60. These idola, ειδωλα [eidôla], images, illusions, fallacies, or, as Lord Bacon calls them in the Advancement of Learning, false appearances, have been often named in English _idols_ of the tribe, of the den, of the market place. But it seems better, unless we retain the Latin name, to employ one of the synonymous terms given above. For the use of idol in this sense is unwarranted by the practice of the language, nor is it found in Bacon himself; but it has misled a host of writers, whoever might be the first that applied it, even among such as are conversant with the Novum Organum. “Bacon proceeds,” says Playfair, “to enumerate the causes of error, the _idols_ as he calls them, or false divinities to which the mind had so long been accustomed to bow.” And with a similar misapprehension of the meaning of the word, in speaking of the _idola specûs_, he says: “besides the causes of error which are common to all mankind, each individual, according to Bacon, has his own dark cavern or den, into which the light is imperfectly admitted, and obscurity of which a tutelary idol lurks, at whose shrine the truth is often sacrificed.”[202] Thus also Dr. Thomas Brown; “in the inmost sanctuaries of the mind were all the idols which he overthrew;” and a later author on the Novum Organum fancies that Bacon “strikingly, though in his usual quaint style, calls the prejudices that check the progress of the mind by the name of idols, because mankind are apt to pay homage to these instead of regarding truth.”[203] Thus too in the translation of the Novum Organum, published in Mr. Basil Montagu’s edition, we find _idola_ rendered by idols, without explanation. We may in fact say that this meaning has been almost universally given by the later writers. By whom it was introduced, I am not able to say. Cudworth, in a passage where he glances at Bacon, has said, “it is no _idol of the den_, to use that affected language.” But, in the pedantic style of the seventeenth century, it is not impossible that idol may here have been put as a mere translation of the Greek ειδωλον [eidôlon], and in the same general sense of an idea or intellectual image.[204] Although the popular sense would not be inapposite to the general purpose of Bacon in this first part of the Novum Organum, it cannot be reckoned so exact and philosophical an illustration of the sources of human error as the unfaithful image, the shadow of reality, seen through a refracting surface, or reflected from an unequal mirror, as in the Platonic hypothesis of the cave, wherein we are placed with our backs to the light, to which he seems to allude in his _idola specûs_.[205] And as this is also plainly the true meaning, as a comparison with the parallel passages in the Advancement of Learning demonstrates, there can be no pretence for continuing to employ a word which has served to mislead such men as Brown and Playfair. [202] Preliminary Dissertation to Encyclopædia.