The Major Works (English Library) (4 page)

‘I was’, we have seen Browne remark, ‘not onely before my selfe, but
Adam
, that is, in the Idea of God’. The concept – echoed in the ‘Ideated Man’ of
Christian Morals
(p. 430) – compels us to suspect Platonism, and reach for our Plotinus. But Browne wore his Platonic cloak with casual abandon, preferring a disconcerting eclecticism where we would demand absolute consistency. His approach, however, is not unlike that of his contemporaries who had also fallen under the sway of the legendary Hermes ‘the Thrice Greatest’ (Trismegistus), the supposed Egyptian author of widely venerated works believed to have predated Plato although actually written in the second century
A
.
D
. The Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in
Oedipus Aegyptiacus
(1652) suggested the nature of the Renaissance commitment, and its implications: ‘Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian, who first instituted the hieroglyphs, thus becoming the prince and parent of all Egyptian theology and philosophy, was the first and most ancient among the Egyptians and first rightly thought of divine things’. This imaginative tradition of a ‘primitive theology of the Gentiles’ had already been formulated by the Neoplatonists of fifteenth-century Florence, notably Marsilio Ficino, who looked on Hermes as ‘the first author of a theology’ which, merging with Zoroastrianism, was inherited by Orpheus and Pythagoras among others to find its way ‘entire’ into the books of ‘our Plato’ – ‘the divine Philosopher’ of Browne’s own statement (p. 325). Hence the summary of Henry More in lines which he mistook (as usual) for poetry:

Browne’s loyalty to ‘Plato’s school’, at best tentative, centres on three concepts alike adapted to his temperament. The first, writ large in
Religio Medici
, transmutes the hieroglyphs of Hermes into so many symbols of the mysteries of the created order in accordance with the generalisation ventured in
Christian Morals
: ‘The Hand of Providence writes often by Abbreviatures, Hieroglyphicks or short Characters’ (
p. 428
). The second concept endeavours to account for these mysteries on the basic premise that God is a single entity while ‘All others doe transcend an unity, and so by consequence are many’ (
p. 153
). This in turn suggests that history from the creation to the Last Judgement and beyond, is the history of the diversification of the One into the Many: ‘As at the Creation, there was a separation of that confused masse into its species, so at the destruction thereof there shall bee a separation into its distinct individuals’ (
p. 120
). The third concept is the familiar one of the Ideas of God, interpreted by Browne along the lines sketched by one of his contemporaries:

Acceptance of this commonplace led Browne not merely to ‘Ideated Man’ but to the more comprehensive generalisation posited early in
Religio Medici
that ‘this visible world is but a picture of the invisible’ (p. 74). Utterly crucial to Browne’s thought, it reverberates across his several works to inform the persuasion he voices in
Hydriotaphia
that ‘Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us’ (p. 313). In
Religio Medici
, significantly enough, the concept is articulated in terms not of theology or philosophy but of art. The ‘idea’, he argues, defies annihilation in that it is by nature imperishable, not subject even to the terminal fires of the final conflagration; for ‘to a sensible Artist’ – that is to say the creative man of sense who perceives the truth – ‘the formes are not perished, but withdrawne into their incombustible part, where they lie secure’
(p. 121). The archetype here as elsewhere is always God, himself a ‘Composer’, ‘an excellent Artist’ (pp.149 and 79).

The concepts adapted from ‘Plato’s school’ as well as the other patterns of thought in
Religio Medici
– the Christian view of history inclusive of the Eternal Present, the Scale of Nature, the confluence of faith and reason, the all-inclusive tolerance, the irenic disposition – all these merge into an eloquent affirmation of ‘the close connexion and cohesion of things’, ‘the common harmony’ said to permeate the created order in spite of the apparent ‘Antipathies and contrary faces’ (p. 146). The aspiration is far from unrealistic. Fully aware that to eschew paradoxes is to deny our common experience, Browne placed them centrally within his vision of coincident opposites,
¹⁷
itself not merely paradoxical but miraculous. Miracles, we should remind ourselves, were generally regarded as the acts of God performed ‘above’ or ‘against’ nature; but Browne resolutely maintained that everything is a miracle, ‘the extraordinary effect of the hand of God’ (p. 95). The attitude is firmly Augustinian: ‘is not the world a miracle, yet visible, and of his making? Nay, all the miracles done in this world are less than the world itself, the heaven and earth and all therein’ (
The City of God
, X, 12). Miracles and paradoxes are merely apparent. A higher reality absorbs both, arresting dualistic tendencies in the reconciliation of discrepancies ‘unto both beings, that is, of this World and the next’ (p. 452).

