English philosophers and schools of philosophy / by James Seth.

  • James Seth
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: English philosophers and schools of philosophy / by James Seth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    62/392 (page 46)
    says Abbott, ‘appears to increase in proportion to his distrust of the New Induction. ’1 In the Dedication of the Phenomena of the Universe, published in 1622, he tells us that ‘a small and well-ordered Natural History is the key of all knowledge ’; and in the Preface to the third part of the Instauratio Magna he says : 4 It comes therefore to this, that my Organum, even if it were completed, would not without the Natural History much advance the Instauration of the sciences, whereas the Natural History without the Organum would advance it not a little.’ But a collection of facts which is not informed by some anticipation of their theoretic signi¬ ficance can have little, if any, scientific value ; here, as elsewhere, deductive and inductive reasoning, hypothesis and verification, must go together. If a true natural philosophy presupposes a wide and careful natural history, it is no less true that a natural history which is to serve as the basis of a natural philosophy itself presupposes a provisional natural philosophy or theory of the facts. A natural history which is not inspired by such a theoretic interest in the facts collected will prove a waste of labour, because its results will be irrelevant to the inquiry in question. In Bacon’s own language, it is not in the 4 mere enumeration ’ of facts, but in the discrimination of the relevant or significant from the irrelevant and, therefore, insignificant facts that the value of the natural history lies. It is not the mere number of the facts, but the selection of them, that determines their scientific value. Bacon’s over-confidence in Natural History is only an added proof of the inadequacy of his conception of the method of science. In two other notable respects Bacon showed a defective understanding of the scientific work which was actually being done in his own time—in his depreciation of the mathematical method and of specialisation in science. Galileo and Kepler were applying mathematics to the theory of astronomy; but Bacon, in his love for the experimental method and his suspicion of deductive 1 Francis Bacon, p. 400.