THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

FRANCIS BACON 99
royal undertakings will involve expense; but "as the secretaries and spies
of princes and states bring in bills for intelligence, so you must allow the
spies and intelligencers of nature to bring in their bills if you would not
be ignorant of many things worthy to be known. And if Alexander placed
so large a treasure at Aristotle's command for the support of hunters,
fowlers, fishers, and the like, in much more need do they stand of this
beneficence who unfold the labyrinths of nature." 76 With such royal aid
the Great Reconstruction can be completed in a few years; without it the
task will require generations.
What is refreshingly new in Bacon is the magnificent assurance with
which he predicts the conquest of nature by man: "I stake all on the
victory of art over nature in the race." That which men have done is "but
an earnest of the things they shall do." But why this great hope? Had not
men been seeking truth, and exploring the paths of science, these two
thousand years? Why should one hope now for such great success where
so long a time had given so modest a result? Yes, Bacon answers; but
what if the methods men have used have been wrong and useless? What if
the road has been lost, and research has gone into by-paths ending in
the air? We need a ruthless revolution in our methods of research and
thought, in our system of science and logic; we need a new Organon,
better than Aristotle's, fit for this larger world.
And so Bacon offers us his supreme book.
2. THE NEW ORGANON
"Bacon's greatest performance," says his bitterest critic, "is the first
book of the Novum Organum" 77 Never did a man put more life into
logic, making induction an epic adventure and a conquest. If one must
study logic, let him begin with this book. "This part of human philosophy
which regards logic is disagreeable to the taste of many, as appearing to
them no other than a net, and a snare of thorny subtlety. . . . But if
we would rate things according to their real worth, the rational sciences
are the keys to all the rest." 78
Philosophy has been barren so long, says Bacon, because she needed a
*iew method to make her fertile. The great mistake of the Greek philos-
ophers was that they spent so much time in theory,
so little in observation.
But thought should be the aide of observation, not its substitute. "Man,"
says the first aphorism of the Novum Organum, as if flinging a challenge
to all metaphysics, "Man, as the minister and interpreter of nature,
does and understands as much as his observations on the order of nature
. . . permit him; and neither knows nor is capable of more." The predecessors
of Socrates were in this matter sounder than his followers; Democ-
ritus, in particular, had a nose for facts, rather than an eye for the
mlbid.f ii, I.
T7
Macaulay, op. cit. f p. 92. Adv. of L. t v, I.