8

Experimental  Xeatslatlon

to  decide  whether  the  world  has  not  made  a  great
mistake.  Professor  Fowler,  in  his  admirable  critical
edition  of  the  <c  Novum  Organum,”  has  said  about
all  that  can  be  said  in  favour  of  Lord  Bacon’s
scientific  claims  ;  yet  I  hold  to  the  opinion,  long
since  stoutly  maintained  by  the  late  Professor  De
Morgan,  not  to  speak  of  Baron  Liebig  and
others,  that  Lord  Bacon,  though  a  truly  clever
man,  was  a  mere  dabbler  in  inductive  science,  the
true  methods  of  which  he  quite  misapprehended.
At  best,  he  put  into  elegant  and  striking  language
an  estimate  of  the  tendency  of  science  towards
experimentalism,  and  a  forecast  of  the  results  to
be  obtained.  The  regeneration  of  these  last
centuries  is  due  to  a  long  series  of  philosophers,
from  Copernicus,  Galileo,  Descartes,  Newton,
Leibnitz,  down  to  Watt,  Faraday,  and  Joule.  Such
men  followed  a  procedure  very  different  from  that
of  Francis  Bacon.

II

OW  we  come  to  the  point  of  our  inquiry.  Is

x  ^  the  experimental  method  necessarily  restricted
to  the  world  of  physical  science  ?  Do  we  sufficiently
apply  to  moral,  social,  and  political  matters  those
methods  which  have  been  proved  so  valuable  in
the  hands  of  physical  philosophers  ?  Do  our
legislators,  in  short,  appeal  to  experiment  in  a
way  which  excepts  them  from  the  definition  of