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,
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
“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?
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.
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.
Thirdly, Idols of the Market-place, arising “from the commerce and association of men with one another. For men converse by means of language; but words are imposed according to the understanding of the crowd; and there arises from a bad and inapt formation of words, a wonderful obstruction to the mind.”88 Philosophers deal out infinites with the careless assurance of grammarians handling infinitives; and yet does any man know what this “infinite” is, or whether it has even taken the precaution of existing? Philosophers talk about “first cause uncaused,” or “first mover unmoved”; but are not these again fig-leaf phrases used to cover naked ignorance, and perhaps indicative of a guilty conscience in the user? Every clear and honest head knows that no cause can be causeless, nor any mover unmoved. Perhaps the greatest reconstruction in philosophy would be simply this—that we should stop lying.
“Lastly, there are idols which have migrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophers, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call Idols of the Theatre, because in my judgment all the received systems of philosophy are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion . . . . And in the plays of this philosophic theater you may observe the same thing which is found in the theater of the poets,—that stories invented for the stage are more compact and elegant, and more as we would wish them to be, than true stories out of history.”89 The world as Plato describes it is merely a world constructed by Plato, and pictures Plato rather than the world.
We shall never get far along towards the truth if these idols are still to trip us up, even the best of us, at every turn. We need new modes of reasoning, new tools for the understanding. “And as the immense regions of the West Indies had never been discovered, if the use of the compass had not first been known, it is no wonder that the discovery and advancement of arts hath made no greater progress, when the art of inventing and discovering of the sciences remains hitherto unknown.”90 “And surely it would be disgraceful, if, while the regions of the material globe . . . have been in our times laid widely open and revealed, the intellectual globe should remain shut up within the narrow limits of old discoveries.”91
Ultimately, our troubles are due to dogma and deduction; we find no new truth because we take some venerable but questionable proposition as an indubitable starting-point, and never think of putting this assumption itself to the test of observation or experiment. Now “if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties” (alas, it is not quite inevitable). Here is a note common in the youth of modern philosophy, part of its declaration of independence; Descartes too would presently talk of the necessity of “methodic doubt” as the cobweb-clearing pre-requisite of honest thought.
Bacon proceeds to give an admirable description of the scientific method of inquiry. “There remains simple experience; which, if taken as it comes, is called accident” (“empirical”), “if sought for, experiment . . . . The true method of experience first lights the candle” (hypothesis), “and then by means of the candle shows the way” (arranges and delimits the experiment); “commencing as it does with experience duly ordered and digested, not bungling nor erratic, and from it educing axioms, and from established axioms again new experiments.”92 (We have here—as again in a later passage93 which speaks of the results of initial experiments as a “first vintage” to guide further research—an explicit, though perhaps inadequate, recognition of that need for hypothesis, experiment and deduction which some of Bacon’s critics suppose him to have entirely overlooked.) We must go to nature instead of to books, traditions and authorities; we must “put nature on the rack and compel her to bear witness” even against herself, so that we may control her to our ends. We must gather together from every quarter a “natural history” of the world, built by the united research of Europe’s scientists. We must have induction.