NOVUM ORGANUM 31 



ing, and should use so much the more caution to preserve 

 it ecjuable and unprejudiced. 



QjIX. The idols of the market are the most troublesome 

 of alTpfcliose namely which have entwined themselves round 

 the understanding from the associations of words and names. 

 For men imagine that their reason governs words, while, in 

 fact, words react upon the understanding; and this has ren- / 

 dered philosophy and the sciences sophistical and inactive. I 

 Words are generally formed in a popular sense, and define j 

 things by those broad lines which are most obvious to the 

 vulgar mind; but when a more acute understanding or 

 more diligent observation is anxious to vary those lines, 

 and to adapt them more accurately to nature, words oppose 

 it. Hence the great and solemn disputes of learned men 

 often terminate in controversies about words and names, in 

 regard to which it would be better (imitating the caution 

 of mathematicians) to proceed more advisedly in the first 

 instance, and to bring such disputes to a regular issue by 

 definitions. Such definitions, however, cannot remedy the 

 evil in natural and material objects, because they consist 

 themselves of words, and these words produce others;&quot; 

 so that we must necessarily have recourse to particular 

 instances, and their regular series and arrangement, as we 



28 The Latin text adds &quot;without end&quot; ; but Bacon is scarcely right in sup 

 posing that the descent from complex ideas and propositions to those of simple 

 nature, involve the analyst in a series of continuous and interminable defini 

 tions. For in the gradual and analytical scale, there is a bar beyond which we 

 cannot go, as there is a summit bounded by the limited variations of our con 

 ceptions. Logical definitions, to fulfil their conditions, or indeed to be of any 

 avail, must be given in simpler terms than the object which is sought to be 

 defined ; now this, in the case of primordial notions and objects of sense, ia im 

 possible; therefore we are obliged to rest satisfied with the mere names of our 

 perceptions. Ed. 



