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| Style | Plain, methodical, clear, animated, energetic; as of a large, earnest soul profoundly penetrated with the vastness of its mission and the brevity of its opportunity. |
| Rank | A giant among his contemporaries, standing out in a picturesque and
impressive contrast ... His works, full of sound and exact knowledge, cover
the whole range of science and philosophy ... He stood upon an lofty eminence,
and looked forward three centuries when his dreams were to take substantial
form.
A keen and systematic thinker who, without being completely dissevered from his national antecedents and surrounding, seeks to divert into other and profitable channels the subtlety of the schoolmen which was growing forests of erudition without fruit. In this he is an accurate representative of the English mind on one of its most striking sides, and the forerunner of his greater namesake, who will exhibit the same fondness for experiment, the same preference of inductive to abstract reasoning. The Opus Majus is the prototype, in spirit of Lord Bacon's Novum Organum. |
| Character | As a teacher, he was devoted to those whom he taught ... Neither his
confidence in the poser of the human intellect nor his devotion to physical
studies materialized his faith or abated his humility. Wisely he says:
Man is incapable of perfect wisdom in this life; it is hard for him to ascend towards perfection, easy to glide downwards to falsehoods and vanities: let him then not boast of his wisdom or extol his knowledge. What he knows is little and worthless, in respect of that which he believes without knowing: and still less, in respect of that which he is ignorant of. He is mad who thinks highly of his wisdom; he most mad, who exhibits it as something to be wondered at. |
| Influence | Upon his own age not great. The seed he let drop, fell for the most part on a barren soil. The master-conception was itself drying up. Science was extinguished in idle raving and inanity ... He sought, in opposition to the spirit of his times, to divert the interest of his contemporaries from scholastic subtleties to the study of nature ... He is ... an interesting and instructive example of real greatness born before its time ... standing alone on heights unknown, and by its very isolation forming no school and leaving no disciples. |
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