future duration, that stretch out on both sides of the narrow isthmus
(time) occupied by man. It must be remembered that Bacon lived before
the doctrine of limits gave rise to the higher calculus, and therefore
could have no conception of different denominations of infinities:
on the other hand he would have thought the man insane who should
have talked to him about lines infinitely great, inclosing angles
infinitely little; that a right line, which is a right line so long
as it is finite, by changing infinitely little its direction, becomes
an infinite curve, and that a curve may become infinitely less than
another curve; that there are infinite squares and infinite cubes, and
infinites of infinites, all greater than one another, and the last
but one of which is nothing in comparison with the last. Yet half a
century sufficed from Bacon’s time, to make this nomenclature, which
would have appeared to him the excess of frenzy, not only reasonable
but necessary, to grasp the higher demonstrations of physical
science.--_Ed._
[17] Spinoza, in his letter to Oldenberg (Op. Posth. p. 398), considers
this aphorism based on a wrong conception of the origin of error,
and, believing it to be fundamental, was led to reject Bacon’s method
altogether. Spinoza refused to acknowledge in man any such thing as a
will, and resolved all his volitions into particular acts, which he
considered to be as fatally determined by a chain of physical causes as
any effects in nature.--_Ed._
[18] _Operatio spirituum in corporibus tangibilibus._ Bacon
distinguished with the schools the gross and tangible parts of bodies,
from such as were volatile and intangible. These, in conformity with
the scholastic language, he terms spirits, and frequently returns to
their operations in the 2d book.--_Ed._
[19] Democritus, of Abdera, a disciple of Leucippus, born B.C. 470,
died 360; all his works are destroyed. He is said to be the author of
the doctrine of atoms: he denied the immortality of the soul, and first
taught that the milky way was occasioned by a confused light from a
multitude of stars. He may be considered as the parent of experimental
philosophy, in the prosecution of which he was so ardent as to declare
that he would prefer the discovery of one of the causes of natural
phenomena, to the possession of the diadem of Persia. Democritus
imposed on the blind credulity of his contemporaries, and, like Roger
Bacon, astonished them by his inventions.--_Ed._
[20] The Latin is _actus purus_, another scholastic expression to
denote the action of the substance, which composes the essence of the
body apart from its accidental qualities. For an exposition of the
various kinds of motions he contemplates, the reader may refer to the
48th aphorism of the 2d book.--_Ed._
[21] The scholastics after Aristotle distinguished in a subject three
modes of beings: viz., the power or faculty, the act, and the habitude,
or in other words that which is able to exist, what exists actually,
and what continues to exist. Bacon means that is necessary to fix our
attention not on that which can or ought to be, but on that which
actually is; not on the right, but on the fact.--_Ed._
[22] The inference to be drawn from this is to suspect that kind of
evidence which is most consonant to our inclinations, and not to admit
any notion as real except we can base it firmly upon that kind of
demonstration which is peculiar to the subject, not to our impression.
Sometimes the mode of proof may be consonant to our inclinations, and
to the subject at the same time, as in the case of Pythagoras, when he
applied his beloved numbers to the solution of astronomical phenomena;
or in that of Descartes, when he reasoned geometrically concerning the
nature of the soul. Such examples cannot be censured with justice,
inasmuch as the methods pursued were adapted to the end of the inquiry.
The remark in the text can only apply to those philosophers who attempt
to build up a moral or theological system by the instruments of
induction alone, or who rush, with the geometrical axiom, and the _à
priori_ syllogism, to the investigation of nature. The means in such
cases are totally inadequate to the object in view.--_Ed._
[23] Gilbert lived toward the close of the sixteenth century, and was
court physician to both Elizabeth and James. In his work alluded to
in the text he continually asserts the advantages of the experimental
over the _à priori_ method in physical inquiry, and succeeded when
his censor failed in giving a practical example of the utility of his
precepts. His “De Magnete” contains all the fundamental parts of the
science, and these so perfectly treated, that we have nothing to add to
them at the present day.
