Bacon also notes another distinction which causes different manifestations of idola specus: "There are found some minds given to an extreme admiration of antiquity, others to an extreme love and appetite for novelty; but few so duly tempered that they can hold the mean, neither carping at what has been well laid down by the ancients, nor despising what is well introduced by the moderns."[6]
Finally, another common cause of idola specus when looking specifically at "contemplations of nature" is that this sometimes requires looking at things in their "simple form". This breaks up and distracts the understanding. Bacon mentions Leucippus and Democritus as compared with the other philosophies. For that school is so busied with the particles that it hardly attends to the structure. On the other hand, "contemplations of nature and bodies in their composition and configuration overpower and dissolve the understanding". And some contemplators of nature become "so lost in admiration of the structure that they do not penetrate to the simplicity of nature". As a way of avoiding these problems, Bacon recommends that these two types of contemplation should be "alternated and taken by turns, so that the understanding may be rendered at once penetrating and comprehensive, and the inconveniences above mentioned, with the idols which proceed from them, may be avoided".[7]
Bacon also drew general advice for more methodical future study of nature, aimed at avoiding the idols of the cave: "generally let every student of nature take this as a rule: that whatever his mind seizes and dwells upon with peculiar satisfaction is to be held in suspicion, and that so much the more care is to be taken in dealing with such questions to keep the understanding even and clear."[3]
