facts of nature
as long as is necessary. Some there are indeed who have committed
themselves to the waves of experience, and almost turned mechanics;
yet these again have in their very experiments pursued a kind of
wandering inquiry, without any regular system of operations. And
besides they have mostly proposed to themselves certain petty tasks,
taking it for a great matter to work out some single discovery;--a
course of proceeding at once poor in aim and unskilful in design. For
no man can rightly and successfully investigate the nature of anything
in the thing itself; let him vary his experiments as laboriously as he
will, he never comes to a resting-place, but still finds something to
seek beyond. And there is another thing to be remembered; namely,
that all industry in experimenting has begun with proposing to itself
certain definite works to be accomplished, and has pursued them
with premature and unseasonable eagerness; it has sought, I say,
experiments of Fruit, not experiments of Light; not Imitating the
divine procedure, which In its first day's work created light only and
assigned to it one entire day; on which day it produced no material
work, but proceeded to that on the days following. As for those who
have given the first place to Logic, supposing that the surest helps
to the sciences were to be found in that, they have indeed most truly
and excellently perceived that the human intellect left to its own
course is not to be trusted; but then the remedy is altogether too
weak for the disease; nor is it without evil in itself. For the
Logic which is received, though it be very properly applied to civil
business and to those arts which rest in discourse and opinion, is not
nearly subtle enough to deal with nature; and in offering at what it
cannot master, has done more to establish and perpetuate error than to
open the way to truth.

Upon the whole therefore, it seems that men have not been happy
hitherto either in the trust which they have placed in others or in
their own industry with regard to the sciences; especially as neither
the demonstrations nor the experiments as yet known are much to be
relied upon. But the universe to the eye of the human understanding is
framed like a labyrinth; presenting as it does on every side so many
ambiguities of way, such deceitful resemblances of objects and signs,
natures so irregular in their lines, and so knotted and entangled. And
then the way is still to be made by