Francis Bacon,

The New Organon; Or, True Directions concerning the Interpretation of Nature (1620)

PREFACE

Those who have taken upon them to lay down the law of nature as a thing already searched out and understood, whether they have spoken in simple assurance or professional affectation, have therein done philosophy and the sciences great injury. For as they have been successful in inducing belief, so they have been effective in quenching and stopping inquiry; and have done more harm by spoiling and putting an end to other men’s efforts than good by their own. Those on the other hand who have taken a contrary course, and asserted that absolutely nothing can be known — whether it were from hatred of the ancient sophists, or from uncertainty and fluctuation of mind, or even from a kind of fullness of learning, that they fell upon this opinion — have certainly advanced reasons for it that are not to be despised; but yet they have neither started from true principles nor rested in the just conclusion, zeal and affectation having carried them much too far. The more ancient of the Greeks (whose writings are lost) took up with better judgment a position between these two extremes — between the presumption of pronouncing on everything, and the despair of comprehending anything; and though frequently and bitterly complaining of the difficulty of inquiry and the obscurity of things, and like impatient horses champing at the bit, they did not the less follow up their object and engage with nature, thinking (it seems) that this very question — viz., whether or not anything can be known — was to be settled not by arguing, but by trying. And yet they too, trusting entirely to the force of their understanding, applied no rule, but made everything turn upon hard thinking and perpetual working and exercise of the mind.

Now my method, though hard to practice, is easy to explain; and it is this. I propose to establish progressive stages of certainty. The evidence of the sense, helped and guarded by a certain process of correction, I retain. But the mental operation which follows the act of sense I for the most part reject; and instead of it I open and lay out a new and certain path for the mind to proceed in, starting directly from the simple sensuous perception. The necessity of this was felt, no doubt, by those who attributed so much importance to dialectics, showing thereby that they were in search of helps for the understanding, and had no confidence in the native and spontaneous process of the mind. But this remedy comes too late to do any good, when the mind is already, through the daily intercourse and conversation of life, occupied with unsound doctrines and beset on all sides by vain imaginations. And therefore that art of dialectics, coming (as I said) too late to the rescue, and no way able to set matters right again, was only good for stabilizing errors rather than disclosing truth. There remains but one course for the recovery of a sound and healthy condition — namely, that the entire work of the understanding be commenced afresh, and the mind itself be from the very outset not left to take its own course, but guided at every step, as though a machine were in control. . . .

Moreover, I have one request to make. I have on my own part made it my care and study that the things which I shall propound should not only be true, but should also be presented to men’s minds, how strangely so ever preoccupied and obstructed, in a manner not harsh or unpleasant. It is but reasonable, however (especially in so great a restoration of learning and knowledge), that I should claim of men one favor in return, which is this: if anyone would form an opinion or judgment either out of his own observation, or out of the crowd of authorities, or out of the forms of demonstration (which have now acquired a sanction like that of judicial laws), concerning these speculations of mine, let him not hope that he can do it in passage or by the by; but let him examine the thing thoroughly; let him make some little trial for himself of the way which I describe and lay out; let him familiarize his thoughts with that subtlety of nature to which experience bears witness; let him correct by seasonable patience and due delay the depraved and deep-rooted habits of his mind; and when all this is done and he has begun to be his own master, let him (if he will) use his own judgment.

APHORISMS CONCERNING THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. BOOK 1:

1. Man, being nature’s servant and interpreter, is limited in what he can do and understand by what he has observed of the course of nature — directly observing it or inferring things. Beyond that he doesn’t know anything and can’t do anything.

4. All that man can do to bring something about is to put natural bodies together or to pull them away from one another. The rest is done by nature working within.

10. Nature is much subtler than are our senses and intellect; so that all those elegant meditations, theorizings, and defensive moves that men indulge in are crazy — except that no one pays attention to them.

14. A syllogism consists of propositions, which consist of words, which are stand-ins for notions. So the root of the trouble is this: If the notions are confused, having been sloppily abstracted from the facts, nothing that is built on them can be firm. So our only hope lies in true induction.

19. There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. One of them starts with the senses and particular events and swoops straight up from them to the most general axioms; on the basis of these, taken as unshakably true principles, it proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of intermediate axioms. This is the way that people follow now. The other derives axioms from the senses and particular events in a gradual and unbroken ascent, arriving finally at the most general axioms. This is the true way, but no one has tried it.

22. Both ways set out from the senses and particular events, and come to rest in the most general propositions; yet they are enormously different. For one of them merely glances in passing at experiments and particular events, whereas the other stays among them and examines them with proper respect. One proceeds immediately to laying down certain abstract and useless generalities, whereas the other rises step by step to what is truly better known by nature.

38. The idols and false notions that now possess the human intellect and have taken deep root in it don’t just occupy men’s minds so that truth can hardly get in, but also when a truth is allowed in they will push back against it, stopping it from contributing to a fresh start in the sciences. This can e avoided only if men are forewarned of the danger and do what they can to fortify themselves against the assaults of these idols and false notions.

