Roger Bacon Quotes on Knowledge
Roger Bacon (c.1219–c.1292) — the English Franciscan natural philosopher and Aristotelian commentator whose Opus Maius (1267), Opus Minus, and Opus Tertium were composed at the request of Pope Clement IV — gave thirteenth-century scholasticism one of its most distinctive programs for the reform of philosophical and scientific knowledge. The central commitments — that experimental science (scientia experimentalis) supplies a third method of knowledge alongside authority and reasoning, that mathematics is the indispensable framework for the systematic articulation of natural-philosophical knowledge, and that the linguistic study of Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic is required for the proper interpretation of the philosophical and theological sources — articulate a research program whose engagement with optics (the influential Perspectiva), alchemy, astronomy, and the broader natural sciences anticipated central themes of the later early modern scientific revolution. The framework shaped subsequent medieval optics through John Pecham and Witelo and the broader recovery of Bacon as a putative early-scientific figure in the modern history of science.
Quotes
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Attributed to Roger Bacon:
“Argument can prove nothing; experience alone can give certainty.”
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“Mathematics is the gate and key to the sciences.”
cited in: Morris Kline (1969) Mathematics and the physical world . p. 1 -
Attributed to Roger Bacon:
“There are four chief obstacles in grasping truth, which hinder every man, however learned: the influence of frail and unworthy authority, long-established custom, the sense of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of one's ignorance behind a show of wisdom.”
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Attributed to Roger Bacon:
“Without experiment nothing can be known sufficiently.”
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Attributed to Roger Bacon:
“All knowledge proceeds from God, and all wisdom is from him.”
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“Oh how delightful is the taste of wisdom to those who are thus steeped in it from its very fount and origin. They who have not tried this cannot feel the delight of wisdom, just as a sick man cannot estimate the flavour of food. But because they are affected with this sort of mental sickness, and their intellect in this matter is as it were deaf from their very birth, so as not to appreciate the delight of harmony, on this account they grieve not at this so great loss of wisdom, though indeed without doubt it is an infinite loss.”
Compendium Studii Theologiae (1292) c. viii. & Brewer's Bacon (1859) p. 466 as cited by George Gresley Perry , The Life and Times of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (1871) -
“For sounds like thunder, and coruscations like lightning, may be made in the air, and they may be rendered even more horrible than those of nature herself. A small quantity of matter, properly manufactured, not larger than the human thumb, may be made to produce a horrible noise and coruscation. And this may be done many ways, by which a city or an army may be destroyed, as was the case when Gideo”
De Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturae et de Nullitate Magise , Ch. 6, in a reference to Bacon's knowledge of gunpowder, as quoted by Thomas Thomson , The History of Chemistry (1830) Vol. 1, p. 36. -
“Mix together saltpetre , luru vopo vir con utriet [powdered charcoal], and sulphur , and you will make thunder and lightning, if you know the method of mixing them.”
De Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturae et de Nullitate Magise , Ch. 11, in a reference to Bacon's knowledge of making gunpowder, as quoted by Thomas Thomson , The History of Chemistry (1830) Vol. 1, p. 36. -
“Prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae.”
To ask the proper question is half of knowing . | Cited in: LIFE , 8 sept 1958, p. 73 Variant translation : Half of science is asking the right questions. -
“To ask the proper question is half of knowing .”
Prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae. -
“Argument is conclusive... but... it does not remove doubt , so that the mind may never rest in the sure knowledge of the truth , unless it finds it by the method of experiment . For if any man who never saw fire proved by satisfactory arguments that fire burns, his hearer's mind would never be satisfied, nor would he avoid the fire until he put his hand in it that he might learn by experiment what argument taught.”
Cited in: Carol A. Dingle (2000) Memorable Quotations: Philosophers of Western Civilization . p. 21