In truth he was so afraid of assumptions and "anticipations" and prejudices--his great bugbear was so much the "_intellectus sibi permissus_" the mind given liberty to guess and imagine and theorise, instead of, as it ought, absolutely and servilely submitting itself to the control of facts--that he missed the true place of the rational and formative element in his account of Induction.

He does tell us, indeed, that "truth emerges sooner from error than from confusion." He indulges the mind, in the course of its investigation of "Instances," with a first "vintage" of provisional generalisations.

But of the way in which the living mind of the discoverer works, with its ideas and insight, and thoughts that come no one knows whence, working hand in hand with what comes before the eye or is tested by the instrument, he gives us no picture.

Compare his elaborate investigation of the "Form of Heat" in the _Novum Organum_, with such a record of real inquiry as Wells's _Treatise on Dew_, or Herschel's analysis of it in his _Introduction to Natural Philosophy_.
And of the difference of genius between a Faraday or a Newton, and the crowd of average men who have used and finished off their work, he takes no account.

Indeed, he thinks that for the future such difference is to disappear.
"That his method is impracticable," says Mr.Ellis, "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.