BOOK I. J AMlORlSifA 303 



sion of tlie miucl, whilst it is very 5iow and unfit for tlie transi- 

 tion to the remote and heterogeneous instances by Avhich axioms 

 are tried as by fire, unless the office be imposed upon it by severe 

 regulations and a powerful authority. 



XL VIII. The human understanding is active and cannot halt 

 or rest, but even, though without effect, still presses forward. 

 Thus we cannot conceive of any end or external boundary of the 

 world, and it seems necessarily to occur to us that there must bo 

 something beyond. Nor can we imagine hovr eternity has flowed 

 on down to the present day, since the usually received distinc- 

 tion of an infinity, a parte ante and a parte post" cannot bold 

 good ; for it would thence follow that one infinity is greater 

 than another, and also that infinity is wasting away and tending 

 to an end. There is the same difficulty in considering the in- 

 finite divisibility of lines arising from the weakness of our minds, 

 which weakness interferes to still greater disadvantage with the 

 discovery of causes ; for although the greatest generalities in 

 nature must be positive, just as they are found, and in fact not 

 causable, yet the human understanding, incapable of resting, 

 seeks for something more intelligible. Thus, however, whilst 

 aiming at further progress, it falls back to what is actually less 

 advanced, namely, final causes ; for they are clearly more allied 

 to man's own nature, than the system of the universe, and from 

 this source they have wonderfully corrupted philosophy. But he 

 would be an unskilful and shallow philosopher who should seek 

 for causes in the greatest generalities, and not be anxious to dis- 

 cover them in subordinate objects. 



XLIX. The human understanding resembles not a dr}^ light, 

 but admits a tincture of the wilP and passions, which generate 



" A scholastic term, to signify the two eternities of past and future 

 duration, that stretch out on both sides of the narrow isthmus (time) 

 occupied by man. It must be remembered that Bacon lived before tlie 

 doctrine of limits gave rise to the higher calculus, and therefore could 

 have no conception of different denominations of infinities : on the 

 other hand he would have thought the man insane who should have 

 talked to him about lines infinitely great, inclosing angles infinitely 

 little ; that a right line, which is a right line so long as it is finite, by 

 changing infinitely little its direction, becomes an infinite curve, and 

 that a curve may become infinitely less than another curve ; that there 

 are infinite squares, and infinite cubes, and infinites of infinites, all 

 greater than one another, and the last but one of which is nothing in 

 comparison with the last. Yet half a century sufficed from Bacon's 

 time, to make this nomenclature, which would have appeared to him 

 the excess of frenzy, not only reasonable but necessary, to grasp the 

 higher demonstrations oi physical science. Ed. 



p Spinoza, in his letter to Oldenberg (Op. Posth. p. 398), considers thii 

 aphorism based on a wrong conception of the origin of error, and, believ- 

 ing it to be fundamental, was led to reject Bacon's method altogether. 



