uses of the errors that infest the human mind; by
their exposure the way is cleared for the introduction of the new method.
The nature of this method cannot be understood until it is exactly seen to
what it is to be applied. What idea had Bacon of science, and how is his
method connected with it? Now, the science[60] which was specially and
invariably contemplated by him was natural philosophy, the great mother of
all the sciences; it was to him the type of scientific knowledge, and its
method was the method of all true science. To discover exactly the
characteristics and the object of natural philosophy it is necessary to
examine the place it holds in the general scheme furnished in the
_Advancement_ or _De Augmentis_. All human knowledge, it is there laid
down, may be referred to man's memory or imagination or reason. In the
first, the bare facts presented to sense are collected and stored up; the
exposition of them is _history_, which is either natural or civil. In the
second, the materials of sense are separated or divided in ways not
corresponding to nature but after the mind's own pleasure, and the result
is _poesy_ or feigned history. In the third, the materials are worked up
after the model or pattern of nature, though we are prone to err in the
progress from sense to reason; the result is _philosophy_, which is
concerned either with God, with nature or with man, the second being the
most important. Natural philosophy is again divided into speculative or
theoretical and operative or practical, according as the end is
contemplation or works. Speculative or theoretical natural philosophy has
to deal with natural substances and qualities and is subdivided into
physics and metaphysics. Physics inquires into the efficient and material
causes of things; metaphysics, into the formal and final causes. The
principal objects of physics are concrete substances, or abstract though
physical qualities. The research into abstract qualities, the fundamental
problem of physics, comes near to the metaphysical study of _forms_, which
indeed differs from the first only in being more general, and in having as
its results a _form_ strictly so called, _i.e._ a nature or quality which
is a limitation or specific manifestation of some higher and better-known
genus.[61] Natural philosophy is, therefore, in ultimate resort the study
of _forms_, and, consequently, the fundamental problem of philosophy in
general is the discovery of these _for