70 NOVUM ORGANUM. 



you have reason to hope, that by banishing or correcting 

 the latter you can produce a great change for the better in 

 the former.&quot; So if men had, during the many years that 

 have elapsed, adhered to the right way of discovering and 

 cultivating the sciences without being able to advance, it 

 would be assuredly bold and presumptuous to imagine it 

 possible to improve, but if they have mistaken the way and 

 wasted their labour on improper objects, it follows that the 

 difficulty does not arise from things themselves, which are 

 not in our power, but from the human understanding, its 

 practice and application, which is susceptible of remedy 

 and correction. Our best plan therefore is to expose these 

 errors. For in proportion as they impeded the past, so do 

 they afford reason to hope for the future. And although 

 we have touched upon them above, yet we think it right to 

 give a brief, bare, and simple enumeration of them in this 

 place. 



95. Those who have treated of the sciences have been 

 either empirics or dogmatical. The former like ants only 

 heap up and use their store, the latter like spiders spin 

 out their own webs. The bee, a mean between both, ex 

 tracts matter from the flowers of the garden and the field, 

 but works and fashions it by its own efforts. The true 

 labour of philosophy resembles hers, for it neither relies 

 entirely or principally on the powers of the mind, nor yet 

 lays up in the memory the matter afforded by the expe 

 riments of natural history or mechanics in its raw state, 

 but changes and works it in the understanding. We have 

 good reason therefore to derive hope from a closer and 

 purer alliance of these faculties (the experimental and 

 rational) than has yet been attempted. 



96. Natural philosophy is not yet to be found unadulte 

 rated, but is impure and corrupted ; by logic in the school 

 of Aristotle, by natural theology in that of Plato, by ma 

 thematics in the second school of Plato (that of Proclus 

 and others) which ought rather to terminate natural philo 

 sophy than to generate or create it. We may therefore 

 hope for better results from pure and unmixed natural 

 philosophy. 



97. No one has yet been found possessed of sufficient 

 firmness and severity to resolve upon and undertake the 

 task of entirely abolishing common theories and notions, 

 and applying the mind afresh, when thus cleared and 

 levelled, to particular researches. Hence our human rea 

 soning is a mere farrago and crude mass made up of a 



