PRESTIGE OF NEW METHODS.--And so, by the time when Bacon had laid down his pen after writing the _New Logic_, the work of discrediting the old system, elaborated with such ingenious industry by Aquinas, was tolerably complete. The new science had begun already to be fruitful in results, both practical and speculative. The successors of Galileo and of Bacon applied the new principles with vigour, and reached astonishing results. Justified by these, the new methods secured a prestige which has not decreased for three centuries. CHAPTER III GROWTH OF THE MECHANICAL THEORY DECLINE OF SCHOLASTICISM.--By the time of Lord Bacon, the Scholastic philosophy might have been described as extinct; it no longer survived as a living system. The loss was a serious one to mankind, which was poorer by the discrediting of an authoritative body of thought, a possession it seems ill able to dispense with. The Baconian philosophy was an imperfect substitute; it was little more than a system of enquiry, a manual of scientific procedure, for Bacon himself was not in the philosophical sense a profound or constructive thinker, though he was one of those men of talent who can give utterance to the tendencies of an epoch. THE NEW PHILOSOPHY.--The task, however, of constructing a new philosophy of the universe was courageously taken in hand by a succession of thinkers, and the energy of thought which the great problem generated is characteristic of perhaps the most vigorous century of European history--the seventeenth. The tendency of the new discoveries in science had not been obscure, and Modern Philosophy starts with an attempt to represent the universe as a self-working machine--a co-ordinated whole, throughout which the principles of mathematics are universally valid. The trend of ideas set in motion by the new discoveries in astronomy seemed to point in this direction. But to introduce mechanics into the celestial regions, though an important step, was but a beginning. Mechanics must be _universally_ valid--even in the human body--or the new teaching was vain. Exceptions may prove a rule, but they destroy a philosophy.