BACON'S IDOLS: A COMMENTARY. 791 



circulate untested. Even more disastrous, perhaps, in the long run, 

 is the power of prepossessions. "When once, says Bacon, the human 

 understanding has " adopted an opinion (either as being the received 

 opinion, or as being agreeable to itself) " it straightway " draws all 

 things else to support and agree with it." Illustrations may be 

 found in every direction. Note, for instance, the vitality, even 

 in the teeth of positive disproof, of many long-accepted and often- 

 challenged ideas belief in dreams, omens, prophecies, in provi- 

 dential visitations and interpositions, in the significance of coinci- 

 dences, in popular saws about natural phenomena, in quacks and 

 quackery, in old wives' tales, vulgar and pseudo-scientific. The 

 story of witchcraft is only another example of the same kind, though 

 written large in the chronicles of the world in letters of fire and 

 blood; the human understanding had " adopted " a belief in witches, 

 and drew " all things else to support and agree with it." In all 

 such cases of prepossession the mind obstinately dwells on every 

 detail that favors its accepted conclusions, while disregarding or de- 

 preciating everything that tells against them; it is always, in Ba- 

 con's phrase, " more moved and excited by affirmatives than by nega- 

 tives." Thus, we hear much of the one dream that is fulfilled, and 

 of the ninety and nine that are unfulfilled nothing. Bacon illus- 

 trates this perversity by the well-known anecdote of the ancient 

 cynic, which may be left to convey its own moral : " And therefore 

 it was a good answer that was made by one who, when they showed 

 him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows 

 as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he 

 did not now acknowledge the power of the gods 'Ay,' asked he 

 again, ' but where are they painted that were drowned after their 

 vows? ' " 



Finally, among these Idols of the Tribe we must include the 

 disturbance caused by the play of feeling upon the mind. " The 

 human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from 

 the will and affections, whence proceed sciences which may be called 

 ' sciences as one would.' ' We all know, to our cost, how passion 

 will warp judgment ; how difficult it is to see clearly when the emo- 

 tions are thoroughly aroused; how tenaciously men cling to opin- 

 ions they are familiar with, or would fain have to be true ; how 

 fiercely they contest ideas that are unfamiliar or repugnant. Had 

 it been contrary to the interest of authority, observed shrewd old 

 Hobbes, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two 

 angles of a square, the fact would have been, if not disputed, yet 

 suppressed.* Similarly, if the passions of men had been called into 

 play over the most clearly demonstrable of abstract mathematical 



* Leviathan, Part I, chapter xi. 



