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

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,' indicated where the goal of physical science really lay. However, Descartes was an eminent mathematician, and it would seem that the bent of his mind led him to overestimate the value