this chapter, include the land itself above and under the water,
all buildings and other articles and structures, substructures,
and superstructures, erected upon, under, or above, or affixed to
the same; all wharves and piers, including the value of the right
to collect wharfage, cranage, or dockage thereon; all bridges,
all telegraph lines, wires, poles, and appurtenances; all
supports and inclosures for electrical conductors and other
appurtenances upon, above, and underground; all surface,
underground, or elevated railroads, including the value of all
franchises, rights or permission to construct, maintain, or
operate the same in, under, above, on, or through streets,
highways, or public places; all railroad structures,
substructures, and superstructures, tracks, and the iron thereon,
branches, switches, and other fixtures permitted or authorized to
be made, laid, or placed on, upon, above, or under any public or
private road, street, or grounds; all mains, pipes, and tanks
laid or placed in, upon, above, or under any public or private
street or place for conducting steam, heat, water, oil,
electricity, or any property, substance, or product capable of
transportation or conveyance therein, or that is protected
thereby, including the value of all franchises, rights,
authority, or permission to construct, maintain, or operate in,
under, above, upon, or through any streets, highways, or public
places, any mains, pipes, tanks, conduits, or wires, with their
appurtenances, for conducting water, steam, heat, light, power,
gas, oil, or other substance, or electricity for telegraphic,
telephonic, or other purposes; all trees and underwood growing
upon land, and all mines, minerals, quarries, and fossils in and
under the same, except mines belonging to the State. A franchise,
right, authority, or permission, specified in this subdivision,
shall for the purposes of taxation be known as a 'special
franchise.' A special franchise shall be deemed to include the
value of the tangible property of a person, copartnership,
association, or corporation, situated in, upon, under, or above
any street, highway, public place, or public waters, in
connection with the special franchise. The tangible property so
included shall be taxed as a part of the special franchise." The
reason for classing franchises as real estate was that under the
existing laws of New York a franchise could not be assessed as
personal property, as the bonded debt could then be deducted,
leaving little or nothing to be taxed.]
Enough has been said to demonstrate the extremely faulty condition of
tax methods in the United States. Uniformity is highly desirable, but
equality of burden is even more to be desired. The advances in this
direction have been few, and accomplished only partially in a few
States. The machinery for making assessments is only a part of the
problem, as the intention of the law, the spirit of the act, is of
even higher importance in securing justice and moderation. If these
essays, incomplete as they must of necessity be, have led to a better
comprehension of the chaotic condition existing now and of the
difficulties to be overcome, their object will have been attained. The
remedy may be left for time to effect.
* * * * *
In connection with the celebration of the centenary of the death
of the naturalist Lazaro Spallanzani, at Reggio, Italy, in
February last, a booklet has been published containing articles
on various aspects of the life and work of Spallanzani and
matters associated with him. Among the authors represented are
Mantegazza, Ferrari, and others well known in Italian science.
BACON'S IDOLS: A COMMENTARY.
BY WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON,
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR
UNIVERSITY.
In the first book of the _Novum Organon_ the great leader of the new
philosophy undertook to set forth the dangers and difficulties which
stand always in the way of clear and fruitful thought. Conscious that
he was breaking entirely with the schools of the past, and ambitious
of laying the firm foundations on which all future inquirers would
have to build, it was natural that Bacon should pause on the threshold
of his vast enterprise to take stock of the mental weaknesses which
had rendered futile the labors of earlier thinkers, and which, if not
carefully guarded against, would jeopardize the efforts of times to
come. That the understanding may direct itself effectively to the
search for truth it is necessary, he insisted, that it should have a
full apprehension of the lapses to which it is ever liable, the
obstacles with which it will constantly have to contend. A vague sense
of peril is not enough. As a first condition of healthy intellectual
activity we must learn to know our frailties for what they really are,
estimate their consequences, and probe the secrets of their power.
