NOVUM OHGANUM. 63 



86. The admiration of mankind with regard to the arts 

 and sciences, which is of itself sufficiently simple and al 

 most puerile, has been increased by the craft and arti 

 fices of those who have treated the sciences and delivered 

 them down to posterity. For they propose and produce 

 them to our view so fashioned, and as it were masked, 

 as to make them pass for perfect and complete. For if 

 you consider their method and divisions, they appear to 

 embrace and comprise every thing which can relate to the 

 subject. And although this frame be badly filled up and 

 resemble an empty bladder, yet it presents to the vulgar 

 understanding the form and appearance of a perfect science. 



The first and most ancient investigators of truth were 

 wont, on the contrary, with more honesty and success, to 

 throw all the knowledge they wished to gather from con 

 templation, and to lay up for use, into aphorisms, or short 

 scattered sentences unconnected by any method, and with 

 out pretending or professing to comprehend any entire art. 

 But according to the present system, we cannot wonder 

 that men seek nothing beyond that which is handed down 

 to them as perfect, and already extended to its full com 

 plement. 



87. The ancient theories have received additional sup 

 port and credit from the absurdity and levity of those who 

 have promoted the new, especially in the active and prac 

 tical part of natural philosophy. For there have been 

 many silly and fantastical fellows who, from credulity or 

 imposture, have loaded mankind with promises, announcing 

 and boasting of the prolongation of life, the retarding of 

 old age, the alleviation of pains, the remedying of natural 

 defects, the deception of the senses, the restraint and ex 

 citement of the passions, the illumination and exaltation of 

 the intellectual faculties, the transmutation of substances, 

 the unlimited intensity and multiplication of motion, the 

 impressions and changes of the air, the bringing into our 

 power the management of celestial influences, the divi 

 nation of future events, the representation of distant ob 

 jects, the^ revelation of hidden objects and the like. One 

 would not be very wrong in observing with regard to such 

 pretenders, that there is as much difference in philosophy, 

 between their absurdity and real science, as there is in 

 history between the exploits of Caesar or Alexander, and 

 those of Amadis de Gaul and Arthur of Britain. For those 

 illustrious generals are found to have actually performed 

 greater exploits, than such fictitious heroes are even pre 

 tended to have accomplished, by the means, however, of 



