1 24 Science Religion and Reality 



to-day are well aware that, in some at least, religious faith has been 

 shaken by the course of science of which Bacon may be regarded 

 as one of the prophets. To Bacon, however, it is not at all evident 

 that this would or could be so, and there is nothing in any of the 

 works by him that would lead us to consider that by his contem- 

 poraries he was regarded as heretical or unorthodox in matters of 

 religion. Since his day many legends have arisen around his name, 

 butt here is not the least historical evidence that his views were 

 held to be subversive of religion. 



The truth is that, even with many of his works printed and 

 with the whole apparatus of modern research in our hands, it is by 

 no means easy to get at the real principles underlying Bacon's 

 philosophical position. In his own time and without the aid of 

 printed books it was perhaps not greatly easier. We know little 

 of Bacon's life and are in the dark at many critical points. It seems 

 probable, however, that the opposition to him was neither an 

 opposition to his actual scientific achievements nor to the effects 

 of those achievements on religion. The opposition was based on 

 a misunderstanding of his method of interrogating Nature. It may 

 reasonably be doubted if in the thirteenth century there were 

 enough men who understood what he meant by Experimental 

 Science to constitute a serious opposition to that. But clear thinkers 

 in those days, as in these, were rare. Bacon was a quarrelsome and 

 irritable man, and despite endless discussion nobody was then, or is 

 now, quite in a position to tell us exactly what he means by " magic." 

 There is an opposition to science that comes from those who know 

 what it is and where it leads. There is another opposition to 

 science which arises from sheer misunderstanding. It was from 

 that that Roger Bacon suffered. The generations that came after 

 him set the seal on that misunderstanding by dubbing him 

 " magician," but of Bacon as a heretic or as a protagonist of any 

 war against religious belief we hear never a word. Thus the very 

 interesting incidents of his life and work, important for the history 

 alike of philosophy, of theology and of science, have little significance 

 for the relation of these departments to each other. 



In the next generation and even more clearly than Roger, a 

 herald of the dawn was the Cardinal usually known as Nicholas of 

 Cusa (140 1 -1 646). This interesting and many-sided thinker is 

 important for us for more than one reason. We may glance first 

 at his scientific standpoint and achievements. He ranks as a real 



