Is it possible that mind can progress at all, if it is for ever fixed on the earth, grovelling after barren facts and never lifted up to heaven, nor exercised in contemplation of the discoveries it has accumulated? Is it possible that the mind can ever be wise which believes that it must study for facts, and not to ‘weigh and consider?’ Must not the former for ever remain the mere basket of the rag-and-bone collector? the receptacle and dead vehicle of material things? Is it not better that the mind should be exercised, like ‘a light bird,’ in the wildest and most visionary dreams, than be reduced to such a ‘dull ass,’ or dead entity? If the student would avoid the latter, he must abandon the mere accumulation of facts for the comparing and weighing of evidence, the calm looking for results, and the deliberate generalization from the facts collected by the fact-collectors; the rag-and-bone-pickers, the hewers of wood and drawers of water of the human race. Nevertheless despise them not; they fill their allotted station in the world; they are as necessary to the thinkers as the different ranks in society are to each other. Bear in mind that Bacon never intended his system for _students_, or to be used as a mental exercise. He only proposed it as a means, (and confessedly the only true means) of ‘discovering the sciences,’ and not as a mode of ‘cultivating’ the mind. It was to be the exercise of the experienced and completely cultivated mind only, ‘of the man of riper years, sound in his senses, and of a clear, unbiassed mind.’[30] He foresaw and cautioned against its abuse by ‘vulgar minds.’ And in the sense used by him all young and learning minds are vulgar (common) minds. The specialities which must distinguish them from the common herd, are as yet unknown and hidden beneath the crust of inexperienced ignorance.