But in rejecting the method of study then in vogue, and in opposing the study of facts to that of questions which by their abstruseness fatigued the intellect, which were of more worth in sharpening the wit than in extending the limits of knowledge, and which led rather to vain contentions than to settled conclusions,—­in thus turning from the investigation of abstract metaphysics to the study of Nature, Roger Bacon went so far before his age as to condemn himself to solitude, to misappreciation, and to posthumous neglect.  Unlike men of far narrower minds, but more conformed to the spirit of the times, he founded no school, and left no disciples to carry out the system which he had advanced, and which was one day to have its triumph.  At the end of the thirteenth century the scholastic method was far from having run its career.  The minds of men were occupied with problems which it alone seemed to be able to resolve, and they would not abandon it at the will of the first innovator.  The questions in dispute were embittered by personal feeling and party animosities.  Franciscans and Dominicans were divided by points of logic not less than by the rules of their orders.[12] Ignorance and passion alike gave ardor to discussion, and it was vain to attempt to convince the heated partisans on one side or the other, that the truths they sought were beyond the reach of human faculties, and that their dialectics and metaphysics served to bewilder more than to enlighten the intellect.  The disciples of subtile speculatists like Aquinas, or of fervent mystics like Bonaventura, were not likely to recognize the worth and importance of the slow processes of experimental philosophy.

The qualities of natural things, the limits of intellectual powers, the relations of man to the universe, the conditions of matter and spirit, the laws of thought, were too imperfectly understood for any man to attain to a comprehensive and correct view of the sources and methods of study and discovery of the truth.  Bacon shared in what may he called, without a sneer, the childishnesses of his time, childishnesses often combined with mature powers and profound thought.  No age is fully conscious of its own intellectual disproportions; and what now seem mere puerilities in the works of the thinkers of the Middle Ages were perhaps frequently the result of as laborious effort and as patient study as what we still prize in them for its manly vigor and permanent worth.  In a later age, the Centuries of the “Sylva Sylvarum” afford a curious comment on the Aphorisms of the “Novum Organum.”

The “Opus Majus” of Bacon was undertaken in answer to a demand of Pope Clement IV. in 1266, and was intended to contain a review of the whole range of science, as then understood, with the exception of logic.  Clement had apparently become personally acquainted with Bacon, at the time when, as legate of the preceding Pope, he had been sent to England on an ineffectual mission to compose the differences between Henry III. and his barons, and he appears to have formed a just opinion of the genius and learning of the philosopher.