"Throughout the Opus Majus there is an orderly arrangement of the subject-matter formed with a definite purpose, and leading up to a central theme, the consolidation of the Catholic faith as the supreme agency for the civilization and ennoblement of mankind. For this end a complete renovation and reorganization of man's intellectual forces was needed. After a brief exposition of the four principal impediments to wisdom—authority, habit, prejudice, and false conceit of knowledge—Bacon proceeds in his second part to explain the inseparable connexion of philosophy with the highest truths of religion. ...The first condition ...of a renovation of learning is the systematic study of at least three languages besides Latin, namely Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic. The second condition was the application of mathematical method to all objects of study, whether in the world or in the Church. ...it [mathematics] raises the understanding to the plane at which knowledge can be distinguished from ignorance. Without it other sciences are unintelligible. It reveals to us the motions of the heavenly bodies, and the laws of the propagation of force in things terrestrial, of which the propagation of light may be taken as a type; without it we are incapable of regulating the festivals of the Church; we remain in ignorance of the influences of climate upon character; of the position of cities and of the boundaries of nations whom it is the function of the Catholic Church to bring within her pale, and to control spiritually. ...But mathematical method, though essential, is insufficient. It must be supplemented by the method of experiment. Experimental science governs all the preceding sciences ('domina est omnium scientiarum praecedentium' [she is the matron of all previous sciences]), it controls their methods; in prosecuting its own special researches it makes use of their results."