ver followed, and by which no science could ever make
progress. The true scientific procedure is by hypothesis followed up and
tested by verification; the most powerful instrument is the deductive
method, which Bacon can hardly be said to have recognized. The power of
framing hypothesis points to another want in the Baconian doctrine. If that
power form part of the true method, then the mind is not wholly passive or
recipient; it anticipates nature, and moulds the experience received by it
in accordance with its own constructive ideas or conceptions; and yet
further, the minds of various investigators can never be reduced to the
same dead mechanical level.[93] There will still be room for the scientific
use of the imagination and for the creative flashes of genius.[94]

If, then, Bacon himself made no contributions to science, if no discovery
can be shown to be due to the use of his rules, if his method be logically
defective, and the problem to which it was applied one from its nature
incapable of adequate solution, it may not unreasonably be asked, How has
he come to be looked upon as the great leader in the reformation of modern
science? How is it that he shares with Descartes the honour of inaugurating
modern philosophy? To this the true answer seems to be that Bacon owes his
position not only to the general spirit of his philosophy, but to the
manner in which he worked into a connected system the new mode of thinking,
and to the incomparable power and eloquence with which he expounded and
enforced it. Like all epoch-making works, the _Novum Organum_ gave
expression to ideas which were already beginning to be in the air. The time
was ripe for a great change; scholasticism, long decaying, had begun to
fall; the authority not only of school doctrines but of the church had been
discarded; while here and there a few devoted experimenters were turning
with fresh zeal to the unwithered face of nature. The fruitful thoughts
which lay under and gave rise to these scattered efforts of the human mind,
were gathered up into unity, and reduced to system in the new philosophy of
Bacon.[95] It is assuredly little matter for wonder that this philosophy
should contain much that is now inapplicable, and that in many respects it
should be vitiated by radical errors. The details of the logical method on
which its author laid the greatest stress have not been found of practical
service;[96] yet the fundamental ideas on which the theory re