both fails us and deceives us. But
its shortcomings are to be supplied and its deceptions to be corrected.
Secondly, notions are all drawn from the impressions of the sense, and are
indefinite and confused, whereas they should be definite and distinctly
bounded. Thirdly, the induction is amiss which infers the principles of
sciences by simple enumeration, and does not, as it ought, employ
exclusions and solutions (or separations) of nature. Lastly, that method of
discovery and proof according to which the most general principles are
first established, and then intermediate axioms are tried and proved by
them, is the parent of error and the curse of all science."--_N. O._ i. 69.

[80] _N. O._ i. 105.

[81] _Ibid._, i. 104; cf. i. 19-26.

[82] This extract gives an answer to the objection sometimes raised that
Bacon is not original in his theory of induction. He certainly admits that
Plato has used a method somewhat akin to his own; but it has frequently
been contended that his induction is nothing more than the [Greek: epagoge]
of Aristotle (see Remusat's _Bacon, &c._, pp. 310-315, and for a criticism,
Waddington, _Essais de Logique_, p. 261. sqq.) This seems a mistake. Bacon
did not understand by induction the argument from particulars to a general
proposition; he looked upon the exclusion and rejection, or upon
_elimination_, as the essence of induction. To this process he was led by
his doctrine of forms, of which it is the necessary consequence; it is the
infallible result of his view of science and its problem, and is as
original as that is. Whoever accepts Bacon's doctrine of cause must accept
at the same time his theory of the way in which the cause may be sifted out
from among the phenomena. It is evident that the Socratic search for the
essence by an analysis of instances--an induction ending in a
definition--has a strong resemblance to the Baconian inductive method.

[83] _N. O._ i. 105.

[84] That is to say, differing in nothing save the absence of the nature
under investigation.

[85] _Distrib. Op._ (_Works_, iv. 28); _Parasceve_ (_ibid._ 251, 252,
255-256); _Descrip. Glob. Intel._ ch. 3.

[86] _Works_, ii. 16; cf. _N. O._ i. 130.

[87] A Barnabite monk, professor of mathematics and philosophy at Annecy.

[88] _Letters and Life_, vii. 377.

[89] For a full discussion of Bacon's relation to his predecessors and
contemporaries, see Fowler's _N. O._ introd. s. 13.

[90] Cf. what Bacon says, _N. O._ i