and enumeration alike. This is to be seen in Zabarella,[1] in
Galilei,[2] and in Bacon. The reformed Aristotelian logic of the
first-named with its inductio demonstrativa, the mathematico-physical
analysis followed by synthesis of the second, the exclusiva,
or method of exclusions of the last, agree at least in this, that the
method of science is one and indivisible, while containing both
an inductive and a deductive moment. That what, e.g., Bacon
says of his method may run counter to this is an accident of the
tradition of the quarrel with realism. So, too, with the scholastic
universals. Aristotle’s forms had been correlated, though
inadequately, with the idea of function. Divorced from this they
are fairly stigmatized as mental figments or branded as ghostly
entities that can but block the path. But consider Bacon’s own
doctrine of forms. Or watch the mathematical physicist with his
formulae. The faith of science looks outward as in the dawn of
Greek philosophy, and subjectivism such as Hume’s has as yet
no hold. Bacon summing up the movement so far as he understood
it, in a rather belated way, has no theory of knowledge
beyond the metaphor of the mirror held up to nature. Yet he
offers an ambitious logic of science, and the case is typical.
The science of the Renaissance differs from that of the false dawn in Greek times in the fact of fruitfulness. It had the achievement of the old world in the field of mathematics upon which to build. It was in reaction against a dialectic and not immediately to be again entrapped. In Galilei. scientific method, then, it could but advance, provided physics and mathematics did not again fail of accord. Kepler and Galilei secured it against that disaster. The ubi materia ibi geometria of the one is the battle-cry of the mathematico-physical advance. The scientific instrument of the other, with its moments of analysis and construction, metodo risolutivo and metodo compositivo, engineers the road for the advance. The new method of physics is verifiable by its fruitfulness, and so free of any immediate danger from dialectic. Its germinal thought may not have been new, but, if not new, it had at least needed rediscovery from the beginning. For it was to be at once certain and experiential. A mathematico-physical calculus that would work was in question. The epistemological problem as such was out of the purview. The relation of physical laws to the mind that thought them was for the time a negligible constant. When Descartes, having faithfully and successfully followed the mathematico-physical inquiry of his more strictly scientific predecessors, found himself compelled to raise the question how it was possible for him to know what in truth he seemed to know so certainly, the problem entered on a new phase. The scientific movement had happily been content for the time with a half which, then and there at least, was more than the whole.
Bacon was no mathematician, and so was out of touch with the main army of progress. By temperament he was rather with the Humanists. He was content to voice the cry for the overthrow of the dominant system as such, and to call for a new beginning, with no realist presuppositions. Bacon. He is with the nominalists of the later Scholasticism and the naturalists of the early Renaissance. He echoes the cry for recourse to nature, for induction, for experiment. He calls for a logic of discovery. But at first sight there is little sign of any greater contribution to the reconstruction than is to be found in Ramus or many another dead thinker. The syllogism is ineffective, belonging to argumentation, and constraining assent where what we want is control of things. It is a mechanical combination of propositions as these of terms which are counters to express concepts often ill-defined. The flight from a cursory survey of facts to wide so-called principles must give way to a gradual progress upward from propositions of minimum to those of medium generality, and in these consists the fruitfulness of science. Yet the induction of the Aristotelians, the dialectical induction of the Topics, content with imperfect enumeration and with showing the burden of disproof upon the critic, is puerile, and at the mercy of a single instance to the contrary. In all this there is but little promise for a new organon. It is neither novel nor instrumental. On a sudden Bacon’s conception of a new method begins to unfold itself. It is inductive only in the sense that it is identical in purpose with the ascent from particulars. It were better called exclusiva or elimination of the alternative, which Bacon proposes to achieve, and thereby guarantee his conclusion against the possibility of instance to the contrary.
