Once more men turned the light of their curiosity upon the stubborn phenomena of the outside world, and as it was Aristotle’s works in which we first found the Greek _anatomy_, ‘cutting up’, so it is Bacon who first uses _dissection_ (from the Latin for the same thing) in its modern technical meaning. After an interval of about 1,500 years, the weighing, measuring, examining, and cutting up had now begun again, and they have gone on ever since. How far Francis Bacon was responsible for the form subsequently taken by scientific thought will probably remain a matter of dispute. His views on ecclesiastical authority, on Scholastic philosophy, on Aristotle, on the Alchemists, certainly suggest that he possessed what the nineteenth century has called the “scientific attitude” to an extent which distinguishes him startlingly from any previous or contemporary writer; _acid_, _hydraulic_, and _suction_ are among the words first found in his pages; but, above all, his consciousness of greater changes afoot is manifested linguistically in such things as his use of the words _progressive_ and _retrograde_ in an historical sense unknown, as we shall see, to the majority of thinkers until the middle of the eighteenth century, or his equally innovating distinction between _ancient_ and _modern_. A marked increase over the second quarter of the seventeenth century in the number of words expressing the notion of doubt, such as _dubious_ (used of opinions), _dubiousness_, _dubitable, ceptic_, _sceptical_, _sceptically_, _scepticism_, _scepticity_, _scepticize_, compares with an increase of only one or two during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And at about the same time the words _curious_, _curiosity_, and _inquisitive_ seem to have lost the air of pious disapproval which they had previously carried with them when used to express the love of inquiry. How much of this is due to novel combinations, such as “a natural _curiosity_ and _inquisitive_ appetite”, which we find in Bacon’s _Advancement of Learning_? We cannot say. There are symptoms of the coming metamorphosis already, before his time, in the appearance in English of the sixteenth century of such significant new terms as _analyse_, _distinguish_, _investigate_, together with the semantic change of _observe_ from “to obey a rule”, or “to inspect auguries” into its modern meaning, and similar changes in the case of _experiment_ and _experimental_. It is impossible to prove these things. As with Aristotle, so with Bacon, it is impossible to say whether his own intellectual volume displaced the great wave or whether he merely rose upon its early crest.