And, as a man is always of his time, he believed in alchemy and in the
possibility of transmuting base metals into gold. But note how he
understood it: "To create a new nature in a given body or to produce new
natures and to introduce them ... he who is acquainted with the forms and
modes of super-inducing yellowness, weight, ductility, fixity, fluidity,
solution, and the rest, with their gradations and methods, will see and
take care that these properties be united in some body, whence its
transformation into gold may follow." Modern chemistry, with scientific
methods highly analogous to those which Bacon indicated or foresaw, has not
made gold, which is not a very useful thing to do, but has done better.

THOMAS HOBBES.--At the end of the sixteenth century, another
Englishman, Thomas Hobbes, began to think. He was, above all else, a
literary man and a sociologist; he translated Thucydides and Homer, he
wrote _Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth_,
which is a manual of despotism, demonstrating that all men in a natural
state were beasts of prey with regard to one another, but that they escaped
this unpleasant fate by submission to a prince who has all rights because
he is perpetually saving his subjects from death, and who can therefore
impose on them whatever he pleases, even scientific dogma or religious
beliefs. Merely regarded as a philosopher, properly so called, Hobbes has
an important position in the history of ideas. Like Francis Bacon, but more
rigorously and authoritatively, he began by separating metaphysics and
theology from philosophy. Philosophy is the art of thinking. That which is
not sensible--mind, soul, God--cannot be thought: can only be believed;
philosophy does not deny all that; merely it does not concern itself
therewith. Here is the whole of positivism established in principle. What
we can think is what we feel. Things are known to us only through
sensations; a thought is a sensation, the human mind is a compound of
sensations.