Note 16 — Chapter XXXV

A similar distinction will be found in the Glosses on the Timaeus of William of Conches (Cousin, Ouvrages inédits d’Abélard, 1836, p. 649), one of Hugh’s contemporaries of whom we shall presently treat. A little later in the twelfth century John of Salisbury (Polycraticus, II, 18) makes the distinction between the two mateses or mathematics lie rather in the quantity of the penultimate vowel “e”. In the thirteenth century Albertus Magnus (Commentary on Matthew, II, 1) also distinguished between the two varieties of mathematics according to the length of the “e” in “mathesis”; but he did not regard the second variety as necessarily superstitious, but as divination from the stars which might be either good or bad, like Hugh’s astrologia.

Roger Bacon mentioned both methods of distinction between the true and false mathematics; but statements in his different works are not in agreement as to which case it is in which the “e” is long or short. In the Opus Maius (Bridges, I, 239 and note) and Opus Tertium (caps. 9 and 65) he states that the vowel is short in the true mathematics and long in the superstitious variety; but in other writings he took the opposite view and declared that “all the Latins” were wrong in thinking otherwise (see Bridges, I, 239 note; Steele (1920) viii).

In a twelfth century MS at Munich (CLM 19488, pp. 17-23) a treatise or perhaps an excerpt from some longer work, entitled De differentiis vocabulorum, opens with the words, “Scire facit mathesis et divinare mathesis.” Roger Bacon says (Steele, 1920, p. 3), “Set glomerelli nescientes Grecum ... ex magna sua ignorancia vulgaverunt hos versus falsos: