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The idola fori, which arise from the use of language in public intercourse, depend upon the confusion of words, which are mere symbols with a conventional value and which are based on the carelessly constructed concepts of the vulgar, with things themselves. Here Bacon warns us to keep close to things.
So far, everybody is agreed: the differences begin when we ask what causes hallucinations, and what different classes of hallucinations exist? Famous cases of the latter class are the idola which beset Nicolai, who studied them, and wrote an account of them.
Many of the aphorisms, but particularly those in which he gives examples of the influence of the idola, show a nicety of observation that has never been surpassed. Every part of the book blazes with wit, but with wit which is employed only to illustrate and decorate truth.
They may find enough of it, and to spare also, in Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy. He, like Knox, and many another scholar of the 16th and of the first half of the 17th century, was unable to free his brain altogether from the idola specus which haunted the cell of the bookworm.
But of the fourth species of error noted by Bacon, the Idola Specus, the Idols of the Cave, that whole tribe of illusions, which are "bred amongst the weeds and tares of one's own brain," Browne tells us nothing by way of criticism; was himself, rather, a lively example of their operation.
Let us own, however, that one-idea'd people are often amusing as well as mischievous or rather, when not mischievous. The rapt devotion they pay to their idola specûs oscillates between the sublime and the ridiculous. We have all seen such people, and alternately admired and laughed at them. We have all witnessed or read pleasant illustrations of their doings.
§ 8. To terminate the subject of Fallacies of Generalization, it remains to be said, that the most fertile source of them is bad classification: bringing together in one group, and under one name, things which have no common properties, or none but such as are too unimportant to allow general propositions of any considerable value to be made respecting the class. The misleading effect is greatest, when a word which in common use expresses some definite fact, is extended by slight links of connection to cases in which that fact does not exist, but some other or others, only slightly resembling it. Thus Bacon, in speaking of the Idola or Fallacies arising from notions temere et inæqualiter
And we discount and allow for every bias and prejudice of our witnesses. I have made a list of these idola in M. R. R. ii. 334-344. Mr. Max Muller now gives a list of inconsistencies in descriptions of Australian Blacks. They are not Blacks, they have a dash of copper colour! Well, I never said that they had 'the sooty tinge of the African negro. Did anybody? Mr.
The belief is not a conclusive proof of its own truth, unless there are no such things as idola tribûs; but being a fact, it calls on antagonists to show, from what except the real existence of the thing believed, so general and apparently spontaneous a belief can have originated. And its opponents have never hesitated to accept this challenge.
In Browne's chapter on the "Sources of Error," again, we may trace much resemblance to Bacon's striking doctrine of the Idola, the "shams" men fall down and worship.
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