supply its
failures, rectifications to correct its errors; and this I endeavour
to accomplish not so much by instruments as by experiments. For the
subtlety of experiments is far greater than that of the sense itself,
even when assisted by exquisite instruments; such experiments, I mean,
as are skilfully and artificially devised for the express purpose
of determining the point in question. To the immediate and proper
perception of the sense therefore I do not give much weight; but I
contrive that the office of the sense shall be only to judge of the
experiment, and that the experiment itself shall judge of the thing.
And thus I conceive that I perform the office of a true priest of the
sense (from which all knowledge in nature must be sought, unless men
mean to go mad) and a not unskilful interpreter of its oracles; and
that while others only profess to uphold and cultivate the sense, I
do so in fact. Such then are the provisions I make for finding the
genuine light of nature and kindling and bringing it to bear. And they
would be sufficient of themselves, if the human intellect were even,
and like a fair sheet of paper with no writing on it. But since the
minds of men are strangely possessed and beset, so that there is no
true and even surface left to reflect the genuine rays of things, it
is necessary to seek a remedy for this also.

Now the idols, or phantoms, by which the mind is occupied are either
adventitious or innate. The adventitious come into the mind from
without; namely, either from the doctrines and sects of philosophers,
or from perverse rules of demonstration. But the innate are inherent
in the very nature of the intellect, which is far more prone to error
than the sense is. For let men please themselves as they will in
admiring and almost adoring the human mind, this is certain: that as
an uneven mirror distorts the rays of objects according to its own
figure and section, so the mind, when it receives impressions of
objects through the sense, cannot be trusted to report them truly,
but in forming its notions mixes up its own nature with the nature of
things.

And as the first two kinds of idols are hard to eradicate, so idols of
this last kind cannot be eradicated at all. All that can be done is
to point them out, so that this insidious action of the mind may be
marked and reproved (else as fast as old errors are destroyed new ones
will spring up out of the ill complexion of the mind itself, and so we