and disfigures it. There are Idols also (4) of the Cave or Den (Idolc Specus); these are the accidental faults and prejudices of the individual inquirer.

On his guard against these idols, the philosopher who follows Bacon's teaching trusts to pure experience. Every thing in nature appears under certain conditions. Comparative experiments can be made to determine which of these conditions are essential, and which accidental. Thus we may advance from fact to fact, till, by successive testings and comparisons of facts, we reach one of the laws by which the course of nature is determined. So we ascend, by the method of induction, from the experiment to the axiom. But experiment may seem to have found a law with which some fact- some "negative instance" - is at odds. This contradiction must not be put out of sight, but taken simply as against acceptance of the law till it be reconciled with it. Nay, more, the investigator must use all his wit to invent combinations able to disprove his fact, if it be no fact; he must seek to invent negative instances, acting as counsel against himself until assured that his new fact will stand firm against any trial. "I think," said Bacon, "that a form of induction should be introduced which from certain instances should draw general conclusions, so that the impossibility of finding a contrary instance might be clearly proved." When so assured that it stands firm, the inquirer may announce his new truth confidently, and either deduce from it himself, or leave others to deduce its use to man.

In this philosophy Bacon did no more than express formally, distinctly, and with great influence over the minds of others, what had always been the tendency of English thought. His namesake, Roger Bacon, in the thirteenth century, had pursued science very much in the same spirit, and had nearly anticipated Francis Bacon's warning against the four idols, in his own four grounds of human ignorance. We must not forget, also, when we find feebleness in the scientific experiments of Francis Bacon and his followers, with the retention of much false opinion about nature, that what he professed was to show, not grand results, but the way to them. He bade his followers "be strong in hope, and not imagine that our 'Instauratio' is something infinite and beyond the reach of man, when really it is not unmindful of mortality and humanity; for it does not expect to complete its work within the course of a single age, but leaves this to the succession of ages; and, lastly, seeks for science, not arrogantly within the little cells of human wit, but humbly, in the greater world.”

20. Bacon's philosophy had arisen out of that part of the

energy of thought, quickened along its whole line, which prompted free inquiry into nature. It gave new impulse and a definite direction to the movement that produced it. Scientific studies had new charms for many minds, and there was an enthusiasm for experiment in the Baconian way. Many a quiet thinker, to whom civil war was terrible, turned aside from the tumult of the times, and found rest for his mind in the calm study of nature. Such men were drawn together by community of taste, driven together also by the discords round about them; and the influence of Bacon's books upon the growing energy of scientific thought was aided by the civil war.

66

But years before the civil war, the spirit of inquiry began to be active for advance of science. John Napier, of Merchistoun, used the same mind which had spent its energies, in 1593, upon "A Plaine Discovery of the whole Revelation of St. John," upon the discovery of the use of Logarithms, and set forth his invention, in 1614, as Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio." In the following year, 1615, William Harvey probably first brought forward, in lectures at the College of Physicians, his discovery of the circulation of the blood, afterwards more fully established and set forth in a small book, early in the reign of Charles I. Harvey at first lost practice by his new opinions, and his doctrine was not received by any physician who was more than forty years old; but he was made, in 1623, Physician Extraordinary to James I., and in 1632 Physician to Charles I.

21. John Wilkins was born in 1614, the son of a goldsmith, at Oxford, was educated there, graduated, took orders, and was chaplain, first to Lord Say, then to the Count Palatine of the Rhine. When the civil war broke out, he took the Solemn League and Covenant. In 1638 he published anonymously, “The Discovery of a New World; or, a Discourse tending to prove that 'tis probable there may be another Habitable World in the Moon." In 1640 this was followed by a "Discourse concerning a New Planet; tending to prove that 'tis probable our Earth is one of the Planets." Wilkins's book on the world in the moon closed with an argument for the proposition "that 'tis possible for some of our posterity to find out a conveyance to this other world; and if there be inhabitants there, to have commerce with them." His other tract, in support of the doctrine set forth by Copernicus, in 1543, and developed in the time of Charles I. by Galileo, included a temperate endeavor to meet those prevalent theological objections to which Galileo had been forced to bend. In 1641, he called attention to various methods of cipher-writing, as well as of telegraphing, by his "Mercury; or, the Secret and Swift Messenger: Shewing how a Man may with Privacy and Speed Communicate his Thoughts to a Friend at a Dis

37%

tance." In 1668, he was made Bishop of Chester; and in the same year his most interesting work, "An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language," was printed by the Royal Society. This applied natural philosophy to language, and labored towards the deduction from first principles of quickened intercourse among men, by an easy common language in which significant signs were to build up the meaning of each word. Bishop Wilkins died in 1672, at his friend Tillotson's house in Chancery Lane.

