FRIAR ROGER BACON. 259 



extinction in this material fashion. Bacon is no martyr of science. 

 He was punished for an attack on the very nature and existence of 

 the church itself; for setting up a natural law to govern and limit 

 the things of the spirit. 



Owing to the horror which was felt by the writers of that age for 

 the heresies of Bacon, his influence was very small. While Albertus 

 Magnus was entertaining kings, and while Aquinus was the honored 

 expounder of ecclesiastical doctrine, their contemporary and peer was 

 languishing in confinement. His immense work was done in spite of 

 his disgrace. His pupils received his doctrines and through them his 

 ideas gained currency. His writings are scarcely mentioned by the 

 authors of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but we know of at 

 least three cases in which they exerted a profound influence. The 

 admirable doctrine of optics set forth in his work on perspective was 

 known to Descartes, beyond a doubt, and cannot have failed to direct 

 the thoughts of the philosopher to whom we owe the foundation of our 

 modern theories. Again, Paul of Middleburg was deeply concerned 

 with the reform of the calendar, and in his treatise on the subject 

 made great use of Bacon's writings. It was Paul that suggested to 

 Copernicus the need of more accurate tables of the planets, and we 

 may fairly say that Bacon's labors came to fruition in the heliocentric 

 theory of the world. Finally, a long passage in his Opus majus, treat- 

 ing of the probable proximity of Spain and India, was literally trans- 

 ferred (without credit) to the Imago Mundi of Peter d'Ailly. It is 

 Columbus himself, in a letter to the King and Queen of Spain, who 

 cites this passage as one of the authorities that put it into his mind to 

 venture on his great voyage. Truly ideas do not die, and those of 

 Bacon have made great changes in this little world of ours. 



We may pass over his influence upon the metaphysical controversies 

 of his time, though it was not small. He was thoroughly versed in 

 scholastic dialectic and was much concerned to combat the pantheistic 

 theories of Averroes and his school. He is of the strictest sect of the 

 Nominalists, with a reasonable practicality all his own. "The prevalent 

 view," he says, "is that universals exist only in the mind. Yet two 

 stones would be like one another even though there should be no mind 

 to perceive them. But it is precisely this likeness of the two stones 

 that constitutes their universal." How modern it sounds ! How crisp 

 and neat, like a French logician. With Bacon as with others whom we 

 call the ancients, we perpetually meet the modern note. A man's 

 character is his fate was not written by Taine or Stendhal, but by 

 Heracleitus five centuries before the Christian era. 



Bacon proposed to Clement IV. the reform of the calendar in 

 sagacious and artfully presented terms. He points out to the pope 

 the errors of the accepted lunar tables, and proves that after a series 



