The qualities of natural things, the limits of intellectual powers, the
relations of man to the universe, the conditions of matter and spirit,
the laws of thought, were too imperfectly understood for any man to
attain to a comprehensive and correct view of the sources and methods of
study and discovery of the truth. Bacon shared in what may he called,
without a sneer, the childishnesses of his time, childishnesses often
combined with mature powers and profound thought. No age is fully
conscious of its own intellectual disproportions; and what now seem mere
puerilities in the works of the thinkers of the Middle Ages were perhaps
frequently the result of as laborious effort and as patient study as
what we still prize in them for its manly vigor and permanent worth. In
a later age, the Centuries of the "Sylva Sylvarum" afford a curious
comment on the Aphorisms of the "Novum Organum."
The "Opus Majus" of Bacon was undertaken in answer to a demand of Pope
Clement IV. in 1266, and was intended to contain a review of the whole
range of science, as then understood, with the exception of logic.
Clement had apparently become personally acquainted with Bacon, at the
time when, as legate of the preceding Pope, he had been sent to England
on an ineffectual mission to compose the differences between Henry III.
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