in all, one set of men could do the observing and collecting, and
another be set on the work of Induction and the discovery of "axioms."
Doubtless in the arrangement and sorting of them his versatile and
ingenious mind gave itself full play; he divides and distinguishes them
into their companies and groups, different kinds of Motion,
"Prerogative" instances, with their long tale of imaginative titles. But
we look in vain for any use that he was able to make of them, or even to
suggest. Bacon never adequately realised that no promiscuous assemblage
of even the most certain facts could ever lead to knowledge, could ever
suggest their own interpretation, without the action on them of the
living mind, without the initiative of an idea. In truth he was so
afraid of assumptions and "anticipations" and prejudices--his great
bugbear was so much the "_intellectus sibi permissus_" the mind given
liberty to guess and imagine and theorise, instead of, as it ought,
absolutely and servilely submitting itself to the control of facts--that
he missed the true place of the rational and formative element in his
account of Induction. He does tell us, indeed, that "truth emerges
sooner from error than from confusion." He indulges the mind, in the
course of its investigation of "Instances," with a first "vintage" of
provisional generalisations. But of the way in which the living mind of
the discoverer works, with its ideas and insight, and thoughts that come
no one knows whence, working hand in hand with what comes before the eye
or is tested by the instrument, he gives us no picture. Compare his
elaborate investigation of the "Form of Heat" in the _Novum Organum_,
with such a record of real inquiry as Wells's _Treatise on Dew_, or
Herschel's analysis of it in his _Introduction to Natural Philosophy_.
And of the difference of genius between a Faraday or a Newton, and the
crowd of average men who have used and finished off their work, he takes
no account. Indeed, he thinks that for the future such difference is to
disappear.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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