Bacon soon became, and indeed has remained almost to the present day, a half-mythical character.  To the imagination of the common people, he was a great necromancer; he had had dealings with the Evil One, who had revealed many of the secrets of Nature to him; he had made a head of brass that could speak and foretell future events; and to him were attributed other not less wonderful inventions, which seem to have formed a common stock for popular legends of this sort during the Middle Ages, and to have been ascribed indiscriminately to one philosopher or another in various countries and in various times.[9] The references in our early literature to Friar Bacon, as one who had had familiarity with spirits and been a master in magic arts, are so numerous as to show that the belief in these stories was wide-spread, and that the real character of the learned Friar was quite given over to oblivion.  But time slowly brings about its revenges; and the man whom his ignorant and stupid fellows thought fit to hamper and imprison, and whom popular credulity looked upon with that half-horror and half-admiration with which those were regarded who were supposed to have put their souls in pawn for the sake of tasting the forbidden fruit, is now recognized not only as one of the most profound and clearest thinkers of his time, but as the very first among its experimental philosophers, and as a prophet of truths which, then neglected and despised, have since been adopted as axioms in the progress of science.  “The precursor of Galileo,” says M. Haureau, in his work on Scholastic Philosophy, “he learned before him how rash it is to offend the prejudices of the multitude, and to desire to give lessons to the ignorant.”

The range of Roger Bacon’s studies was encyclopedic, comprehending all the branches of learning then open to scholars.  Brucker, in speaking of him in his History of Philosophy, has no words strong enough to express his admiration for his abilities and learning.  “Seculi sui indolem multum superavit,” “vir summus, tantaque occultioris philosophiae cognitione et experientia nobilis, ut merito Doctoris Mirabilis titulum reportaverit."[10] The logical and metaphysical studies, in the intricate subtilties of which most of the schoolmen of his time involved themselves, presented less attraction to Bacon than the pursuits of physical science and the investigation of Nature.  His genius, displaying the practical bent of his English mind, turning with weariness from the endless verbal discussions of the Nominalists and Realists, and recognizing the impossibility of solving the questions which divided the schools of Europe into two hostile camps, led him to the study of branches of knowledge that were held in little repute.  He recognized the place of mathematics as the basis of exact science, and proceeded to the investigation of the facts and laws of optics, mechanics, chemistry, and astronomy.  But he did not limit himself to positive science; he was at the same time a student of languages and of language, of grammar and of music.  He was versed not less in the arts of the Trivium than in the sciences of the Quadrivium.[11]