Page 11 - GALIET UNAPHORISMS and the 4 Idols: Bacon IV

unexperience is irrational. When Bacon says that “the best demonstration by far is experience, if it go not beyond the actual experiment. For if it be transferred to other cases which are deemed similar, unless such transfer be made by a just an orderly process, it is a fallacious thing” (LXX , 67), is he not contradicting himself to oblivion? Present thinking. Think of the mystics’ experiences. Think of Rimbaud who after his sensory “Illuminations” drifts from the world. Rimbaud and Bacon: presence versus absence, ecstasy versus argument. First refraction: unexperience.
Let’s dilate even further to the penetrating experience of the senses: multi-real. Unlike Bacon’s unpenetrating argument delivered on the stand of reason: “But the corruption of philosophy by superstition and an admixture of theology ... does the greatest harm, whether to entire systems or their parts. For the human understanding is obnoxious to the influence of the imagination no less than to the influence of common notions” (LXV, 62). Translation. An unexperienced God: nocive “influence of the imagination”; half-poetic and swollen with dreams. An experienced God: Untranslatable: fully poetic and swollen with presence. Bacon and God: Prose versus Poetry.
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