chapter 3 - francisco bacon 下部分

2. THE NEW ORGANON

1: “Bacon’s greatest performance,” says his bitterest critic, “is the first book of the Novum Organum.”77 Never did a man put more life into logic, making induction an epic adventure and a conquest. If one must study logic, let him begin with this book. “This part of human philosophy which regards logic is disagreeable to the taste of many, as appearing to them no other than a net, and a snare of thorny subtlety . . . . But if we would rate things according to their real worth, the rational sciences are the keys to all the rest.”78

2: Philosophy has been barren so long, says Bacon, because she needed a new method to make her fertile. The great mistake of the Greek philosophers was that they spent so much time in theory, so little in observation. But thought should be the aide of observation, not its substitute. “Man,” says the first aphorism of the Novum Organum, as if flinging a challenge to all metaphysics,—“Man, as the minister and interpreter of nature, does and understands as much as his observations on the order of nature . . . permit him; and neither knows nor is capable of more.” The predecessors of Socrates were in this matter sounder than his followers; Democritus, in particular, had a nose for facts, rather than an eye for the clouds. No wonder that philosophy has advanced so little since Aristotle’s day; it has been using Aristotle’s methods. “To go beyond Aristotle by the light of Aristotle is to think that a borrowed light can increase the original light from which it is taken.”79 Now, after two thousand years of logic-chopping with the machinery invented by Aristotle, philosophy has fallen so low that none will do her reverence. All these medieval theories, theorems and disputations must be cast out and forgotten; to renew herself philosophy must begin again with a clean slate and a cleansed mind.

1: The first step, therefore, is the Expurgation of the Intellect. We must become as little children, innocent of isms and abstractions, washed clear of prejudices and preconceptions. We must destroy the Idols of the mind.

2: An idol, as Bacon uses the word (reflecting perhaps the Protestant rejection of image-worship), is a picture taken for a reality, a thought mistaken for a thing. Errors come under this head; and the first problem of logic is to trace and dam the sources of these errors. Bacon proceeds now to a justly famous analysis of fallacies; “no man,” said Condillac, “has better known than Bacon the causes of human error.”

1: These errors are, first, Idols of the Tribe,—fallacies natural to humanity in general. “For man’s sense is falsely asserted” (by Protagoras’ “Man is the measure of all things”) “to be the standard of things: on the contrary, all the perceptions, both of the senses and the mind, bear reference to man and not to the universe; and the human mind resembles those uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects . . . and distort and disfigure them.”80 Our thoughts are pictures rather of ourselves than of their objects. For example, “the human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and regularity in things than it really finds . . . . Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles.”81 Again,

2: the human understanding, when any proposition has been once laid down (either from general admission and belief, or from the pleasure it affords), forces everything else to add fresh support and confirmation: and although most cogent and abundant instances may exist to the contrary, yet either does not observe, or despises them, or it gets rid of and rejects them by some distinction, with violent and injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice the authority of its first conclusions. It was well answered by him who was shown in a temple the votive tablets suspended by such as had escaped the peril of shipwreck, and was pressed as to whether he would then recognize the power of the gods . . . . “But where are the portraits of those that have perished in spite of their vows?” All superstition is much the same, whether it be that of astrology, dreams, omens, retributive judgment, or the like, in all of which the deluded believers observe events which are fulfilled, but neglect and pass over their failure, though it be much more common.82

1: “Having first determined the question according to his will, man then resorts to experience; and bending her into conformity with his placets, leads her about like a captive in a procession.”83 In short, “the human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections, whence proceed sciences which may be called ‘sciences as one would.’ . . . For what a man had rather were true, he more readily believes.”84 Is it not so?

2: Bacon gives at this point a word of golden counsel. “In general let every student of nature take this as a rule—that whatever his mind seizes and dwells upon with peculiar satisfaction, is to be held in suspicion; and that so much the more care is to be taken, in dealing with such questions, to keep the understanding even and clear.”85 “The understanding must not be allowed to jump and fly from particulars to remote axioms and of almost the highest generality; . . . it must not be supplied with wings, but rather hung with weights to keep it from leaping and flying.”86 The imagination may be the greatest enemy of the intellect, whereas it should be only its tentative and experiment.

1: A second class of errors Bacon calls Idols of the Cave—errors peculiar to the individual man. “For every one . . . has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature”; this is his character as formed by nature and nurture, and by his mood or condition of body and mind. Some minds, e.g., are constitutionally analytic, and see differences everywhere; others are constitutionally synthetic, and see resemblances; so we have the scientist and the painter on the one hand, and on the other hand the poet and the philosopher. Again, “some dispositions evince an unbounded admiration for antiquity, others eagerly embrace novelty; only a few can preserve the just medium, and neither tear up what the ancients have correctly established, nor despise the just innovations of the moderns.”87 Truth knows no parties.