102 NOVUM ORGANUZT 



losophy alone according to our method, or the other sciences 

 also, such as logic, ethics, politics. We certainly intend to 

 comprehend them all. And as common logic, which regu 

 lates matters by syllogisms, is applied not only to natural, 

 but also to every other science, so our inductive method 

 likewise comprehends them all. 67 For we form a history 

 and tables of invention for anger, fear, shame, and the 

 like, and also for examples in civil life, and the mental 

 operations of memory, composition, division, judgment, and 

 the rest, as well as for heat and cold, light, vegetation, 

 and the like. But since our method of interpretation, after 

 preparing and arranging a history, does not content itself 

 with examining the operations and disquisitions of the mind 

 like common logic, but also inspects the nature of things, 

 we so regulate the mind that it may be enabled to apply 

 itself in every respect correctly to that nature. On that 

 account we deliver numerous and various precepts in our 

 doctrine of interpretation, so that they may apply in some 



67 The old error of placing the deductive syllogism in antagonism to the 

 inductive, as if they were not both parts of one system or refused to cohere 

 together. So far from there being any radical opposition between them, it 

 would not be difficult to show that Bacon s method was syllogistic in his sense 

 of the term. For the suppressed premise of every Baconian enthymeme, viz., 

 the acknowledged uniformity of the laws of nature as stated in the axiom, 

 whatever has once occurred will occur again, must be assumed as the basis 

 of every conclusion which he draws before we can admit its legitimacy. The 

 opposition, therefore, of Bacon s method could not be directed against the old 

 logic, for it assumed and exemplified its principles, but rather to the abusive 

 application which the ancients made of this science, in turning its powers to 

 the development of abstract principles which they imagined to be pregnant 

 with the solution of the latent mysteries of the universe. Bacon justly over 

 threw these ideal notions, and accepted of no principle as a basis which was 

 not guaranteed by actual experiment and observation; and so far he laid the 

 foundations of a sound philosophy by turning the inductive logic to its proper 

 account in the interpretation of nature. 



