LULLY, Raymond (1235-1315), the inventor of a fantastic system of logic by which Mohammedans should be converted to Christianity, was born at Palma, in the island of Majorca, in 1235. His father had been born at Barcelona, and belonged to a distinguished Catalonian family; but for his services in helping to recover the Balearic islands from the Saracens he was rewarded with a gift of land in the conquered territory, and the paternal estates descended to his enthusiastically-minded son. The younger Lully, however, showed at first but little of the speculative tendencies which he afterwards developed, and his early years were spent in the gaiety and even profligacy of a courtier in the service of James II., of Aragon, who appointed him grand seneschal of the isle. He married, but notwithstanding sought the reputation of a gallant, and was mixed up in more than one intrigue. Something, however, of the nature of a cancer, which attacked one of the objects of his passion, Signora Ambrosia,—such is the way in which we are asked to account for his “conversion,”—affected him so deeply that he abandoned in his thirty-second year his licentious life, and, having distributed the greater portion of his goods to his family and the poor, he withdrew to the retirement Of a cell on Mount Randa, the only part of his property which he had reserved for himself. Visions of a crucified Saviour and like phenomena confirmed him in his devotion to the cause of Christ, and in the course of a nine years’ retreat on Randa he came to regard himself as commissioned by God to refute the errors of Mohammed.

This missionary call became henceforth the actuating principle in Lully’s life. To realize it, he went to Paris in his fortieth year, to prosecute the study of Latin and logic; and, with a view to becoming familiar with the language of the infidels, he engaged the services of an unlettered Arabian, who, finding that Lully was seeking to demolish the faith of Islam, attempted to assassinate his master. This need of acquiring a knowledge of the language of the church’s adversary became itself now one of Lully’s favourite ideas. In 1286 he began a series of visits, which he made to Rome to induce the supreme pontiff to found colleges for the study of Arabic; but the small success which would attend his efforts in this direction was foreshadowed by the death of Honorius (then pope) before he could attain an audience of him. Meanwhile Lully had become discontented with the methods of science commonly in use, and had set himself to construct his “great art,” a method which, by mechanically presenting all the predicates which could attach to any subject, was adapted to answer any question on any topic, and would (its author imagined) by the cogency of its inferences necessarily convert the heathen. His natural enthusiasm respecting the consequences of this art were strengthened by revelations (as he judged them) of the co-operation of God in his designs, and he gave himself up, with the fervour of a divinely appointed missionary, to the work of spreading a knowledge of his “great art” in every country. He expounded it at Paris and Montpellier in 1286, and after a visit to Pope Nicholas, to solicit his help in founding linguistic colleges, and a serious illness at Genoa, brought on apparently by an isolated fit of nervous cowardice in face of the dangers he was going to encounter, he sailed to Tunis, to apply his new method to the errors of Mohammedanism. At Tunis his attacks upon the religion of the country led to his being cast into prison, and it was only by the mediation of a sheikh, who had been impressed by the earnestness of the Christian preacher, that he managed to escape to sea, not without the roughest treatment at the hands of the mob, and find his way to Naples.

A new influence was brought to bear on Lully’s life at Naples. He made the acquaintance of the alchemist Arnaud de Villeneuve, and acquired, we may believe, not only that skill in transmuting metals for which Lully himself became in popular tradition famous, but imbibed also something of that spirit which brought down the censure of the church on Villeneuve for maintaining that medicine and charity were more pleasing to God than religious services. For the next few years the scene of Lully’s labours was continually changing. He made an unsuccessful attempt to interest Pope Boniface in the missionary colleges which he wished to see established, and similar appeals to the kings of France and Cyprus met with no more favourable a response. From Cyprus Lully proceeded (1306) to Bougiah in Africa, and repeated the experiences he had already had at Tunis. But, though Mohammedanism showed little disposition to welcome the “great art” and its author, the European world had meanwhile begun to show itself more favourably disposed towards Lully’s projects. In 1297 he had received at Montpellier, from the general of the Franciscans, letters recommending him to the superiors of all Franciscan houses; and in 1309 his “art” was publicly approved by a decree of the university of Paris. Emboldened perhaps by such recognition, he appeared before the council of Vienne in southern France in 1311, and petitioned the assembled fathers to reduce the different and often-contending religious orders to one great order serving simply under Christ, and to meet Mohammedanism abroad and Averroism at home by founding colleges for the study of Arabic. Nothing would seem to have come directly of these petitions, but we may perhaps trace their result in some chairs of Syriac and Arabic which Clement V. instituted at Rome, and in a college for training Franciscans in Oriental languages which James of Aragon established in Majorca. Lully was now nearly eighty years of age, but his zeal in combating the foes of Christianity did not abate. He sailed again for Africa, and received the martyr’s crown, which would seem to have become the ambition of his life. At Bougiah he again proclaimed the doctrines of the church, and his preaching raised such a tumultuous attack that although he managed to get on board a Genoese vessel, he succumbed during the voyage to the injuries he had received, and died in sight of his native town of Palma (1315).

During his lifetime Lully composed, a vast number of treatises, some of which have never yet been printed. They were written partly in Latin, partly in Catalonian, Lully deserving mention as one of the first in medi<eval times who tried to find a national expression for philosophy in the language of the country. Some of these works may be described as dealing with apologetic theology, e.g., the Liber de Gentili et Tribus Sapientibus, in which a Jew, Christian, and Saracen explain the nature of their faith, or the Disputatio Fidelis et Infidelis ; others again relate to dogmatic divinity, e.g., Liber de XIV. Articulis, De Deo et Jesu Christo·, a third class refer to particular questions of logic, e.g., De Prima et Secunda Intentione, Ars Inveniendi'Particularia in Universalibus, De Venatione Medii ; and a large number are reputed to deal with questions of alchemy. But the “Great Art” of discovery itself is the subject of most or Lully’s treatises. So it is with the Ars Demonstrativa, Compendium Artis Demonstratives, Ars Universalis, Ars Inventiva Veritatis, De Aιιditu Cabbalistico, Ars Magna et Ultima. And even when Lully is engaged with such treatises as the Principia Medicinae or Principia Juris it is to the universal key of knowledge which the great art supplies that he invariably falls back.

