BACON'S LIFE

In considering the little that is known of the life of Bacon, it is well to give precedence to the few facts that are fixed with perfect precision by his own statement. We know with entire accuracy the date of the composition of the Opus Majus, and of the two subsidiary works, the Opus Minus and the Opus Tertium. Pope Clement IV's instructions to him to transmit the results of his labours were issued June 22, 1266 from Viterbo. Within the year that followed, the Opus Majus, with its supplement, the Opus Minus, and its introduction, the Opus Tertium, had been completed and sent to the Pope. At this time he speaks of himself as an old man, and he says that he had been studying language, science, and philosophy for nearly forty years (Opus Tertium, cap. 20). From this it may be supposed that he was born between 1210 and 1215. But the place of his birth cannot be said to be fixed with certainty.

One, and only one, notice of his name occurs in a contemporary writer. Matthew Paris relates, under the year 1233, that Henry III convoked the counts and barons of the kingdom to a council at Oxford. Their animosity against Pierre des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, the king's chief adviser, who had surrounded his person with a body-guard of Poitevins and filled England with these foreigners, led them to refuse the summons.

A sufficient reason for a new edition of Roger Bacon's principal work would be the extreme rarity of the edition of the Opus Majus published by Jebb in 1733, and reprinted seventeen years afterwards in Venice. But a more cogent reason is that this edition is incomplete. The work, as we learn from Bacon's account of it in his Opus Tertium, consisted of seven parts; and the seventh part, a discourse on Moral Philosophy, was omitted by the editor.

Why Jebb should have taken this course is not clear. In his preface he speaks of the work as consisting of six parts, ‘in sex partes distributum,’ and adds, ‘tractatum de Morali Philosophia ad calcem adjunxit.’ In 1858 a paper was read by Dr. Ingram before the Royal Irish Academy, and was printed in the seventh volume of the Proceedings of this institution, in which the writer showed conclusively the continuity of this seventh part of the Opus Majus with all that had gone before. The continuity is marked unmistakably in the very title of the section, Incipit septima pars hujus persuasionis de Morali Philosophia, and in its opening words, ‘Manifestavi in praecedentibus,’ &c. Repeated references to the foregoing parts will be found; and if further proof were wanting, it is supplied in abundance by the two appendages to the Opus Majus which were sent by Bacon to Pope Clement IV within a few months of the dispatch of the principal work, published by Professor Brewer in 1859, in the Rolls Series, as Opera Inedita.