never been surpassed in subtlety.  No man ever more carefully studied the operation of his own mind and the intellectual character of others.”  Nor did Bacon despise metaphysical science, only the frivolous questions that the old scholastics associated with it, and the general barrenness of their speculations.  He surely would not have disdained the subsequent inquiries of Locke, or Berkeley, or Leibnitz, or Kant.  True, he sought definite knowledge,—­something firm to stand upon, and which could not be controverted.  No philosophy can be sound when the principle from which deductions are made is not itself certain or very highly probable, or when this principle, pushed to its utmost logical sequence, would lead to absurdity, or even to a conflict with human consciousness.  To Bacon the old methods were wrong, and it was his primal aim to reform the scientific methods in order to arrive at truth; not truth for utilitarian ends chiefly, but truth for its own sake.  He loved truth as Palestrina loved music, or Raphael loved painting, or Socrates loved virtue.

Now the method which was almost exclusively employed until Bacon’s time is commonly called the deductive method; that is, some principle or premise was assumed to be true, and reasoning was made from this assumption.  No especial fault was found with the reasoning of the great masters of logic like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, for it never has been surpassed in acuteness and severity.  If their premises were admitted, their conclusions would follow as a certainty.  What was wanted was to establish the truth of premises, or general propositions.  This Bacon affirmed could be arrived at only by induction; that is, the ascending from ascertained individual facts to general principles, by extending what is true of particulars to the whole class in which they belong.  Bacon has been called the father of inductive science, since he would employ the inductive method.  Yet he is not truly the father of induction, since it is as old as the beginnings of science.  Hippocrates, when he ridiculed the quacks of his day, and collected the facts and phenomena of disease, and inferred from them the proper treatment of it, was as much the father of induction as Bacon himself.  The error the ancients made was in not collecting a sufficient number of facts to warrant a sound induction.  And the ancients looked out for facts to support some preconceived theory, from which they reasoned syllogistically.  The theory could not be substantiated by any syllogistic reasonings, since conclusions could never go beyond assumptions; if the assumptions were wrong, no ingenious or elaborate reasoning would avail anything towards the discovery of truth, but could only uphold what was assumed.  This applied to theology as well as to science.  In the Dark Ages it was well for the teachers of mankind to uphold the dogmas of the Church, which they did with masterly dialectical skill.  Those were ages of Faith, and not of Inquiry.  It was all-important to ground believers in a firm faith of the dogmas which were deemed necessary to support the Church and the cause of religion.  They were regarded as absolute certainties.  There was no dispute about the premises of the scholastic’s arguments; and hence his dialectics strengthened the mind by the exercise of logical sports, and at the same time confirmed the faith.