80
In the thirteenth century then the conflict with
the provisional synthesis of the Faith had become
imminent and menacing. The faith, the chivalry
and the learning of the Saracens led men to feel
that without the Church all might not be utter
darkness. Albert owed as much to Avicenna-
order there were three well-marked parties; namely, of the naturalists, as Bacon; of the mystics, as Bonaventura; and of the sophists, as John Duns the Northumbrian. Now Bacon's troubles did not begin till the succession to the Generalship of the Order of the seraphic Bonaventura, an argumentative mystic (like Duns, and unlike the ecstatic mystics of St Victor), who, rejecting Aristotle, had steeped himself in the neo-platonism of Augustine and "Dionysius the Areopagite"; and Bonaventura and his party it was who stopped Bacon's month at Oxford, and shut him up in Paris. What the life of Bacon and the direction of medieval thought might have been had Grosseteste been able to spare Adam Marsh from Oxford for the Generalship it were perhaps too curious to consider; yet we may profitably remember that Bacon, brushing aside Porphyry and his ques- tions, and denouncing the "vain physics" of Paris, urged that enquiry should begin with the simplest objects of research, and rise gradually to the higher and higher; every observa- tion being controlled by experiment. He says indeed that by experiment only can we distinguish a sophism from a demon- stration. (Op. Tert. xIx.) Earnestly he tried to follow this method; he seems to have spent on it substance of his own, and, after this was exhausted, to have appeared for the first time in history as a petitioner for "scientific grants in aid." Diderot speaks of Bacon as "Un des génies les plus surpre- nants que la nature ait produits, et un des hommes les plus malheureux"; he lived in vain, died unhonoured, and left no disciple.
