Roger Bacon Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Henry Osborn Taylor

Critical Essay by Henry Osborn Taylor

SOURCE: "Roger Bacon," in The Mediaeval Mind: A History of the Development of Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages, Vol. II, Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1911, pp. 484-508.

In the following excerpt, Taylor offers a balanced examination of Bacon's attitude toward Scripture and the doctrines of the Church, his views of the state of knowledge in his time, and his interest in optics and experimental science.

Of all mediaeval men, Thomas Aquinas achieved the most organic and comprehensive union of the results of human reasoning and the data of Christian theology. He may be regarded as the final exponent of scholasticism, perfected in method, universal in scope, and still integral in purpose. The scholastic method was soon to be impugned and the scholastic universality broken. The premature attack upon the method came from Roger Bacon; the fatal breach in the scholastic wholeness resulted from the constructive, as well as...
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