CHAPTER V.

THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA.

The history of the encyclopaedic conception of human knowledge is a much more interesting and important object of inquiry than a list of the various encyclopaedic enterprises to be found in the annals of literature.  Yet it is proper here to mention some of the attempts in this direction, which preceded our memorable book of the eighteenth century.  It is to Aristotle, no doubt, that we must look for the first glimpse of the idea that human knowledge is a totality, whose parts are all closely and organically connected with one another.  But the idea that only dawned in that gigantic understanding was lost for many centuries.  The compilations of Pliny are not in a right sense encyclopaedic, being presided over by no definite idea of informing order.  It was not until the later middle age that any attempt was made to present knowledge as a whole.  Albertus Magnus, “the ape of Aristotle” (1193-1280), left for a season the three great questions of the existence of universals, of the modes of the existence of species and genus, and of their place in or out of the bosom of the individuals, and executed a compilation of such physical facts as had been then discovered.[90] A more distinctly encyclopaedic work was the book of Vincent de Beauvais (d. 1264), called Speculum naturale, morale, doctrinale, et historiale—­a compilation from Aquinas in some parts, and from Aristotle in others.  Hallam mentions three other compilations of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and observes that their laborious authors did not much improve the materials which they had amassed in their studies, though they sometimes arranged them conveniently.  In the mediaeval period, as he remarks, the want of capacity to discern probable truths was a very great drawback from the value of their compilations.[91]

Far the most striking production of the thirteenth century in this kind was the Opus Majus of Roger Bacon (1267), of which it has been said that it is at once the Encyclopaedia and the Novum Organum of that age;[92] at once a summary of knowledge, and the suggestion of a truer method.  This, however, was merely the introductory sketch to a vaster encyclopaedic work, the Compendium Philosophiae, which was not perfected.  “In common with minds of great and comprehensive grasp, his vivid perception of the intimate relationship of the different parts of philosophy, and his desire to raise himself from the dead level of every individual science, induced Bacon to grasp at and embrace the whole."[93] In truth, the encyclopaedic spirit was in the air throughout the thirteenth century.  It was the century of books bearing the significant titles of Summa, or Universitas, or Speculum.