"And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it."
— Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)
Work Title
Date
1620
Metaphor
"And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it."
Metaphor in Context
XLI.
The Idols of the Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions as well of the sense as of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.
Categories
Provenance
Reading Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 149.
Date of Entry
07/31/2014