Bacon's statement of the sources of error and vain philosophizing is
regarded by him as merely the _pars destruens_ or negative portion of
his work--as it were, "the clearing of the threshing floor." But his
aphorisms are packed close with solid and substantial thought, and
well deserve the attention of all who would seriously devote
themselves to the intellectual life. "True philosophy," as he
conceived it, "is that which is the faithful echo of the voice of the
world, which is written in some sort under the direction of things,
which adds nothing of itself, which is only the rebound, the
reflection of reality." To reach for ourselves, as nearly as we may, a
philosophy which shall meet the terms of this exigent definition is,
or should be, one chief purpose of our study and our thought. We may
very well ask, then, what help so great and suggestive a thinker may
give us on our way.
With his characteristic fondness for fanciful phraseology, Bacon
describes the causes which distort our mental vision as _Idola_--idols
or phantoms of the mind.[17] Of such he distinguishes four classes,
which he calls, respectively: Idols of the Tribe (_Idola Tribus_);
Idols of the Cave (_Idola Specus_); Idols of the Market Place (_Idola
Fori_); and Idols of the Theater (_Idola Theatri_). It is not to be
claimed for Bacon's analysis that it is exhaustive or always
scientifically exact. In many places, too, it opens up difficult
philosophic questions, which for the present must be disregarded. But,
as Professor Fowler has said, there is something about his diction,
"his quaintness of expression, and his power of illustration which
lays hold of the mind and lodges itself in the memory in a way which
we can hardly find paralleled in any other writer, except it be
Shakespeare."[18] Moreover, though he often deals with matters of
merely technical and temporary interest, his leading thoughts are of
permanent and universal applicability. Let us see, then, what
suggestions we can gather from a brief consideration of his Idols, one
by one.
[Footnote 17: _Idola_ ([Greek: eidôla]), though commonly rendered
idols, would here undoubtedly be more correctly translated
phantoms or specters. With this explanation, however, I shall
usually employ the more familiar word.]
[Footnote 18: Novum Organon, edited by Thomas Fowler,
introduction, p. 132.]
Idols of the Tribe are so called because they "have their foundation
in human nature itself"; in other words, they are the prepossessions
and proclivities which belong to men as men, and as such are common to
the whole race or tribe. "Let men please themselves as they will,"
says Bacon, "in admiring and almost adoring the human mind, this is
certain: that as an uneven mirror distorts the rays of objects
according to its own figure and section, so the mind, when it receives
impressions of objects through the sense, can not be trusted to report
them truly, but in forming its notions mixes up its own nature with
the nature of things." In many lines of thought there is no more
pregnant source of fallacy and confusion than the tendency, innate in
all and seldom properly checked, to accept man as the measure of all
things, and to translate the entire universe into terms of our own
lives. Theology, though it is slowly outgrowing its cruder
anthropomorphism, still talks about the "will" of God, an
"intelligent" First Cause, the "moral governor," and "lawgiver"; and
outside theology we have ample evidence of the persistency with which
we humanize and personify Nature by endowing it with attributes
belonging to ourselves. Darwin confessed that he found it difficult to
avoid this tendency.[19] It is a pitfall into which men constantly
stumble in their attempts to interpret the processes at work about
them.
[Footnote 19: Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. i, p.
6.]
One important result of our habit of thus forcing the universe to
become "the bond-slave of human thought" is to be found, as Bacon
notes, in our proneness to "suppose the existence of more order and
regularity in the world" than is actually to be discovered there.
While we read design and purpose into the phenomena of Nature because
we are conscious of design and purpose in our own activities, thus
allowing ourselves to drift into the metaphysical doctrine of Final
Causes, we also do our best to bring Nature's multitudinous
operations into such definite formulas as will satisfy our love of
plan and symmetry. We are not content till we can systematize and
digest, whence our continual recourse to loose analogies and fanciful
resemblances. We start from an imagined necessity of order, or from
some conception of things attractive because of its apparent
simplicity, and then reason out from this into the facts of Nature.
