obedience to the dictates of the understanding. Temples have their sacred images, and we see what influence they have always had over a great part of mankind. But in truth, the ideas and images in men’s minds are the invisible powers that constantly govern them, and to these they all universally pay a ready submission. It is therefore of the highest concernment that great care should be taken of the understanding, to conduct it right in the search of knowledge, and in the judgments it makes.
The logic now in use[1] has so long possessed the chair, as the only art taught in the schools, for the direction of the mind in the study of the arts and sciences, that it would perhaps be thought an affectation of novelty to suspect that rules that have served the learned world these two or three thousand years, and which, without any complaint of defects, the learned have rested in, are not sufficient to guide the understanding. And I should not doubt but this attempt would be censured as vanity or presumption, did not the great Lord Verulam’s[2] au-
- ↑ The logic now in use. The logic of Locke’s time was based upon the principles of Aristotle, who lived about 392 b. c.
- ↑ Lord Verulam. Francis Bacon (1560-1626), the greatest statesman, philosopher, and scientific writer of the Elizabethan Age. His chief fame rests upon the “Novum Organum,” which was, according to the author, “True Directions concerning the Interpretation of Nature.” By this work, he became the founder of the inductive method in scientific research. His biographer, James Spedding, says of him: “If he did not succeed in making any scientific discoveries himself, or even in pointing out the particular steps by which others were to make them, he delivered a set of cautions as to the use of the human understanding applicable to the pursuit of truth in all departments, which have scarcely been added ton or improved upon since his time.”
