BOOK 1.1 APHORISMS. 385 



XII. The present system of logic rather assists in confirming 

 and rendering inveterate the errors founded on vulgar notions 

 than in searching after truth, and is therefore more hurtful than 

 useful. 



XIII. The syllogism is not applied to the principles of the 

 sciences, and is of no avail in intermediate axioms, as being very 



theses and abstract conceptions. This had been unfortunately the prac 

 tice of the Greeks. From the rapid development geometry received in 

 their hands, they imagined the same method would lead to results 

 equally brilliant in natural science, and snatching up some abstract 

 principle, which they carefully removed from the test of experiment, 

 imagined they could reason out from it all the laws and external appear 

 ances of the universe. The scholastics were impelled along the same 

 path, not only by precedent, but by profession. Theology was the 

 only science which received from them a consistent development, 

 and the d priori grounds on which it rested prevented them from 

 employing any other method in the pursuit of natural phenomena. 

 Thus, forms of demonstration, in themselves accurate, and of momentous 

 value in their proper sphere, became confounded with fable, and led 

 men into the idea they were exploring truth when they were only 

 accurately deducing error from error. One principle ever so slightly 

 deflected, like a false quantity in an equation, could be sufficient to 

 infect the whole series of conclusions of which it was the base ; and 

 though the philosopher might subsequently deduce a thousand consecu 

 tive inferences with the utmost accuracy or precision, he would only 

 succeed in drawing out very methodically nine hundred and ninety-nine 

 errors. Ed. 



c It would appear from this and the two preceding aphorisms, that 

 Bacon fell into the error of denying the utility of the syllogism in 

 the very part of inductive science where it is essentially required ; 

 Logic, like mathematics, is purely a formal process, and must, as the 

 scaffolding to the building, be employed to arrange facts in the struc 

 ture of a science, and not to form any portion of its ground- work, or 

 to supply the materials of which the system is to be composed. The 

 word syllogism, like most other pyschological terms, has no fixed or 

 original signification, but is sometimes employed, as it was by the 

 Greeks, to denote general reasoning, and at others to point out the 

 formal method of deducing a particular inference from two or more general 

 propositions. Bacon does not confine the term within the boundaries of 

 express definition, but leaves us to infer that he took it in the latter 

 sense, from his custom of associating the term with the wranglings of 

 the schools. The scholastics, it is true, abused the deductive syllogism, 

 by employing it in its naked, skeleton-like form, and confounding it 

 with the whole breadth oi logical theory ; but their errors are not to be 

 visited on Aristotle, who never dreamt of playing with formal syllo 

 gisms, and, least of all, mistook the descending for the ascending 

 series of inference. In our mind we are of accord with the Stagyrite, 

 who propounds, as far as we can interpret him, two modes of investi 

 gating truth, the one by which we ascend from particular and singular 

 tacts to general laws and axioms, and the other by which we descend 



2 2c 



