In this he resembled Cardan and
Paracelsus who went before him, and who like him pulled down, but could
not, like him, build up. He resembled them, however, in the possession
of another element of character, namely, that poetic imagination which
looks abroad into the regions of possibilities, and foresees or invents.
But in the case of the charlatan, the vaguest suggestions of his mind in
its favourite mood, is adopted as a theory all but proved, if not as a
direct revelation to the favoured individual; while the true thinker
seeks but an hypothesis corresponding in some measure to facts already
discovered, in order that he may have the suggestion of new experiments
and investigations in the course of his attempts to verify or disprove
the hypothesis. Lord Bacon considered hypothesis invaluable in the
discovery of truth, but he only used it as a board upon which to write
his questions to nature; or, to use another figure, hypothesis with him
is as the next stepping-stone in the swollen river, which he supposes to
be here or there, and so feels for with his staff. But it must be proved
before it be regarded as a law, and greatly corroborated before it be
even adopted as a theory.
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