41. The idols of the tribe have their foundation in human nature itself—in the tribe known as ‘mankind’. It is not true that the human senses are the measure of things; for all perceptions — of the senses as well as of the mind — reflect the perceiver rather than the world. The human intellect is like a distorting mirror, which receives light-rays irregularly and so mixes its own nature with the nature of things, which it distorts.

42. The idols of the cave are the idols of the individual man. In addition to the errors that are common to human nature in general, everyone has his own personal cave or den that breaks up and corrupts the light of nature. This may come from factors such as these: his own individual nature, how he has been brought up and how he interacts with others, his reading of books and the influence of writers he esteems and admires, differences in how his environment affects him because of differences in his state of mind — whether it is busy thinking about something else and prejudiced against this intake or calm and open-minded. . . .

43. There are also idols formed by men’s agreements and associations with each other. I call these idols of the market place, because that is where men come together and do business, because men associate by talking to one another, and the uses of words reflect common folks’ ways of thinking. . . .

44. Lastly, there are idols that have come into men’s minds from various philosophical dogmas and from topsy-turvy laws of demonstration. I call these idols of the theatre, because I regard every one of the accepted systems as the staging and acting out of a fable, making a fictitious staged world of its own. . . .

45.The human intellect is inherently apt to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds there. . . .

46. Once a human intellect has adopted an opinion (either as something it likes or as something generally accepted), it draws everything else in to confirm and support it. Even if there are more and stronger instances against it, the intellect either overlooks these or treats them as negligible or does some line-drawing that lets it shift them out of the way and reject them. . . .

47. The greatest effect on the human intellect is had by things that strike and enter the mind simultaneously and unexpectedly; it is these that customarily fill— inflate! — the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes that every-thing else is somehow, though it can’t see how, similar to those few things that have taken it by storm. . . .

49. The human intellect doesn’t burn with a dry light, because what the person wants and feels gets pumped into it; and that is what gives rise to the ‘please-yourself sciences’. For a man is more likely to believe something if he would like it to be true. Therefore he rejects difficult things because he hasn’t the patience to research them, sober and prudent things because they narrow hope, the deeper things of nature, from superstition, the light that experiments can cast, from arrogance and pride (not wanting people to think his mind was occupied with trivial things), surprising truths, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. In short, there are countless ways in which, sometimes imperceptibly, a person’s likings colour and infect his intellect.

50. But what contributes most to the blockages and aberrations of the human intellect is the fact that the senses are dull, incompetent and deceptive. . . .

69. But the idols have defences and strongholds, namely defective demonstrations; and the demonstrations we have in dialectics do little except make the world a slave to human thought, and make human thought a slave to words. Demonstrations are indeed incipient philosophies and sciences: how good or bad a demonstration is determines how good or bad will be the system of philosophy and the thoughts that follow it. Now the demonstrations that we use in our whole process of getting from the senses and things to axioms and conclusions are defective and inappropriate. This process has four parts, with a fault in each of them. (1) The impressions of the senses itself are faulty, for the senses omit things and deceive us. Their omissions should be made up for, and their deceptions corrected. (2) Notions are abstracted badly from the impressions of the senses, and are vague and confused where they should be definite and clearly bounded. (3) Induction goes wrong when it infers scientific principles by simple enumeration, and doesn’t, as it should, take account of the exceptions and distinctions that nature is entitled to. (4) The method of discovery and proof in which you first state the most general principles and then bring the intermediate axioms into the story, ‘proving’ them from the general principles, is the mother of errors and a disaster for all the sciences. . . .

95. Those who have been engaged in the sciences divide into experimenters and theorists. The experimenters, like ants, merely collect and use facts; the theorists, like spiders, make webs out of themselves. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and the field, but uses its own powers to transform and absorb this material. A true worker at philosophy is like that: he doesn’t rely solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, and he doesn’t take the material that he gathers from natural history and physical experiments and store it up in his memory just as he finds it. Instead, he stores the material in his intellect, altered and brought under control. So there is much to hope for from a closer and purer collaboration between these two strands in science, experimental and theoretical — a collaboration that has never occurred before now.

98. We can’t do without experience; but so far we haven’t had any foundations for experience, or only very weak ones. No one has searched out and stored up a great mass of particular events that is adequate in number, in kind, in certainty, or in any other way to inform the intellect. On the contrary, learned men — relaxed and idle — have accepted, as having the weight of legitimate evidence for constructing or confirming their philosophy, bits of hearsay and rumours about experience. Think of a kingdom or state that manages its affairs on the basis not of letters and reports from ambassadors and trustworthy messengers but of street-gossip and the gutter! Well, the way philosophy has managed its relations with experience has been exactly like that. Nothing examined in enough careful detail, nothing verified, nothing counted, nothing weighed, nothing measured is to be found in natural history. And observations that are loose and unsystematic lead to ideas that are deceptive and treacherous. . . .