4. _Roger Bacon._--There is one writer of the middle ages, on whom much stress has been laid, and who was certainly a most remarkable person. Roger Bacon's works are not only so far beyond his age in the knowledge which they contain, but so different from the temper of the times, in his assertion of the supremacy of experiment, and in his contemplation of the future progress of knowledge, that it is difficult to conceive how such a character could then exist. That he received much of his knowledge from Arabic writers, there can be no doubt; for they were in his time the repositories of all traditionary knowledge. But that he derived from them his disposition to shake off the authority of Aristotle, to maintain the importance of experiment, and to look upon knowledge as in its infancy, I cannot believe, because I have not myself hit upon, nor seen quoted by others, any passages in which Arabian writers express such a disposition. On the other hand, we do find in European writers, in the authors of Greece and Rome, the solid sense, the bold and hopeful spirit, which suggest such tendencies. We have already seen that Aristotle asserts, as distinctly as words can express, that all knowledge must depend on observation, and that science must be collected from facts by induction. We have seen, too, that the Roman writers, and Seneca in particular, speak with an enthusiastic confidence of the progress which science must make in the course of ages. When Roger Bacon holds similar language in the thirteenth century, the resemblance is probably rather a sympathy of character, than a matter of direct derivation; but I know of nothing {246} which proves even so much as this sympathy in the case of Arabian philosophers. A good deal has been said of late of the coincidences between his views, and those of his great namesake in later times, Francis Bacon.[91\4] The resemblances consist mainly in such points as I have just noticed; and we cannot but acknowledge, that many of the expressions of the Franciscan Friar remind us of the large thoughts and lofty phrases of the Philosophical Chancellor. How far the one can be considered as having anticipated the method of the other, we shall examine more advantageously, when we come to consider what the character and effect of Francis Bacon's works really are.[92\4] [Note 91\4: Hallam's _Middle Ages_, iii. 549. Forster's _Mahom. U._ ii. 313.] [Note 92\4: In the _Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences_, I have given an account at considerable length of Roger Bacon's mode of treating Arts and Sciences; and have also compared more fully his philosophy with that of Francis Bacon; and I have given a view of the bearing of this latter upon the progress of Science in modern times. See _Phil. Ind. Sc._ book xii. chaps. 7 and 11. See also the Appendix to this volume.]