Roger Bacon, 13th-century English Franciscan friar and philosopher. Taken from the book Old England's Worthies, London, c. 1850. (Photo by The Print Collector)
School period
College/University
Gallery of Roger Bacon
A 19th-century engraving of Bacon observing the stars at Oxford.
Gallery of Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon. Engraved By J.W.Cook. (Photo by Ken Welsh)
Career
Gallery of Roger Bacon
"Roger Bacon discovers gunpowder", "whereby Guy Fawkes was made possible", an image from Bill Nye's Comic History of England
Gallery of Roger Bacon
Ernest Board's portrayal of Bacon in his observatory at Merton College.
Gallery of Roger Bacon
A picture of Roger Bacon, the English Franciscan monk, philosopher and scientist (Photo by Popperfoto)
Gallery of Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon, 13th-century English philosopher and Franciscan friar, Illustration from John Cassell's Illustrated History of England, Vol. I from the earliest period to the reign of Edward the Fourth, Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1857. (Photo by Glasshouse Vintage/Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group)
Gallery of Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon
Gallery of Roger Bacon
Illustration of Roger Bacon in his study (1905)
Gallery of Roger Bacon
A diorama of Bacon presenting one of his works to the chancellors of Paris University.
Roger Bacon, 13th-century English philosopher and Franciscan friar, Illustration from John Cassell's Illustrated History of England, Vol. I from the earliest period to the reign of Edward the Fourth, Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1857. (Photo by Glasshouse Vintage/Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group)
(Roger Bacon's Opus maius represents an attempt to create ...)
Roger Bacon's Opus maius represents an attempt to create a whole new vision of what Christian education should be, one centered on service to the Church. One chapter of this work, "On Signs," is the most comprehensive and innovative treatise on semiotics in the thirteenth century. To understand the myriad ways in which things and words signify, Bacon says, is "a thing of marvelous usefulness and beauty."
Roger Bacon was a 13th-century English philosopher, scientist, and Franciscan friar of the Medieval period, and certainly one of the most eminent scholars of the times.
Bacon is sometimes credited as one of the earliest European advocates of Empiricism and the modern scientific method. He decried the prevailing Scholastic system, based as it was solely on tradition and prescribed authorities.
Background
Roger Bacon was born in Ilchester in Somerset, England, possibly in about 1220, but more likely in 1214 (the date depends on how literally a later statement of Bacon's is interpreted). His family appears to have been well-off, but, during the stormy reign of King Henry III of England, their property was despoiled and several members of the family were driven into exile.
Education
Having completed his elementary education at home, the 13-year-old Roger was sent to the Franciscan school at Oxford. He faithfully attended lectures in the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and the quadrivium (music, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic). Through this programme of lectures and debates, he learned that the study of astronomy included not just observation of the stars, but also a knowledge of world geography. His teachers convinced him that the world was round, as could be deduced by the curved shadow that it cast on the moon during an eclipse. In his logic class, he discovered that the universe was infinite for no finite cosmos could contain an infinite God.
Entering university at the age of thirteen meant that the university was providing both what would be considered today as a secondary and tertiary education, so Bacon would have spent many years of study at Oxford.
Later, Bacon became a Master at Oxford, lecturing on Aristotle, and he was greatly influenced by the Oxford masters and professors Robert Grosseteste, Adam Marsh, Richard Fitzacre, and Edmund Rich and the French mathematician and scientist Pierre de Maricourt.
There is no evidence he was ever awarded a doctorate - the title Doctor Mirabilis was posthumous and figurative.
During the 1240s, Bacon was lecturing in the faculty of arts at Paris. His lectures covered Aristotle's Metaphysics, Physics, De sensu et sensato, probably De generatione et corruptione, De animalibus, and the De anima. It thus appears that Bacon was one of the early lecturers, on Aristotle’s libri naturales in Paris.
About 1247, Bacon gave up his membership in the arts faculty at Paris and returned to Oxford. The move to Oxford has been assumed to mark the turning point in his interests. This turn involved a broadening of his outlook in the direction of Robert Grosseteste's philosophy and the contents of various Arabic sources.
Bacon joined the Franciscans about 1257 and reports a series of hardships in the first 10 years of his life as a Franciscan. He accuses his superiors of burdening him with duties and punishing him with isolation, hunger, and "unspeakable violence."