66

22. Samuel Hartlib was of a good Polish family; ancestors of his had been Privy Councillors to Emperors of Germany. He came to England about 1628, and his active beneficent mind brought him into friendship with many of the earnest thinkers of the time. In 1641, Hartlib published "A Brief Relation of that which hath been lately attempted to procure Ecclesiastical Peace among Protestants," and a "Description of Macaria," his ideal of a well-ordered state. In the midst of the strife of civil war, Hartlib was wholly occupied with scientific study, having especial regard to the extension and improvement of education, and the development of agriculture and manufactures. In 1642 he translated from the Latin of a Moravian pastor, John Amos Comenius, two treatises on A Reformation of Schooles." His zeal for the better education of the people, as a remedy for their distresses, caused him not only to give thought to the education of the poor, but also to attempt the establishment of a school for the improved education of the rich; and he asked Milton to print his ideas on the subject; hence the tract of eight pages published by Milton, in 1644, without titlepage, but inscribed on the top in one line, "Of Education. To Mr. Samuel Hartlib." In 1651 Hartlib edited a treatise on "Flemish Agriculture," which gave counsel that added greatly to the wealth of England. Among Hartlib's schemes was a plan for a sort of guild of science, which should unite students of nature into a brotherhood while they sought knowledge in the way set forth by Francis Bacon.

23. A young man of science who did not separate himself from the contest of the time was the mathematician, John Wallis, born in 1616, son of a rich incumbent of Ashford, Kent. His father died when he was six years old, his mother educated him for a learned profession, he went at sixteen to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is said to have been the first student who maintained Harvey's new doctrine of the circulation of the blood. There was no study of mathematics then in Cambridge; the best mathematicians were in London, and their science was little esteemed. Wallis graduated, obtained a fellowship at Queen's College, took orders in 1640, and acted as chaplain in private families until the Civil War. He then took the side of the Parliament, and used his mathematical skill in reading the secret ciphers of the Royalists. In 1643, he obtained the living of St. Gabriel, Fenchurch Street. In the same year the death of his mother gave him independent fortune. In 1644 he married, and was one of the secretaries of

the Assembly of Divines at Westminster. In 1645 he was among the men of science, and took part in the meetings which led to the formation of the Royal Society. In 1648 he was rector of a church in Ironmonger Lane. He remonstrated against the execution of Charles I., and in 1649 he was appointed Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford. He died in 1703.

CHAPTER VII.

FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: RELIGIOUS, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND POLITICAL WRITERS.

1. Owen Feltham.-2. Henry More.-3. Richard Sibbes.-4. Jeremy Taylor.-5. William Prynne.-6. Peter Heylin.-7. William Chillingworth.-8. Philip Hunton; Sir Robert Filmer.-9. John Gauden. - 10. John Milton.

1. THE religious mind of England had in the days of James I. and of Charles I., as always, manifold expression. There were many readers of the " Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political," published about 1628, by Owen Feltham, a man of middle-class ability, with a religious mind, who was maintained in the household of the Earl of Thomond. His Resolves are one hundred and forty-six essays on moral and religious themes, the writing of a quiet churchman, who paid little attention to the rising controversies of his day.

2. Henry More represented Platonism. He was born in 1614, at Grantham, in Lincolnshire, educated at Eton and Christ Church, Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship. He abandoned Calvinism, was influenced by Tauler's "Theologia Germanica," and fed his spiritual aspirations with writings of Plato and the Neoplatonists, Plotinus and Iamblichus, and Platonists of Italy at the time of the revival of scholarship. Henry More was for a time tutor in noble families, obtained a prebend at Gloucester, but soon resigned it in favor of a friend. Content with a small competence, he declined preferment, and sought to live up to his own ideal as a Christian Platonist. He lived on through the reign of Charles II., and died in 1687, aged seventy-three. The Platonism which had been a living influence upon Europe at the close of the fifteenth century had its last representative in Henry More. In 1642 he published "Pozoódu Platonica; or, a Platonical Song of the Soul," in four books;

66