The Copernican view of the solar system had been stated, restated, fought, and insisted on; a chain of brilliant telescopic discoveries had made it popular and accessible to all men of any intelligence: henceforth it must be left to slowly percolate and sink into the minds of the people. For the nations were waking up now, and were accessible to new ideas. England especially was, in some sort, at the zenith of its glory; or, if not at the zenith, was in that full flush of youth and expectation and hope which is stronger and more prolific of great deeds and thoughts than a maturer period.
A common cause against a common and detested enemy had roused in the hearts of Englishmen a passion of enthusiasm and patriotism; so that the mean elements of trade, their cheating yard-wands, were forgotten for a time; the Armada was defeated, and the nation's true and conscious adult life began. Commerce was now no mere struggle for profit and hard bargains; it was full of the spirit of adventure and discovery; a new world had been opened up; who could tell what more remained unexplored? Men awoke to the splendour of their inheritance, and away sailed Drake and Frobisher and Raleigh into the lands of the West.
For literature, you know what a time it was. The author of Hamlet and Othello was alive: it is needless to say more. And what about science? The atmosphere of science is a more quiet and less stirring one; it thrives best when the fever of excitement is allayed; it is necessarily a later growth than literature. Already, however, our second great man of science was at work in a quiet country town—second in point of time, I mean, Roger Bacon being the first. Dr. Gilbert, of Colchester, was the second in point of time, and the age was ripening for the time when England was to be honoured with such a galaxy of scientific luminaries—Hooke and Boyle and Newton—as the world had not yet known.
Yes, the nations were awake. "In all directions," as Draper says, "Nature was investigated: in all directions new methods of examination were yielding unexpected and beautiful results. On the ruins of its ivy-grown cathedrals Ecclesiasticism [or Scholasticism], surprised and blinded by the breaking day, sat solemnly blinking at the light and life about it, absorbed in the recollection of the night that had passed, dreaming of new phantoms and delusions in its wished-for return, and vindictively striking its talons at any derisive assailant who incautiously approached too near."
Of the work of Gilbert there is much to say; so there is also of Roger Bacon, whose life I am by no means sure I did right in omitting. But neither of them had much to do with astronomy, and since it is in astronomy that the most startling progress was during these centuries being made, I have judged it wiser to adhere mainly to the pioneers in this particular department.
Only for this reason do I pass Gilbert with but slight mention. He knew of the Copernican theory and thoroughly accepted it (it is convenient to speak of it as the Copernican theory, though you know that it had been considerably improved in detail since the first crude statement by Copernicus), but he made in it no changes. He was a cultivated scientific man, and an acute experimental philosopher; his main work lay in the domain of magnetism and electricity. The phenomena connected with the mariner's compass had been studied somewhat by Roger Bacon; and they were now examined still more thoroughly by Gilbert, whose treatise De Magnete, marks the beginning of the science of magnetism.
As an appendix to that work he studied the phenomenon of amber, which had been mentioned by Thales. He resuscitated this little fact after its burial of 2,200 years, and greatly extended it. He it was who invented the name electricity—I wish it had been a shorter one. Mankind invents names much better than do philosophers. What can be better than "heat," "light," "sound"? How favourably they compare with electricity, magnetism, galvanism, electro-magnetism, and magneto-electricity! The only long-established monosyllabic name I know invented by a philosopher is "gas"—an excellent attempt, which ought to be imitated.[12]
Of Lord Bacon, who flourished about the same time (a little later), it is necessary to say something, because many persons are under the impression that to him and his Novum Organon the reawakening of the world, and the overthrow of Aristotelian tradition, are mainly due. His influence, however, has been exaggerated. I am not going to enter into a discussion of the Novum Organon, and the mechanical methods which he propounded as certain to evolve truth if patiently pursued; for this is what he thought he was doing—giving to the world an infallible recipe for discovering truth, with which any ordinarily industrious man could make discoveries by means of collection and discrimination of instances. You will take my statement for what it is worth, but I assert this: that many of the methods which Bacon lays down are not those which the experience of mankind has found to be serviceable; nor are they such as a scientific man would have thought of devising.
True it is that a real love and faculty for science are born in a man, and that to the man of scientific capacity rules of procedure are unnecessary; his own intuition is sufficient, or he has mistaken his vocation,—but that is not my point. It is not that Bacon's methods are useless because the best men do not need them; if they had been founded on a careful study of the methods actually employed, though it might be unconsciously employed, by scientific men—as the methods of induction, stated long after by John Stuart Mill, were founded—then, no doubt, their statement would have been a valuable service and a great thing to accomplish. But they were not this. They are the ideas of a brilliant man of letters, writing in an age when scientific research was almost unknown, about a subject in which he was an amateur. I confess I do not see how he, or John Stuart Mill, or any one else, writing in that age, could have formulated the true rules of philosophizing; because the materials and information were scarcely to hand. Science and its methods were only beginning to grow. No doubt it was a brilliant attempt. No doubt also there are many good and true points in the statement, especially in his insistence on the attitude of free and open candour with which the investigation of Nature should be approached. No doubt there was much beauty in his allegories of the errors into which men were apt to fall—the idola of the market-place, of the tribe, of the theatre, and of the den; but all this is literature, and on the solid progress of science may be said to have had little or no effect. Descartes's Discourse on Method was a much more solid production.
You will understand that I speak of Bacon purely as a scientific man. As a man of letters, as a lawyer, a man of the world, and a statesman, he is beyond any criticism of mine. I speak only of the purely scientific aspect of the Novum Organon. The Essays and The Advancement of Learning are masterly productions; and as a literary man he takes high rank.