Cambridge:—Trinity College, MS. Gale (transcript of the Cotton MS.).
Douai, 691 (sec. xvii), wanting chapters 38-52: this MS. has been described by Victor Cousin, Journal des Savants for 1848 (5 articles).
Printed in Bacon’s Opera Inedita (Rolls Series), pp. 3-310.
Charles has been misled by a passage in the work called ‘Communia Naturalium’ into thinking that this latter formed part of the Opus Tertium; Charles, R. Bacon, pp. 65, 83-4; his description of Opus Tertium is consequently erroneous. The passage is from the Mazarine MS. of the Communia Naturalium (i.e. No. 3576), fol. 85:
‘Quod est improbatum in secunda parte primi operis, deinde in hoc tertio opere explanavi hoc et solvi objectiones.’
These words refer to Bacon’s doctrine that the intellectus agens is not part of the soul, but God and angels. This is insisted on in the Opus Tertium, cap. xxiii, and it is not likely that Bacon would do more than refer to it again casually in the course of the same work. The relation of the Opus Tertium to the Commun. Nat. is probably as follows: the latter was written or begun first. Bacon repeatedly mentions that he was, while writing his three Opera for the Pope, engaged on a larger work, Scriptum Principale, which he did not send to Clement[1349]. Much of this larger work naturally found its way, probably in a summarised form, into the Opus Tertium as we know it, the treatise actually sent to the Pope.
Tractatus de multiplicatione specierum, or, De generatione specierum et multiplicatione et corruptione earum, is inserted by Jebb in the Opus Majus, pp. 358-445, between Part v and Part vi. The subject is however discussed in Part iv, which is often quoted or referred to in Part v. In the De multiplicatione, &c. (p. 368), are the words:
Ut tactum est in communibus naturalium.
Again (p. 358):
Recolendum est igitur quod in tertia parte hujus operis tactum est, quod essentia, substantia, natura, potestas, potentia, virtus, vis, significant eandem rem, sed differunt sola comparatione.