The grey friar of the fourteenth century, as we know him in Langland and Chaucer, or later in the degraded fanaticism of the Observants, had fallen far from the example of his master. Perhaps the chief reason for Bacon’s decision was that his friend Grosseteste, who on the first coming of the friars wrote eloquently to Gregory the Ninth of their illumination, humility and piety, was a member of the Order, and was the first of its Rectors in Oxford. (Rd. Grosseteste, Epist. ed. Luard; Rolls, 1861, p. 179.) Even in Cambridge, till 1877, teachers and professors, save those of Law or Medicine, were generally speaking in holy orders; for instance, the following extract, of date 1849, which I owe to the kindness of Dr Donald MacAlister, “Cæterum neminem in socium unquam admitti volumus qui non sit aut Theologiam professurus et sacros ordines post certum temporis intervallum inferius definiendum suscepturus aut e Collegio discessurus, nisi unus e duobus sociis qui Medicinæ aut ex illis duobus qui Juris Civilis studio deputati sunt, electus fuerit.” (Stat. Coll. Div. Joh. Evan. Cant. cap. xii. 28 April, 12 Vict. 1849.) To this hour in England the clergy command the public schools. In a warlike society learning and contemplation must fall to the clergy; without the fortresses of war or learning, if there was any safety, there was not dignity or peace. The mendicant orders were young institutions, ascendant, and in favour with the great. Of their usurpations in the universities I have spoken. Within them even Popes could not meddle, as Bacon found to his sorrow. Hales and Ockham also became Minors, as Albert and St Thomas, both of illustrious descent, became Preachers. Moreover the Franciscans had devoted themselves to the care of the sick, and especially of those smitten with the new pestilences—such as leprosy, syphilis, and plague—which Oriental dirt and asceticism had engendered or inflamed; and thus a bent to observation of natural phenomena may have been encouraged (see art. Roger Bacon, Westminster Rev. loc. cit.). To say that to the monks we owe the conservation of learning is not so true as to say that learned men betook themselves to the religious houses in order to find relief from turmoil, to secure the subsistence of life without its cares, to get access to books, and to profit by the counsel of comrades who had enjoyed not only the culture of their own house, but also the interchange of ideas and manuscripts with all the learned houses in Europe. When these advantages were to be had in the world, learning deserted the monasteries. Again, Bacon was not an unbeliever, nor anything like it; in the Opus Majus he declares the Holy Scriptures to be the source of all truth; not only, like Socrates before him and Kant after him, did he fix his eyes on moral perfection as the end, but also on the Church as the means: on the other hand the resentments of passionate genius under harsh duress did not make a naturally rebellious temper more tractable. “Fames et mora bilem conciunt.” It is evident that within the Franciscan order there were three well-marked parties; namely, of the naturalists, as Bacon; of the mystics, as Bonaventura; and of the sophists, as John Duns the Northumbrian. Now Bacon’s troubles did not begin till the succession to the Generalship of the Order of the seraphic Bonaventura, an argumentative mystic (like Duns, and unlike the ecstatic mystics of St Victor), who, rejecting Aristotle, had steeped himself in the neo-platonism of Augustine and “Dionysius the Areopagite”; and Bonaventura and his party it was who stopped Bacon’s mouth at Oxford, and shut him up in Paris. What the life of Bacon and the direction of medieval thought might have been had Grosseteste been able to spare Adam Marsh from Oxford for the Generalship it were perhaps too curious to consider; yet we may profitably remember that Bacon, brushing aside Porphyry and his questions, and denouncing the “vain physics” of Paris, urged that enquiry should begin with the simplest objects of research, and rise gradually to the higher and higher; every observation being controlled by experiment. He says indeed that by experiment only can we distinguish a sophism from a demonstration. (Op. Tert. xix.) Earnestly he tried to follow this method; he seems to have spent on it substance of his own, and, after this was exhausted, to have appeared for the first time in history as a petitioner for “scientific grants in aid.” Diderot speaks of Bacon as “Un des génies les plus surprenants que la nature ait produits, et un des hommes les plus malheureux”; he lived in vain, died unhonoured, and left no disciple.
[60] “Colliget,” Mr E. G. Browne tells me, is a corruption of Kulliyyat. It does not exactly mean “Summary” (as commonly stated) but rather “General Principles” (Kull means “the whole”; Kulli universal or general; fem. pl. Kulliyyat). It may also mean collected writings (e.g. of a poet).
[61] Vid. p. 50.
[62] I venture to say “even of Caius,” though Caius was a competent and indeed for his time an able clinical physician, as we observe in his work on the sweating sickness. (Vid. note, p. 96.)
[63] Oxford fell in the first instance under Franciscan influence, yet Alexander Hales (of this order) gave the peripatetic bent to Oxford which it retains to this day. Creed rather than conduct was the dominant note of the Faith (p. 85); it is interesting therefore to learn that for Oxford Robert of Lincoln and Adam Marsh translated, or procured a translation of, the Ethics. On the probability that Grosseteste had some substantial knowledge of Greek, see p. 75, note 2.
[64] In Casaubon’s diary we get a glimpse of Oxford in 1613. The University was wealthy enough; it had escaped the Paris devastation, but had scarcely deserved its good fortune. There was much active teaching of a routine kind, many formalities, much serving of tables; but of living interest in science, learning, or high culture there was not a trace. Of classical learning, in Casaubon’s sense, there was naught. Ecclesiastical controversies absorbed or overwhelmed all other subjects; and the University was regarded by the Government as an instrument of party. The professors were all clerks, and ardent only as pamphleteers. Thus, says Pattison, “the University took its full share of national passion, prejudice and religious sentiment, but was wholly destitute of any power to vivify, to correct, to instruct, or to enlighten.” Pattison’s Casaubon, p. 417.
[65] Both in Bologna and Padua of course there was a faculty of Medicine; but its tradition in Bologna was traditional and galenical, in Padua independent and progressive. Montpellier had suffered in the desolation of Languedoc.
[66] See page 82.
[67] Contra Medicum quendam Invectivarum Libri Quatuor. (Op. T. II. pp. 1086, 801. Ed. Basel, 1555, quoted Renan, Aver. p. 331.)
[68] The Royal College of Physicians of London had its birth in the schools of Italy; and perhaps in revolt from Averroism the elegant humanity of Linacre has too often prevailed in this College rather than Harvey’s strenuous control of tradition and rhetoric by more positive conceptions, and of all conceptions by direct experimental verification.