The reasonableness and demonstrability of Christianity is the assumption underlying the exercise of this great method. Nothing, Lully holds, interferes more with the spread of Christianity than the attempt of its advocates to present its doctrines as undemonstrated and undemonstrable truths; the very difference between Christianity and Antichrist lies in the fact that the former can prove the truth of its beliefs; and the glory of the faith, repeats the Liber Magnus Contemplationis, is not that it maintains the indemonstrable but simply the supersensuous. The demonstration, however, which is wanted in the service of Christianity is not, Lully thinks, that of the ordinary logic; we require a method which will reason not only from effect to cause, or from cause to effect, butper aequiparantiam, and show that contrary attributes can coexist together in one subject. This method-, however, must be real, not merely formal and subjective; it must deal not only with the second intentions, but rather with the first intentions, that is, the things themselves. The great art in fact goes beyond logic and metaphysic; as a universal topic it provides a universal art of discovery, and contains the formula* to which every demonstration in every science can be reduced. This ars investigandi, however, turns out to be not so much a key to all possible knowledge as a tabulation of the different points of view from which propositions may be framed about various objects—a mechanical contrivance for finding out the different ways in which categories apply to things. Just, Lully thought, as by knowing the typical terminations of cases and tenses we could inflect and conjugate any word whatever, so by a knowledge of the different types of existence and their possible combinations as portrayed by his method we should possess implicitly a knowledge of the whole of nature.

The great art accordingly begins by laying down an alphabet according to which the nine letters from B to K stand for the different kinds of substances and attributes. Thus, in the series of substances, B stands for God, C angel, D heaven, E man, and so on; in the series of absolute attributes, B represents goodness, C greatness, D duration; or again, in the nine questions, B stands for Utrum, C for Quid, D for De quo. The manipulating of these letters in such a way as will show the relationship between different subjects and predicates constitutes accordingly the peculiarity of the “new art,” this manipulation being effected by the help of certain so-called “figures.” The construction of these figures varies somewhat in different parts of Lully’s writings, but their general character is always the same. Circles and other mathematical figures divided into sections and marked by Lully’s symbolical letters are so arranged, sometimes with the help of different colours, as to show the possible combinations of which the letters are capable. Thus for example one figure exhibits the possible combination of the attributes of God, another the possible conditions of the soul, and so on. These figures are fenced about by various definitions and rales, and their use is further specified by various “evacuations” and “multiplications” which show us how to exhaust and draw out all the possible combinations and sets of questions which the terms under consideration can admit. When so “multiplied,” the fourth figure is, Lully himself says, that by which other sciences can be most easily and rapidly acquired; and it may accordingly be taken as no unfair specimen of Lully’s method. This fourth figure then is simply an arrangement of three concentric circles (made of tin or pasteboard) each divided into nine sections B,C,D, &c., and so constructed that while the upper and smaller circle remains fixed, the two lower and outer revolve round it. Taking then the letters in the sense of the series which seems most fitted for the subject under discussion, we are enabled by making the outer circles revolve to find out the possible relationships between different conceptions and elucidate the agreement or disagreement which subsists between them, while, at the same time, we discover the intermediate terms (in the middle circle) by which they are to be connected or disconnected.

The weakness of Lully’s art is the weakness of every system which pretends, as Bacon’s also did, to equalize all intellects, and provide a method which will produce discovery as surely as compasses will construct a circle. But it would be unfair to say that Lully supposed that thinking and reasoning could be reduced to a mere rotation of pasteboard circles. The real value of his art lies not in being an a p>riori compendium of knowledge but a method of investigation—a tabulation of the different sides from which a question must be regarded, and in embodying the ideal which science puts before herself of finally bringing all conceptions into unity and correlation. It is easy, with the Port-Boyal logic, to speak ol Lιιlly ’ s art as merely enabling us “to talk without judgment of that which we do not know”; but in his conception of scientific method as tending to the glory of God and the good of man, in his departure from the school logic and his wish for a real interpretation of nature, in his conception of a universal method and his application of the vernacular languages to philosophy, heappears as a precursor of Bacon himself. And in his assertion of the place of reason in religion, in his demand that a rational Christianity should be presented to heathendom, in his missionary zeal and his project of linguistic colleges, Lully, with all his quixotic character, goes far beyond the ideas and the aspirations of the century in which he lived.

A few of Lully’s works were published by Zetzner in 1598 and frequently reprinted; but the first systematic edition was begun by Salzinger in 1721, and after Salzinger’s death completed in 1742, This edition is non inally in 10 vols., but vols. vii. and viii. were never published. In addition to older works, such as Perroquet (1667) a d Nie. de Hauteville (1666) and the Acta Sanctorum (vol. xxiv.), the best account of Lully's life is to be found in an arti le by Dclecluze in the Revue d. d. Mondes for 1840, and the fullest account of his method in Prantl, Geschichte d. Logik, iii. 145-177, and Erdmann, Grundriss d. Gesch. d. Philosophie, i. § 206. The philological importance of Lully’s writings is brought out by A. Helfferich, Raymond Lull und die Anfänge d. Catalonischen Literatur, Berlin, 1858.