Gilbert adopted the Copernican system, and even spoke of the contrary
theory as utterly absurd, grounding his argument on the vast velocities
which such a supposition requires us to ascribe to the heavenly
bodies.--_Ed._
[24] The Latin text adds “without end”; but Bacon is scarcely right
in supposing that the descent from complex ideas and propositions to
those of simple nature, involve the analyst in a series of continuous
and interminable definitions. For in the gradual and analytical scale,
there is a bar beyond which we cannot go, as there is a summit bounded
by the limited variations of our conceptions. Logical definitions, to
fulfil their conditions, or indeed to be of any avail, must be given in
simpler terms than the object which is sought to be defined; now this,
in the case of primordial notions and objects of sense, is impossible;
therefore we are obliged to rest satisfied with the mere names of our
perceptions.--_Ed._
[25] The ancients supposed the planets to describe an exact circle
round the south. As observations increased and facts were disclosed,
which were irreconcilable with this supposition, the earth was removed
from the centre to some other point in the circle, and the planets were
supposed to revolve in a smaller circle (epicycle) round an imaginary
point, which in its turn described a circle of which the earth was
the centre. In proportion as observation elicited fresh facts,
contradictory to these representations, other epicycles and eccentrics
were added, involving additional confusion. Though Kepler had swept
away all these complicated theories in the preceding century, by the
demonstration of his three laws, which established the elliptical
course of the planets, Bacon regarded him and Copernicus in the same
light as Ptolemy and Xenophanes.--_Ed._
[26] Empedocles, of Agrigentum, flourished 444 B.C. He was the
disciple of Telanges the Pythagorean, and warmly adopted the doctrine
of transmigration. He resolved the universe into the four ordinary
elements, the principles of whose composition were life and happiness,
or concord and amity, but whose decomposition brought forth death and
evil, or discord and hatred. Heraclitus held matter to be indifferent
to any peculiar form, but as it became rarer or more dense, it took the
appearance of fire, air, earth and water. Fire, however, he believed to
be the elementary principle out of which the others were evolved. This
was also the belief of Lucretius. See book i. 783, etc.
[27] It is thus the Vulcanists and Neptunians have framed their
opposite theories in geology. Phrenology is a modern instance of hasty
generalization.--_Ed._
[28] In Scripture everything which concerns the passing interests of
the body is called dead; the only living knowledge having regard to the
eternal interest of the soul.--_Ed._
[29] In mechanics and the general sciences, causes compound their
effects, or in other words, it is generally possible to deduce _à
priori_ the consequence of introducing complex agencies into any
experiment, by allowing for the effect of each of the simple causes
which enter into their composition. In chemistry and physiology a
contrary law holds; the causes which they embody generally uniting
to form distinct substances, and to introduce unforeseen laws and
combinations. The deductive method here is consequently inapplicable,
and we are forced back upon experiment.
Bacon in the text is hardly consistent with himself, as he admits in
the second book the doctrine, to which modern discovery points, of the
reciprocal transmutation of the elements. What seemed poetic fiction
in the theories of Pythagoras and Seneca, assumes the appearance of
scientific fact in the hands of Baron Caynard.--_Ed._
[30] Galileo had recently adopted the notion that nature abhorred a
vacuum for an axiomatic principle, and it was not till Torricelli, his
disciple, had given practical proof of the utility of Bacon’s method,
by the discovery of the barometer (1643) that this error, as also that
expressed below, and believed by Bacon, concerning the homœopathic
tendencies of bodies, was destroyed.--_Ed._
[31] _Donec ad materiam potentialem et informem ventum fuerit._ Nearly
all the ancient philosophers admitted the existence of a certain
primitive and shapeless matter as the substratum of things which the
creative power had reduced to fixed proportions, and resolved into
specific substances. The expression potential matter refers to that
substance forming the basis of the Peripatetic system, which virtually
contained all the forms that it was in the power of the efficient cause
to draw out of it.--_Ed._
[32] An allusion to the humanity of the _Sultans_, who, in their
earlier histories are represented as signalizing their accession to
the throne by the destruction of their family, to remove the danger of
rivalry and the terrors of civil war.--_Ed._
