“That his method is impracticable,” says Mr. Ellis, “cannot, I think, be denied, if we reflect not only that it never has produced any result, but also that the process by which scientific truths have been established cannot be so presented as even to appear to be in accordance with it.  In all cases this process involves an element to which nothing corresponds in the Tables of ‘Comparence’ and ‘Exclusion,’ namely, the application to the facts of observation of a principle of arrangement, an idea, existing in the mind of the discoverer antecedently to the act of induction.  It may be said that this idea is precisely one of the naturae into which the facts of observation ought in Bacon’s system to be analysed.  And this is in one sense true; but it must be added that this analysis, if it be thought right so to call it, is of the essence of the discovery which results from it.  In most cases the act of induction follows as a matter of course as soon as the appropriate idea has been introduced.”—­Ellis, General Preface, i. 38.

Lastly, not only was Bacon’s conception of philosophy so narrow as to exclude one of its greatest domains; for, says Mr. Ellis, “it cannot be denied that to Bacon all sound philosophy seemed to be included in what we now call the natural sciences,” and in all its parts was claimed as the subject of his inductive method; but Bacon’s scientific knowledge and scientific conceptions were often very imperfect—­more imperfect than they ought to have been for his time.  Of one large part of science, which was just then beginning to be cultivated with high promise of success—­the knowledge of the heavens—­he speaks with a coldness and suspicion which contrasts remarkably with his eagerness about things belonging to the sphere of the earth and within reach of the senses.  He holds, of course, the unity of the world; the laws of the whole visible universe are one order; but the heavens, wonderful as they are to him, are—­compared with other things—­out of his track of inquiry.  He had his astronomical theories; he expounded them in his “Descriptio Globi Intellectualis” and his Thema Coeli He was not altogether ignorant of what was going on in days when Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were at work.  But he did not know how to deal with it, and there were men in England, before and then, who understood much better than he the problems and the methods of astronomy.  He had one conspicuous and strange defect for a man who undertook what he did.  He was not a mathematician:  he did not see the indispensable necessity of mathematics in the great Instauration which he projected; he did not much believe in what they could do.  He cared so little about them that he takes no notice of Napier’s invention of Logarithms.  He was not able to trace how the direct information of the senses might be rightly subordinated to the rational, but not self-evident results of geometry and arithmetic.