Calculator

THE Calcidlationes of Richard Suiseth, from which the author received his sobriquet of C6alculator, appear as the leading model of a great mass of writing during the closing middle ages devoted to the intensity and remission or latitude of forms, to uniformity anid difformity, the proportions of velocities, reaction, maximum and minimum, and kindred topics and concepts. This involved and subtle scholastic discussion of problems which were physical and mathematical as well as exercises in logic became anathema and an object of loathing to the tired humanists of the so-called Italian Renaissance and to those beyond the Alps who lightly praised folly and preached reform. Few modern scholars have had the time and patience to try to puzzle it out. But although to a superficial view it appears to have been discarded then and neglected since, one suspects that in reality it was laying the foundation for the later development of the mathematical method in physical science; that it was striving to express in words and arguments what was later to be put much more clearly, forcibly, and conveniently into symbols and equations; that it was giving a first faulty theoretical expression to what was in time to be formulated upon a more concrete and exact basis of experimental physics. Whether it may be worth wlile or not to attempt the resuscitation of the details of these forgotten modes of thought, it does seem that they constituted a preliminary discussion which was helpful, in its failures as well as its surmises, and probably even essential under the circumstances to the further development of scientific thought. We would not then wholly pass over this considerable body of later mediaeval writing and thought, as so many historians of philosoplhy, mathematics, and plhysics have done, but give it some attention, though inadequate enough, in noting one of its earlier and apparently its greatest individual expressions, the work of Calculator. Even if this type of writing and thinking had done nothing more than help to take experiment away from natural magic and associate it to some slight extent, at least, with logical, mathematical, and physical argument, it would have served a great negative purpose. The C(alculationes, primarily logical and mathematical in character and purpose, with an eye single to the relentless pursuit of abstract and intricate sophismata, offer not the slightest opening for magical modes of thought to intrude themselves. Not all writings of this type, however, were so severely free from any interest in magic as was the work of Suiseth. Even so celebrated an exponent of the latitude of forms and the system of coordinates, and so rational a critic of marvels and astrology as Nicolas Oresme adduced the