artificially producing an effect, implying a previous knowledge of at least one of its causes. If we discover the causes of effects, it is generally by having previously discovered the effects of causes; the greatest skill in devising crucial instances for the former purpose may only end, as Bacon's physical inquiries did, in no result at all. Was it that his eagerness to acquire the power of producing for man's benefit effects of practical importance to human life, rendering him impatient of pursuing that end by a circuitous route, made even him, the champion of experiment, prefer the direct mode, though one of mere observation, to the indirect, in which alone experiment was possible? Or had even Bacon not entirely cleared his mind from the notion of the ancients, that "rerum cognoscere causas" was the sole object of philosophy, and that to inquire into the effects of things belonged to servile and mechanical arts?
It is worth remarking that, while the only efficient mode of cultivating speculative science was missed from an undue contempt of manual operations, the false speculative views thus engendered gave in their turn a false direction to such practical and mechanical aims as were suffered to exist. The assumption universal among the ancients and in the Middle Ages, that there were principles of heat and cold, dryness and moisture, etc., led directly to a belief in alchemy; in a transmutation of substances, a change from one Kind into another. Why should it not be possible to make gold? Each of the characteristic properties of gold has its forma, its essence, its set of conditions, which if we could discover, and learn how to realize, we could superinduce that particular property upon any other substance, upon wood, or iron, or lime, or clay. If, then, we could effect this with respect to every one of the essential properties of the precious metal, we should have converted the other substance into gold. Nor did this, if once the premises were granted, appear to transcend the real powers of mankind. For daily experience showed that almost every one of the distinctive sensible properties of any object, its consistence, its color, its taste, its smell, its shape, admitted of being totally changed by fire, or water, or some other chemical agent. The formæ of all those qualities seeming, therefore, to be within human power either to produce or to annihilate, not only did the transmutation of substances appear abstractedly possible, but the employment of the power, at our choice, for practical ends, seemed by no means hopeless.(244)
A prejudice, universal in the ancient world, and from which Bacon was so far from being free, that it pervaded and vitiated the whole practical part of his system of logic, may with good reason be ranked high in the order of Fallacies of which we are now treating.
§ 8. There remains one a priori fallacy or natural prejudice, the most deeply-rooted, perhaps, of all which we have enumerated; one which not only reigned supreme in the ancient world, but still possesses almost undisputed dominion over many of the most cultivated minds; and some of the most remarkable of the numerous instances by which I shall think it necessary to exemplify it, will be taken from recent thinkers. This is, that the conditions of a phenomenon must, or at least probably will, resemble the phenomenon itself.
