Previously Unpublished Works, Fascicle 1

and of the arts, there is no one among the moderns Bacon uses the term "moderns" to refer to his contemporaries in the mid-thirteenth century. who knows how to supply through their own discovery any worthy part of wisdom not already held in the Latin language, nor how to translate it from another language. Yet authority defines that the later people are in time, the more insightful they should be. Since the first discoverers had no assistance, and those who came after had only the assistance of those before them, wisdom always grew. Parts of the worthy arts were added little by little.

Now, however, we have the labors of all who preceded us ready for our use. Yet we do not know how to add those things which they could not reach, nor do we know how to translate the works they completed which are missing in our own language. We should be completing what is missing and even improving upon what has already been found. As Boethius An influential sixth-century philosopher whose works bridged classical Greek thought and the Latin Middle Ages. says in the book On the Discipline of Scholars:

“It is a wretched thing to always use what has been discovered and never what is to be discovered.”

For nothing is perfect in human inventions. The nature of all things promises that we may perceive things equal to God, as the Commentator Averroes, the twelfth-century Islamic philosopher whose commentaries on Aristotle were central to medieval university education. says in the chapter On the Rainbow. Seneca A Roman Stoic philosopher and advisor to Nero, often cited by medieval authors for his scientific and ethical insights. also says in the third book of Natural Questions:

“Everything was new to those first attempting it. Afterward, those same things were polished. But if anything was discovered, it should be credited to them. . . . For no thing is finished while it is just beginning.”

Regarding this, he further says in the fourth book:

“It is not yet fifteen hundred years since Greece ‘gave numbers and names to the stars.’ Even today there are many nations that only know the sky by its appearance.”

The time will come when the day and the diligence of a longer age will bring into the light these things which now lie hidden. Therefore, if those who came later progressed in the sciences as they ought, they would fulfill the needs of their own time by completing what was lacking in their predecessors. But they do not do this. Instead, what is worse, they do not even understand the things placed right before their eyes. This is clear in every part of wisdom.

39 b 2. Therefore it is not necessary to provide an example in alchemy alkimia: the medieval study of the transformation of matter and the pursuit of the philosopher's stone, and in the sciences