[43] See end of [Axiom lxi]. The subject extends to [Axiom xc].
[44] If we adopt the statement of Herodotus, who places the Homeric era 400 years back from his time, Homer lived about 900 years before Christ. On adding this number to the sixteen centuries of the Christian era which had elapsed up to Bacon’s time, we get the twenty-five centuries he mentions. The Homeric epoch is the furthest point in antiquity from which Bacon could reckon with any degree of certainty. Hesiod, if he were not contemporary, immediately preceded him.
The epoch of Greek philosophy may be included between Thales and Plato, that is, from the 35th to the 88th Olympiad; that of the Roman, between Terence and Pliny. The modern revolution, in which Bacon is one of the central figures, took its rise from the time of Dante and Petrarch, who lived at the commencement of the fourteenth century; and to which, on account of the invention of printing, and the universal spread of literature, which has rendered a second destruction of learning impossible, it is difficult to foresee any other end than the extinction of the race of man.—Ed.
[45] The allusion is evidently to Roger Bacon and Réné Descartes.—Ed.
[46] From the abuse of the scholastics, who mistook the à priori method, the deductive syllogism, for the entire province of logic.—Ed.
[47] See [Aphorism xcv].
[48] The incongruity to which Bacon alludes appears to spring from confounding two things, which are not only distinct, but affect human knowledge in inverse proportion, viz., the experience which terminates with life, with that experience which one century transmits to another.—Ed.
[49] The Chinese characters resemble, in many respects, the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians, being adapted to represent ideas, not sounds.
[50] See [Axiom 75].
[51] The methods by which Newton carried the rule and compass to the boundaries of creation is a sufficient comment on the sagacity of the text. The same cause which globulizes a bubble, has rounded the earth, and the same law which draws a stone to its surface, keeps the moon in her orbit. It was by calculating and ascertaining these principles upon substances entirely at his disposal that this great philosopher was enabled to give us a key to unlock the mysteries of the universe.—Ed.