Bacon was no mathematician, and so was out of touch with the main army of progress. By temperament he was rather with the Humanists. He was content to voice the cry for the overthrow of the dominant system as such, and to call for a new beginning, with no realist presuppositions. He is with the nominalists of the later Scholasticism and the naturalists of the early Renais sance. He echoes the cry for recourse to nature, for induction, for experiment. He calls for a logic of discovery. But at first sight there is little sign of any greater contribution to the recon struction than is to be found in Ramus or many another dead thinker. The syllogism is ineffective, belonging to argumentation, and constraining assent where what we want is control of things. It is a mechanical combination of propositions, as these of terms, which are counters to express concepts often ill-defined. The flight from a cursory survey of facts to wide so-called principles must give way to a gradual progress upward from propositions of minimum to those of medium generality, and in these consists the fruitfulness of science. Yet the induction of the Aristotelians, the dialectical induction of the Topics, content with imperfect enumeration and throwing the burden of disproof upon the critic, is puerile, and at the mercy of a single instance to the con trary. In all this there is but little promise for a new organon. It is neither novel nor instrumental. On a sudden Bacon's con ception of a new method begins to unfold itself. It is inductive only in the sense that it is identical in purpose with the ascent from particulars. It were better called exclusiva or elimination of the alternative, which Bacon proposes to achieve, and thereby guarantee his conclusion against the possibility of an instance to the contrary.
Bacon's method begins with a digest into three tables of the facts relevant to any inquiry. The first contains cases of the occur rence of the quality under investigation, colour, e.g., or heat in varying combinations. The second notes its absence in com binations so allied to certain of these that its presence might fairly have been looked for. The third registers its quantitative varia tion according to quantitative changes in its concomitants. The method now proceeds on the basis of the first table to set forth the possible suggestions as to a general explanatory formula for the quality in question. In virtue of the remaining tables it rejects any suggestion qualitatively or quantitatively inadequate. If one suggestion, and one alone, survives the process of attempted rejection it is the explanatory formula required. If none, we must begin afresh. If more than one, recourse is to be had to certain devices of method, in the enumeration of which the meth ods of agreement, difference and concomitant variations find a place beside the crucial experiment, the glaring instance and the like. An appeal, however, to such devices, though a permissible "first vintage" is relatively an imperfection of method, and a proof that the tables need revision. The positive procedure by hypoth esis and verification is rejected by Bacon, who thinks of hypothesis as the will o' the wisp of science, and prefers the cumbrous machinery of negative reasoning.
Historically he appears to have been under the dominance of the Platonic metaphor of an alphabet of nature, with a con sequent belief in the relatively small number of ultimate prin ciples to be determined, and of Plato's conception of Division, cleared of its dialectical associations and used experimentally in application to his own molecular physics. True it is that the re jection of all the co-species is a long process, but what if therein their simultaneous or subsequent determination is helped forward ? They, too, must fall to be determined sometime, and the ideal of science is fully to determine all the species of the genus. This will need co-operative effort as is described in the account of Solomon's House in the New Atlantis. But once introduce the conception of division of labour as between the collector of data on the one hand and the expert of method, the interpreter of nature at headquarters on the other, and Bacon's attitude to hypothesis and to negative reasoning is at least in part explained. The hypothesis of the collector, the man who keeps a rain-gauge, or the missionary among savages, is to be discounted from as a source of error. The expert on the other hand may be supposed, in the case of facts over which he had not himself brooded in the course of their acquisition, to approach them without any pre sumption this way or that. He will, too, have no interest in the isolation of any one of several co-ordinate inquiries. That Bacon underestimates the importance of selective and of provisional explanatory hypotheses even in such fields as that of chemistry, and that technically he is open to some criticism from the point of view that negative judgment is derivate as necessarily resting on positive presuppositions, may be true enough. It seems, how ever, no less true that the greatness of his conception of organized common effort in science has but rarely met with due appreciation.
In his doctrine of forms, too, the "universals" of his logic, Bacon must at least be held to have been on a path which led forward and not back. His forms are principles whose function falls entirely within knowledge. They are the formulae for the control of the activities and the production of the qualities of bodies. Forms are qualities and activities expressed in terms of the ultimates of nature, i.e., normally in terms of collocations of matter or modes of motion. (The human soul is still an excep tion.) Form is bound up with the molecular structure and change of structure of a body, one of whose qualities or activities it expresses in wider relations. A mode of motion, for instance, of a certain definite kind, is the form of heat. It is the recipe for, and at the same time is, heat, much as is the formula for and is water. Had Bacon analysed bodies into their elements in stead of their qualities and ways of behaviour, he would have been the logician of the chemical formula. Here, too, he has scarcely received his meed of appreciation.