[18] Novum Organon, edited by Thomas Fowler, introduction, p. 132.
[19] Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. i, p. 6.
[20] Logic, ninth edition, Book V, chapter v, § 6.
[21] Leviathan, Part I, chapter xi.
[22] It is well to remember that if common sense had said the last word about the matter, the Ptolemaic theory of the universe would still stand unshaken.
[23] The metaphor is taken from the opening of the seventh book of Plato's Republic.
[24] Cf. Spencer's Introduction to the Study of Sociology, chapters viii-xii.
[25] The need of a language of rigid mathematical precision for the purposes of philosophic thought and discussion has long been the subject of remark. Hence Bishop Wilkins's Essay toward a real character and a philosophic language (1668), and the earlier Ars Signorum of George Dalgarno—boldly presented by its inventor as a "remedy for the confusion of tongues, as far as this evil is reparable by art." We may give these ingenious authors full credit for the excellent intentions with which they set out on impossible undertakings. A philosophic language may perhaps be attained in the millennium, but then probably it will be no longer needed. Meanwhile readers interested in the history of the mad scheme called Volapük may find some curious matter in these rare works.
[26] History of Philosophy, vol. ii, pp. 95, 96.
[27] This quotation is not from Bacon.