e by her own power and
without respect to other sciences investigates the secret of
Nature.

So far, then, as Exhortation goes, King James's great lawyer and
statesman was not in advance of Pope Clement's friar. Their first
principle was the same. It is only by facts that theories can be
tested. Man must not impose his own preconceptions (_anticipationes
mentis_) on nature. Man is only the interpreter of nature. Both
were also at one in holding that the secrets of nature could not be
discovered by discussion, but only by observation and experiment.

Francis Bacon, however, went beyond all his predecessors in furnishing
an elaborate Method for the interpretation of Nature. When he
protested against the intellect's being left to itself (_intellectus
sibi permissus_), he meant more than speculation left unchecked by
study of the facts. He meant also that the interpreter must have a
method. As man, he says, cannot move rocks by the mere strength of his
hands without instruments, so he cannot penetrate to the secrets of
Nature by mere strength of his intellect without instruments. These
instruments he undertakes to provide in his Inductive Method or _Novum
Organum_. And it is important to understand precisely what his methods
were, because it is on the ground of them that he is called the
founder of Inductive Philosophy, and because this has created a
misapprehension of the methods actually followed by men 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 (_tabulae comparentiae primae 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 x 3 x 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 e