An Unnoticed Treatise of Roger Bacon on Time and Motion

A great deal of serious work has been done during the last decades on the life and literary activity of ROGER BACON (II241294 ?). Yet the task of properly estimating BACON'S work remains immensely complicated by the difficulties arising out of faulty MS transmission, BACON'S frequent reworking of parts of his larger works, the fact that he left a number of fragments and unfinished works and the regrettable fact that the number of works unascribed in AVIS which are probably genuine is doubtless greater in his case than for any comparable figure of his century.(i) The reason for this is not far to seek: he was in trouble with his superiors during much of his productive life and it was not fashionable to quote him as an authority either during his lifetime or during the century after his death. In view of these circumstances it is, to say the least, fortunate that we have, authenticated, as much of his work as we do. The general lack of MS ascription in BACON codices has not made the work of Mr. STEELE and his collaborators easier.(2) When, therefore, a hitherto unnoticed work of BACON appears in a XJJJth century MS written by an English scribe, there is cause for satisfaction. The opusculum here presented may serve to authenticate some other work now attributed to BACON on less solid grounds, or fill in a gap in the general picture of his thought. MS 33I4 of the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid is a quarto miscellaneous codex containing a number of psychological and philosophical treatises of the mid-XJIIth century. On ff. I-67