We must, as I have said,
begin with experience, and by means of this discover the reason."

Compare with this the two following passages from the "Novum
Organum,"--the first being taken from the Ninety-ninth Axiom of the
First Book. "Then only will there be good ground of hope for the further
advance of knowledge, when there shall be received and gathered together
into natural history a variety of experiments, which are of no use in
themselves, but to discover causes and axioms."--The next passage is
the Twenty-sixth Axiom of the same Book;--"The conclusions of human
reason, as ordinarily applied in matter of nature, I call, for the
sake of distinction, _Anticipations of Nature_ (as a thing rash or
premature). That reason which is elicited from facts by a just and
methodical process I call _Interpretation of Nature_."

The first and famous axiom of the "Novum Organum" contains the phrase
which Bacon constantly repeats,--"man being the interpreter of Nature."
Leonardo uses the same expression,--"li omini inventori e interpreti
tra la natura e gli omini." In another admirable passage of rebuke of
the boastful and empty followers of old teachers, Leonardo says: "Though
I might not cite authors as well as they, I shall cite a much greater
and worthier thing, in citing experience, the teacher of their teachers"
(_Maestra di loro maestri_). "And as for the overmuch credit," says
Bacon, "that hath been given unto authors in sciences, in making them
dictators that their words should stand, and not counsellors to give
advice, the damage is infinite that sciences have received thereby."

Similar parallelisms of thought are to be found in some of Galileo's
sentences, when brought into comparison with Lord Bacon.]

[Footnote B: Article on Whately's Edition of Bacon's Essays. September,
1856.]

The cause of Bacon's error in this regard, an error in spite of which
his philosophical works still remain the crowded repositories of true
wisdom, seems to have arisen, in considerable part, from a defect of
imagination. Knowledge is to be viewed in two aspects: one, that of its
relation to the finite capacities of the human mind; the other, its
relation to the infinity of Nature, that is, to the infinity of the
subjects of knowledge. Bacon regarded it chiefly from the first point of
view,--and, so far as we are aware, there is nowhere in his works any
recognition of the fact, that each advance in knowledge only opens new
and previousl