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I worked on true Baconian principles; and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale, more especially with respect to domesticated productions, by printed inquiries, by conversation with skilful breeders and gardeners, and by extensive reading.
Greenwood cannot mean that; for he is not a Baconian. What DOES he mean? Put together his pages 483, 489-491.
I felt that politics could not be a science of specific experience; and that the accusations against the Benthamic theory of being a theory, of proceeding a priori by way of general reasoning, instead of Baconian experiment, showed complete ignorance of Bacon's principles, and of the necessary conditions of experimental investigation.
The schemes which have been recently broached in Germany, and imitated in France, for constructing, at one time, a deductive Psychology, at another a deductive Physics, at a third a deductive Ethics, at a fourth a deductive Theory of Progress, at a fifth a deductive History of Religion, afford more than sufficient evidence that hitherto the spirit of the Baconian philosophy has been little understood, and still less appreciated, by our continental neighbors; and that the efforts of the highest genius have been sadly frustrated, in attempting the impracticable task of extracting from mere reason that knowledge which can only be acquired in the school of experience.
The only question is whether it shall take the pomp of a priori speculation or conceal itself under a show of 'Baconian induction. On one point they agree. Both Mill and Macaulay profess unbounded confidence in the virtue and wisdom of the middle, that is, of their own class.
Waldron was a strict disciplinarian with a gift of acid humor, as exemplified upon the gentleman with the red tie, which made it perilous to interrupt him. But this interjection appeared to him so absurd that he was at a loss how to deal with it. So looks the Shakespearean who is confronted by a rancid Baconian, or the astronomer who is assailed by a flat-earth fanatic.
In that he shows, with great logical skill, as well as with some humour, how the man who, on rising in the morning finds the parlour- window open, the spoons and teapot gone, the mark of a dirty hand on the window-sill, and that of a hob-nailed boot outside, and comes to the conclusion that someone has broken open the window, and stolen the plate, arrives at that hypothesis for it is nothing more by a long and complex train of inductions and deductions of just the same kind as those which, according to the Baconian philosophy, are to be used for investigating the deepest secrets of Nature.
But any hypothesis is, in Mr. Montagu's opinion, more probable than that his hero should ever have done anything very wrong. This mode of defending Bacon seems to us by no means Baconian. To take a man's character for granted, and then from his character to infer the moral quality of all his actions, is surely a process the very reverse of that which is recommended in the Novum Organum.
"But, at any rate, we have the Stratford monument," says Mr. Greenwood, and delves into this problem. Even the Stratford monument of Shakespeare in the parish church is haunted by Baconian mysteries. "Thou wast that all to me, Will, For which my soul did pine."
Aubrey Moore, writing in 1889, connected the Catholic revival with the abandonment of atomism in natural philosophy and of Baconian metaphysics. These were, he thought, the counterpart of individualism in politics and Calvinism in religion.
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