76 NOVUM OROANUM 



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 culti 

 vating 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 labor 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. 

 XCY. Those who have treated of the sciences have been 

 either empirics or dogmatical. 68 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, extracts 

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

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

 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 experiments of 

 natural history and mechanics in its raw state, but changes 

 and works it in the understanding. We have good reason, 



58 Bacon, in this Aphorism, appears to have entertained a fair idea of the 

 use of the inductive and deductive methods in scientific inquiry, though his 

 want of geometrical knowledge must have hindered him from accurately deter 

 mining the precise functions of each, as it certainly led him in other paris of 

 the Organon (V. A ph. 82), to undervalue the deductive, and, as ho calls it, the 

 dogmatic method, and to rely too much upon empiricism. Ed. 



