Novum Organum. Bacon Francis

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СКАЧАТЬ human knowledge in inverse proportion, viz., the experience which terminates with life, with that experience which one century transmits to another. —Ed.

49

The Chinese characters resemble, in many respects, the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians, being adapted to represent ideas, not sounds.

50

See Axiom 75.

51

The methods by which Newton carried the rule and compass to the boundaries of creation is a sufficient comment on the sagacity of the text. The same cause which globulizes a bubble, has rounded the earth, and the same law which draws a stone to its surface, keeps the moon in her orbit. It was by calculating and ascertaining these principles upon substances entirely at his disposal that this great philosopher was enabled to give us a key to unlock the mysteries of the universe. —Ed.

52

See the “Clouds” of Aristophanes, where Socrates is represented as chasing Jupiter out of the sky, by resolving thunderstorms into aërial concussions and whirlwinds. —Ed.

53

Robespierre was the latest victim of this bigotry. In his younger days he attempted to introduce Franklin’s lightning conductor into France, but was persecuted by those whose lives he sought to protect, as one audaciously striving to avert the designs of Providence. —Ed.

54

We can hardly agree with the text. The scholastics, in building up a system of divinity, certainly had recourse to the deductive syllogism, because the inductive was totally inapplicable, except as a verificatory process. With regard to the technical form in which they marshalled their arguments, which is what our author aims at in his censure, they owed nothing at all to Aristotle, the conducting a dispute in naked syllogistic fashion having originated entirely with themselves. —Ed.

55

Bacon cannot be supposed to allude to those divines who have attempted to show that the progress of physical science is confirmatory of revelation, but only to such as have built up a system of faith out of their own refinements on nature and revelation, as Patricius and Emanuel Swedenborg. —Ed.

56

Daniel xii. 4.

57

Bacon, in this Aphorism, appears to have entertained a fair idea of the use of the inductive and deductive methods in scientific inquiry, though his want of geometrical knowledge must have hindered him from accurately determining the precise functions of each, as it certainly led him in other parts of the Organon (V. Aph. 82), to undervalue the deductive, and, as he calls it, the dogmatic method, and to rely too much upon empiricism. —Ed.

58

The reader may consult the note of the 23d Aphorism for the fault which Bacon censures, and, if he wish to pursue the subject further, may read Plato’s Timæus, where that philosopher explains his system in detail. Bacon, however, is hardly consistent in one part of his censure, for he also talks about the spirit and appetites of inanimate substances, and that so frequently, as to preclude the supposition that he is employing metaphor. —Ed.

59

Proclus flourished about the beginning of the fifth century, and was the successor of Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblicus, who, in the two preceding centuries, had revived the doctrines of Plato, and assailed the Christian religion. The allusion in the text must be assigned to Iamblicus, who, in the fourth century, had republished the Pythagorean theology of numbers, and endeavored to construct the world out of arithmetic, thinking everything could be solved by the aid of proportions and geometry. Bacon must not be understood in the text to censure the use but the abuse of mathematics and physical investigations, as in the “De Augmentis” (lib. iv. c. 6), he enumerates the multiplicity of demonstration scientific facts admit of, from this source. —Ed.

60

See Livy, lib. ix. c. 17, where, in a digression on the probable effect of a contest between Rome and Alexander the Great, he says: “Non cum Dario rem esse dixisset: quem mulierum ac spadonum agmen trahentem inter purpuram atque aurum, oneratum fortunæ apparatibus, prædam veriùs quam hostem, nihil aliud quam ausus vana contemnere, incruentus devicit.”

61

The lowest axioms are such as spring from simple experience – such as in chemistry, that animal substances yield no fixed salt by calcination; in music, that concords intermixed with discords make harmony, etc. Intermediate axioms advance a step further, being the result of reflection, which, applied to our experimental knowledge, deduces laws from them, such as in optics of the first degree of generality, that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection; and in mechanics, Kepler’s three laws of motion, while his general law, that all bodies attract each other with forces proportional to their masses, and inversely as the squares of their distances, may be taken as one of the highest axioms. Yet so far is this principle from being only notional or abstract, it has presented us with a key which fits into the intricate wards of the heavens, and has laid bare to our gaze the principal mechanism of the universe. But natural philosophy in Bacon’s day had not advanced beyond intermediate axioms, and the term notional or abstract is applied to those general axioms then current, not founded on the solid principles of inductive inquiry, but based upon à priori reasoning and airy metaphysics. —Ed.

62

This hope has been abundantly realized in the discovery of gravity and the decomposition of light, mainly by the inductive method. To a better philosophy we may also attribute the discovery of electricity, galvanism and their mutual connection with each other, and magnetism, the inventions of the air-pump, steam-engine and the chronometer.