The idols of the market are the most troublesome of all

From Francis Bacon in Novum Organum

For whatever reason, Bacon has always been somewhat absent from my reading. Perhaps it has been the translations. For whatever reason, all of a sudden I am finding much with which I agree and am pleased to see an ancient articulate my nebulous thoughts.

The idols of the market are the most troublesome of all, those, namely, which have entwined themselves round the understanding from the associations of words and names. For men imagine that their reason governs words, whilst, in fact, words react upon the understanding; and 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; so that we must necessarily have recourse to particular instances, and their regular (p.350) series and arrangement, as we shall mention when we come to the mode and scheme of determining notions and axioms.