The intense intellectual activity of the thirteenth century flowed in
more than one channel, and Englishmen took their full share both in
building up and in destroying. Two Englishmen of the next generation
mark in different ways the reaction against the moderate
Aristotelianism and orthodox rationalism which their countryman Hales
first brought into vogue. These were the Franciscan friars, Roger Bacon
and Duns Scotus. Bacon, though he studied at Paris as well as at
Oxford, is much more closely identified with England than with the
Continent. His sceptical, practical intellect led him to heap scorn on
Hales and his followers and to plunge into audacities of speculation
which cost him long seclusions in his convent and enforced abstinence
from writing and study. In his war against the Aristotelians, the
intrepid friar upheld recourse to experiment and observation as
superior to deference to authority, in language which stands in strange
contrast to the traditions of the thirteenth century. Grosseteste, who
also had preferred the teachings of experience to the appeal to the
sages of the past, was the only academic leader that escaped Bacon's
scathing censure.
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