" The conception, indeed, of
a "great Art of knowledge," of an "Instauration" of the sciences, of a
"Clavis" which should unlock the difficulties which had hindered
discovery, was not a new one. This attempt at a method which should be
certain, which should level capacities, which should do its work in a
short time, had a special attraction for the imagination of the wild
spirits of the South, from Raimond Lulli in the thirteenth century to
the audacious Calabrians of the sixteenth. With Bacon it was something
much more serious and reasonable and business-like. But such a claim has
never yet been verified; there is no reason to think that it ever can
be; and to have made it shows a fundamental defect in Bacon's conception
of the possibilities of the human mind and the field it has to work in.
In the next place, though the prominence which he gave to the doctrine
of Induction was one of those novelties which are so obvious after the
event, though so strange before it, and was undoubtedly the element in
his system which gave it life and power and influence on the course of
human thought and discovery, his account of Induction was far from
complete and satisfactory.
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