第60章

2. The other remarkable feature in Bacon is that in his second work, his Organon, he sought at great length to establish a new method in learning; in this regard his name is still held greatly in honour by many. What chiefly distinguishes his system is his polemical attitude towards scholastic methods as they had hitherto existed, towards syllogistic forms. He calls these methods anticipationes natur?; in them men begin with pre-suppositions, definitions, accepted ideas, with a scholastic abstraction, and reason further from these without regarding that which is present in actuality. Thus regarding God and His methods of operating in nature, regarding devils, &c., they make use of passages from the Bible, such as “Sun, stand thou still,” in order to deduce therefrom certain metaphysical propositions from which they go further still. It was against this a priori method that Bacon directed his polemic; as against these anticipations of nature he called attention to the explanation, the interpretation of nature. (6) “The same action of mind,” he says, “which discovers a thing in question, judges it; and the operation is not performed by the help of any middle term, but directly, almost in the same manner as by the sense. For the sense in its primary objects at once apprehends the appearance of the object, and consents to the truth thereof.” (7) The syllogism is altogether rejected by Bacon. As a matter of fact, this Aristotelian deduction is not a knowledge through itself in accordance with its content: it requires a foreign universal as its basis, and for that reason its movement is in its form contingent. The content is not in unity with the form, and this form is hence in itself contingent, because it, considered on its own account, is the movement onwards in a foreign content. The major premise is the content existent for itself, the minor is likewise the content not through itself, for it goes back into the infinite, i.e., it has not the form in itself; the form is not the content. The opposite may always be made out equally well through the syllogism, for it is a matter of indifference to this form what content is made its basis. “Dialectic does not assist in the discovery of the arts; many arts were found out by chance.” (8)It was not against this syllogism generally, i.e., not against the Notion of it (for Bacon did not possess this), but against deduction as it was put into operation, as it was to the scholastics - the deduction which took an assumed content as its basis - that Bacon declaimed, urging that the content of experience should be made the basis, and the method of induction pursued. He demanded that observations on nature and experiments should be made fundamental, and pointed out the objects whose investigation was of special importance in the interests of human society, and so on. From this there then resulted the establishment of conclusions through induction and analogy. (9) In fact it was only to an alteration in the content that, without being aware of it, Bacon was impelled. For though he rejected the syllogism and only permitted conclusions to be reached through induction, he unconsciously himself drew deductions; likewise all these champions of empiricism, who followed after him, and who put into practice what he demanded, and thought they could by observations, experiments and experiences, keep the matter in question pure, could neither so do without drawing deductions, nor without introducing conceptions; and they drew their deductions and formed their notions and conceptions all the more freely because they thought that they had nothing to do with conceptions at all; nor did they go forth from deduction to immanent, true knowledge. Thus when Bacon set up induction in opposition to the syllogism, this opposition is formal; each induction is also a deduction, which fact was known even to Aristotle.

For if a universal is deduced from a number of things, the first proposition reads, “These bodies have these qualities;” the second, “All these bodies belong to one class;” and thus, in the third place, this class has these qualities. That is a perfect syllogism. Induction always signifies that observations are instituted, experiments made, experience regarded, and from this the universal determination is derived.