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In Bacon’s model inquiry, which occupies so great a space in the Novum Organum, the inquisitio in formam calidi, the conclusion which he favors is that heat is a kind of motion; meaning of course not the feeling of heat, but the conditions of the feeling; meaning, therefore, only that wherever there is heat, there must first be a particular kind of motion; but he makes no distinction in his language between these two ideas, expressing himself as if heat, and the conditions of heat, were one and the same thing.
On one occasion when Calidius was accusing a man of conspiring against his life, he pleaded with such smoothness and languor, that Cicero, who was for the defence, at once gained his cause by the argumentum ad hominem. Tu istuc M. Calidi nisi fingeres sic ageres? praesertim cum ista eloquentia alienorum hominum pericula defendere acerrime soleas, tuum negligeres?
When he is inquiring into what he terms the forma calidi aut frigidi, gravis aut levis, sicci aut humidi, and the like, he never for an instant doubts that there is some one thing, some invariable condition or set of conditions, which is present in all cases of heat, or cold, or whatever other phenomenon he is considering; the only difficulty being to find what it is; which accordingly he tries to do by a process of elimination, rejecting or excluding, by negative instances, whatever is not the forma or cause, in order to arrive at what is.
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