On the Secret Works of Art and Nature and the Nullity of Magic

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Roger Bacon was born near Ilchester in Somersetshire in the year 1214 into an old, respectable family. He laid the first foundations of learning at Oxford and had the good fortune that, through some learned men who bestowed their favor upon him and held more correct concepts of learning than were then common, he learned to know true and useful scholarship and to distinguish it from the dry, confused, and useless logomachy original: Wortkrämerey; essentially "word-peddling" or empty scholastic disputation of that time. He built further upon these concepts in Paris, from where he returned in the year 1240, at approximately the twenty-sixth year of his age, with the degree of Doctor. At about this time, Bacon joined the Franciscan Order. It seems that he chose this way of life with the intention of thereby gaining the time and leisure to attend to his studies at his pleasure. After he had returned to England, he began to hold lectures at Oxford. In these, he abandoned the common path and led his students through more correct ways to a more useful knowledge and science than was then commonly done. In particular, he strove