Other Causes of the Errors in Learning

¹ The first of these errors is the extreme affecting of 2 extremities:

1. The antiquity

Antiquity envies new additions.

2. The novelty

Novelty is not content to add, and so it defaces the old.

The prophet’s advice is correct: State super vias antiquas, et videte quænam sit via recta et bona et ambulate in ea.

Antiquity deserves that reverence. Men should make a stand and discover what is the best way.

But after the discovery is well taken, men should progress.

Antiquitas sæculi juventus mundi.

These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient ordine retrogrado, by a computation backward from ourselves.

² Another error induced by the present is a distrust that anything should be now be found out which the world has missed and passed over so long time.

Lucian asked Jupiter and the other the heathen gods why they begot so many children in the ancient time but begot none in his time.

So it seems men doubt lest time is become past children and generation;

Contrariwise, we commonly see the levity and inconstancy of men’s judgments until the matter is finished.

• Afterwards, they wonder that it could be done.
• As soon as it is done, wonder again that it was no sooner done.

For example, Alexander’s expedition into Asia was at first prejudged as impossible.

Yet afterwards, Livy wrote: Nil aliud quàm bene ausus vana contemnere.

The same happened to Columbus in the western navigation.

But in intellectual matters it is much more common as seen in most of Euclid’s propositions.

They seem strange until they are demonstrated. But after being demonstrated, our mind accepts them by a kind of relation (as the lawyers speak), as if we had known them before.

³ Another error is a conceit that former opinions or sects after variety and examination the best hath still prevailed and suppressed the rest.

This is similar to the previous error.

If a man should begin the labour of a new search, he were but like to light upon somewhat formerly rejected, and by rejection brought into oblivion.

as if the multitude, or the wisest for the multitude’s sake, were not ready to give passage rather to that which is popular and superficial than to that which is substantial and profound for the truth is, that time seemeth to be of the nature of a river or stream, which carrieth down to us that which is light and blown up, and sinketh and drowneth that which is weighty and solid.

⁴ Another error, of a diverse nature from all the former, is the over-early and peremptory reduction of knowledge into arts and methods; from which time commonly sciences receive small or no augmentation.

Young men who knit and shape perfectly seldom grow to a further stature. Likewise, knowledge, while it is in aphorisms and observations, it is in growth. But when it once is comprehended in exact methods, it may:

• be further polished
• illustrate and accommodated for use and practice

But it increases no more in bulk and substance.

⁵ This leads to another error. After the distribution of particular arts and sciences, men have abandoned universality, or philosophia prima.

This stops all progression because no perfect discovery can be made on a flat or a level.

It is not possible to discover the more remote and deeper parts of any science if you stand but upon the level of the same science, and ascend not to a higher science.

⁶ Another error comes from too great a reverence and adoration of man’s mind and understanding.

Men have withdrawn themselves too much from the contemplation of nature, and the observations of experience. They have tumbled up and down in their own reason and conceits.

Heraclitus gave these intellectualists a just censure:

“Men sought truth in their own little worlds, and not in the great and common world;”

They disdain to spell, and so by degrees to read in the volume of God’s works.

Contrariwise, by continual meditation and agitation of wit do urge and, as it were, invocate their own spirits to divine and give oracles unto them, whereby they are deservedly deluded.

⁷ Another error that connected to this latter is that men have used to infect their meditations, opinions, and doctrines with some conceits which they have most admired, or some sciences which they have most applied.

These then gave all other things a tincture according to them, utterly untrue and improper.

For example:

• Plato intermingled his philosophy with theology
• Aristotle intermingled his philosophy with logic.
• The second school of Plato, Proclus and the rest, with the mathematics

These were the arts which had a primogeniture with them severally.

Likewise:

• the alchemists made a philosophy out of a few experiments of the furnace.
• Gilbert, our own countryman, had made a philosophy out of the observations of a loadstone.

Cicero, when reciting the several opinions of the nature of the soul, he found a musician that held the soul was but a harmony, said pleasantly, Hic ab arte sua non recessit, &c.

But of these conceits Aristotle speaketh seriously and wisely when he saith, Qui respiciunt ad pauca de facili pronunciant.