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.

    44/180 (page 42)
    study of, and copious extracts from, the important fragment of the Scriptum Principale^ entitled Com- munia JNaturalium^^ of which copies exist in the Mazarine library in Paris and in the British Museum. Haurdau’s comprehensive Histoire de la Phtlo- sophie Scolastique has made it easy to refute the illusion, still, however, not entirely dissipated, that scholasticism implies a special set of philo- sophical tenets or an uniform method of treatment. Philosophical writers in the thirteenth century differed from one another no less than philosophi- cal writers in the nineteenth ; though in either case a certain similarity in the subjects considered, and in the mode of handling them, was impressed by the circumstances of the time. Scholastic philo- sophy means simply philosophy taught in mediaeval schools. And between the schools of the twelfth, of the thirteenth, and of the fourteenth centuries, there were great and essential differences. To pass from the reading of the Policraticus of John of Salisbury, who knew nothing of Aristotle but his Logic, and that imperfectly, to a treatise of Albert or of Aquinas seems, and is, a transition quite as abrupt as to exchange a volume of 1 [This work has now been published, as follows :—Commun- tutn Naturalium Fratris Rogeri. Parts I-IV. Ed. R. Steele. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1909-11.]