82 NOVUM ORGANUM 



shall mention when we come to the mode and scheme of 

 determining notions and axioms. 



LX. The idols imposed upon the understanding by words 

 are of two kinds. They are either the names of things which 

 have no existence (for as some objects are from inattention 

 left without a name, so names are formed by fanciful imagi 

 nations which are without an object), or they are the names 

 of actual objects, but confused, badly defined, and hastily 

 and irregularly abstracted from things. Fortune, the pri- 

 vnum mobile, the planetary orbits, 84 the element of fire, and 

 the like fictions, which owe their birth to futile and false 

 theories, are instances of the first kind. And this species 

 of idols is removed with greater facility, because it can be 

 exterminated by the constant refutation or the desuetude of 

 the theories themselves. The others, which are created by 

 vicious and unskilful abstraction, are intricate and deeply 

 rooted. Take some word, for instance, as moist, and let us 

 examine how far the different significations of this word are 

 consistent. It will be found that the word moist is nothing 

 but a confused sign of different actions admitted of no set 

 tled and defined uniformity. For it means that which easily 

 diffuses itself over another body; that which is indetermi 

 nable and cannot be brought to a consistency; that which 



24 The ancients supposed the planets to describe an exact circle round the 

 south. As observations increased and facts were disclosed, which were irrec 

 oncilable with this supposition, the earth was removed from the centre to some 

 other point in the circle, and the planets were supposed to revolve in a smaller 

 circle (epicycle) round an imaginary point, which in its turn described a circle 

 of which the earth waa the centre. In proportion as observation elicited fresh 

 facts, contradictory to these representations, other epicycles and eccentrics 

 were added, involving additional confusion. Though Kepler had swept away all 

 these complicated theories in the preceding century, by the demonstration of his 

 three laws, which established the elliptical course of the planets, Bacon re 

 garded him and Copernicus in the same light as Ptolemy and Xcuophanes. Ed. 



