14 THE GREAT INSTAURATIOK. 



than their own principles can give ; and that such supposed 

 principles should be examined, till they become absolutely 

 clear and certain. As for first notions of the rnind, we 

 suspect all those that the understanding, left to itself, 

 procures ; nor ever allow them till approved and authorized 

 by a second judgment. And with respect to the informations 

 of the senses, we have many ways of examining them ; for the 

 senses are fallacious, though they discover their own errors ; 

 but these lie near, whilst the means of discovery are 

 remote. 



The senses are faulty in two respects, as they either fail or 

 deceive us. For there are many things that escape the 

 senses, though ever so rightly disposed ; as by the subtilty of 

 t he whole body, or the minuteness of its parts ; the distance 

 of place; the slowness or velocity of motion; the common 

 ness of the object, &c. Neither do the senses, when they lay 

 hold of a thing, retain it strongly; for evidence, and the in 

 formations of sense, are in proportion to a man, and not in 

 proportion to the universe. 1 * And it is a grand error to assert 

 that sense is the measure of things. 15 



b Bacon held, that every perception is nothing more than the con 

 sciousness of some body acting either interiorly or from without upon 

 that portion of the frame which is the point of contact. Hence all thd 

 knowledge we have of the material world arises from the movements 

 which it generates in our senses. These sensations simply inform us 

 that a wide class of objects exist independent of ourselves, which affect 

 us in a certain manner, and do not convey into our minds the real pro 

 perties of such objects so much as the effects of the relation in which they 

 stand to our senses. Human knowledge thus becomes relative ; and 

 that which we call the relation of objects to one another, is nothing moro 

 than the relation which they have to our organization. Hence as these 

 relations of objects, either internal or exterior to the mind vary, sensn- 

 tions must vary along with them, and produce, even in the same indi 

 vidual, a crowd of impressions either conflicting or in some measure 

 opposed to each other. So far as these feelings concern morals, it 

 is the business of ethics to bring them under the influence of reason, 

 and, selecting out of them such as are calculated to dignify and elevate 

 man s nature, to impart to them a trenchant and permanent character. 

 As respects that portion which flow in upon the mind from the internal 

 world, it is the peculiar province of induction as reformed by our author, 

 to separate such as are illusory from the real, and to construct out of 

 the latter a series of axioms, expressing in hierarchical gradation the 

 general system of laws by which the universe is governed. Ed. 



* The doctrine of the two last paragraphs may appear contradictory 

 lo the oj iriion of some p.-^osophers, who maintain the infallibility of 



