The Idols of the Market

3 minutes • 561 words

⁵⁹ The idols of the market are the most troublesome of all.

These have entwined themselves around the understanding from the associations of words and names.

Men imagine that their reason governs words, while, in fact, words react upon the understanding.

This has rendered philosophy and the sciences sophistical and inactive.

Words are generally formed in a popular sense, and define things by those broad lines which are most obvious to the vulgar mind; but when a more acute understanding or more diligent observation is anxious to vary those lines, and to adapt them more accurately to nature, words oppose it.

Hence the great and solemn disputes of learned men often terminate in controversies about words and names, in regard to which it would be better (imitating the caution of mathematicians) to proceed more advisedly in the first instance, and to bring such disputes to a regular issue by definitions.

Such definitions, however, cannot remedy the evil in natural and material objects, because they consist themselves of words, and these words produce others;[24] so that we must necessarily have recourse to particular instances, and their regular series and arrangement, as we[32] shall mention when we come to the mode and scheme of determining notions and axioms.

⁶⁰ There are 2 kinds of idols imposed on the understanding:

The names of things which have no existence

(for as some objects are from inattention left without a name, so names are formed by fanciful imaginations which are without an object),

Fortune, the primum mobile, the planetary orbits,[25] the element of fire, and the like fictions, which owe their birth to futile and false theories, are instances of the first kind.

This species of idols is removed with greater facility, because it can be exterminated by the constant refutation or the desuetude of the theories themselves.

The confused, badly defined, and hastily and irregularly abstracted names of actual objects

These are created by vicious and unskilful abstraction.

An example is “moist”.

“moist” is just a confused sign of different actions with no settled uniformity. It means:

that which easily diffuses itself over another body;
that which is indeterminable and cannot be brought to a consistency;
that which[33] yields easily in every direction;
that which is easily divided and dispersed;
that which is easily united and collected;
that which easily flows and is put in motion;
that which easily adheres to, and wets another body;
that which is easily reduced to a liquid state though previously solid.

Thus:

in one sense, flame is moist
in another sense, air is not moist
in another sense, fine powder is moist
in another sense, glass is moist

This word is hastily abstracted from water and common liquors without any due verification of it.

There are, however, different degrees of distortion and mistake in words.

One of the least faulty classes is that of the names of substances, particularly of the less abstract and more defined species (those then of chalk and mud are good, of earth bad); words signifying actions are more faulty, as to generate, to corrupt, to change; but the most faulty are those denoting qualities (except the immediate objects of sense), as heavy, light, rare, dense. Yet in all of these there must be some notions a little better than others, in proportion as a greater or less number of things come before the senses.