Rogered
Sir: Frank Alan Thompson (Letters, September 9) suggests that in my discussion of the supernatural (19 August) I may have confused Roger Bacon's "four major sources of error" with Francis Bacon's Idola, thus back-dating my comment by nearly four centuries.
If, however, Mr Thompson will open Roger Bacon's Opus Majus, he will find the whole of Part One (thirty-three pages in the Burke translation) to be devoted to the four causes of error which were included in my list, and summarised in the very first sentence • of the second paragraph of the work: "Now there are four chief obstacles in grasping truth, which hinder every man, however learned, and scarcely allow any one to win a clear title to learning, namely, submission to faulty and unworthy authority, influence of custom, popular pre:udice, and concealment of our own ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious display of our knowledge ".
I arn not insensible to the contributions — though I think them overrated — of Sir Francis Bacon to the scientific revolution, but I am not guilty of having mixed him up with his predecessor, about whom I have in fact written a novel (Doctor Mirabilis, Faber & Faber 1964; Dodd, Mead 1971). Sir Francis himself was so conscious of his indebtedness to his namesake that he attributed the pioneering experiments of his nearcontemporary William Gilbert on magnetism to Roger, thus committing a more serious injustice by far than the one Mr Thompson imputes to me.
James Blish Treetops, Woodlands Road, Harpsden, Henley, Oxon
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