NOVUM ORGANUM 25 



boundary of the world, and it seems necessarily to occur 

 to us that there must be something beyond. Nor can we 

 imagine how eternity has flowed on down to the present 

 day, since the usually received distinction of an infinity, 

 a parte ante and a parte post, 16 cannot hold good; for it 

 would thence follow that one infinity is greater than an 

 other, and also that infinity is wasting away and tending 

 to an end. There is the same difficulty in considering the 

 infinite divisibility of lines, arising from the weakness of 

 our minds, which weakness interferes to still greater dis 

 advantage with the discovery of causes; for although the 

 greatest generalities in nature must be positive, just as 

 they are found, and in fact not causable, yet the human 

 understanding, incapable of resting, seeks for something 

 more intelligible. Thus, however, while aiming at further 

 progress, it falls back to what is actually less advanced, 

 namely, final causes; for they are clearly more allied to 

 man s own nature, than the system of the universe, and 

 from this source they have wonderfully corrupted philoso 

 phy. But he would be an unskilful and shallow philoso 

 pher who should seek for causes in the greatest generalities, 



15 A scholastic term, to signify the two eternities of past and future dura 

 tion, 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 dif 

 ferent denominations of infinities : on the other hand he would have thought 

 the man insane who should have talked to him about lines infinitely great, in 

 closing 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. 



