NOVUM ORGANUM 101 



scruple; for we allow that the ancients had a particular 

 form of investigation and discovery, and their writings show 

 it. But it was of such a nature, that they immediately flew 

 from a few instances and particulars (after adding some 

 common notions, and a few generally received opinions 

 most in vogue) to the most general conclusions or the prin 

 ciples of the sciences, and then by their intermediate propo 

 sitions deduced their inferior conclusions, and tried them 

 by the test of the immovable and settled truth of the first, 

 and so constructed their art. Lastly, if some new particu 

 lars and instances were brought forward, which contradicted 

 their dogmas, they either with great subtilty reduced them 

 to one system, by distinctions or explanations of their own 

 rules, or got rid of them clumsily as exceptions, laboring 

 most pertinaciously in the meantime to accommodate the 

 causes of such as were not contradictory to their own prin 

 ciples. Their natural history and their experience were 

 both far from being what they ought to have been, and 

 their flying off to generalities ruined everything. 



CXXV1. Another objection will be made against us, 

 that we prohibit decisions and the laying down of certain 

 principles, till we arrive regularly at generalities by the 

 intermediate steps, and thus keep the judgment in suspense 

 and lead to uncertainty. But our object is not uncertainty 

 but fitting certainty, for we derogate not from the senses 

 but assist them, and despise not the understanding but 

 direct it. It is better to know what is necessary, and not 

 to imagine we are fully in possession of it, than to imagine 

 that we are fully in possession of it, and yet in reality to 

 know nothing which we ought. 



CXXVII. Again, some may raise this question rather 

 than objection, whether we talk of perfecting natural phi- 



