[29] In mechanics and the general sciences, causes compound their effects, or in other words, it is generally possible to deduce à priori the consequence of introducing complex agencies into any experiment, by allowing for the effect of each of the simple causes which enter into their composition. In chemistry and physiology a contrary law holds; the causes which they embody generally uniting to form distinct substances, and to introduce unforeseen laws and combinations. The deductive method here is consequently inapplicable, and we are forced back upon experiment.
Bacon in the text is hardly consistent with himself, as he admits in the second book the doctrine, to which modern discovery points, of the reciprocal transmutation of the elements. What seemed poetic fiction in the theories of Pythagoras and Seneca, assumes the appearance of scientific fact in the hands of Baron Caynard.—Ed.
[30] Galileo had recently adopted the notion that nature abhorred a vacuum for an axiomatic principle, and it was not till Torricelli, his disciple, had given practical proof of the utility of Bacon’s method, by the discovery of the barometer (1643) that this error, as also that expressed below, and believed by Bacon, concerning the homœopathic tendencies of bodies, was destroyed.—Ed.
[31] Donec ad materiam potentialem et informem ventum fuerit. Nearly all the ancient philosophers admitted the existence of a certain primitive and shapeless matter as the substratum of things which the creative power had reduced to fixed proportions, and resolved into specific substances. The expression potential matter refers to that substance forming the basis of the Peripatetic system, which virtually contained all the forms that it was in the power of the efficient cause to draw out of it.—Ed.
[32] An allusion to the humanity of the Sultans, who, in their earlier histories are represented as signalizing their accession to the throne by the destruction of their family, to remove the danger of rivalry and the terrors of civil war.—Ed.
[33] The text is “in odium veterum sophistarum, Protagoræ, Hippiæ, et reliquorum.” Those were called sophists, who, ostentationis aut questus causa philosophabantur. (Acad. Prior. ii. [72].) They had corrupted and degraded philosophy before Socrates. Protagoras of Abdera (Ἄβδηρα), the most celebrated, taught that man is the measure of all things, by which he meant not only that all which can be known is known only as it related to our faculties, but also that apart from our faculties nothing can be known. The sceptics equally held that knowledge was probable only as it related to our faculties, but they stopped there, and did not, like the sophist, dogmatize about the unknown. The works of Protagoras were condemned for their impiety, and publicly burned by the ædiles of Athens, who appear to have discharged the office of common hangmen to the literary blasphemers of their day.—Ed.
[34] Bacon is hardly correct in implying that the enumerationem per simplicem was the only light in which the ancients looked upon induction, as they appear to have regarded it as only one, and that the least important, of its species. Aristotle expressly considers induction in a perfect or dialectic sense, and in an imperfect or rhetorical sense. Thus if a genus (
G
), contains four species (
A