I3 8 BACON 



and stupid, it might seem incredible that such acute and subtile 

 geniuses as have been exercised this way, could ever have ob- 

 truded it upon the world, but that they hasted to theories and 

 opinions, and, as it were, disdained to dwell upon particulars ; 

 for they have used examples and particular instances but as 

 whifflers to keep the crowd off and make room for their own 

 opinions, without consulting them from" the beginning, so as 

 to make a just and mature judgment of the truth of things. 

 And this procedure has, indeed, struck me with an awful and 

 religious wonder, to see men tread the same paths of error, both 

 in divine and human inquiries. For as in receiving divine 

 truths men are averse to become as little children, so in the ap- 

 prehending of human truths, for men to begin to read, and, like 

 children, come back again to the first elements of induction, is 

 reputed a low and contemptible thing. 



But, allowing the principles of the sciences might be justly 

 formed by the common induction, or by sense and experience, 

 yet it is certain that the lower axioms cannot, in natural things, 

 be with certainty deduced by syllogism from them. For syl- 

 logism reduces propositions to principles by intermediate prop- 

 ositions. And this form, whether of invention or proof, has 

 place in the popular sciences, as ethics, politics, law, etc., and 

 even in divinity, since God has been pleased to accommodate 

 himself to the human capacity; but in physics, where nature 

 is to be caught by works, and not the adversary by argument, 

 truth in this way slips through our fingers, because the subtil- 

 ty of the operations of nature far exceeds the subtilty of words. 

 So that syllogism thus failing, there is everywhere a necessity 

 for employing a genuine and correct induction, as well in the 

 more general principles, as the inferior propositions. For syl- 

 logisms consist of propositions, propositions of words, but 

 words are the signs of notions ; wherefore if these notions, 

 which are the souls of words, be unjustly and unsteadily ab- 

 stracted from things, the whole structure must fall. Nor can 

 any laborious subsequent examination of the consequences of 

 arguments, or the truth of propositions, ever repair the ruin ; 

 for the error lies in the first digestion, which cannot be rectified 

 by the secondary functions of nature. 



It was not, therefore, without cause, that many of the ancient 

 philosophers, and some of them eminent in their way, became 

 academics and sceptics, who denied all certainty of human 