III

Pseudodoxia Epidemica
– ‘Vulgar Errors’ according to its running title – was first published in 1646 and extensively revised five times to 1672.
¹⁸
Stylistically the revisions display an increasing
devotion to a simpler form of discourse in order to conform, so far as it was possible for Browne to conform, to the acceptable style of the dawning scientific age; while thematically his periodic amendments and substantial additions suggest an unfailing commitment to the latest developments in several fields. The colossal work is testimony to Browne’s breathtaking range of interests and stupendous learning. It hardly hindered him to have known ‘no lesse then six languages’ as he proudly states in
Religio Medici
(p. 147) – that is to say six
modern
languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Danish), not to mention Hebrew and especially Latin and Greek. Thus fortified he advanced through a catholic range of interests which, amply confirmed in several posthumously published tracts,
¹⁹
include in alphabetic order: anatomy, antiquities, astronomy, Biblical scholarship, botany, cartography, chemistry, cosmography, embryology, folklore, geography, history and historiography, law, literature both English and Continental,
²⁰
medicine, mineralogy, ornithology, philology, philosophy, physiology, rhetoric, seamanship, theology, travel literature, zoology – and no doubt others. Sir Thomas Browne was, it appears, curious.

The learning displayed by
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
is not exceptional to Browne, however. Jonson, Donne, Burton, Milton, Ralegh in his appropriately entitled
History of the World
,
alike share that spectacular breadth of knowledge represented on a lower level by Samuel Purchas’s inability to resist the invocation of ‘seven hundred Authors, of one or other kind’ (the kinds: ‘Sacred, Prophane, Learned, Unlearned, Ancient, Moderne, Good, and Bad’).
²¹
Browne’s attitude to his own countless authorities is eminently pragmatic, and certainly not indiscriminate. He cites them, it has been said, ‘for purposes of confirmation as for those of confutation’,
²²
fully cognisant that the naturalist Gesner and the anatomist Rondelet are reliable witnesses but that Aristotle, for instance, may not be accepted without qualification. Browne’s view of Aristotle coincides rather with Ralegh’s (‘I shall never bee persuaded, that GOD hath shut up all light of Learning within the lanthorne of
Aristotles
braines’) than with Dryden’s more sweeping condemnation:

In
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
, accordingly, Aristotle is frequently and necessarily praised as a biologist even while he is corrected in the light of a ‘singular discloser of truth’ like William Harvey.
²⁴
So, too, in
Christian Morals
he is extolled as the author of
Nicomachean Ethics
, yet everywhere else – for example in
Religio Medici
(p. 77) – he is reprimanded because of his exclusive concern with the visible order. In the understatement
of John Smith the Cambridge Platonist, Aristotle was ‘not over-zealous of Religion’.
²⁵

‘Authority’ is in any case the third pillar supporting
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
, the other two being ‘experience’ and ‘reason’. These, alike commended in
Christian Morals
(‘Joyn Sense unto Reason, and Experiment unto Speculation’ [p. 439]), involve in the main the approach endorsed with equal enthusiasm in
The Garden of Cyrus
as to ‘sense and ocular Observation, which seems to me the surest path, to trace the Labyrinth of Truth’ (p. 386). Browne’s actual scientific contributions are hardly numerous since he may only be credited with the identification of ‘adipocere’ (in
Hydriotaphia
, below, p. 295, note 79), and possibly with the first experiments in chemical embryology.
²⁶
But no matter; for Browne’s stature as an experimental scientist should be measured not by any immediate practical results but, as in Bacon’s case, by method. This is not to say that Browne’s method is an extension of Bacon’s, since the catalogue of ‘vulgar errors’ in
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
is only nominally a response to the ‘calendar of popular errors’ enjoined in
The Advancement of Learning
, their respective authors differing in temperament and therefore in aim.
²⁷
Even so Browne shares with Bacon a commitment to that ‘sense and ocular Observation’ patiently progressing through prejudice and misconception towards the truth. Hence Browne’s omnivorous curiosity in
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
, evident also in his several letters with which he pursued his son Edward across the Continent:

