It is very evident that modern scientists would have more of kinship and intellectual sympathy with Friar {291} Bacon than most of them are apt to think possible. A faithful student of his writings, who was at the same time in many ways a cordial admirer of medievalism, the late Professor Henry Morley, who held the chair of English literature at University College, London, whose contributions to the History of English Literature are probably the most important of the nineteenth century, has a striking paragraph with regard to this attitude of Bacon toward knowledge and science--two words that have the same meaning etymologically, though they have come to have quite different connotations. In the third volume of his English Writers, page 321, Professor Morley, after quoting Bacon's four grounds of human ignorance, said:-- "No part of that ground has yet been cut away from beneath the feet of students, although six centuries ago the Oxford friar clearly pointed out its character. We still make sheep walks of second, third and fourth and fiftieth-hand references to authority; still we are the slaves of habit; still we are found following too frequently the untaught crowd; still we flinch from the righteous and wholesome phrase, 'I do not know,' and acquiesce actively in the opinion of others, that we know what we appear to know. Substitute honest research, original and independent thought, strict truth in the comparison of only what we really know with what is really known by others, and the strong redoubt of ignorance is fallen." This attitude of mind of Friar Bacon toward the reasons for ignorance, is so different from what is usually predicated of the Middle Ages and of medieval scholars, that it seems worth while insisting on it. Authority is supposed to have meant everything for the scholastics, {292} and experiment is usually said to have counted for nothing. They are supposed to have been accustomed to swear to the words of the master--"_jurare in verba magistri_"--yet here is a great leader of medieval thought insisting on just the opposite. As clearly as ever it was proclaimed, Bacon announces that an authority is worth only the reasons that he advances. These thirteenth century teachers are supposed, above all, to have fairly bowed down and worshipped at the shrine of Aristotle. Many of them doubtless did. In every generation the great mass of mankind must find someone to follow. As often as not, their leaders are much more fallible than Aristotle. Bacon, however, had no undue reverence for Aristotle or anyone else, and he realized that the blind following of Aristotle had done much harm. In his sketch of Gilbert of Colchester, which was published in the "Popular Science Monthly" for August, 1901, Brother Potamian calls attention to this quality of Roger Bacon in a striking passage.