Thus he has been said to have, 1st, underrated and misconceived the value of the Mind; 2d, to have been ignorant of the very first principle of all inquiry, that which leads the way in all pursuit of knowledge; 3d, to have waged war against hypothesis, by the very means of an hypothesis. Now as these points bear entirely on those first steps in human knowledge which constitute belief and positive faith, the subject, we believe, will be in some measure elucidated by an exposition of Lord Bacon's tenets. The memory of that great, and unfortunate philosopher is, we conceive, quite free from the imputation of such an error of judgment. The opinion of Bacon's great rival, of Descartes, may be here brought forward as the first in time, if not in weight. This opinion is extant in a letter written by Descartes six years after the death of Lord Bacon, and five years before the publication of Descartes' first work. (1637.) In this letter addressed from Holland to his Parisian correspondent Father Mersenne, Descartes expresses himself in the following words: "You wish to learn from me in which manner useful experiments are to be made. On that subject, after all that Verulam has written thereon, I have only to add, that without extending our researches unto the very slightest particularities respecting any matter, our principal care ought to be to form general collections of all the most common things of those which are quite certain, and can be ascertained without expense. Thus for instance, it would be useful to observe, whether all fossil shells are turned into layers having the same direction, and if the same direction persists beyond the line: if the bodies of all animals present three cavities, head, chest, and abdomen, and so on, for all these things apparently indifferent are of use in the search of Truth. As to the more particular researches (experiments) it

is impossible to avoid many superfluous and even erroneous ones if the truth of things be not known beforehand." (Euvres compl. de Descartes. Lettres au P. Mersenne.) These lines of Descartes express the metaphysical tendency of his mind. In saying that experiments are not entered into without some previous knowledge of Truth, he means that they are not made haphazard, but that the mind conducts the process in a peculiar way according to the nature of the experiment. But Descartes only repeats, on this occasion, the very opinion of Bacon, who tells us that the mind judges of experiment in two ways: 1. By a kind of sagacity above all philosophy. 2. By induction or inference. This natural sagacity Bacon proposes to help by the means of a new organ, (novum organum,) which facilitates the inquiry by laying before the mind, in all possible ways, the facts inquired into. But Bacon was too great a practical philosopher to admit that beyond that innate, instinctive sagacity, any relative truths could be known without their being attended to, and without the validity of the conditions being attested. According to Lord Bacon, this innate sagacity is the guide to Truth, but does not constitute Truth herself. Bacon, therefore, cannot be considered rightly as having underrated the value of the mind.

An objection of a more serious nature against Lord Bacon as a philosopher, is now prevailing in the schools, not only of France and Germany, but even of England. He stands arraigned for having been ignorant of the natural method of the mind, of the process instinctively adopted to arrive at Truth; i. e., first, by guessing and then verifying. This accusation, which we have heard fall from the lips of men of high and undoubted talent, of MM. Victor Cousin and Auguste Comte, and which is to be found in their respective works; has found in

England not a mere tacit assent, but a full and open avowel. Distrusting our own strength before such powerful antagonists, we ask leave to bring into the field Lord Bacon himself, and we feel confident that the sturdy champion will prove worthy of the task.

For the entire judgment delivered by M. Victor Cousin on this point of the Baconian philosophy, we refer to his "Cours de l'Histoire de la Philosophie, vol. i. p. 100, and seq.," and merely state that this judgment of M. Cousin has been widely circulated by his disciples. M. Auguste Comte, considering the real process of the mind in all inquiry to be a desideratum in philosophy, enters fully and copiously on that subject in his "Cours de Philosophie positive, 2m. vol. pp. 433 to 463." An eminent English philosopher, M. Stuart Mill, concurs in the view adopted by M. Auguste Comte, and quotes the following words of that deep thinker as a clear statement of the position: "Some fact is as yet little understood, or some law is unknown: we frame on the subject an hypothesis as accordant as possible with the whole of the data already possessed, and the science, being thus enabled to move forward freely, always ends by leading to new consequences capable of observation, which either confirm or refute, unequivocally, the first supposition. Neither induction nor deduction would enable us to understand even the simplest phenomena if we did not commence by anticipating on the results; by making a provisional supposition, at first essentially conjectural as to some of the very notions which constitute the final object of the inquiry. It is in this way, which has some resemblance to the methods of approximation of mathematicians, that we arrive, by means of hypothesis, at con

clusions not hypothetical." (A system of Logic by M. J. Stuart Mill, vol. ii. Book 3, ch. xiv. p. 20.)

Mr. Whewell, in his History of the Inductive Sciences, evidently considers the Baconian method which demands facts and not hypotheses as somewhat erroneous, and denies that the cause assigned should be a cause already known, which would be equivalent to saying that we could never become acquainted with any new cause. Speaking of the discoveries of Kepler and Copernicus, Mr. Whewell remarks that "Real discoveries are thus mixed up with baseless assumptions; profound sagacity is combined with fanciful conjecture; not rarely or in peculiar instances, but commonly and in most cases, probably in all, if we could read the thoughts of discoverers as we read the books of Kepler. To try wrong guesses is apparently the only way to hit upon right ones." These views of Mr. Whewell elicit the following reflexions from the eminent reviewer of Mr. Whewell's above-mentioned work, as may be seen in the Edinburgh Review for October, 1837: "These views of Mr. Whewell bear a striking similarity to those contained in the following extract from the life of Sir Isaac Newton, and had the author of the History of the Inductive Sciences been aware of this, he would no doubt have referred to them in conformation of his own observations: เ Nothing, even in mathematical science, can be more certain than that a collection of scientific facts are of themselves incapable of leading to discovery, or to the determination of general laws, unless they contain the predominating fact or relation in which the discovery mainly resides.' In order to give additional support to these views, it would be interesting to ascertain the general character of the process by which a mind of acknowledged power proceeds in the path of successful inquiry.

The history of science does not furnish us with much information on this head, and, if it is to be found at all it must be gleaned from the lives of eminent men. Whatever this process may be in its details, if it has any, there cannot be the slightest doubt that in its generalities at least, it is the very reverse of the method of induction."

Nothing can be more consistent with Truth and with the sound principles of the elements of the process of scientific inquiry, than the value laid by thinkers upon hypothesis, or supposition, as a first step in all such inquiry. The only point here at issue is whether Lord Bacon overlooked this first step, or whether Bacon's very first position has not been overlooked. Does not Lord Verulam lay down as a first truth fully confirmed by experience that on account of the very nature of the human mind which, like a faulty mirror, always reflects false images, man cannot do otherwise than anticipate, or guess at Truth? Does he not consider all human inquiry as susceptible of being ranged under two heads, viz., as Anticipations of Nature, and as Interpretations of Nature. Bacon, it is true, does not say that the method of inquiry should be first to guess and then to verify; but he says man cannot do otherwise. With him it constitutes no method peculiar to any particular road which may be taken or not, but it is the only road the mind can follow. The undoubted tenor of this very first position of the inductive method we conceive to be sufficient to vindicate Lord Bacon from having made the oversight alluded to.

But stronger evidence can be adduced. Does he not, in the "Novum Organum," when exposing the various instances or facts which he deems worthy of becoming the objects of inductive investigation, does

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