kind of mechanism. Raymond de Lulle was at once a learned man and a
well-informed and most enquiring naturalist for whom Arabian science held
no secrets. With that he was poet, troubadour, orator, as well as very
eccentric and attractive. He was beloved and persecuted in his lifetime,
and long after his death still found enthusiastic disciples.

BACON.--Contemporaneously lived the man whom it is generally the
custom to regard as the distant precursor of experimental science, Roger
Bacon (who must not be confused with Francis Bacon, another learned man who
lived much nearer to our own time). Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar,
occupied himself almost exclusively with physical and natural science. He
passed the greater portion of his life in prison by reason of alleged
sorcery and, more especially, perhaps, because he had denounced the evil
lives of his brethren. He had at least a presentiment of almost all modern
inventions: gunpowder, magnifying glass, telescope, air-pump; he was
distinctly an inventor in optics. In philosophy, properly speaking, he
denounced what was hollow and empty in scholasticism, detesting that
preference should be given to "the straw of words rather than to the grain
of fact," and proclaiming that reasoning "is good to conclude but not to
establish." Without discovering the law of progress, as has too often been
alleged, he arrived at the conclusion that antiquity being the youth of the
world, the moderns are the adults, which only meant that it would be at our
school that the ancients would learn were they to return to earth and that
we ought not to believe blindly in the ancients; and this was an
insurrection against the principle of authority and against the idolatry of
Aristotle. He preached the direct study of nature, observation, and
experiment with the subsequent application of deduction, and especially of
mathematical deduction, to experiment and observation. With all that, he
believed in astrology; for those who are in advance of their time none the
less belong to it: but he was a very great man.