(1) The Mediaeval Attitude toward Astrology, particularly in England (2) Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, Fasc v Secretum Secretorum cum glossis et notulis; Tractatus brevis et utilis ad declarandum quedam obscure dicta

Abstract

THE attitude of man towards Nature may be said to have two stages—the “magical ”and the “scientific.”In the former, man lives in a world surrounded by other 1ll-defined beings and powers. From time to time he finds, or thinks he finds, some way to make these subserve his will, but he has as yet no apprehension of a constant relation of cause and effect. In the later, scientific stage-which first presents itself clearly to our view in the Ionian philosophers of the sixth century B.C.-a belief has arisen in natural law, in an invariable relation of cause and effect. Perhaps the most important step in the journey towards this belief was the discovery of the regularity in the movements of the heavenly bodies. The laws that these movements exhibit had long been the subject of organised observation in the Mesopotamian civilisations from which the lonians inherited a wealth of data. But the Greeks had a passionate, almost an instinctive, belief in natural law, though few such laws had been demonstrated. Perceiving the majestic and regular recurrence of heavenly phenomena, they learned to predict them. They saw, too, that winter and summer, seed-time and harvest, day and night, and all the other broadly cyclic events of life, could be brought into some sort of relation with the heavenly cycle. Outside and beyon these there were, indeed, innumerable less regular and unpredictable phenomena, for there was as yet no biology, no chemistry, practically no physics, and scarcely any mathematics. What more reasonable than to attribute a relation between the phenomena observed to be cyclic and those the laws of which were yet unknown? Natural laws there must be, and the field of the known was but extended into the unknown. Thus astrology was born.

(1) The Mediaeval Attitude toward Astrology, particularly in England.

By Theodore Otto Wedel. (Yale Studies in English. No. lx.) Pp. vii + 168. (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Humphrey Milford: Oxford University Press, 1920.) 10s. 6d. net.

(2) Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, Fasc. v. Secretum Secretorum cum glossis et notulis; Tractatus brevis et utilis ad declarandum quedam obscure dicta.

By Fratris Rogeri. Nunc primum edidit Robert Steele. Accedunt versio Anglicana ex Arabico edita per A. S. Fulton. Versio retusta Anglo-Normanica nunc primum edita. Pp. lxiv + 317. (Oxford: Clarendon Press.) 28s. net.