Note Footnote 2: — INDUCTIVE LOGIC, OR THE LOGIC OF SCIENCE.

Ingenious, penetrating, wide-ranging, happy in nomenclature, the Novum Organum is a wonderful monument of the author's subtle wit and restless energy; but, beyond giving a general impulse to testing speculative fancies by close comparison with facts, it did nothing for science. His method—with its Tables of Preliminary Muster for the Intellect (tabulæ comparentiæ primæ instantiarum ad intellectum, facts collected and methodically arranged for the intellect to work upon); its Elimination upon first inspection of obviously accidental concomitants (Rejectio sive Exclusiva naturarum); its Provisional Hypothesis (Vindemiatio Prima sive Interpretatio Inchoata); its advance to a true Induction or final Interpretation by examination of special instances (he enumerates twenty-seven, 3 × 3 × 3, Prerogativas Instantiarum, trying to show the special value of each for the inquirer)2—was beautifully regular and imposing, but it was only a vain show of a method. It was rendered so chiefly by the end or aim that Bacon proposed for the inquirer. In this he was not in advance of his age; on the contrary, he was probably behind Roger Bacon, and certainly far behind such patient and concentrated thinkers as Copernicus, Gilbert, and Galileo—no discredit to the grandeur of his intellect when we remember that science was only his recreation, the indulgence of his leisure from Law and State.