Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, Vol. II (Burke English trans.)

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CHAPTER III

Concerning the attributes that are apprehended by special senses, by the common sense, and by imagination.

WE must note that imagination, the common sense, and any particular sense form judgments of themselves only concerning twenty-nine properties. For example, sight judges concerning light and color; touch concerning heat, cold, moistness, and dryness; smell concerning odors; and taste concerning flavor. These are the nine special properties that belong to their own senses, as I have named them, of which no other particular sense can form a judgment.

There are, moreover, twenty other properties, namely: distance, position, figure, magnitude, continuity, discreetness or separation, number, motion, rest, roughness, smoothness, transparency, thickness, shadow, darkness, beauty, and ugliness, as well as similarity and difference in all these things and in all things composed of them. Besides these qualities, there are some that are placed under one or more of these qualities, such as order under position, and writing and painting under figure and order. Further examples are straightness and crookedness, and concavity and convexity, which are placed under figure; multitude and fewness, which are placed under number; equality, augmentation, and diminution, which are placed under similarity and difference; eagerness, laughter, and sadness, which are apprehended from the figure and form of the face; and lamenting, which is apprehended from the form of the face together with the shedding of tears.

Moistness and dryness are also included, which are placed under motion and rest; from the sense of vision, moistness is not apprehended except from the liquidity of the moist body and from the motion of one part of it before another, and dryness is apprehended from the retention of the parts of the dry body and from the absence of liquidity. Here, however, we must consider that Aristotle maintains in the second book on Generation that moist and dry are, in one way, primary attributes that naturally belong to the elements, and that through these attributes spring the non-elemental moistness and dryness, which are reduced to the primary attributes and are caused by them. Concerning, then, these primary attributes, it has been stated that they are