Horace Craig Longwell

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”