236 ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 



a subtile genius, and reduced to numerous fragments, as 

 having a great sympathy with the human understanding; 

 for the mind is wonderfully bent against fluctuating, and 

 endeavors to find something fixed and unmovable, upon 

 which, as a firm basis, to rest in its inquiries. And as 

 Aristotle endeavors to prove that, in all motion of bodies, 

 there is something still at rest, and elegantly explains the 

 ancient fable of Atlas, sustaining the heavens on his shoul 

 ders, of the poles of the world, about which the revolutions 

 are performed: 3 so men have a strong desire to retain within 

 themselves an atlas, or pole for their thoughts, in some 

 measure to govern the fluctuations and revolutions of the 

 understanding, as otherwise fearing their heaven should 

 tumble. And hence it is, that they have been ever hasty 

 in laying the principles of the sciences, about which all the 

 variety of disputes might turn without danger of falling; 

 not at all regarding, that whoever too hastily catches at 

 certainties shall end in doubts, as he who seasonably with 

 holds his judgment shall arrive at certainties. 



It is therefore manifest that this art of judging by syl 

 logism is nothing more than a reduction of propositions to 

 their principles by middle terms. 3 But principles are sup 

 posed to be received by consent, and exempt from question, 

 while the invention of middle terms is freely permitted to 

 the subtilty and investigation of the wit. This reduction is 

 of two kinds, direct and inverse. It is direct when the 

 proposition itself is reduced to the principle, and this 



2 Animal. Mot. 3. 



3 Bacon here only gives us a loose translation of the Dictum de omne et nullo, 

 as inclosing the essentiality of the syllogism. Thus, to develop his thought, 

 when a certain attribute does not appear to belong to a proposed subject, the 

 logician presents another subject, in which the contested quality is admitted by 

 his hearers to enter, and having shown that this new subject the middle term 

 may be affirmed of the original subject with which he set out, he concludes 

 that its inseparable attribute must also belong to it. If these two primary prop 

 ositions, viz. , those which affirm the attribute of the middle term, and connect 

 this term with the original subject, need proof, he is obliged to seek other mid 

 dle terms, and employ them in the same manner, until he establish his disputed 

 premises on the basis of experience or consentaneous principles. If such funda 

 ments, common to the minds of the disputants, do not exist, the argument is 

 nugatory, ana rational conviction impossible. Ed. 



