Bacon was the first of the long line of scientifically minded philosophers who have emphasized
the importance of induction as opposed to deduction. Like most of his successors, he tried to find
some better kind of induction than what is called "induction by simple enumeration." Induction by
simple enumeration may be illustrated by a parable. There was once upon a time a census officer
who had to record the names of all householders in a certain Welsh village. The first that he
questioned was called William Williams; so were the second, third, fourth,... At last he said to
himself: "This is tedious; evidently they are all called William Williams. I shall put them down so
and take a holiday." But he was wrong; there was just one whose name was John Jones. This
shows that we may go astray if we trust too implicitly in induction by simple enumeration.
Bacon believed that he had a method by which induction could be made something better than
this. He wished, for example, to discover the nature of heat, which he supposed (rightly) to consist
of rapid irregular motions of the small parts of bodies. His method was to make lists of hot bodies,
lists of cold bodies, and lists of bodies of varying degrees of heat. He hoped that these lists would
show some characteristic always present in hot bodies and absent in cold bodies, and present in
varying degrees in bodies of different degress of heat. By this method he expected to arrive at
general laws, having, in the first instance, the lowest degree of generality. From a number of such
laws he hoped to reach laws of the second degree of generality, and so on. A suggested law should
be tested by being applied in new circumstances; if it worked in these circumstances it was to that
extent confirmed. Some instances are specially valuable because they enable us to decide between
two theories, each possible so far as previous observations are concerned; such instances are
called "prerogative" instances.
Bacon not only despised the syllogism, but undervalued mathematics, presumably as insufficiently
experimental. He was virulently hostile to Aristotle, but thought very highly of Democritus.
Although he did not deny that the course of nature exemplifies a Divine purpose, he objected to
any admixture of teleological explanation in the actual investigation of phenomena; everything, he
held, should be explained as following necessarily from efficient causes.
He valued his method as showing how to arrange the observational