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 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, too Ramist,[99] when the interest in scholastic issues was
fading, to bring his original ideas to a successful market.
Bacon's Logic, then, like Galilei's, intended as a contribution to
scientific method, a systematization of discovery by which, given the
fact of knowledge, new items of knowledge may be acquired, failed to
convince contemporaries and successors alike of its efficiency as an
instrument. It was an ideal that failed to embody itself and justify
itself by its fruits. It was otherwise with the mathematical
instrument of Galilei.
Descartes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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