The life & work of Roger Bacon : an introduction to the Opus majus / by H. Gordon Jones.

  • John Henry Bridges
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The life & work of Roger Bacon : an introduction to the Opus majus / by H. Gordon Jones. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of Peter Peregrinus ; and a careful comparison of the two works, separated as they are by an interval of more than three centuries, shows undoubted and weighty obligations of Gilbert to his predecessor. In the construction of globular magnets (the ‘ terrella,’ or model of the earth), in the mode of finding their poles, the procedure, and indeed the very language of Peter, is closely followed by the later inquirer.^ To a mind so original as Bacon’s, trained in scientific method by Grosseteste and other mem- bers of the English mathematical school, the influence of an experimental thinker like Peter of Maricourt must have been stimulating in the extreme. Bacon was thirsting for reality in a barren land infested with metaphysical mirage. From the horse-load of verbal controversies con- tained in the Summa of Alexander of Hales, from the interminable series of tedious commentaries on Aristotle, of which so great a master as Albert was setting the first fatal example, he took refuge in the visions of the harvest of new truth that was to be reaped by patient observation of nature, 1 [For a full account of Peter’s treatise on the magnet and a most interesting description of his remarkable inventions, such as that of the pivoted compass with divided circle, see S. P. Thompson’s Petrus Peregnnus de Maricourt and his Epistola de Magnete. {Proc, Brit. Acad.., vol. ii, 1906.)]