THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

FRANCIS BACON 107
But is the formulation Bacon's own? Is not the Socratic method induc-
tive? Is not Aristotle's biology inductive? Did not Roger Bacon practise
as well as preach the inductive method which Francis Bacon merely
preached? Did not Galileo formulate better the procedure that science
has actually used? True of Roger Bacon, less true of Galileo, less true yet
of Aristotle, least true of Socrates. Galileo outlined the aim rather than
the method of science, holding up before its followers the goal of
mathematical and quantitative formulation of all experience and rela-
tionships; Aristotle practised induction when there was nothing else for
him to do, and where the material did not lend itself to his penchant for
the deduction of specific conclusions from magnificently general assumptions;
and Socrates did not so much practise induction the gathering of
data as analysis the definition and discrimination of words and ideas.
Bacon makes no claim to parthenogenetic originality; like Shakespeare
he takes with a lordly hand, and with the same excuse, that he adorns
whatever he touches. Every man has his sources, as every organism has its
food; what is his is the way in which he digests them and turns them into
flesh and blood. As Rawley puts it, Bacon "contemned no man's observations,
but would light his torch at every man's candle," 105 But Bacon
acknowledges these debts: he refers to "that useful method of Hippocrates,"
106
so sending us at once to the real source of inductive logic
among the Greeks; and "Plato," he writes (where less accurately we write
"Socrates"), "giveth good example of inquiry by induction and view of
particulars; though in such a wandering manner as is of no force or
fruit," 107 He would have disdained to dispute his obligations to these
predecessors; and we should disdain to exaggerate them.
But then again, is the Baconian method correct? Is it the method most
fruitfully used in modern science? No: generally, science has used, with
best result, not the accumulation of data ("natural history") and their
manipulation by the complicated tables of the Novum Organum, but the
simpler method of hypothesis, deduction and experiment. So Darwin,
reading Malthus' Essay on Population, conceived the idea of applying to
all organisms the Malthusian hypothesis that population tends to increase
faster than the means of subsistence; deduced from this hypothesis the
probable conclusion that the pressure of population on the food-supply
results in a struggle for existence in which the fittest survive, and by
which in each generation every species is changed into closer adaptation
to its environment; and finally (having by hypothesis and deduction
limited his problem and his field of observation) turned to "the un-
withered face of nature" and made for twenty years a patient inductive
examination of the facts. Again, Einstein conceived, or took from New-
MB Quoted by J. M. Robertson, Introduction to The Philosophical Works of
francis Bacon; p. 7.
Adv. of L., iv, a. FiL Lab., ad fin.