In those first years as a Franciscan (until 1266), Bacon wrote the De mirabilis potestate artis etnaturae, and the De computo naturali. This was the period of his most intense occupation with optics, and in the late 1250s or the early 1260s, he wrote the De multiplicatione specierum and the De speculis comburentibus. Following a short correspondence with Guy de Foulques, who was elected Pope as Clement IV, Bacon sent him in 1267/1268 the Opus majus, the Opus minus, and the De multiplicatione specierum. The Pope died in the same year, and his successor was not elected until 1271, so Bacon received no answer, and no result had followed from his writings.
Bacon is often considered the first European to describe a mixture containing the essential ingredients of gunpowder. Based on two passages from Bacon's Opus Maius and Opus Tertium, extensively analyzed by J. R. Partington, several scholars cited by Joseph Needham concluded that Bacon had most likely witnessed at least one demonstration of Chinese firecrackers, possibly obtained with the intermediation of other Franciscans, like his friend William of Rubruck, who had visited the Mongols.
In the late 1260s and early 1270s, Bacon probably wrote his Communia naturalium and Communiamathematica, mature expressions of many of his theories. This was also the period of Bacon's intense occupation with language. The Greek and Hebrew grammars belong to the phase immediately following the Opus majus. These were followed in 1271 or 1272 by the polemical Compendium studii philosophiae, in which Bacon criticized the Franciscan and Dominican orders for their educational practices.
A chronicle, from about 1370, reports that Bacon was condemned and imprisoned by his order for "certain suspected novelties." The chronicle further tells that Bacon's works and doctrines were to be avoided by all, since the order had rejected them. Bacon was supposedly confined to the Paris convent at about 1277, perhaps until 1292, by Jerome of Ascoli, the Franciscan minister general. The reason for this condemnation is unknown. Perhaps it had to do with the repercussions resulting from the Compendium studii philosophiae, which was likely to give offense both to the more conservative members of his own order and to the Dominicans. It could also have been connected to Bacon’s leaning toward the spiritual branch of his order, a branch perceived as a threat by his superiors.
In 1292, at a chapter of the order held in Paris, just after Jerome of Ascoli's death, certain prisoners condemned in 1277 were set free. It is likely that Bacon may have been one of them. The last evidence of Bacon’s life is the Compendium studii theologiae, which he left unfinished. This was a grammatical work, repeating many of the themes and ideas that had appeared long before in his De signis (a part of the Opus majus). It is reasonable to assume that he died in 1292 or soon thereafter.
He died without any important followers, was quickly forgotten, and remained so for a long time until his works were rediscovered and published in the 18th Century.
Roger Bacon saw the value of glorifying God through study of the world. He believed science would draw people to faith in God. It is interesting to note that it was the Christian thinkers in the universities and in the monasteries who connected the dots between the Bible and science. Bacon made errors and had some superstitions of his own about alchemy and astrology (as did most people in his day), but he saw how experimental science could lead people away from the errors of superstition and magic by demonstrating how the world really works.
In order to think along these lines, clearly Roger Bacon had to have a Christian world view that nature was rational and obeyed natural laws. While other cultures achieved successes in engineering or medicine through pragmatism, luck or necessity, Bacon’s point was philosophical (philo=love, sophos=wisdom); he valued knowledge not just for its practical benefits, but for its own intrinsic value both as a means of avoiding error and for understanding the mind of God. This was the foundation that led to a sustainable scientific enterprise. His prophecies were to be vindicated hundreds of years later as experimental science was taken up vigorously by more famous Christians - Kepler, Boyle, Newton.
Politics
Bacon's works contained a political program whose goal was to civilize humankind as well as to secure peace and prosperity for the whole of the Christian world, both in the hereafter and in this world.
Views
The pivotal concepts around which all of Bacon’s philosophical efforts revolved were utilitas ("utility") and sapientia ("wisdom"). Bacon used the concept of utility in the context of his reflections on the relation, scope, and goal of the sciences. More specifically, he used the term in two senses: to describe the hierarchy between the sciences and to refer to the function of the sciences, namely, the improvement of the physical and spiritual well-being of humankind in this world and the next.
Bacon called for an extensive modification of the curricula. He believed neither philosophical nor theological matters could be properly understood without employing mathematics. Bacon's reform program included the introduction of five main sciences that he thought were neglected or misunderstood by his contemporaries. Apart from mathematics, these were the science of languages, perspective, moral philosophy, experimental science, and alchemy. According to Bacon, these sciences were more conducive to the advancement of the mind, the body, and society than some of the sciences preferred by his contemporaries, such as logic, the less significant parts of natural philosophy, and a part of metaphysics.
