258 NOVUM ORGANUM. 



it (either because they are generally received and believed, or because 

 they suit the taste), brings everything else to support and agree with 

 them ; and though the weight and number of contradictory instances 

 be superior, still it either overlooks or despises them, or gets rid of 

 them by creating distinctions, not without great and injurious pre 

 judice, that the authority of these previous conclusions may be main 

 tained inviolate. And so he made a good answer, who, when he was 

 shown, hung up in the temple, the votive tablets of those who had 

 fulfilled their vows after escaping from shipwreck, and was pressed 

 with the question, &quot; Did he not then recognize the will of the gods?&quot; 

 asked, in his turn, &quot; But where are the pictures of those who have 

 perished, notwithstanding their vows?&quot; The same holds true of 

 almost every superstition as astrology, dreams, omens, judgments, 

 and the like wherein men, pleased with such vanities, attend to those 

 events which are fulfilments ; but neglect and pass over the instances 

 where they fail (though this is much more frequently the case). But 

 this evil insinuates itself with far more subtlety in Philosophy and the 

 Sciences, in which anything which is once approved vitiates every 

 thing else and reduces it to subjection (though the latter be much 

 surer and more powerful). Moreover, even supposing this self-pleasing 

 and vanity, of which we have spoken, to be absent, still such is the 

 peculiar and continual disposition to error of the human Intellect, 

 that it is more moved and roused by affirmations than negations, when 

 it ought in due order to treat both impartially ; nay, in establishing 

 any true Axiom, the influence of the negative instance is the greater. 



xlvii. The human Intellect is most moved by those things which 

 can strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly; by which 

 the fancy is usually filled and inflated ; it then in some way, though 

 quite imperceptibly, represents and supposes everything else to be 

 similarly constituted to those few objects by which the mind is beset ; 

 but the intellect is exceedingly slow, and unfit for that transition to 

 remote and heterogeneous influences by which Axioms are proved as 

 by fire, unless the office be imposed upon it by strict laws and force 

 of authority. 



xlviii. The human Intellect is unquiet, and cannot halt or rest, but 

 presses onward, yet in vain. And so we cannot conceive any extreme 

 or limit to the universe, but it always occurs, as if a necessity, that 

 there must be something beyond. Nor, again, can we conceive how 

 eternity has flowed down to this present day, since the distinction 

 which is usually received between the infinite &quot; a parte ante&quot; and &quot; a 

 part e post&quot; cannot by any means stand, since it would thence follow 

 that one infinity is greater than another infinity, and so that infinity 

 may be lessening and verging to the finite. There is a similar subtlety 

 as regards the divisibility of lines, arising from the impotence of 

 thought. But this impotence of mind interferes with more pernicious 

 results in the discovery of causes ; for though the highest universals 

 in Nature ought to be positive, just as they are discovered, and are 

 not really referable to causation, yet the human Intellect, incapable 

 of resting, still seeks something better known. But then, whilst aim- 



