Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)

The Masculine Birth of Time [Temporis Partus Masculus]

c. 1603

"Just when the human mind, borne thither by some favouring gale, had found rest in a little truth, this man presumed to cast the closest fetters on our understandings."

But, now that I think of it, it will be safer to condemn them one by one by name; for their authority is great and if not named they may be thought to be excepted. Nor would I have anyone suppose, seeing the hatred and fury with which they wage their internecine strife, that I have come to lend my support to one side or the other in this battle of ghosts and shadows. Come, then, let Aristotle be summoned to the bar, that worst of sophists stupefied by his own unprofitable subtlety, the cheap dupe of words. Just when the human mind, borne thither by some favouring gale, had found rest in a little truth, this man presumed to cast the closest fetters on our understandings. He composed an art or manual of madness and made us slaves of words. Nay more, it was in his bosom that were bred and nurtured those crafty triflers, who turned themselves away from the perambulation of our globe and from the light of nature and of history; who from the pliant material provided by his precepts and propositions, and relying on the restless agitation of their own wit, spun out for us the countless quibbles of the Schools. But he, their dictator, is more to blame than they. He still moved in the daylight of honest research when he fetched up his darksome idols from some subterranean cave, and over such observation of particulars as had been made spun as it were spiders' webs which he would have us accept as causal bonds, though they have no strength nor worth.
(p. 63)

Weather::Gale Fetters

Reading

Trans. Benjamin Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964), 60-72. <Link to Online text>

04/14/2010

06/27/2011