In his Parisian phase of career, Roger Bacon developed the idea of the utmost significance of the speaker’s intention, and original theories of imposition and equivocation. He affirmed that universals are extramental, believed in innate confused knowledge, and held to the theory of universal hylomorphism. Instead of the Aristotelian linear scale of colors, he posited five principal colors, from which the other colors are produced by mixtures.
In his mature phase of thought, Bacon proposed an order of sciences in which the practical sciences received precedence, advocated the use of experimental method, developed the theory of the multiplication of species, and combined it with Alhacen's ideas on light and vision. He stressed the importance of mathematics in providing scientific explanations and drew geometrical diagrams exemplifying the rules of reflection, refraction, and other related phenomena. His view of matter as positive and worthy of investigation found expression in his strong notion of representation, arguing for the need to portray not only formal aspects but material ones as well in both cognitive contents and language. Bacon described the details of the workings of the sensitive soul and ascribed complex cognitive capacities to animals. He presented an original classification of signs and reversed the linguistic triangle prescribed by Aristotle and Boethius.
According to Bacon, sight can perceive 22 visible qualities among which are light, color, remoteness, position, corporeity, shape, size, continuity, number, and motion. Of these, only light and color are perceived directly, since they alone produce species, while the other visual qualities are deduced from the way the species of light and color are arranged on the surface of the eye, an arrangement which accurately reflects the original proportions within the issuing object. In deducing visual information, both humans and animals employ a kind of syllogism which resembles reasoning. Bacon ascribed complex cognitive capacities to animals; he adduced that spiders spinning their webs and monkeys taking revenge on people who have hurt them are examples of animals' ability to learn from experience and to plan their actions accordingly.
Bacon describes the brain as divided into three chambers. The first chamber he calls phantasia and says it houses the common sense and imagination. Upon receiving the species, the common sense first makes judgments concerning each sense separately, discerning the distinctive kind of information supplied by the proper senses. The species are then retained in the imagination. In the rear chamber of the brain, the estimative faculty receives the species of the substantial nature of things, and memory retains them. The species retained in both phantasia and memory are multiplied all the way to the highest faculty of the sensitive soul, located in the middle cell of the brain: cogitation. The faculty of cogitation is the one responsible for the syllogistic mode of cognition, and serves as the link between the sensitive and the rational soul in men.
Bacon believed that the Earth was a sphere and that one could sail around it. For the radius of the Earth Bacon took a figure of 3,245 miles. He estimated the distance to the stars coming up with the answer 130 million miles.
Bacon believed that the Calendar of his time was out by 11 minutes every year, and that since 45 B.C. enough of those minutes had accumulated to put the Calendar out by ten days. Bacon worried that all religious functions were being celebrated on a wrong day. He pleaded to have the Calendar rectified. But it wasn't until 1582 - almost 300 years after Bacon's death - that Pope Gregory XIII had his people draw up a new Calendar. Bacon's calculations were adopted for this newly rectified Gregorian Calendar. Until 1752, Britain and all of its colonies including America were living by Bacon's measurements.
Quotations:
"If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics."
"For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics. For this is an assured fact in regard to celestial things, since two important sciences of mathematics treat of them, namely theoretical astrology and practical astrology. The first... gives us definite information as to the number of the heavens and of the stars, whose size can be comprehended by means of instruments, and the shapes of all and their magnitudes and distances from the earth, and the thicknesses and number, and greatness and smallness... It likewise treats of the size and shape of the habitable earth... All this information is secured by means of instruments suitable for these purposes, and by tables and by canons... For everything works through innate forces shown by lines, angles and figures."
"Neglect of mathematics work injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or things of this world. And what is worst, those who are thus ignorant are unable to perceive their own ignorance, and so do not seek a remedy."
"Knowledge of languages is the doorway to wisdom."
"Cease to be ruled by dogmas and authorities; look at the world!"
Personality
Roger Bacon was known as an intelligent, curious, and enthusiastic person.
Bacon had a reputation as an unconventional scholar, pursuing learning in alchemy and magic - interests which earned him the soubriquet "Doctor Mirabilis." This led to his rejection from the Franciscans and eventual imprisonment.
Mathematics, languages, optics, and natural philosophy became a passion into which Bacon poured all his family's wealth. He bought books, equipment, instruments, and mathematical tables. These were all very expensive for all books were in manuscript and each volume had to be copied by hand. Bacon was so fully occupied with his studies that he had no time for friends or the university life around him.
Quotes from others about the person
Alexander von Humboldt: "Bacon was the most important phenomenon of the Middle Ages."