– and so on. Browne himself certainly practised what he preached, whether through his ceaseless reading and voluuminous correspondence, his expeditions personally to examine a whale in spite of its ‘abominable scent’ (
p. 219
), or his studies at home amidst the collected rarities seen by John Evelyn in 1671:

Many besides Evelyn were equally impressed, witness the munificent eulogies like Robert Boyle’s commendation of Browne as a trustworthy naturalist.
²⁹

But the naturalist who responded to the scientific spirit in
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
, was also the believer who had penned
Religio Medici
; nor were the two experiences, for Browne, mutually exclusive. We tend as a matter of course to sever the scientific mind from the religious, thinking it odd that Boyle was at once a scientist and a theologian, that Newton advanced to the forefront of science even as he laboured over commentaries on the Book of Revelation, or that in Kepler astronomy cohabited with astrology, and mathematics with superstitious mysticism. But perhaps we have not yet perceived that scientists unite what we sever, and bind what we sunder, ever conscious as they are that appearances must by definition cohere in a higher reality. So Kepler in
Harmonices mundi
(1619) had no sooner formulated the third law of planetary motion than he exploded in praise of the music of the spheres, even as his discovery of the geometric patterns of the supralunar regions was merged with a celebration of the Creator as ‘Geometriæ fons ipsissimus, et, ut PLATO scripsit,
aternam exercens Geometriam
’. The implications are clearly to be observed: as Einstein said, ‘without the belief in the inner harmony of the world, there could be no science’.
³⁰
For like reasons, I would
submit, the earth-bound naturalist of
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
cannot be distinguished from the believer who in
Religio Medici
endorses the music of the spheres (
p. 149
) and in
The Garden of Cyrus
remarks at length on ‘how nature Geometrizeth, and observeth order in all things’ (
p. 356
). Style apart, Browne’s assumption is the assumption of Einstein: ‘God does not play dice with the world’.
³¹

But temperamentally incapable as Browne was to treat a grave subject gravely, the irrepressible humourist flashes across the philosopher in
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
as he did in
Religio Medici
. He approaches man’s boundless credulity not so much with censorious disapproval as with sympathetic understanding. The humour on such occasions is entirely good-natured, whether he examines the belief that the sun dances on Easter Day (
p. 241
), or ‘the other conceit that a Peacock is ashamed when he looks on his legges’ (
p. 222
). But where credulity leads to prejudice, and prejudice to injustice, it is another matter: thus, in arguing the implausibility that the Jews ‘stinck naturally’ (
pp. 226
ff.), he remarks on their sheer numbers in order to conclude triumphantly: ‘could they be smelled out, would much advantage, not only the Church of Christ, but also the coffers of Princes’.

In another respect, however,
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
responds to the very ‘vulgar errors’ it censures, especially the harmless popular beliefs now lovingly reiterated only to be dismissed. Implicit at the core of
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
, in other words, is a sense of qualified despondency because fabulous yet enchanting beliefs – that the beaver when hunted bites off its testicles, that the lamprey is endowed with nine eyes, that man alone possesses an upright stature, and so on – all these must be sacrificed on the altar of demanding truth. But if Browne upholds through his rhythms what he must condemn through ‘sense and ocular Observation’, the final impression is of a tension arising not from divided loyalties as from calculated ambiguities – ambiguities not unlike those inherent in Spenser’s dissolution of the Bower of Bliss or Milton’s dismissal of the pagan deities in the
Nativity Ode, Lycidas
and
Paradise Lost. Pseudodoxia
Epidemica
is a vastly learned contribution to scientific methodology; but it is articulated, all too consciously, in aesthetic terms.