ooked upon as the true
father of inductive science, an honor that history has unfortunately
taken from him to confer {295} it undeservedly on his namesake of four
centuries later; but the teaching out of which Roger Bacon was to
develop the principles of experimental science can be found in many
places in the master's writings. In Albert's tenth book, wherein he
catalogues and describes all the trees, plants, and herbs known in his
time, he observes: "All that is here set down is the result of our own
experience, or has been borrowed from authors whom we know to have
written what their personal experience has confirmed: for in these
matters experience alone can give certainty"--_experimentum solum
certificat in talibus_. "Such an expression," says his biographer,
"which might have proceeded from the pen of (Francis) Bacon, argues in
itself a prodigious scientific progress, and shows that the medieval
friar was on the track so successfully pursued by modern natural
philosophy. He had fairly shaken off the shackles which had hitherto
tied up discovery, and was the slave neither of Pliny nor of
Aristotle."

Albert was a theologian rather than a scientist, and yet, deeply
versed as he was in theology, he declared in a treatise concerning
Heaven and Earth, [Footnote 33] that "in studying nature we have not
to enquire how God the Creator may, as He freely wills, use His
creatures to work miracles and thereby show forth His power; we have
rather to enquire what nature with its immanent causes can naturally
bring to pass." This can scarcely fail to seem a surprising
declaration to those who have been accustomed to think of medieval
philosophers as turning by preference to miraculous explanations of
things, but such a notion is founded partly on false tradition, with
regard to the real teaching of the medieval {296} scholars, and even
more on the partisan declarations of those who thought it the proper
thing to make as little as possible of the intelligence of the people
of the Middle Ages, in order to account for their adhesion to the
Catholic Church.

[Footnote 33: De Coelo et Mundo, I. tr. iv., X.]

As a matter of fact, Albert's declaration, far from being an
innovation, was only in pursuance of the truly philosophic method
which had characterized the writings of the great Christian thinkers
from the earlier time. Unfortunately, the declarations of lesser minds
are sometimes accepted as having represented the thoughts of