Mill furnishes some telling examples. "As late as the Copernican
controversy it was urged, as an argument in favor of the true theory
of the solar system, that it placed the fire, the noblest element, in
the center of the universe. This was a remnant of the notion that the
order of the universe must be perfect, and that perfection consisted
in conformity to rules of procedure, either real or conventional.
Again, reverting to numbers, certain numbers were _perfect_, therefore
these numbers must obtain in the great phenomena of Nature. Six was a
perfect number--that is, equal to the sum of all its factors--an
additional reason why there must be exactly six planets. The
Pythagoreans, on the other hand, attributed perfection to the number
ten, but agreed in thinking that the perfect numbers must be somehow
realized in the heavens; and knowing only of nine heavenly bodies to
make up the enumeration, they asserted 'that there was an
_antichthon_, or counter-earth, on the other side of the sun,
invisible to us.' Even Huygens was persuaded that when the number of
heavenly bodies had reached twelve it could not admit of any further
increase. Creative power could not go beyond that sacred number."[20]
Do these concrete illustrations of perverse reasoning strike us as
ludicrous? It is because they are taken from an order of ideas long
since outgrown. The tendencies they exemplify have not been outgrown.
We have only to keep a vigilant eye on our own mental conduct to be
convinced that we are very apt to begin with some general notion of
"the fitness of things," or what "ought to be," and to argue thence to
conclusions not a whit less absurd essentially than those just
referred to.
[Footnote 20: Logic, ninth edition, Book V, chapter v, § 6.]
While these universal mental habits are conspicuous enough in the
higher regions of thought and begin to play tricks with us the moment
we undertake on our own accounts any serious speculation, there are
other Idols of the Tribe whose influence is perhaps more commonly
fatal. We all jump at conclusions, the mind feigning and supposing
"all other things to be somehow, though it can not see how, similar to
those few things by which it is surrounded"; we all allow ourselves to
be unduly "moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind
simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination." Hasty
judgments are thus daily and hourly passed on men and things, and rash
generalizations permitted to circulate untested. Even more
disastrous, perhaps, in the long run, is the power of prepossessions.
When once, says Bacon, the human understanding has "adopted an opinion
(either as being the received opinion, or as being agreeable to
itself)" it straightway "draws all things else to support and agree
with it." Illustrations may be found in every direction. Note, for
instance, the vitality, even in the teeth of positive disproof, of
many long-accepted and often-challenged ideas--belief in dreams,
omens, prophecies, in providential visitations and interpositions, in
the significance of coincidences, in popular saws about natural
phenomena, in quacks and quackery, in old wives' tales, vulgar and
pseudo-scientific. The story of witchcraft is only another example of
the same kind, though written large in the chronicles of the world in
letters of fire and blood; the human understanding had "adopted" a
belief in witches, and drew "all things else to support and agree with
it." In all such cases of prepossession the mind obstinately dwells on
every detail that favors its accepted conclusions, while disregarding
or depreciating everything that tells against them; it is always, in
Bacon's phrase, "more moved and excited by affirmatives than by
negatives." Thus, we hear much of the one dream that is fulfilled, and
of the ninety and nine that are unfulfilled--nothing. Bacon
illustrates this perversity by the well-known anecdote of the ancient
cynic, which may be left to convey its own moral: "And therefore it
was a good answer that was made by one who, when they showed him
hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as
having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not
now acknowledge the power of the gods--'Ay,' asked he again, 'but
where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?'"
