402 KOVUM OttGANtnr. COOK 1. 



jancy, than to those of vulgar notions. The disputatious and 

 sopliistic school entraps the understanding, whilst the fanciful, 

 bombastic, and, as it were, poetical school, rather flatters it. 

 There is a clear example of this among the Greeks, especially in 

 Pythagoras, where, however, the superstition is coarse and over 

 charged, but it is more dangerous and refined in Plato and his 

 school. This evil is found also in some branches of other 

 systems of philosophy, where it introduces abstracted forms, 

 iinal and first causes, omitting frequently the intermediate and 

 the like. Against it we must use the greatest caution ; for the 

 apotheosis of error is the greatest evil of all, and when folly is 

 worshipped, it is, as it were, a plague spot upon the understand 

 ing. Yet some of the moderns have indulged this folly with 

 such consummate inconsideratencss, that they have endeavoured 

 to build a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of 

 Genesis, the book of Job, and other parts of Scripture ; seeking 

 thus the dead amongst the living. And this folly is the more to 

 be prevented and restrained, because not only fantastical philo 

 sophy, but heretical religion spring from the absurd mixture of 

 matters divine and human. It is therefore most wise soberly to 

 render unto faith the things that are faith s. 



LXVI. Having spoken of the vicious authority of the systems 

 founded either on vulgar notions, or on a few experiments, or on 

 superstition, we must now consider the faulty subjects for con 

 templation, especially in natural philosophy. The human under 

 standing is perverted by observing the power of mechanical arts, 

 in which bodies are very materially changed by composition or 

 separation, and is induced to suppose that something similar 

 takes place in the universal nature of things. Hence the fiction 

 of elements, and their co-operuuon in forming natural bodies.* 



c In scripture everything tvhich concerns the passing interests oi the 

 body is called dead ; the only living knowledge having regard to the 

 eternal interest of the soul. Ed. 



a In mechanics and the general sciences, causes compound their 

 effects, or in other words, it is generally possible to deduce a priori 

 the consequence of introducing complex agencies into any experi 

 ment, by allowing for the effect of each of the simple causes which 

 enter into their composition. In chemistry and physiology a contrary law 

 holds ; the causes which they embody generally uniting to form distinct 

 substances, and to introduce unforeseen laws and combinations. The 

 deductive method here is consequently inapplicable, and we are forced 

 back upon experiment. 



Bacon in the text is hardly consistent with himself, as he admits in. 

 the second book the doctrine, to which modern discovery points, of the 

 reciprocal transmutation of the elements. What seemed poetic fiction 

 in the theories of Pythagoras and Seneca, assumes the appearance of 

 scientific fact in the hands of Baron Cavnard. Ed. 



