CONDUCT OF UNDERSTANDING. Cclxxxiil 



As our opinions are formed by impressions made upon Formation 

 our senses, by confidence in the communications of others, opln 

 and by our own meditations, man, in the infancy of his 

 reason, is unavoidably in error: for, although our senses 

 never deceive us, the communications made by others, 

 and our own speculations must, according to the ignorance 

 of our teachers, and the liveliness of our own imaginations, 

 teem with error. 



Bacon saw the evil, and he saw the remedy : he saw and 

 taught his contemporaries and future ages, that reasoning 

 is nothing worth, except as it is founded on facts. 



In his Sylva Sylvarum, he thus speaks : &quot; The philosophy 

 of Pythagoras, which was full of superstition, did first 

 plant a monstrous imagination, which afterwards was, by 

 the school of Plato and others, watered and nourished. 

 It was, that the world was one entire, perfect, living 

 - creature; that the ebbing and flowing of the sea was the 

 respiration of the world, drawing in water as breath, and 

 putting it forth again. They went on and inferred, that 

 if the world were a living creature, it had a soul and spirit. 

 This foundation being laid, they might build upon it what 

 they would ; for in a living creature, though never so 

 great, as, for example, in a great whale, the sense, and 

 the effects of any one part of the body, instantly make a 

 transcursion throughout the whole body : so that by this 

 they did insinuate that no distance of place, nor want or 

 indisposition of matter, could hinder magical operation ; 

 but that, for example, we might here in Europe have 

 sense and feeling of that which was done in China. With 

 these vast and bottomless follies, men have been in part 

 entertained, (a) But we that hold firm to the works of 



() See absurdities of the same nature in Kenelm Digby s discourse on 

 Powder of Sympathy, by which wounds were cured. He says, that &quot; a man 