Finally, among these Idols of the Tribe we must include the
disturbance caused by the play of feeling upon the mind. "The human
understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will
and affections, whence proceed sciences which may be called 'sciences
as one would.'" We all know, to our cost, how passion will warp
judgment; how difficult it is to see clearly when the emotions are
thoroughly aroused; how tenaciously men cling to opinions they are
familiar with, or would fain have to be true; how fiercely they
contest ideas that are unfamiliar or repugnant. Had it been contrary
to the interest of authority, observed shrewd old Hobbes, that the
three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square,
the fact would have been, if not disputed, yet suppressed.[21]
Similarly, if the passions of men had been called into play over the
most clearly demonstrable of abstract mathematical truths, we may be
sure that furious controversy would have attended the issue, and some
way found to overthrow the demonstration. That two and two make four
would have been denied had any strong emotion been excited against the
proposition. "Men," said Whateley, "are much more anxious to have
truth on their side than to be on the side of truth." And the danger
is greater because we are frequently not aware of the bias given by
feeling. There are cases in plenty where men more or less consciously
and deliberately espouse "sciences as one would," but there are many
others in which the emotional interference is insidious and obscure.
"Numberless, in short, are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in
which the feelings color and infect the understanding."
[Footnote 21: Leviathan, Part I, chapter xi.]
These Idols of the Tribe are of course inherent in our intellectual
constitution, and are ineradicable. The simple consideration that all
knowledge is relative--that by no effort and under no circumstances
can we escape beyond the conditions and limitations of our own
minds--suffices to show that intelligence must ever mix up its own
nature with the nature of things, though this fact need not make us
doubt the validity of knowledge as is sometimes hastily inferred. For
the rest, clear recognition of these common obstacles to thought
should put us in the way of anticipating and withstanding their more
serious effects. In practice it must be our object to maintain
watchfulness and a careful skepticism; to test evidence and check
passion; to cultivate candor, flexibility, and alertness of mind; to
avoid loose generalizations; and to be ever ready to accept, revise,
reject. Above all must we steadily resist the seductions of what is
called common sense, and overcome that mental inertness which too
often leads us to drift unthinking along the current of popular
opinion.[22]
[Footnote 22: It is well to remember that if common sense had
said the last word about the matter, the Ptolemaic theory of the
universe would still stand unshaken.]
But, in addition to errors arising from the common intellectual nature
of men, there are others, the sources of which are to be found in the
idiosyncrasies of the individual mind. These Bacon calls Idols of the
Cave;[23] for every one, he says, "has a cave or den of his own, which
refracts and discolors the light of Nature, owing either to his own
proper and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with
others; or to his reading of books, and the authority of those whom he
esteems and admires; or to the differences of impressions, accordingly
as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed, or in a mind
indifferent and settled; and the like." This summary is comprehensive
enough to indicate the character and point to some of the causes of
individual aberrations of judgment; that it does no more than this is
due to the simple fact that the personal bias is as varied as humanity
itself, and that the deflecting impulses in any given case are to be
referred to a complex of factors almost eluding analysis. To follow
this part of the subject into detail would, therefore, manifestly be
impossible. But certain of the larger and more widely influential of
these disturbing forces may be roughly marked out by way of
illustration.
[Footnote 23: The metaphor is taken from the opening of the
seventh book of Plato's Republic.]
In the first place, there is what we may call the professional bias.
Exclusive devotion to separate lines of activity, study, or thought
inevitably gives the mind a particular set or twist. Bacon complains
that Aristotle, primarily a logician, made his natural philosophy the
slave of his logic. Few specialists can escape the insulation
consequent upon living too continuously in a confined area of problems
and ideas. Their intellectual outlook is necessarily circumscribed,
facts are seen by them out of proper perspective, and one-sidedness of
training and discipline renders their judgment of things partial and
incomplete. The lawyer carries his legal, the theologian his
theological, the scientist his scientific bent of mind into every
inquiry; with what grotesque results is only too frequently apparent.
Accustomed to move in a single narrow groove, and wholly absorbed in
the contemplation of certain isolated classes of phenomena, they
unconsciously allow their particular interests to dominate their
thought, and impose disastrous restrictions upon their view of
whatever lies outside their own chosen field.
