of passionate genius under harsh duress did not make a naturally rebellious temper more tractable. “Fames et mora bilem conciunt.” It is evident that within the Franciscan order there were three well-marked parties; namely, of the naturalists, as Bacon; of the mystics, as Bonaventura; and of the sophists, as John Duns the Northumbrian. Now Bacon’s troubles did not begin till the succession to the Generalship of the Order of the seraphic Bonaventura, an argumentative mystic (like Duns, and unlike the ecstatic mystics of St Victor), who, rejecting Aristotle, had steeped himself in the neo-platonism of Augustine and “Dionysius the Areopagite”; and Bonaventura and his party it was who stopped Bacon’s mouth at Oxford, and shut him up in Paris. What the life of Bacon and the direction of medieval thought might have been had Grosseteste been able to spare Adam Marsh from Oxford for the Generalship it were perhaps too curious to consider; yet we may profitably remember that Bacon, brushing aside Porphyry and his questions, and denouncing the “vain physics” of Paris, urged that enquiry should begin with the simplest objects of research, and rise gradually to the higher and higher; every observation being controlled by experiment. He says indeed that by experiment only can we distinguish a sophism from a demonstration. (Op. Tert. XIX.) Earnestly he tried to follow this method; he seems to have spent on it substance of his own, and, after this was exhausted, to have appeared for the first time in history as a petitioner for “scientific grants in aid.” Diderot speaks of Bacon as “Un des génies les plus surprenants que la nature ait produits, et un des hommes les plus malheureux”; he lived in vain, died unhonoured, and left no disciple. [60] “Colliget,” Mr E. G. Browne tells me, is a corruption of Kulliyyat. It does not exactly mean “Summary” (as commonly stated) but rather “General Principles” (Kull means “the whole”; Kulli universal or general; fem. pl. Kulliyyat). It may also mean collected writings (e.g. of a poet). [61] Vid. p. 50. [62] I venture to say “even of Caius,” though Caius was a competent and indeed for his time an able clinical physician, as we observe in his work on the sweating sickness. (Vid. note, p. 96.) [63] Oxford fell in the first instance under Franciscan influence, yet Alexander Hales (of this order) gave the peripatetic bent to Oxford which it retains to this day. Creed rather than conduct was the dominant note of the Faith (p. 85); it is interesting therefore to learn that for Oxford Robert of Lincoln and Adam Marsh translated, or procured a translation of, the Ethics. On the probability that Grosseteste had some substantial knowledge of Greek, see p. 75, note 2.