Modern discoveries have not been made by large collections of facts, with
subsequent discussion, separation, and {86} resulting deduction of a truth
thus rendered perceptible. A few facts have suggested an _hypothesis_,
which means a _supposition_, proper to explain them. The necessary results
of this supposition are worked out, and then, and not till then, other
facts are examined to see if these ulterior results are found in nature.
The trial of the hypothesis is the _special object_: prior to which,
hypothesis must have been started, not by rule, but by that sagacity of
which no description can be given, precisely because the very owners of it
do not act under laws perceptible to themselves.[130] The inventor of
hypothesis, if pressed to explain his method, must answer as did Zerah
Colburn,[131] when asked for his mode of instantaneous calculation. When
the poor boy had been bothered for some time in this manner, he cried out
in a huff, "God put it into my head, and I can't put it into yours."[132]
{87} Wrong hypotheses, rightly worked from, have produced more useful
results than unguided observation. But this is not the Baconian plan.
Charles the Second, when informed of the state of navigation, founded a
Baconian observatory at Greenwich, to observe, observe, observe away at the
moon, until her motions were known sufficiently well to render her useful
in guiding the seaman. And no doubt Flamsteed's[133] observations, twenty
or thirty of them at least, were of signal use. But how? A somewhat
fanciful thinker, one Kepler, had hit upon the approximate orbits of the
planets by trying one hypothesis after another: he found the _ellipse_,
which the Platonists, well despised of Bacon, and who would have despised
him as heartily if they had known him, had investigated and put ready to
hand nearly 2000 years before.[134] The sun in the focus, the motions of
the planet more and more rapid as they approach the sun, led Kepler--and
Bacon would have reproved him for his rashness--to imagine that a force
residing in the sun might move the planets, a force inversely as the
distance. Bouillaud,[135] upon a fanciful analogy, rejected the inverse
distance, {88} and, rejecting the force altogether, declared that if such a
thing there were, it would be as the inverse _square_ of the distance.
Newton, ready prepared with the mathematics of the subject, tried the fall
of the moon towards the earth, away from her tangent, and found that, as
compared with the fall of a stone, the law of the inverse square did hold
for the moon. He deduced the ellipse, he proceeded to deduce the effect of
the disturbance of the sun upon the moon, upon the assumed theory of
_universal_ gravitation. He found result after result of his theory in
conformity with observed fact: and, by aid of Flamsteed's observations,
which amended what mathematicians call his _constants_, he constructed his
lunar theory. Had it not been for Newton, the whole dynasty of Greenwich
astronomers, from Flamsteed of happy memory, to Airy whom Heaven
preserve,[136] might have worked away at nightly observation and daily
reduction, without any remarkable result: looking forward, as to a
millennium, to the time when any man of moderate intelligence was to see
the whole explanation. What are large collections of facts for? To make
theories _from_, says Bacon: to try ready-made theories _by_, says the
history of discovery: it's all the same, says the idolater: nonsense, say
we!
Time and space run short: how odd it is that of the three leading ideas of
mechanics, time, space, and matter, the first two should always fail a
reviewer before the third. We might dwell upon many points, especially if
we attempted a more descriptive account of the valuable edition before us.
No one need imagine that the editors, by their uncompromising attack upon
the notion of Bacon's influence common even among mathematicians and
experimental philosophers, have lowered the glory of the great man whom it
was, many will think, their business to defend through thick and thin. They
have given a clearer notion of his {89} excellencies, and a better idea of
the power of his mind, than ever we saw given before. Such a correction as
theirs must have come, and soon, for as Hallam says--after noting that the
_Novum Organum_ was _never published separately in England_, Bacon has
probably been more read in the last thirty years--now forty--than in the
two hundred years which preceded. He will now be more read than ever he
was. The history of the intellectual world is the history of the worship of
one idol after another. No sooner is it clear that a Hercules has appeared
among men, than all that imagination can conceive of strength is attributed
to him, and his labors are recorded in the heavens. The time arrives when,
as in the case of Aristotle, a new deity is found, and the old one is
consigned to shame and reproach. A reaction may afterwards take place, and
this is now happening in the case of the Greek philosopher. The end of the
process is, that the opposing deities take their places, side by side, in a
Pantheon dedicated not to gods, but to heroes.