CHAPTER VIII
FRIAR BACON
Roger Bacon was born at Ilchester, in Somersetshire, in 1214, and died about 1294. If the dedication be authentic, his Epistola de Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturæ et de Nullitate Magiæ, the work with which we are chiefly concerned here, was written before 1249.[334]
Bacon attacks Magic in this book on the ground that science and art can exhibit far greater wonders than the alleged wonders of the Black Art, and to prove his point he enumerates, in the first eight chapters, a number of wonders which (he believed) art could produce and magic could not. Everything is sufficiently clear until we reach the ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters, and they are unintelligible as they stand. Now, it is past belief that a man of commanding genius should have deliberately stooped to write page after page of nonsense. The three chapters, therefore, must have some meaning, hidden from us though it be.[335]
It is unquestionable that Bacon believed he possessed secrets of vast importance. At the close of Chapter VIII. he tells us by way of warning that he may resort (in the following chapters) to certain cryptic methods, “on account of the magnitude of his secrets” (propter secretorum magnitudinem); and, fearing that ordinary cryptic methods might be too transparent, he wraps up his secrets in an anagram in Chapter XI.
If Bacon were in possession of such secrets, why, it may be asked, did he not publish them openly? The reason was, as he explains repeatedly and at length, that he firmly believed scientific knowledge to be hurtful to the people. He protests in his works again and again against the diffusion of scientific information. “The crowd,” he says, “is unable to digest scientific facts, which it scorns and misuses to its own detriment and that of the wise. Let not pearls, then, be thrown to swine.”[336] Elsewhere he says: “The mob scoff at philosophers and despise scientific truth. If by chance they lay hold upon some great principle, they are sure to misinterpret and misapply it, so that what would have been gain to every one causes loss to all.”[337] “It is madness,” he goes on to say, “to commit a secret to writing, unless it be so done as to be unintelligible to the ignorant, and only just intelligible to the best educated”;[338] and so much in earnest was he upon this point that he enumerates seven methods of baffling public curiosity. A secret may be concealed by making use of:—
(1) Symbols and incantations (characteres et carmina);
(2) Enigmatic and figurative words;
(3) Consonants only, without vowels;
(4) Letters from different alphabets;
(5) Specially devised letters;