fruit'--the importance of winning solid material advantages by the
investigation of Nature and the desirableness of limiting the
application of scientific methods of inquiry to that field.

[Sidenote: Hobbes.]

[Sidenote: Descartes.]

Bacon's younger contemporary, Hobbes, casting aside the prudent
reserve of his predecessor in regard to those matters about which the
Crown or the Church might have something to say, extended scientific
methods of inquiry to the phenomena of mind and the problems of social
organisation; while, at the same time, he indicated the boundary
between the province of real, and that of imaginary, knowledge. The
'Principles of Philosophy' and the 'Leviathan' embody a coherent
system of purely scientific thought in language which is a model of
clear and vigorous English style. At the same time, in France, a man
of far greater scientific capacity than either Bacon or Hobbes, René
Descartes, not only in his immortal 'Discours de la Méthode' and
elsewhere, went down to the foundations of scientific certainty, but,
in his 'Principes de Philosophie,' indicated where the goal of
physical science really lay. However, Descartes was an eminent
mathematician, and it would seem that the bent of his mind led him to
overestimate the value of deductive reasoning from general principles,
as much as Bacon had underestimated it. The progress of physical
science has been effected neither by Baconians nor by Cartesians, as
such, but by men like Galileo and Harvey, Boyle and Newton, who would
have done their work just as well if neither Bacon nor Descartes had
ever propounded their views respecting the manner in which scientific
investigation should be pursued.