Bacon’s method begins with a digest into three tables of the facts relevant to any inquiry. The first contains cases of the occurrence of the quality under investigation, colour, e.g., or heat, in varying combinations. The second notes its absence in combinations so allied to certain of these that its presence His three Methods. might fairly have been looked for. The third registers its quantitative variation according to quantitative changes in its concomitants. The method now proceeds on the basis of the first table to set forth the possible suggestions as to a general explanatory formula for the quality in question. In virtue of the remaining tables it rejects any suggestion qualitatively or quantitatively inadequate. If one suggestion, and one alone, survives the process of attempted rejection it is the explanatory formula required. If none, we must begin afresh. If more than one, recourse is to be had to certain devices of method, in the enumeration of which the methods of agreement, difference and concomitant variations[3] find a place, beside the crucial experiment, the glaring instance and the like. An appeal, however, to such devices, though a permissible “first vintage” is relatively an imperfection of method, and a proof that the tables need revision. The positive procedure by hypothesis and verification is rejected by Bacon, who thinks of hypothesis as the will o’ the wisp of science, and prefers the cumbrous machinery of negative reasoning.
Historically he appears to have been under the dominance of the Platonic metaphor of an alphabet of nature, with a consequent belief in the relatively small number of ultimate principles to be determined, and of Plato’s conception of Division, cleared of its dialectical associations and used experientially in application to his own molecular physics. True it is that the rejection of all the cospecies is a long process, but what if therein their simultaneous or subsequent determination is helped forward? They, too, must fall to be determined sometime, and the ideal of science is fully to determine all the species of the genus. This will need co-operative effort as described in the account of Solomon’s House in the New Atlantis.[4] But once introduce the conception of division of labour as between the collector of data on the one hand and the expert of method, the interpreter of nature at headquarters, on the other, and Bacon’s attitude to hypothesis and to negative reasoning is at least in part explained. The hypothesis of the collector, the man who keeps a rain-gauge, or the missionary among savages, is to be discounted from as a source of error. The expert on the other hand may be supposed, in the case of facts over which he has not himself brooded in the course of their acquisition, to approach them without any presumption this way or that. He will, too, have no interest in the isolation of any one of several co-ordinate inquiries. That Bacon underestimates the importance of selective and of provisional explanatory hypotheses even in such fields as that of chemistry, and that technically he is open to some criticism from the point of view that negative judgment is derivate as necessarily resting on positive presuppositions, may be true enough. It seems, however, no less true that the greatness of his conception of organized common effort in science has but rarely met with due appreciation.
In his doctrine of forms, too, the “universals” of his logic, Bacon must at least be held to have been on a path which led forward and not back. His forms are principles whose function falls entirely within knowledge. They are formulae for the control of the activities and the production of the qualities of bodies. Forms. Forms are qualities and activities expressed in terms of the ultimates of nature, i.e. normally in terms of collocations of matter or modes of motion. (The human soul is still an exception.) Form is bound up with the molecular structure and change of structure of a body, one of whose qualities or activities it expresses in wider relations. A mode of motion, for instance, of a certain definite kind, is the form of heat. It is the recipe for, and at the same time is, heat, much as H2O is the formula for and is water. Had Bacon analysed bodies into their elements, instead of their qualities and ways of behaviour, he would have been the logician of the chemical formula. Here, too, he has scarcely received his meed of appreciation.
His influence on his successors has rather lain in the general stimulus of his enthusiasm for experience, or in the success with which he represents the cause of nominalism and in certain special devices of method handed down till, through Hume or Herschel, they affected the thought of Mill. For the rest he was too Aristotelian, if we take the word broadly enough, or, as the result of his Cambridge studies,
- ↑ See E. Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem, i. 134 seq., and the justificatory excerpts, pp. 539 sqq.
- ↑ See Riehl in Vierteljahrschr. f. wiss. Philos. (1893).
- ↑ Bacon, Novum Organum, ii. 22, 23; cf. also Aristotle, Topics i. 12. 13, ii. 10. 11 (Stewart, ad Nic. Eth. 1139b 27) and Sextus Empiricus, Pyrr. Hypot. iii. 15.
- ↑ Bacon’s Works, ed. Ellis and Spedding, iii. 164-165.
