NOVUM ORGANUM 23 



ment of fire is introduced with its peculiar orbit, 1 * to keep 

 square with those other three which are objects of our 

 senses. The relative rarity of the elements (as they are 

 called) is arbitrarily made to vary in tenfold progression, 

 with many other dreams of the like nature. 13 Nor is this 

 folly confined to theories, but it is to be met with even in 

 simple notions. 



XLYI. The human understanding, when any proposi 

 tion has been once laid down (either from general admission 

 and belief, or from the pleasure it affords), forces everything 

 else to add fresh support and confirmation; and although 

 mostogejot_and abundant instances may exist to the con 

 trary, yet either does not observe or despises them, or gets 

 rid of and rejects them by some distinction, with violent and 

 injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice the authority of its 

 first conclusions. It was well answered by him 14 who was 



notice of posterity for his astronomical ingenuity, and, as Ptolemy had labored 

 by means of epicycles and eccentrics, and Kepler with ellipses, to explain the 

 laws of planetary motion, Bacon thought the mystery would unfold itself quite 

 as philosophically through spiral labyrinths and serpentine lines. &quot;What the 

 details of his system were, we are left to conjecture, and that from a very 

 meagre but naive account of one of his inventions which he has left in his 

 Miscellany MSS. Ed. 



12 Hinc elementum ignis cum orbe suo introductum est. Bacon saw in fire 

 the mere result of a certain combination of action, and was consequently led 

 to deny its elementary character. The ancie nt physicists attributed an orbit to 

 each of the four elements, into which they resolved the universe, and supposed 

 their spheres to involve each other. The orbit of the earth was in the centre, 

 that of fire at the circumference. For Bacon s inquisition into the nature 

 of heat, and its complete failure, see the commencement of the second book 

 of the Novum Organum. Ed. 



13 Robert Fludd is the theorist alluded to, who had supposed the gravity 

 of the earth to be ten times heavier than water, that of water ten times heavier 

 than air, and that of air ten times heavier than fire. Ed. 



14 Diagoras. The same allusion occurs in the second part of the Advance 

 ment of Learning, where Bacon treats of the idols of the mind. 



