402 Kovu.M ORGANu:\r. 



IWOK t. 



lancy, than to tliose of vulgar notions. Tlie dlspntatioiis and 

 Ropliistic scliool entraps the understanding, whilst the fanciful, 

 bombastic, and, as it were, poetical school, rather flatters it. 

 There is a clear example of this among the Greeks, especially in 

 Pythagoras, where, however, the superstition is coarse and over- 

 charged, but it is more dangerous and refined in Plato and his 

 school. This evil is found also in some branches of other 

 systems of philosophy, where it introduces abstracted forms, 

 liual and first causes, omitting frequently the intermediate and 

 tlio like. Against it we must use the greatest caution ; for the 

 apotheosis of error is the greatest evil of all, and when folly is 

 worshipped, it is, as it were, a plague spot upon the understand- 

 ing. Yet some of the moderns have indulged this folly with 

 such consummate inconsiderateness, that they have endeavoured 

 to build a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of 

 Genesis, the book of Job, and other parts of Scripture ; seeking 

 thus the dead amongst the living.* And this folly is the more to 

 ! be prevented and restrained, because not only fantastical pLilo- 

 Isophy, but heretical religion spring from the absurd mixture of 

 matters divine and human. It is therefore most wise soberly to 

 jrender unto faith the things that are faith's. . 



LXVI. Having spoken of the vicious authority of the systems 

 founded either on vulgar notions, or on a few experiments, or on 

 superstition, w^e must now consider the faulty subjects for con- 

 templation, especially in natural philosophy. The human under- 

 standing is perverted by observing the power of mechanical arts, 

 in which bodies are very materially changed by composition or 

 separation, and is induced to suppose that something similar 

 takes place in the universal nature of things. Hence the fiction 

 of elements, and their co-operation in forming natural bodies.* 



•= In scripture everything which concerns the passing interests oi the 

 body is called dead ; the only living knowledge having regard to tho 

 eternal interest of the soul. JEd. 



'^ In meclianics and the general sciences, causes compound their 

 effects, or in other words, it is generally possible to deduce d priori 

 the consequence of introducing complex agencies into any experi- 

 ment, by allowing for the effect of each of the simple causes which 

 enter into their composition. In chemistry and physiology a contrary law 

 holds ; the causes which they embody generally uniting to form distinct 

 substances, and to introduce unforeseen laws and combinations. The 

 deductive method here is consequently inapplicable, and we are forced 

 back upon experiment. 



Bacon in the text is hardly consistent with himself, as he admits in 

 the second book the doctrine, to which modern discovery points, of the 

 jeciprocal transmutation of the elements. What seemed poetic fiction 

 in the theories of Pythagoras and Seneca, assumes the appearance 0/ 

 scientific fact in the handa of Baron Cayuard. Ed, 