Secondly, we have the bias of nation, rank, party, sect. Here the
mental disturbances are too numerous to permit and too obvious to
require special exemplification. Intellectual provincialism of any
kind is fatal to large and fertile thought, alike by limiting the
range of our knowledge and sympathies and by inducing mental habits
and implanting prejudices which prevent us from seeing things in wide
relations and under a clear light. So long as our point of view is
simply that of our country, our class, our party, or our church, so
long, it is evident, our minds will lack the breadth and flexibility
necessary for free inquiry, fruitful comparisons, sane and balanced
judgments.[24]
[Footnote 24: _Cf._ Spencer's Introduction to the Study of
Sociology, chapters viii-xii.]
Finally, among the Idols of the Cave "which have most effect in
disturbing the clearness of the understanding," mention must be made
of the temperamental bias. Every man, it has been said, is born
Platonist or Aristotelian; it is certain that the great divisions in
thought--religious, philosophical, political--answer roughly to
fundamental differences in human nature, and that every one not
checked or turned aside by extraneous influences will spontaneously
gravitate in one or another direction. Bacon is only recording a fact
of the commonest experience when he says that "there are found some
minds given to an extreme admiration of antiquity, others to an
extreme love and appetite for novelty, but few so duly tempered that
they can hold the mean, neither carping at what has been well laid
down by the ancients nor despising what is well introduced by the
moderns." Many instinctively brace themselves against authority and
tradition; by others again, whatever is handed down to us by authority
and tradition is for this reason alone treated with contempt. That the
crowd believes a thing is enough to convince this man of its truth,
and that of its falsehood.
"The vulgar thus through imitation err;
As oft the learned by being singular."
These and similar congenital differences in men's intellectual
constitutions might be illustrated indefinitely if it were necessary.
A further remark of Bacon's must, however, be quoted, for it goes
deeper in mental analysis and touches a less obvious point. "There is
one principal and, as it were, radical distinction between different
minds in respect of philosophy and the sciences, which is this: that
some minds are stronger and apter to mark the differences of things,
others to mark their resemblances. The steady and acute mind can fix
its contemplations and dwell and fasten on the subtlest distinctions;
the lofty and discursive mind recognizes and puts together the finest
and most general resemblances." Men belonging to the former class we
should call logical and critical; those belonging to the latter,
imaginative and constructive. Each class tends to the excesses of its
own predominant powers, and in each case excess interferes with calm
reasoning and sound judgment.
To correct the personal equation it is imperative that we should study
ourselves conscientiously, consider dispassionately the natural
tendencies of our birth, early surroundings, education, associations,
and interests, and do our utmost to conquer, or at least to make
allowance for, every individual peculiarity, temperamental or
acquired, likely to turn the mind aside from the straight line of
thought. Such self-discipline every one must strenuously undertake on
his own account if he would wish to see things as they really are.
Stated in more general terms, our aim must be to rise above all kinds
of provincialism and personal prejudice, and to overcome our natural
proneness to rest content in our own particular point of view. Bacon
quotes with approval the words of Heraclitus: "Men look for sciences
in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world."
We must strive to escape from our own lesser world, and to make
ourselves citizens of the greater, common world. For this we need the
widest and most generous culture--the culture that is to be found in
books, in travel, in intercourse with men of all classes and every
shade of opinion. Left to ourselves we only too sedulously cultivate
our own insularity; we mingle simply with the people who agree with
us, belong to our own caste, and share our own prejudices; we read
only the papers of our own party, the literature of our own sect; we
allow our own special interests in life to absorb our energies, color
all our thoughts, and narrow our horizon. In this way the Phantoms of
the Cave secure daily and yearly more despotic sway over our minds.
Self-detachment, disinterestedness, the power of provisional sympathy
with alien modes of thought and feeling, must be our ideal. "Let every
student of Nature," says Bacon, "take this as a rule, that whatever
his mind seizes and dwells on with particular satisfaction is to be
held in suspicion, and that so much the more care is to be taken in
dealing with such questions to keep the understanding even and clear."
A hard saying, truly, yet one that must be laid well to heart.