Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, v. 2 (Hardcover, New impression)

Excerpt: ...by which scientific truths have been established cannot be so presented as even to appear to be in accordance with it." How early this conviction had forced itself upon him, I cannot say; but it was certainly not later than 1859, when the "Origin of Species" was constantly met with "Oh, but this is contrary to the Baconian method." He had long felt what he expresses most clearly in the "Progress of Science" ("Collected Essays" 1 46-57), that Bacon's "majestic eloquence and fervid vaticinations," which "drew the attention of all the world to the 'new birth of Time, '" were yet, for all practical results on discovery, "a magnificent failure." The desire for "fruits" has not been the great motive of the discoverer; nor has discovery waited upon collective research. "Those who refuse to go beyond fact," he writes, "rarely get as far as fact; and any one who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the 'anticipation of nature, ' that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with; and, not unfrequently, in spite of a long career of usefulness, turned out to be wholly erroneous in the long-run." Thus he had been led to a settled disbelief in Bacon's scientific greatness, that reasoned "prejudice" against which Spedding himself was moved to write twice in defence of Bacon. In his first letter he criticised a passage in the lecture touching this question. On the one hand, he remarks, "Bacon would probably have agreed with you as to his pretensions as a scientific discoverer (he calls himself a bellman to call other wits together, or a trumpeter, or a maker of bricks for others to build with)." On the other hand, he asks, ought a passage from a fragment-the "Temporis partus masculus"-unpublished in Bacon's lifetime, to be treated as one of his representative opinions? In his second letter he adduces, on other grounds, his own more favourable...