SOURCE: "The Life and Writings of Roger Bacon," in The Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, Vol. LXXXI, No. CLIX, January, 1864, pp. 1-30.

In the following excerpt, an anonymous critic surveys Bacon's career and outlines Bacon's character based on his writings.

Roger Bacon is one of the few really great men who have been equally neglected by their contemporaries and by posterity. All who have looked into his writings, Leland and Selden no less than Humboldt and Victor Cousin, point to him as the most original thinker of the middle ages. His anticipations of the course of scientific discovery, yield only in importance to the justness of his conceptions of the method and purposes of science itself. First among the schoolmen, he pointed out the evils of that blind subservience to authority which is the cardinal defect of scholasticism. First in an age almost wholly devoted to meta-physical speculation...