[33] The text is “in odium veterum sophistarum, Protagoræ, Hippiæ,
et reliquorum.” Those were called sophists, who, _ostentationis aut
questus causa philosophabantur_. (Acad. Prior. ii. 72.) They had
corrupted and degraded philosophy before Socrates. Protagoras of
Abdera (Ἄβδηρα), the most celebrated, taught that man is the measure
of all things, by which he meant not only that all which can be known
is known only as it related to our faculties, but also that apart from
our faculties nothing can be known. The sceptics equally held that
knowledge was probable only as it related to our faculties, but they
stopped there, and did not, like the sophist, dogmatize about the
unknown. The works of Protagoras were condemned for their impiety, and
publicly burned by the ædiles of Athens, who appear to have discharged
the office of common hangmen to the literary blasphemers of their
day.--_Ed._
[34] Bacon is hardly correct in implying that the _enumerationem
per simplicem_ was the only light in which the ancients looked upon
induction, as they appear to have regarded it as only one, and that
the least important, of its species. Aristotle expressly considers
induction in a perfect or dialectic sense, and in an imperfect or
rhetorical sense. Thus if a genus (=G=), contains four species (=A=,
=B=, =C=, =D=), the syllogism would lead us to infer, that what is true
of =G=, is true of any one of the four. But perfect induction would
reason, that what we can prove of =A=, =B=, =C=, =D=, separately, we
may properly state as true of =G=, the whole genus. This is evidently
a formal argument as demonstrative as the syllogism. In necessary
matters, however, legitimate induction may claim a wider province,
and infer of the whole genus what is only apparent in a part of
the species. Such are those inductive inferences which concern the
laws of nature, the immutability of forms, by which Bacon strove to
erect his new system of philosophy. The Stagyrite, however, looked
upon _enumerationem per simplicem_, without any regard to the nature
of the matter, or to the completeness of the species, with as much
reprehensive caution as Bacon, and guarded his readers against it as
the source of innumerable errors.--_Ed._
[35] See Ax. lxi. toward the end. This subject extends to Ax. lxxviii.
[36] Gorgias of Leontium went to Athens in 424 B.C. He and Polus were
disciples of Empedocles, whom we have already noticed (Aphorism 63),
where he sustained the three famous propositions, that nothing exists,
that nothing can be known, and that it is out of the power of man
to transmit or communicate intelligence. He is reckoned one of the
earliest writers on the art of rhetoric, and for that reason, Plato
called his elegant dialogue on that subject after his name.
[37] Chrysippus, a stoic philosopher of Soli in Cilicia, Campestris,
born in 280, died in the 143d Olympiad, 208 B.C. He was equally
distinguished for natural abilities and industry, seldom suffering
a day to elapse without writing 500 lines. He wrote several hundred
volumes, of which three hundred were on logical subjects; but in all,
borrowed largely from others. He was very fond of the _sorites_ in
argument, which is hence called by Persius the heap of Chrysippus.
He was called the Column of the Portico, a name given to the Stoical
School from Zeno, its founder, who had given his lessons under the
portico.
Carneades, born about 215, died in 130. He attached himself to
Chrysippus, and sustained with _éclat_ the scepticism of the academy.
The Athenians sent him with Critolaus and Diogenes as ambassador
to Rome, where he attracted the attention of his new auditory by
the subtilty of his reasoning, and the fluency and vehemence of his
language. Before Galba and Cato the Censor, he harangued with great
variety of thought and copiousness of diction in praise of justice.
The next day, to establish his doctrine of the uncertainty of human
knowledge, he undertook to refute all his arguments. He maintained
with the New Academy, that the senses, the imagination, and the
understanding frequently deceive us, and therefore cannot be infallible
judges of truth, but that from the impressions produced on the mind by
means of the senses, we infer appearances of truth or probabilities.
Nevertheless, with respect to the conduct of life, Carneades held that
probable opinions are a sufficient guide.
Xenophanes, a Greek philosopher, of Colophon, born in 556, the founder
of the Eleatic school, which owes its fame principally to Parmenides.
Wild in his opinions about astronomy, he supposed that the stars were
extinguished every morning, and rekindled at night; that eclipses were
occasioned by the temporary extinction of the sun, and that there were
several suns for the convenience of the different climates of the
earth. Yet this man held the chair of philosophy at Athens for seventy
years.
