True it is that a real love and faculty for science are born in a man, and that to the man of scientific capacity rules of procedure are unnecessary; his own intuition is sufficient, or he has mistaken his vocation,--but that is not my point. It is not that Bacon's methods are useless because the best men do not need them; if they had been founded on a careful study of the methods actually employed, though it might be unconsciously employed, by scientific men--as the methods of induction, stated long after by John Stuart Mill, were founded--then, no doubt, their statement would have been a valuable service and a great thing to accomplish. But they were not this. They are the ideas of a brilliant man of letters, writing in an age when scientific research was almost unknown, about a subject in which he was an amateur. I confess I do not see how he, or John Stuart Mill, or any one else, writing in that age, could have formulated the true rules of philosophizing; because the materials and information were scarcely to hand. Science and its methods were only beginning to grow. No doubt it was a brilliant attempt. No doubt also there are many good and true points in the statement, especially in his insistence on the attitude of free and open candour with which the investigation of Nature should be approached. No doubt there was much beauty in his allegories of the errors into which men were apt to fall--the _idola_ of the market-place, of the tribe, of the theatre, and of the den; but all this is literature, and on the solid progress of science may be said to have had little or no effect. Descartes's _Discourse on Method_ was a much more solid production. You will understand that I speak of Bacon purely as a scientific man. As a man of letters, as a lawyer, a man of the world, and a statesman, he is beyond any criticism of mine. I speak only of the purely scientific aspect of the _Novum Organon_. _The Essays_ and _The Advancement of Learning_ are masterly productions; and as a literary man he takes high rank. The over-praise which, in the British Isles, has been lavished upon his scientific importance is being followed abroad by what may be an unnecessary amount of detraction. This is always the worst of setting up a man on too high a pinnacle; some one has to undertake the ungrateful task of pulling him down again. Justus von Liebig addressed himself to this task with some vigour in his _Reden und Abhandlung_ (Leipzig, 1874), where he quotes from Bacon a number of suggestions for absurd experimentation.[13] The next paragraph I read, not because I endorse it, but because it is always well to hear both sides of a question. You have probably been long accustomed to read over-estimates of Bacon's importance, and extravagant laudation of his writings as making an epoch in science; hear what Draper says on the opposite side:--[14]