T.H.  Huxley.

CHAPTER 2.10.

1878.

[The year 1878 was the tercentenary of Harvey’s birth, and Huxley was very busy with the life and work of that great physician.  He spoke at the memorial meeting at the College of Physicians (July 18), he gave a lecture on Harvey at the Royal Institution on January 25, afterwards published in “Nature” and the “Fortnightly Review,” and intended to write a book on him in a projected “English Men of Science” series.  (See below.)]

I am very glad you like “Harvey” [he writes to Professor Baynes on February 11].  He is one of the biggest scientific minds we have had.  I expect to get well vilipended not only by the anti-vivisection folk, for the most of whom I have a hearty contempt, but apropos of Bacon.  I have been oppressed by the humbug of the “Baconian Induction” all my life, and at last the worm has turned.

[Now in this lecture he showed that Harvey employed vivisection to establish the doctrine of the circulation of the blood, and furthermore, that he taught this doctrine before the “Novum Organum” was published, and that his subsequent “Exercitatio” displays no trace of being influenced by Bacon’s work.  After glancing at the superstitious reverence for the “Baconian Induction,” he pointed out Bacon’s ignorance of the progress of science up to his time, and his inability to divine the importance of what he knew by hearsay of the work of Copernicus, or Kepler, or Galileo; of Gilbert, his contemporary, or of Galen; and wound up by quoting Ellis’s severe judgment of Bacon in the General Preface to the Philosophic Works, in Spedding’s classical edition (page 38):—­] “That his method is impracticable cannot, I think, be denied, if we reflect, not only that it never has produced any result, but also that the process by which scientific truths have been established cannot be so presented as even to appear to be in accordance with it.”

[How early this conviction had forced itself upon him, I cannot say; but it was certainly not later than 1859, when the “Origin of Species” was constantly met with “Oh, but this is contrary to the Baconian method.”  He had long felt what he expresses most clearly in the “Progress of Science” ("Collected Essays” 1 46-57), that Bacon’s] “majestic eloquence and fervid vaticinations,” [which] “drew the attention of all the world to the ‘new birth of Time,’” [were yet, for all practical results on discovery,] “a magnificent failure.” [The desire for “fruits” has not been the great motive of the discoverer; nor has discovery waited upon collective research.] “Those who refuse to go beyond fact,” [he writes,] “rarely get as far as fact; and any one who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the ‘anticipation of nature,’ that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with; and, not unfrequently, in spite of a long career of usefulness, turned out to be wholly erroneous in the long-run.”