as those deductive philosophies on which he lavished his scorn.  He has left precepts and examples of what he meant by his cross-examining and sifting processes.  As admonitions to cross-examine and to sift facts and phenomena they are valuable.  Many of the observations and classifications are subtle and instructive.  But in his hands nothing comes of them.  They lead at the utmost to mere negative conclusions; they show what a thing is not.  But his attempt to elicit anything positive out of them breaks down, or ends at best in divinations and guesses, sometimes—­as in connecting Heat and Motion—­very near to later and more carefully-grounded theories, but always unverified.  He had a radically false and mechanical conception, though in words he earnestly disclaims it, of the way to deal with the facts of nature.  He looked on them as things which told their own story, and suggested the questions which ought to be put to them; and with this idea half his time was spent in collecting huge masses of indigested facts of the most various authenticity and value, and he thought he was collecting materials which his method had only to touch in order to bring forth from them light and truth and power.  He thought that, not in certain sciences, but in all, one set of men could do the observing and collecting, and another be set on the work of Induction and the discovery of “axioms.”  Doubtless in the arrangement and sorting of them his versatile and ingenious mind gave itself full play; he divides and distinguishes them into their companies and groups, different kinds of Motion, “Prerogative” instances, with their long tale of imaginative titles.  But we look in vain for any use that he was able to make of them, or even to suggest.  Bacon never adequately realised that no promiscuous assemblage of even the most certain facts could ever lead to knowledge, could ever suggest their own interpretation, without the action on them of the living mind, without the initiative of an idea.  In truth he was so afraid of assumptions and “anticipations” and prejudices—­his great bugbear was so much the “intellectus sibi permissus” the mind given liberty to guess and imagine and theorise, instead of, as it ought, absolutely and servilely submitting itself to the control of facts—­that he missed the true place of the rational and formative element in his account of Induction.  He does tell us, indeed, that “truth emerges sooner from error than from confusion.”  He indulges the mind, in the course of its investigation of “Instances,” with a first “vintage” of provisional generalisations.  But of the way in which the living mind of the discoverer works, with its ideas and insight, and thoughts that come no one knows whence, working hand in hand with what comes before the eye or is tested by the instrument, he gives us no picture.  Compare his elaborate investigation of the “Form of Heat” in the Novum Organum, with such a record of real inquiry as Wells’s Treatise on Dew, or Herschel’s analysis of it in his Introduction to Natural Philosophy.  And of the difference of genius between a Faraday or a Newton, and the crowd of average men who have used and finished off their work, he takes no account.  Indeed, he thinks that for the future such difference is to disappear.