NOVUM ORGANUM 159 



or contained within the bounds of its first dimensions, verg 

 ing to dissolution or remaining fixed, animal, vegetable, or 

 mineral, water, or oil, or air, or any olrher substance what 

 ever susceptible of such motion. Sensible heat is the same, 

 but considered relatively to the senses. Let us now proceed 

 to further helps. 



XXI. After our tables of first review, our rejection or 

 exclusive table, and the first vintage derived from them, we 

 must advance to the remaining helps of the understanding 

 with regard to the interpretation of nature, and a true and 

 perfect induction, in offering which we will take the exam 

 ples of cold and heat where tables are necessary, but where 

 fewer instances are required we will go through a variety 

 of others, so as neither to confound investigation nor to 

 narrow our doctrine. 



In the first place, therefore, we will treat of prerogative 

 instances; 37 2. Of the supports of induction; 3. Of the cor- 



37 By this term Bacon understands general phenomena, taken in order from 

 the great mass of indiscriminative facts, which, as they lie in nature, are apt 

 to generate confusion by their number, indistinctness and complication. Such 

 classes of phenomena, as being peculiarly suggestive of causation, he quaintly 

 classes under the title of prerogative inquiries, either seduced by the fanciful 

 analogy, which such instances bore to the prerogativa centuria in the Roman 

 Comitia, or justly considering them as Herschel supposes to hold a kind of 

 prerogative dignity from being peculiarly suggestive of causation. 



Two high authorities in physical science (v. Herschel, Nat. Phil., art. 192; 

 &quot;Whowell s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. ii. p. 243) pronounce 

 these instances of little service in the task of induction, being for the most part 

 classed not according to the ideas which they involve, or to any obvious cir 

 cumstance in the facts of which they consist, but according to the extent and 

 manner of their influence upon the inquiry in which they are employed. Thus 

 we have solitary instances, migrating instances, ostensive instances, clandestine 

 instances, so termed according to the degree in which they exhibit, or seem to 

 exhibit, the property, whose nature we would examine. We have guide-post 

 instances, crucial instances, instances of the parted road, of the doorway, of the 

 lamp, according to the guidance they supply to our advance. &quot;Whewell remarks 



