522 ADDITIONS. 



progress of knowledge. It would seern, indeed, that something of a 

 struggle between the progressive and stationary powers of the human 

 mind was going on at this time. Bacon himself says, 21 'Never was 

 there so great an appearance of wisdom, nor so much exercise of study 

 in so many Faculties, in so many regions, as for this last forty years. 

 Doctors are dispersed everywhere, in every castle, in every burgh, and 

 especially by the students of two Orders (he means the Franciscans 

 and Dominicans, who were almost the only religious orders that dis- 

 tinguished themselves by an application to study), 22 which has not hap- 

 pened except for about forty years. And yet there was never so much 

 ignorance, so much error.' And in the part of his work which refers 

 to Mathematics, he says of that study, 23 that it is the door and the key 

 of the sciences ; and that the neglect of it for thirty or forty years has 

 entirely ruined the studies of the Latins. According to these state- 

 ments, some change, disastrous to the fortunes of science, must have 

 taken place about 1230, soon after the foundation of the Dominican 

 and Franciscan Orders. 24 Nor can we doubt that the adoption of the 

 Aristotelian philosophy by these two Orders, in the form in which the 

 Angelical Doctor had systematized it, was one of the events which 

 most tended to defer, for three centuries, the reform which Roger 

 Bacon urged as a matter of crying necessity in his own time." 



It is worthy of remark that in the Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, as 

 afterwards in the Novum Organon of Francis Bacon, we have certain 

 features of experimental research pointed out conspicuously as Prero- 

 gatives : although in the former, this term is employed to designate 

 the superiority of experimental science in general to the science of the 

 schools ; in the latter work, the term is applied to certain classes of 

 experiments as superior to others. 



21 Quoted by Jebb, Pref. to Op. Maj. 22 Mosheim, Mist. iii. 161. 



" Op. Maj. p. 57. S4 Mosheim, iii. 161. 



