SOURCE: "Philosophic and Cultural Background: Roger Bacon," in Introduction to the History of Science: From Rabbi Ben Ezra to Roger Bacon, Vol. II, The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1931, pp. 952-67.

In the following excerpt from a work originally published in 1927, Sarton surveys Bacon's achievement, arranged by discipline, referring occasionally to his unfinished Compendium philosophiae.

General appreciation—Bacon was essentially an encyclopaedist; that is, he was tormented with the idea of the unity of knowledge, and his life was a long effort better to grasp and to explain that unity. He denounced violently the evils of scholasticism, too violently in fact to obtain practical results. He realized the urgent need for philosophers and theologians to enlarge their basis of knowledge; they were not acquainted with the available scientific data and their mathematical and linguistic equipment was utterly insufficient. His greatest title to fame however, was his vindication of the experimental...