SOURCE: An introduction to The "Opus Majus" of Roger Bacon, Vol. I, edited by John Henry Bridges, 1897. Reprint by Minerva G. m. b. H., 1964, pp. xxi-xcii.

A Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and sometime Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, Bridges was a scholar of Auguste Compte's work and himself a philosophical positivist. He edited a Latin edition of Opus Majus which was first published in two volumes in 1897, but was withdrawn by the Clarendon Press after critics noted serious errors in the text due to Bridges's faulty reading of Bacon's manuscripts, his too-strict reliance upon Samuel Jebb's 1733 edition, and his omission of a key section of text located in the Vatican. (A corrected edition was published in 1900). In the following excerpt, Bridges, comments upon general characteristics of Opus Majus and compares Bacon's thought to that of Sir Francis Bacon and Auguste Compte.

The question presents itself...