BACON'S IDOLS: A COMMENTARY. 789 



Fori); and Idols of the Theater (Idola Theatri). It is not to be 

 claimed for Bacon's analysis that it is exhaustive or always scien- 

 tifically exact. In many places, too, it opens up difficult philosophic 

 questions, which for the present must be disregarded. But, as Pro- 

 fessor Fowler has said, there is something about his diction, " his 

 quaintness of expression, and his power of illustration which lays 

 hold of the mind and lodges itself in the memory in a way which we 

 can hardly find paralleled in any other writer, except it be Shake- 

 speare." * Moreover, though he often deals with matters of merely 

 technical and temporary interest, his leading thoughts are of perma- 

 nent and universal applicability. Let us see, then, what suggestions 

 we can gather from a brief consideration of his Idols, one by one. 



Idols of the Tribe are so called because they " have their founda- 

 tion in human nature itself " ; in other words, they are the pre- 

 possessions and proclivities which belong to men as men, and as such 

 are common to the whole race or tribe. " Let men please them- 

 selves as they will," says Bacon, " in admiring and almost adoring 

 the human mind, this is certain: that as an uneven mirror distorts 

 the rays of objects according to its own figure and section, so the 

 mind, when it receives impressions of objects through the sense, 

 can not be trusted to report them truly, but in forming its notions 

 mixes up its own nature with the nature of things." In many lines 

 of thought there is no more pregnant source of fallacy and confu- 

 sion than the tendency, innate in all and seldom properly checked, 

 to accept man as the measure of all things, and to translate the 

 entire universe into terms of our own lives. Theology, though it 

 is slowly outgrowing its cruder anthropomorphism, still talks about 

 the " will " of God, an " intelligent " First Cause, the " moral gov- 

 ernor," and " lawgiver " ; and outside theology we have ample evi- 

 dence of the persistency with which we humanize and personify 

 Nature by endowing it with attributes belonging to ourselves. Dar- 

 win confessed that he found it difficult to avoid this tendency. f It 

 is a pitfall into which men constantly stumble in their attempts to 

 interpret the processes at work about them. 



One important result of our habit of thus forcing the universe 

 to become " the bond-slave of human thought " is to be found, as 

 Bacon notes, in our proneness to " suppose the existence of more 

 order and regularity in the world " than is actually to be discovered 

 there. While we read design and purpose into the phenomena of 

 Nature because we are conscious of design and purpose in our own 

 activities, thus allowing ourselves to drift into the metaphysical 

 doctrine of Final Causes, we also do our best to bring Nature's mul- 



* Novum Organon, edited by Thomas Fowler, introduction, p. 182. 

 \ Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. i, p. 6. 



