation of colours in flowers of the same species, are solitary instances, for the black and white