Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/801

told to expand their souls to the measure of the universe, and they were unwilling to confess their inadequacy to the effort required of them. They were like men groping in the darkness for a door which they had but to throw wide, in order to find themselves in the full blaze of daylight; and they learned with reluctance that only by painful and prolonged exertions could they expect to open a chink here and there for a ray of twilight to enter.

This insensible change of front, as regards scientific method, is very clearly discernible in Hooke's writings. He began life with hopes as large as and more defined than those of Bacon himself. Even before he left Oxford, he had provided himself with what he called a "mechanical algebra," which he regarded as an infallible guide to invention. This he afterward expanded into an elaborate engine of discovery, competent, as he believed, to construct with certainty and swiftness an edifice of knowledge, heretofore unmatched for vastness and durability. The scheme, like all his more ambitious designs, remained incomplete, or, at most, was completed only in the mind of its author; and the tract in which he describes it breaks off just as the momentous secret is about to be disclosed. Whether it was that the difficulties in the way became more clear to him as he advanced, and that he lost faith in his own means of removing them, or whether it was that his jealousy of disclosure overbalanced, at the critical moment, his appetite for fame, we shall never know. We do know, however, enough to show us that the revelation would have been valuable only as a gratification of our curiosity, and as throwing a singular light on the visions which haunted the morning of experimental science.

The following extract from his essay on "The Present State of Natural Philosophy" briefly exposes his ideal of a method. He attempted, as will be seen, to come to closer quarters with the problem than Bacon had done, and succeeded thereby in more clearly defining its insolubility.

"Some other kind of art for inquiry," he writes,^[1] "than what hath been hitherto made use of, must be discovered; the intellect is not to be suffered to act without its helps, but is continually to be assisted by some method or engine, which shall be as a guide to regulate its actions, so as that it shall not be able to act amiss. Of this engine, no man except the incomparable Verulam hath had any thoughts, and he indeed hath promoted it to a very good pitch; but there is yet somewhat more to be added, which he seemed to want time to complete. By this, as by that art of Algebra in Geometry, 'twill be very easy to proceed in any natural inquiry, regularly and certainly: and indeed it may not improperly be called a Philosophical Algebra, or an art of directing the mind in the search after philosophical truths."

The first part only of this "Algebra of Discovery," "containing the manner of preparing the mind, and furnishing it with fit materials to work on," was written; the second, which should have set forth "the

1. "Posthumous Works," p. 6.