Page:The Golden verses of Pythagoras (IA cu31924026681076).pdf/199

 continually on their knees before a sterile antiquity, have remained stationary, whereas all around is progression; and for nearly four thousand years have really not advanced a step more towards the civilization and perfection of the arts and sciences.

The side on which Bacon has departed from the juste milieu has been precisely the opposite from that which prevented Kong-Tse from remaining there. The Chinese theosophist had been led astray by his excessive veneration for antiquity and the English philosopher, by his profound disdain for it. Warned against the doctrine of Aristotle, Bacon has extended his prejudice to everything that came from the ancients. Rejecting in a moment the labour of thirty centuries and the fruit of the meditation of the greatest geniuses, he has wished to admit nothing beyond what experience could confirm in his eyes. Logic to him has seemed useless for the invention of the sciences. He has abandoned the syllogism, as an instrument too gross to penetrate the depths of nature. He has thought that it could be of no avail either in expression of words or in the ideas which flow from it. He has believed the abstract principles deprived of all foundation; and with the same hand with which he fights these false ideas he has fought the results of these principles, in which he has unfortunately found much less resistance.ə Filled with contempt for the philosophy of the Greeks, he has denied that it had produced anything either useful or good ; so that after having banished the natural philosophy of Aristotle, which he called a jumble of dialectic terms, he has seen in the metaphysics of Plato only a dangerous and depraved philosophy, and in the theosophy of Pythagoras only a gross and shocking superstition. Here indeed is