The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, Vol. 1 (English Translation)

buked and banished far from the consideration of science. For where these three bear sway, no reason influences, no right decides, no law binds, religion has no place, nature’s mandate fails, the complexion of things is changed, their order is confounded, vice prevails, virtue is extinguished, falsehood reigns, truth is hissed off the scene. Therefore nothing is more necessary of consideration than the positive condemnation of those four errors through the chosen arguments of wise men which shall prove irrefutable. Inasmuch as the wise unite the first three together and condemn them, and since the fourth, owing to its exceptional folly, needs special treatment, I shall first attempt to show the banefulness of the three. But although authority be one of those, I am in no way speaking of that solid and sure authority, which either by God’s judgment has been bestowed upon his Church, or which springs from the merit and dignity of an individual among the Saints, the perfect philosophers, and other men of science, who up to the limit of human utility are expert in the pursuit of science; but I am speaking of that authority, which without divine consent many in this world have unlawfully seized, not from the merit of their wisdom but from their presumption and desire of fame—an authority which the ignorant throng concedes to many to its own destruction by the just judgment of God. For according to Scripture, “owing to the sins of the people frequently the hypocrite rules”; for I am speaking of the sophistical authorities of the irrational multitude, men who are authorities in an equivocal sense, even as the eye carved in stone or painted on canvas has the name but not the quality of an eye.

CHAPTER II

THESE three errors sacred Scripture reproves, sainted doctors condemn, canon law forbids, philosophy rebukes; but for reasons previously touched upon in regard to adducing philosophical principles, and since the judgments of philosophers in regard to these three are less widely known, I shall in the first instance adduce those judgments. Seneca indeed condemns all these three banes at once in the book of his Second Epistles near the end in a single statement. He says, “Among the reasons