[75] Cogitationes (Works, iii. 187).
[76] N. O. ii. 10.
[77] Pref. to Instaur. Cf. Valerius Term. (Works, iii. 224), and N. O. i. 68, 124.
[78] Pref. to Inst.
[79] Bacon's summary is valuable. "In the whole of the process which leads from the senses and objects to axioms and conclusions, the demonstrations which we use are deceptive and incompetent. The process consists of four parts, and has as many faults. In the first place, the impressions of the sense itself are faulty, for the sense 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 ἐπάγωγη of Aristotle (see Rémusat'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.