82 NOVUM ORGANUM 



CIV. Nor can we suffer the understanding to jump and 

 fly from particulars to remote and most general axioms (such 

 as are termed the principles of arts and things), and thus 

 prove and make out their intermediate axioms according to 

 the supposed unshaken truth of the former. This, however, 

 has always been done to the present time from the natural 

 bent of the understanding, educated too, and accustomed to 

 this very method, by the syllogistic mode of demonstration. 

 But we can then only augur well foi the sciences, when the 

 assent shall proceed by a true scale and successive steps, 

 without interruption or breach, from particulars to the 

 lesser axioms, thence to the intermediate (rising one above 

 the other), and lastly, to the most general. For the lowest 

 axioms differ but little from bare experiment; 80 the highest 

 and most general (as they are esteemed at present), are 

 notional, abstract, and of no real weight. The interme 

 diate are true, solid, full of life, and upon them depend 

 the business and fortune of mankind; beyond these are the 

 really general, but not abstract, axioms, which are truly 

 limited by the intermediate. 



60 The lowest axioms are such as spring from simple experience such as in 

 chemistry, that animal substances yield no fixed salt by calcination; in music, 

 that concords intermixed with discords make harmony, etc. Intermediate axi 

 oms advance a step further, being the result of rotlection, which, applied to our 

 experimental knowledge, deduces laws from them, such as in optics of the first 

 degree of generality, that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflec 

 tion; and in mechanics, Kepler s three laws of motion, while his general law, 

 that all bodies attract each other with forces proportional to their masses, and 

 inversely as the squares of their distances, may be taken as one of the highest 

 axioms. Yet so far is this principle from being only notional or abstract, it has 

 presented us with a key which lits into the intricate wards of the heavens, and 

 has laid bare to our gaze the principal mechanism of the universe. But natural 

 philosophy in Bacon s day had not advanced beyond intermediate axioms, and 

 Die term notional or abstract is applied to those general axioms then current, 

 not founded on the solid principles of inductive inquiry, but based upon a priori 

 reasoning and airy metaphysics. Ed. 



