"Nam semper posteriores addiderunt ad opera priorum, et multa correxerunt, et plura mutaverunt, sicut maxime per Aristotelem patet, qui omnes sententias praecedentium discussit"[1]
Again, he animadverts upon the duty of thirteenth-century Christians to supply the defects of the old philosophers:
"Quapropter antiquorum defectus deberemus nos posteriores supplere, quia introivimus in labores eorum, per quos, nisi simus asini, possumus ad meliora excitari; quia miserrimum est semper uti inventis et nunquam inveniendis."[2]
Speaking of language, he says:
"Impossibile est quod proprietas unius linguae servetur in alia."[3] ("The idioms of one language cannot be preserved in a translation.") And again: "Omnes philosophi fuerunt post patriarchas et prophetas … et legerunt libros prophetarum et patriarcharum qui sunt in sacro textu."[4] ("The philosophers of Greece came after the prophets of the Old Testament and read their works contained in the sacred text.")
In the first of these sentences Bacon shows his linguistic insight; in the second he reflects an uncritical view entertained since the time of the Church Fathers; in both, he writes with an order of words requiring no change in an English translation.
In his time, Bacon had but a sorry fame, and his works no influence. The writings of his younger contemporary Thomas Aquinas exerted greater influence than those of any man after Augustine. They represent the culmination of scholasticism. He was Italian born, and his language, however difficult the matter, is lucidity itself. It is never rhetorical; but measured, temperate, and balanced; properly proceeding from the mind which weighed every proposition in the scales of universal consideration. Sometimes it gains a certain fervour from the clarity and import of the statement which it so lucidly conveys. In article eighth, of the first Questio, of Pars Prima of the Summa theologiae, Thomas thus decides that Theology is a rational (argumentativa) science:
