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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) 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. 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, “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. But his impatient dismissal of that learning is from no unworthy motive; it arises rather from a pure and whole-hearted love of Truth—indeed, the man is carried away with the fine enthusiasm of the devotee of Truth “writ large.” “I am after the treasures of the Sciences,” he continues, “the wonders of Truth whereof one excels a thousand of commonplace truths. I would diligently search out the dominion of the Sciences and of the Languages, and the other things needful to raise the edifice of Truth.” Bold words these are, but they well characterize the spirit and the labor of the man as we know it. And so it is not strange that the figure of Bacon has been drawn almost exclusively in these lines by the historians of Philosophy.
But while his mind was so full of this inquiry after method, one does wrong to suppose that it held nothing more; nothing more than a critical opposition to the conditions then prevailing in the scholarly world, and an attempt to sketch some plan for its regeneration. On the contrary, his works make it plain that he had pondered—and pondered deeply, shrewdly and seriously—the problems that engaged the thoughtful men about him; and that he had his own views, and very decided ones they were, concerning these problems. To be sure, that degree of system which characterizes the work of Thomas Aquinas we are not to expect; for only in Bacon’s Scriptum Principale could this have been furnished, and that great work, if ever consummated, does not exist for us now. But there is plain evidence of a system in the making, and it is our task to indicate some of its features, and to make clear his position with reference to certain of the problems which attracted the thinkers of his day.
Now in his work there is revealed a mind filled, out of all proportion to his time, with the conviction that the exactness of the mathematico-mechanical method alone could be fruitful in investigating the various departments of knowledge. And while there are many indications of this scientific character of our Author’s way of thinking, these lie for us too far afield. But there is one feature so salient, so vitally characteristic, and so important for his Philosophy of Mind, that we must devote our first efforts to a comprehensive study of it. And this is his theory of Species or Forms.
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