INTRODUCTION.
In following the history of thought one comes soon to know those figures in the drama who pass as the men “beyond their time”; men whose minds are so endowed as to assimilate fairly well the learning inherited by their time, but especially gifted with an insight that carries them beyond their immediate age. It is with a mind of this type—a mind too far beyond its time—that we shall have to do in the pages that follow. For, that which is characteristic and original in Roger Bacon is not the system of his Philosophy, but rather his search for philosophic Method; and indeed a search in which appears an anticipation, now clear and again but vaguely suggested, of the trend of thought which in later centuries came to be called the Scientific Movement. His is not a mind that fits comfortably into the predominant tendencies of the thirteenth century, and it is therefore important that we should bear in mind throughout the type of mind with which we have to deal.
Living (1214-1294)[1] in a century when the most varied determining factors were at work, his natural bent threw him into that development which might properly be called the Scientific Movement of his day.[2] Dissatisfied with what seemed to him the unfruitful method of inquiry then prevailing, he bent his efforts rather to preliminary Method than to formulated System, to the foundations of knowledge rather than to the completed edifice. The world, he thought, was quite too full of vain attempts to systematize; overburdened with specimens of plebeian and trivial knowledge. “It is easy,” as he says,[3] “for any man of learning to multiply without end truths that are paltry and commonplace, and to spin out and magnify what is of little value. But for the scholar this is an unworthy procedure, and the more so when the limits to his scholarly thought are fixed thereby.” And more than once he gives evidence of an intense disdain for the learning of the eminent scholars of his day.[4] But his impatient dismissal of that learning
- ↑ Exact dates are not known. As late as 1220 is not impossible for birth (v. Br. 65), and he must have been living in 1292 (v. Br. Pref. iv., n. 2). Cf. Emile Charles, op. cit. pp. 4-6; 41, n. 2; 109, n. 4.
- ↑ See C. Bacumker: Die Europ. Philos. d. Mittelalt., in Kultur d. Gegenwart, T. I. abth. V. pp 327-331, Berlin 1909. Also M. de Wulf: Histoire de la Philos. med., secs. 116-119, prem ed. Paris 1905. The Bacumker-v, Hertling Series has served to make this plain. For indications in Bacon’s own works of the "scientific" movement under way, see e.g. I-116, cf. II-538 (cf. 134): Ep. 511; C. N. 9; Br. 42, 47, 113, 116, 317; II-202; Br. 359; 523-551, especially 533; 34; 41; 58, cf. 38; III: 33, 42.14, 70, 91, 229, 428, 469, 472; 434; 94.
- ↑ See Ep. 501.
- ↑ Thus, Br. 30 ff.; 325 ff.; C. N. 11 ff. Cf. Br. Pref. lvi. The Compendium Studii Theologise is promised, ed. H. Rashdall, for publication by the British Society of Franciscan Studies.
