A second and almost as important a reason for the superstition--for it is a supposed truth accepted without good reasons therefor--that somehow the Church was opposed to the inductive or experimental method, is the persistent belief which, in spite of frequent {283} contradictions, remains in the minds of so many scientists, that the inductive or experimental method was introduced to the world by Francis Bacon, the English philosopher, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Bacon himself was a Protestant; he did not do his writing until the reformation so-called had been at work in Europe for nearly a century, and somehow it is supposed that these facts are linked together as causes and effects. The reason why such a formulation of the inductive method had not come before was because this was forbidden ground! Nothing could be less true than that Lord Bacon had any serious influence in bringing about the introduction of the inductive method into science. At most he was a chronicler of tendencies that he saw in the science of his day. It is true that his writings served to give a certain popular vogue to the inductive method, or rather a certain exaggerated notion of the import of experiment to those who were not themselves scientists. Bacon was a popular writer on science, not an original thinker or worker in the experimental sciences. Popularizers in science, alas! have from Amerigo Vespucci down reaped the rewards due to the real discoverers. Induction in the genuine significance of the word had been recognized in the world long before Bacon's time and been used to much better effect than he was able to apply it. Personally, I have always felt that he has almost less right to all the praise that has been bestowed on him for what he is supposed to have done for science, than he has for any addition to his reputation because of the attribution to him by so many fanatics of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. It is rather difficult to understand how his reputation ever came about. Lord {284} Macaulay is much more responsible for it than is usually thought; his brilliancy often overreached itself or went far beyond truth; his favorite geese were nearly always swans, in his eyes.