This want, which he keenly felt, Francis Bacon tried to satisfy. He pointed out, vaguely, but zealously and in a noble spirit, the end which that new logic had to accomplish. Bacon, however, could not do more than state these bold suggestions: he had not the power to execute them. He imagined indeed that he could display a method, by which science would make incredible advances, and the kingdom of truth in a few years come into the world. But this is a sort of thing which no man can do. Plato, if we take his _Republic_ for a political pamphlet, had tried to do it for the social life of Athens. What Plato could not do for the political world of Greece, Bacon could not do for the intellectual world in his time: for as the Athenian worked under the shadow of his own state, over-mastered even without his knowledge by the ordinances of Athens, so the Englishman was evidently enthralled by the medieval conceptions and by the logic which he condemned. What Aristotle had for ages been supposed to do, no philosopher could do for the new spirit of inquiry which had risen in and before the days of Bacon. That spirit, as exhibited in his great contemporaries, Bacon, as he has himself shown, could not rightly understand or appreciate. He failed, above all, to recognise the self-corrective, tentative, and hypothetical nature, of all open inquiry. But one need not for this disparage his work. It showed a new sense of the magnitude of the modern problem: it set prominently forward the comprehensive aim of human welfare: and by its conception of the 'forma' it kept science pledged to a high ideal. But Bacon could only play the part of the guide-post: he could not himself lay down the road. And negatively he could warn against the belief that mathematics could _generate_ or do more indeed than _define_ the sciences. The spirit of free science, of critical investigation, of inductive inquiry, must and did constitute its forms, legislation, and methods for itself. For no philosopher can lay down laws or methods beforehand which the sciences must follow. The logician only comes after, and, appreciating and discovering the not always conspicuous methods of knowledge, endeavours to gather them up and give them their proper place in the grand total of human thought, correcting its inadequacies by their aid, and completing their divisions by its larger unities. Or rather this is a picture of what English logic might have done. But it does not do so in the ordinary and accepted text-books on the subject. What it does do, is rather as follows. To the second and fundamental part which it subjects to a few unimportant alterations,--i. e. to the doctrine of terms, propositions, and reasonings,--it subjoins an enumeration of the methods used in the sciences.