With
many of the strong men of the period one feels the keenest mental
sympathy. Grosseteste, the great Clerk of Lincoln, as a scholar, a
teacher and a reformer, represents a type of mind that could grow
only in fruitful soil. Roger Bacon may be called the first of
the moderns--certainly the first to appreciate the extraordinary
possibilities which lay in a free and untrammelled study of nature.
A century which could produce men capable of building the Gothic
cathedrals may well be called one of the great epochs in history, and
the age that produced Dante is a golden one in literature. Humanity has
been the richer for St. Francis; and Abelard, Albertus and Aquinas form
a trio not easy to match, in their special departments, either before or
after. But in science, and particularly in medicine, and in the advance
of an outlook upon nature, the thirteenth century did not help man very
much. Roger Bacon was "a voice crying in the wilderness," and not one of
the men I have picked out as specially typical of the period instituted
any new departure either in practice or in science. They were servile
followers, when not of the Greeks, of the Arabians. This is attested by
the barrenness of the century and a half that followed.
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