It appears to me that by far the most extraordinary parts of Bacon's works are those in which, with extreme earnestness and clearness, he insists upon a _graduated and successive induction_, as opposed to a hasty transit from special facts to the highest generalizations. The nineteenth Axiom of the First Book of the _Novum Organon_ contains a view of the nature of true science most exact and profound, and, so far as I am aware, at the time perfectly new. "There are two ways, and can only be two, of seeking and finding truth. The one, from sense and particulars, takes a flight to the most general axioms, and from those principles and their truth, settled once for all, invents and judges of intermediate axioms. The other method collects axioms from sense and particulars, ascending _continuously and by degrees_, so that in the end it arrives at the most general axioms; this latter way is the true one, but hitherto untried." It is to be remarked, that in this passage Bacon employs the term _axioms_ to express any propositions collected from facts by induction, and thus fitted to become the starting-point of deductive reasonings. How far propositions so obtained may approach to the character of axioms in the more rigorous sense of the term, we have already in some measure examined; but that question does not here immediately concern us. The truly remarkable circumstance is to find this recommendation of a continuous advance from observation, by limited steps, through successive gradations of generality, given at a time when speculative men in general had only just begun to perceive that they must begin their course from experience in some way or other. How exactly this description represents the general structure of the soundest and most comprehensive physical theories, all persons who have studied the progress of science up to modern times can bear testimony; but perhaps this structure of science cannot in any other way be made so apparent as by those Tables of successive generalizations in which we have exhibited the history and constitution of some of the principal physical sciences, in the Chapter of a preceding work which treats of the Logic of Induction. And the view which Bacon thus took of the true progress of science was not only new, but, so far as I am aware, has never been adequately illustrated up to the present day.