Philolaus, a Pythagorean philosopher of Crotona, B.C. 374. He first
supported the diurnal motion of the earth round its axis, and its
annual motion round the sun. Cicero (Acad. iv. 39) has ascribed this
opinion to the Syracusan philosopher Nicetas, and likewise to Plato.
From this passage, it is most probable that Copernicus got the idea of
the system he afterward established. Bacon, in the Advancement of Human
Learning, charges Gilbert with restoring the doctrines of Philolaus,
because he ventured to support the Copernican theory.--_Ed._
[38] Bacon is equally conspicuous for the use and abuse of analogical
illustrations. The levity, as Stuart Mill very properly observes, by
which substances float on a stream, and the levity which is synonymous
with worthlessness, have nothing beside the name in common; and to
show how little value there is in the figure, we need only change the
word into buoyancy, to turn the semblance of Bacon’s argument against
himself.--_Ed._
[39] We have before observed, that the New Academy did not profess
skepticism, but the ἀκατάληψια, or incomprehensibility of the absolute
essences of things. Even modern physicists are not wanting, to assert
with this school that the utmost knowledge we can obtain is relative,
and necessarily short of absolute certainty. It is not without an
appearance of truth that these philosophers maintain that our ideas
and perceptions do not express the nature of the things which they
represent, but only the effects of the peculiar organs by which they
are conveyed to the understanding, so that were these organs changed,
we should have different conceptions of their nature. That constitution
of air which is dark to man is luminous to bats and owls.
[40] Owing to the universal prevalence of Aristotelism.
[41] It must be remembered, that when Bacon wrote, algebra was in its
infancy, and the doctrine of units and infinitesimals undiscovered.
[42] Because the vulgar make up the overwhelming majority in such
decisions, and generally allow their judgments to be swayed by passion
or prejudice.
[43] See end of Axiom lxi. The subject extends to Axiom xc.
[44] If we adopt the statement of Herodotus, who places the Homeric
era 400 years back from his time, Homer lived about 900 years before
Christ. On adding this number to the sixteen centuries of the Christian
era which had elapsed up to Bacon’s time, we get the twenty-five
centuries he mentions. The Homeric epoch is the furthest point in
antiquity from which Bacon could reckon with any degree of certainty.
Hesiod, if he were not contemporary, immediately preceded him.
The epoch of Greek philosophy may be included between Thales and
Plato, that is, from the 35th to the 88th Olympiad; that of the Roman,
between Terence and Pliny. The modern revolution, in which Bacon is
one of the central figures, took its rise from the time of Dante and
Petrarch, who lived at the commencement of the fourteenth century; and
to which, on account of the invention of printing, and the universal
spread of literature, which has rendered a second destruction of
learning impossible, it is difficult to foresee any other end than the
extinction of the race of man.--_Ed._
[45] The allusion is evidently to Roger Bacon and Réné Descartes.--_Ed._
[46] From the abuse of the scholastics, who mistook the _à priori_
method, the deductive syllogism, for the entire province of
logic.--_Ed._
[47] See Aphorism xcv.
[48] The incongruity to which Bacon alludes appears to spring from
confounding two things, which are not only distinct, but affect human
knowledge in inverse proportion, viz., the experience which terminates
with life, with that experience which one century transmits to
another.--_Ed._
[49] The Chinese characters resemble, in many respects, the
hieroglyphics of the Egyptians, being adapted to represent ideas, not
sounds.
[50] See Axiom 75.
