

60 GENERAL PREFACE TO 



they only who come in their own name will be received of men. 

 He constantly exhorted the seeker after truth to seek it in 

 intercourse with Nature, and has repeatedly professed that he 

 was no founder of a sect or school. He condemned the arro- 

 gance of those who thought it beneath the dignity of the philo- 

 sopher to dwell on matters of observation and experiment, and 

 reminded them that the sun " aeque palatia et cloacas ingreditur ; 

 nee tamen polluitur." We do not, he continues, erect or de- 

 dicate to human pride a capitol or a pyramid ; we lay the 

 foundations in the mind of man of a holy temple, whereof the 

 exemplar is the universe. Throughout his writings the re- 

 jection of systems and authority is coupled with the assertion, 

 that it is beyond all things necessary that the philosopher should 

 be an humble follower of Nature. One of the most remarkable 

 parts of the Novum Organum is the doctrine of Idola. It is an 

 attempt to classify according to their origin the false and ill- 

 defined notions by which the mind is commonly beset. They 

 come, he tells us, from the nature of the human mind in general, 

 from the peculiarities of each man's individual mind, from his 

 intercourse with other men, from the formal teaching of the re- 

 ceived philosophies. All these must be renounced and put away, 

 else no man can enter into the kingdom which is to be founded 

 on the knowledge of Nature. 1 Of the four kinds of idols 

 Mersenne has spoken in his Verite des Sciences, published in 

 1625, as of the four buttresses of the Organum of Verulam. 

 This expression, though certainly inaccurate, serves to show the 

 attention which in Bacon's time was paid to his doctrine of 

 idola. 2 



His rejection of syllogistic reasoning in the proposed process 

 for the establishment of axioms, was not without utility. In 

 the middle ages and at the reform of philosophy the value of 

 the syllogistic method was unduly exalted. Bacon was right in 

 denying that it was possible to establish by a summary process 

 and a priori the first principles of any science, and thence to 

 deduce by syllogism all the propositions which that science 

 could contain; and though he erred in rejecting deductive 

 reasoning altogether, this error could never have exerted any 

 practical influence on the progress of science, while the truth 



1 Nov. Org. i. 68. The word idolon is u^cd by Bacon in antithesis to idea. He 

 does not mean by it an idol or false object of worship. 



2 Compare Gassendi, Inst. Log. 



