92 PREFACE TO 



After enumerating the four kinds of idols, Bacon gives in- 

 stances of each (4567.); and speaking in (62.) of idols of the 

 theatre, introduces a triple classification of false philosophies, to 

 which he seems to have attached much importance, as we find it 

 referred to in many parts of his writings. False philosophy is 

 sophistical, empirical, or superstitious ; sophistical, when it con- 

 sists of dialectic subtleties built upon no better foundation than 

 common notions and every-day observation ; empirical, when it 

 is educed out of a few experiments, however accurately ex- 

 amined ; and superstitious, when theological traditions are made 

 its basis. In the Cogitata et Visa he compares the rational 

 philosophers (that is, those whose system is sophistical, the name 

 implying that they trust too much to reason and despise ob- 

 servation) to spiders whose webs are spun out of their own 

 bodies, and the empirics to the ant which simply lays up its 

 store and uses it. Whereas the true way is that of the bee, 

 which gathers its materials from the flowers of the field and of 

 the garden, and then, ex propria facultate, elaborates and trans- 

 forms them. 1 The third kind of false philosophy is not here 

 mentioned. In the Novum Organum Bacon perhaps intended 

 particularly to refer to the Mosaical philosophy of Fludd, who 

 is one of the most learned of the Cabalistic writers. 2 



In (69.) Bacon speaks of faulty demonstrations as the 

 defences and bulwarks of idols, and divides the common pro- 

 cess for the establishment of axioms and conclusions into four 

 parts, each of which is defective. He here describes in gene- 

 ral terms the new method of induction. In the next aphorism, 

 which concludes this part of his subject, he condemns the 

 way in which experimental researches have commonly been 

 carried on. 



The doctrine of idols seems, when the Novum Organum was 

 published, to have been esteemed one of its most important 

 portions. Mersenne at least, the earliest critic on Bacon's 

 writings, his Certitude des Sciences having been published in 



1 In the Advancement of Learning and the De Aug mentis, the schoolmen in par- 

 ticular are compared to the spider; a passage which has been misunderstood by a 

 distinguished writer, whose judgments seem not unfrequently to be as hastily formed 

 as they are fluently expressed, and who conceives that Bacon intended to condemn 

 the study of psychology. 



In speaking of the field and the garden, Bacon refers respectively to observations of 

 Nature and artificial experiment ; an instance of the " curiosa felicitas " of his 

 metaphors. 



a Tiudd's work, entitled PhllosopJiia Moysaica, was published in 163$. 