[51] The methods by which Newton carried the rule and compass to the
boundaries of creation is a sufficient comment on the sagacity of the
text. The same cause which globulizes a bubble, has rounded the earth,
and the same law which draws a stone to its surface, keeps the moon in
her orbit. It was by calculating and ascertaining these principles upon
substances entirely at his disposal that this great philosopher was
enabled to give us a key to unlock the mysteries of the universe.--_Ed._
[52] See the “Clouds” of Aristophanes, where Socrates is represented as
chasing Jupiter out of the sky, by resolving thunderstorms into aërial
concussions and whirlwinds.--_Ed._
[53] Robespierre was the latest victim of this bigotry. In his younger
days he attempted to introduce Franklin’s lightning conductor into
France, but was persecuted by those whose lives he sought to protect,
as one audaciously striving to avert the designs of Providence.--_Ed._
[54] We can hardly agree with the text. The scholastics, in building
up a system of divinity, certainly had recourse to the deductive
syllogism, because the inductive was totally inapplicable, except as
a verificatory process. With regard to the technical form in which
they marshalled their arguments, which is what our author aims at in
his censure, they owed nothing at all to Aristotle, the conducting a
dispute in naked syllogistic fashion having originated entirely with
themselves.--_Ed._
[55] Bacon cannot be supposed to allude to those divines who have
attempted to show that the progress of physical science is confirmatory
of revelation, but only to such as have built up a system of faith out
of their own refinements on nature and revelation, as Patricius and
Emanuel Swedenborg.--_Ed._
[56] Daniel xii. 4.
[57] Bacon, in this Aphorism, appears to have entertained a fair
idea of the use of the inductive and deductive methods in scientific
inquiry, though his want of geometrical knowledge must have hindered
him from accurately determining the precise functions of each, as
it certainly led him in other parts of the Organon (V. Aph. 82), to
undervalue the deductive, and, as he calls it, the dogmatic method, and
to rely too much upon empiricism.--_Ed._
[58] The reader may consult the note of the 23d Aphorism for the fault
which Bacon censures, and, if he wish to pursue the subject further,
may read Plato’s Timæus, where that philosopher explains his system
in detail. Bacon, however, is hardly consistent in one part of his
censure, for he also talks about the spirit and appetites of inanimate
substances, and that so frequently, as to preclude the supposition that
he is employing metaphor.--_Ed._
[59] Proclus flourished about the beginning of the fifth century,
and was the successor of Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblicus, who, in
the two preceding centuries, had revived the doctrines of Plato, and
assailed the Christian religion. The allusion in the text must be
assigned to Iamblicus, who, in the fourth century, had republished
the Pythagorean theology of numbers, and endeavored to construct the
world out of arithmetic, thinking everything could be solved by the
aid of proportions and geometry. Bacon must not be understood in the
text to censure the use but the abuse of mathematics and physical
investigations, as in the “De Augmentis” (lib. iv. c. 6), he enumerates
the multiplicity of demonstration scientific facts admit of, from this
source.--_Ed._
[60] See Livy, lib. ix. c. 17, where, in a digression on the probable
effect of a contest between Rome and Alexander the Great, he says: “Non
cum Dario rem esse dixisset: quem mulierum ac spadonum agmen trahentem
inter purpuram atque aurum, oneratum fortunæ apparatibus, prædam
veriùs quam hostem, nihil aliud quam ausus vana contemnere, incruentus
devicit.”
[61] The lowest axioms are such as spring from simple experience--such
as in chemistry, that animal substances yield no fixed salt by
calcination; in music, that concords intermixed with discords make
harmony, etc. Intermediate axioms advance a step further, being the
result of reflection, which, applied to our experimental knowledge,
deduces laws from them, such as in optics of the first degree of
generality, that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of
reflection; and in mechanics, Kepler’s three laws of motion, while
his general law, that all bodies attract each other with forces
proportional to their masses, and inversely as the squares of their
distances, may be taken as one of the highest axioms. Yet so far is
this principle from being only notional or abstract, it has presented
us with a key which fits into the intricate wards of the heavens, and
has laid bare to our gaze the principal mechanism of the universe.
But natural philosophy in Bacon’s day had not advanced beyond
intermediate axioms, and the term notional or abstract is applied to
those general axioms then current, not founded on the solid principles
of inductive inquiry, but based upon _à priori_ reasoning and airy
metaphysics.--_Ed._
[62] This hope has been abundantly realized in the discovery of gravity
and the decomposition of light, mainly by the inductive method. To a
better philosophy we may also attribute the discovery of electricity,
galvanism and their mutual connection with each other, and magnetism,
the inventions of the air-pump, steam-engine and the chronometer.