Let us conclude this head by mentioning two examples among others which he brings to explain the better what he means by his first philosophy.  The first is this axiom, “If to unequals you add equals, all will be unequal.”  This, he says, is an axiom of justice as well as of mathematics; and he asks whether there is not a true coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, and arithmetical and geometrical proportion.  But I would ask in my turn whether the certainty that any arithmetician or geometrician has of the arithmetical or geometrical truth will lead him to discover this coincidence.  I ask whether the most profound lawyer who never heard perhaps this axiom would be led to it by his notions of commutative and distributive justice.  Certainly not.  He who is well skilled in arithmetic or geometry, and in jurisprudence, may observe perhaps this uniformity of natural principle or impression because he is so skilled, though, to say the truth, it be not very obvious; but he will not have derived his knowledge of it from any spring-head of a first philosophy, from any science of an “higher stage” than arithmetic, geometry, and jurisprudence.

The second example is this axiom, “That the destruction of things is prevented by the reduction of them to their first principles.”  This rule is said to hold in religion, in physics, and in politics; and Machiavel is quoted for having established it in the last of these.  Now though this axiom be generally, it is not universally, true; and, to say nothing of physics, it will not be hard to produce, in contradiction to it, examples of religious and civil institutions that would have perished if they had been kept strictly to their first principles, and that have been supported by departing more or less from them.  It may seem justly matter of wonder that the author of the “Advancement of Learning” should espouse this maxim in religion and politics, as well as physics, so absolutely, and that he should place it as an axiom of his first philosophy relatively to the three, since he could not do it without falling into the abuse he condemns so much in his “Organum Novum”—­the abuse philosophers are guilty of when they suffer the mind to rise too fast, as it is apt to do, from particulars to remote and general axioms.  That the author of the “Political Discourses” should fall into this abuse is not at all strange.  The same abuse runs through all his writings, in which, among many wise and many wicked reflections and precepts, he establishes frequently general maxims or rules of conduct on a few particular examples, and sometimes on a single example.  Upon the whole matter, one of these axioms communicates no knowledge but that which we must have before we can know the axiom, and the other may betray us into great error when we apply it to use and action.  One is unprofitable, the other dangerous; and the philosophy which admits them as principles of general knowledge deserves ill