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. 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. His three Methods.