The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century | Page 2

or for some better reason, the founders of the schools of the
Middle Ages included astronomy, along with geometry, arithmetic, and
music, as one of the four branches of advanced education; and, in this
respect, it is only just to them to observe that they were far in advance
of those who sit in their seats. The school men considered no one to be
properly educated unless he were acquainted with, at any rate, one
branch of physical science. We have not, even yet, reached that stage of
enlightenment.
[Sidenote: Further advance after Renaissance.]
In the early decades of the seventeenth century, the men of the
Renaissance could show that they had already put out to good interest
the treasure bequeathed to them by the Greeks. They had produced the
astronomical system of Copernicus, with Kepler's great additions; the
astronomical discoveries and the physical investigations of Galileo; the
mechanics of Stevinus and the 'De Magnete' of Gilbert; the anatomy of
the great French and Italian schools and the physiology of Harvey. In
Italy, which had succeeded Greece in the hegemony of the scientific
world, the Accademia dei Lyncei and sundry other such associations
for the investigation of nature, the models of all subsequent academies
and scientific societies, had been founded, while the literary skill and
biting wit of Galileo had made the great scientific questions of the day
not only intelligible, but attractive, to the general public.
[Sidenote: Francis Bacon.]
In our own country, Francis Bacon, had essayed to sum up the past of
physical science, and to indicate the path which it must follow if its
great destinies were to be fulfilled. And though the attempt was just
such a magnificent failure as might have been expected from a man of

great endowments, who was so singularly devoid of scientific insight
that he could not understand the value of the work already achieved by
the true instaurators of physical science; yet the majestic eloquence and
the fervid vaticinations of one who was conspicuous alike by the
greatness of his rise and the depth of his fall, drew the attention of all
the world to the 'new birth of Time.'
[Sidenote: The defect of his method.]
But it is not easy to discover satisfactory evidence that the 'Novum
Organum' had any direct beneficial influence on the advancement of
natural knowledge. No delusion is greater than the notion that method
and industry can make up for lack of motherwit, either in science or in
practical life; and it is strange that, with his knowledge of mankind,
Bacon should have dreamed that his, or any other, 'via inveniendi
scientias' would 'level men's wits' and leave little scope for that inborn
capacity which is called genius. As a matter of fact, Bacon's 'via' has
proved hopelessly impracticable; while the 'anticipation of nature' by
the invention of hypotheses based on incomplete inductions, which he
specially condemns, has proved itself to be a most efficient, indeed an
indispensable, instrument of scientific progress. Finally, that
transcendental alchemy--the superinducement of new forms on
matter--which Bacon declares to be the supreme aim of science, has
been wholly ignored by those who have created the physical knowledge
of the present day.
Even the eloquent advocacy of the Chancellor brought no unmixed
good to physical science. It was natural enough that the man who, in
his better moments, took 'all knowledge for his patrimony,' but, in his
worse, sold that birthright for the mess of pottage of Court favor and
professional success, for pomp and show, should be led to attach an
undue value to the practical advantages which he foresaw, as Roger
Bacon and, indeed, Seneca had foreseen, long before his time, must
follow in the train of the advancement of natural knowledge. The
burden of Bacon's pleadings for science is the gathering of fruit'--the
importance of winning solid material advantages by the investigation of
Nature and the desirableness of limiting the application of scientific

methods of inquiry to that field.
[Sidenote: Hobbes.]
[Sidenote: Descartes.]
Bacon's younger contemporary, Hobbes, casting aside the prudent
reserve of his predecessor in regard to those matters about which the
Crown or the Church might have something to say, extended scientific
methods of inquiry to the phenomena of mind and the problems of
social organisation; while, at the same time, he indicated the boundary
between the province of real, and that of imaginary, knowledge. The
'Principles of Philosophy' and the 'Leviathan' embody a coherent
system of purely scientific thought in language which is a model of
clear and vigorous English style. At the same time, in France, a man of
far greater scientific capacity than either Bacon or Hobbes, René
Descartes, not only in his immortal 'Discours de la Méthode' and
elsewhere, went down to the foundations of scientific certainty, but, in
his 'Principes de Philosophie,'