44 NOVUM ORGANUM. 



of that nature even in theory (so that men must apply 

 to them with some risk and injury to their own fortunes, 

 and not only without reward but subject to contumely and 

 envy), there is no doubt that many other sects of philosophers 

 and theorists would have been introduced, like those which 

 formerly flourished in such diversified abundance amongst 

 the Greeks. For as many imaginary theories of the heavens 

 can be deduced from the phenomena of the sky, so is it even 

 more easy to found many dogmas upon the phenomena of 

 philosophy and the plot of this our theatre resembles those 

 of the poetical, where the plots which are invented for 

 the stage are more consistent, elegant, and pleasurable 

 than those taken from real history. 



In general men take for the groundwork of their philo 

 sophy either too much from a few topics, or too little from 

 many; in either case their philosophy is founded on too 

 narrow a basis of experiment and natural history, and de 

 cides on too scanty grounds. For the theoretic philo 

 sopher seizes various common circumstances by experiment, 

 without reducing them to certainty or examining and fre 

 quently considering them, and relies for the rest upon 

 meditation and the activity of his wit. 



There are other philosophers who have diligently and 

 accurately attended to a few experiments, and have thence 

 presumed to deduce and invent systems of philosophy, 

 forming every thing to conformity with them. 



A third set from their faith and religious veneration in 

 troduce theology and traditions ; the absurdity of some 

 amongst them having proceeded so far, as to seek and 

 derive the sciences from spirits and genii. There are 

 therefore three sources of error and three species of false 

 philosophy; the sophistic, empiric, and superstitious. 



63. Aristotle affords the most eminent instance of the 

 first : for he corrupted natural philosophy by logic thus 

 he formed the world of categories, assigned to the human 

 soul, the noblest of substances, a genus determined by words 

 of secondary operation, treated of density and rarity (by 

 which bodies occupy a greater or lesser space) by the 

 frigid distinctions of action and power, asserted that there 

 was a peculiar and proper motion in all bodies, and that if 

 they shared in any other motion, it was owing to an exter 

 nal moving cause, and imposed innumerable arbitrary dis 

 tinctions upon the nature of things ; being every where 

 more anxious as to definitions in teaching and the accuracy 

 of the wording of his propositions, than the internal truth 



