and of herself, she can investigate the secrets of nature.’ These truths, now accepted as trite and self-evident, ranked, in Roger Bacon’s day, as novel and important discoveries.
He was born at Ilchester, in Somersetshire, in 1214. Of his lineage, parentage, and early education we know nothing, except that he must have been very young when he went to Oxford, for he took orders there before he was twenty. Joining the Franciscan brotherhood, he applied himself to the study of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic; but his genius chiefly inclined towards the pursuit of the natural sciences, in which he obtained such a mastery that his contemporaries accorded to him the flattering title of ‘The Admirable Doctor.’ His lectures gathered round him a crowd of admiring disciples; until the boldness of their speculations aroused the suspicion of the ecclesiastical authorities, and in 1257 they were prohibited by the General of his Order. Then Pope Innocent IV. interfered, interdicting him from the publication of his writings, and placing him under close supervision. He remained in this state of tutelage until Clement IV., a man of more liberal views, assumed the triple tiara, who not only released him from his irksome restraints, but desired him to compose a treatise on the sciences. This was the origin of Bacon’s ‘Opus Majus,’ ‘Opus Minus’ and ‘Opus Tertius,’ which he completed in a year and a half, and despatched to Rome. In 1267 he was allowed to return to Oxford, where he wrote his ‘Compendium Studii Philosophiæ.’ His vigorous advocacy of new methods of scientific investigation, or, perhaps, his unsparing exposure of the ignorance and vices of the monks and the clergy, again brought down upon him the heavy arm of the ecclesiastical tyranny. His works were condemned by the General of his Order, and in 1278, during the pontificate of Nicholas III., he was thrown into prison, where he was detained for several years. It is said that he was not released until 1292, the year in which he published his latest production, the ‘Compendium Studii Theologiæ.’ Two years afterwards he died.
In many respects Bacon was greatly in advance of his contemporaries, but his general repute ignores his real and important services to philosophy, and builds up a glittering fabric upon mechanical discoveries and inventions to which, it is to be feared, he cannot lay claim. As Professor Adamson puts it, he certainly describes a method of constructing a telescope, but not so as to justify the conclusion that he himself was in possession of that instrument. The invention of gunpowder has been attributed to him on the strength of a passage in one of his works, which, if fairly interpreted, disposes at once of the pretension; besides, it was already known to the Arabs. Burning-glasses were in common use; and there is no proof that he made spectacles, although he was probably acquainted with the principle of their construction. It is not to be denied, however, that in his interesting treatise on ‘The Secrets of Nature and Art,’2 he exhibits every sign of a far-seeing and lively intelligence, and foreshadows the possibility of some of our great modern inventions. But, like so many master-minds of the Middle Ages, he was unable wholly to resist the fascinations of alchemy and astrology. He believed that various parts of the human body were influenced by the stars, and that the mind was thus stimulated to particular acts, without any relaxation or interruption of free will. His ‘Mirror of Alchemy,’ of which a translation into French was executed by ‘a Gentleman of Dauphiné,’ and printed in 1507, absolutely bristles with crude and unfounded theories – as, for instance, that Nature, in the formation of metallic veins, tends constantly to the production of gold, but is impeded by various accidents, and in this way creates metals in which impurities mingle with the fundamental substances. The main elements, he says, are quicksilver and sulphur; and from these all metals and minerals are compounded. Gold he describes as a perfect metal, produced from a pure, fixed, clear, and red quicksilver; and from a sulphur also pure, fixed, and red, not incandescent and unalloyed. Iron is unclean and imperfect, because engendered of a quicksilver which is impure, too much congealed, earthy, incandescent, white and red, and of a similar variety of sulphur. The ‘stone,’ or substance, by which the transmutation of the imperfect into the perfect metals was to be effected must be made, in the main, he said, of sulphur and mercury.
It is not easy to determine how soon an atmosphere of legend gathered around the figure of ‘the Admirable Doctor;’ but undoubtedly it originated quite as much in his astrological errors as in his scientific experiments. Some of the myths of which he is the traditional hero belong to a very much earlier period, as, for instance, that of his Brazen Head, which appears in the old romance of ‘Valentine and Orson,’ as well as in the history of Albertus Magnus. Gower, too, in his ‘Confessio Amantis,’ relates how a Brazen Head was fabricated by Bishop Grosseteste. It was customary in those days to ascribe all kinds of marvels to men who obtained a repute for exceptional learning, and Bishop Grosseteste’s Brazen Head was as purely a fiction as Roger Bacon’s. This is Gower’s account:
‘For of the gretè clerk Grostest
I rede how busy that he was
Upon the clergie an head of brass
To forgè; and make it fortelle
Of suchè thingès as befelle.
And seven yerès besinesse
He laidè, but for the lachèsse3
Of half a minute of an hour …
He lostè all that he hadde do.’
Stow tells a story of a Head of Clay, made at Oxford in the reign of Edward II., which, at an appointed time, spoke the mysterious words, ‘Caput decidetur – caput elevabitur. Pedes elevabuntur supra caput.’ Returning to Roger Bacon’s supposed invention, we find an ingenious though improbable explanation suggested by Sir Thomas Browne, in his ‘Vulgar Errors’:
‘Every one,’ he says, ‘is filled with the story of Friar Bacon, that made a Brazen Head to speak these words, “Time is.” Which, though there went not the like relations, is surely too literally received, and was but a mystical fable concerning the philosopher’s great work, wherein he eminently laboured: implying no more by the copper head, than the vessel wherein it was wrought; and by the words it spake, than the opportunity to be watched, about the tempus ortus, or birth of the magical child, or “philosophical King” of Lullius, the rising of the “terra foliata” of Arnoldus; when the earth, sufficiently impregnated with the water, ascendeth white and splendent. Which not observed, the work is irrecoverably lost… Now letting slip the critical opportunity, he missed the intended treasure: which had he obtained, he might have made out the tradition of making a brazen wall about England: that is, the most powerful defence or strongest fortification which gold could have effected.’
An interpretation of the popular myth which is about as ingenious and far-fetched as Lord Bacon’s expositions of the ‘Fables of the Ancients,’ of which it may be said that they possess every merit but that of probability!
Bacon’s Brazen Head, however, took hold of the popular fancy. It survived for centuries, and the allusions to it in our literature are sufficiently numerous. Cob, in Ben Jonson’s comedy of ‘Every Man in his Humour,’ exclaims: ‘Oh, an my house were the Brazen Head now! ’Faith, it would e’en speak Mo’ fools yet!’ And we read in Greene’s ‘Tu Quoque’:
‘Look to yourself, sir;
The brazen head has spoke, and I must have you.’
Lord Bacon used it happily in his ‘Apology to the Queen,’ when Elizabeth would have punished the Earl of Essex for his misconduct in Ireland: – ‘Whereunto I said (to the end utterly to divert her), “Madam, if you will have me speak to you in this argument, I must speak to you as Friar Bacon’s head spake, that said first, ‘Time is,’ and then, ‘Time was,’ and ‘Time would never be,’ for certainly” (said I) “it is now far too late; the matter is cold, and hath taken too much wind.”’ Butler introduces it in his ‘Hudibras’: – ‘Quoth he, “My head’s not made of brass, as Friar Bacon’s noddle was.”’ And Pope, in ‘The Dunciad,’ writes: – ‘Bacon trembled for his brazen head.’ A William Terite, in 1604, gave to the world some verse,
Epistola Fratris Rogerii Baconis de Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturæ et de Nullitate Magiæ.
