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

for our evils is the fact that we live according to examples, and are not regulated by reason but influenced by custom. That which if done by few we should not care to imitate, when many begin to do it, we do it also, influenced by numbers more than by higher motives, and an error when it has become general takes for us the place of truth.” The Philosopher, in fact, through the whole course of his philosophy attacks unworthy authority and asserts in the second book of the Metaphysics that the chief sources of human error are custom and the influence of the masses. Seneca again in his book on the Happy Life says, “No man errs for himself alone, but he is the cause and author of another’s error, and error transmitted from one to another tosses and drives us headlong, and we come to grief by the examples of other men.” In his second book on Anger he says because of the evil of custom, “With difficulty are those vices lopped off which have grown up with us.” Moreover in his book on the Happiness of Life, in opposition to the common opinion he says, “Nothing involves us in greater evils than the fact that we regulate our lives by mere report, reckoning best that which has been so accepted by general consent, and we do not live according to reason but in accordance with our desire to copy others. Hence comes that heaping together of man tumbling over man. For in a great massacre of men, when the mob crowds upon itself, no one falls in such a way as not to drag his neighbor after him, and the first cause those that follow them to stumble into destruction. You may see this happening in every life.” He likewise says in the same book, “The mob pits itself against reason in defense of its own bane”; and he adds, “Human affairs are not so well ordered that better counsels please the majority of us,” and he continues, “A crowd is the worst of arguments.” Marcus Tullius, also, in the third book of the Tusculan Disputations says, “When we have been handed over to school masters, we are not only imbued with divers errors, but truth yields to vanity and firmly established nature herself gives way to mere opinion.” Also he says in the Lucullus, “Some complying with a friend or captivated by the mere discourse of someone to whom they have listened, form judgments about matters unknown to them, and driven as it were by stress of weather to some branch of study, no matter what, they cling to it as though to a rock. Many have chosen to remain in error and to defend