speculations, between natural and violent motions, though not without a plausible foundation in the appearances themselves, was doubtless greatly recommended to adoption by its conformity to this prejudice.
§ 7. From the fundamental error of the scientific inquirers of antiquity, we pass, by a natural association, to a scarcely less fundamental one of their great rival and successor, Bacon. It has excited the surprise of philosophers that the detailed system of inductive logic, which this extraordinary man labored to construct, has been turned to so little direct use by subsequent inquirers, having neither continued, except in a few of its generalities, to be recognized as a theory, nor having conducted in practice to any great scientific results. But this, though not unfrequently remarked, has scarcely received any plausible explanation; and some, indeed, have preferred to assert that all rules of induction are useless, rather than suppose that Bacon's rules are grounded on an insufficient analysis of the inductive process. Such, however, will be seen to be the fact, as soon as it is considered, that Bacon entirely overlooked Plurality of Causes. All his rules tacitly imply the assumption, so contrary to all we now know of nature, that a phenomenon can not have more than one cause.
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. But, that this forma or cause is one thing, and that it is the same in all hot objects, he has no more doubt of, than another person has that there is always some cause _or other_. In the present state of knowledge it could not be necessary, even if we had not already treated so fully of the question, to point out how widely this supposition is at variance with the truth. It is particularly unfortunate for Bacon that, falling into this error, he should have fixed almost exclusively upon a class of inquiries in which it was especially fatal; namely, inquiries into the causes of the sensible qualities of objects. For his assumption, groundless in every case, is false in a peculiar degree with respect to those sensible qualities. In regard to scarcely any of them has it been found possible to trace any unity of cause, any set of conditions invariably accompanying the quality. The conjunctions of such qualities with one another constitute the variety of Kinds, in which, as already remarked, it has not been found possible to trace any law. Bacon was seeking for what did not exist. The phenomenon of which he sought for the one cause has oftenest no cause at all, and when it has, depends (as far as hitherto ascertained) on an unassignable variety of distinct causes.
And on this rock every one must split, who represents to himself as the first and fundamental problem of science to ascertain what is the cause of a given effect, rather than what are the effects of a given cause. It was shown, in an early stage of our inquiry into the nature of Induction,(243) how much more ample are the resources which science commands for the latter than for the former inquiry, since it is upon the latter only that we can throw any direct light by means of experiment; the power of
