Nil • Despemnchim. 159

tude of treatises than added to their weight; the ne-
glect of Natural Philosophy, " the great mother of the
Sciences/7 which have been torn from her womb and so
severed from their root; waste of time in unprofitable
talk; reverence for " the world's youth; " * a lazy con-
tent with discoveries already made ; the quackery of
magicians and the habit of limiting investigation to ono
subject, as the magnet, the sea, the heavens, of which
Bacon, in the wide range of his ambition, did not realise
the need. He ends his list with his prevailing note—-
that of the herald, bell-ringer, and trumpeter of the
race : " The greatest obstacle to progress is that men
despair and think things impossible,"—and then passes
to the grounds of Hope (Aph. 92-115).

After a characteristic appeal to prophecy, he main-
tains that our knowledge of the errors of the past, as
arising from the divorce of the experimental and reason-
ing faculties, is an argument for trust in the future. We
have now a better understanding of the true functions
of Philosophy, which must no longer be subservient
either to Logic or to Mathematics; we have the begin-
nings of a more extensive Natural History, and new
helps to making it profitable,—a result which, will be
achieved if we do not sever the sciences from their stem,
and discard the common childish induction by simple
enumeration, whose conclusions, exposed to the refuta-
tion of a single negative, are precarious. Everything
may be expected from the now method when wo con-
sider what has bemi done without it. "Living In the

1 To previous instances of the use of thi.s phrase we may add that,
of Otto (Jasmaim. It has been traced to Ksrtras. "The world has
lost its youth, and the times begin to wax old."