You Could Look It Up (23 page)

Over its long history, the
Index
has included Francis Bacon, Pierre Bayle, Henri Bergson, George Berkeley, Auguste Comte, Jean d’Alembert, René Descartes, Denis Diderot, Dumas père & fils, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Hobbes, Victor Hugo, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Nicolas de Malebranche, Blaise Pascal, Ernest Renan,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benedict Spinoza, Voltaire, and Émile Zola. Some names catch us unawares. The novel
Pamela
by Samuel Richardson seems a model of piety. The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus remained a devout Catholic, even in the midst of the Protestant Reformation, but his satires on the abuses of the clergy were enough to put him on the first Roman
Index
in 1559. Books could also come off the list. Johannes Kepler’s
Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae
was banned in 1621, but a mere 214 years later, in 1835, it was deemed safe. Copernicus and Galileo were removed in 1822.

From its origins in the 1520s through its last edition in 1948, the
Index
attempted to combat more than four hundred years of heresy. The First Vatican Council in 1870 considered reworking the whole system of censorship, but nothing came of it. Not long after that, Pope Leo XIII revised the legislation somewhat, with a new version—this time known as the
Leonine Index
—in early 1897. This
Index
was reissued and revised several times; it reached a twentieth edition in 1948, listing five thousand prohibited titles. Still, Leo’s work was less about banning individual titles than about laying out principles to guide the faithful. Nonetheless, the
Index
’s days were numbered. The Second Vatican Council, convened by Pope John XXIII in 1962, called for a Church more open to modernity. The pastoral constitution known as
Gaudium et spes
—“Joy and Hope”—was officially promulgated on the last day of the council by Pope Paul VI. It included the provision “Let it be recognized that all the faithful, clerical and lay, possess a lawful freedom of inquiry and thought.” The new openness to freedom of thought was followed shortly afterward by the official demise of the
Index
: on June 14, 1966, the practice of banning books was officially brought to an end.

A very different attempt to patrol the borders of truth produced one of the strangest books ever published in any genre. It does not quite deserve to be called a reference book, but then, it does not really fit in any other category.

Thomas Browne’s
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
—the title, made up of Latinized Greek roots, means something like “outbreak of false belief”—is an imposing compendium of error. Browne was a quirky
English polymath who studied at Oxford and became a physician, publishing a spiritual autobiography called
Religio Medici
(
The Religion of a Physician
) that became a wholly unexpected bestseller in 1643. Though Browne was devout, his main concern was not false Christian doctrine but folk beliefs without foundation. And his four-hundred-page
Pseudodoxia
is chock full of these misguided beliefs.
3

We make mistakes, Browne explained, because we are human: “The first and father cause of common Error, is the common infirmity of humane nature; of whose deceptible condition, although perhaps there should not need any other eviction, then the frequent errors, we shall our selves commit, even in the expresse declarement hereof.” In the Bible between the Fall and the Flood, he pointed out, “there is but one speech delivered by man, wherein there is not an erronious conception.” Some errors were attributable to “an invisible Agent,” who “playes in the darke upon us, and that is the first contriver of Error, and professed opposer of Truth, the Divell”—Satan himself. And Browne warned that youthful errors, however innocent, eventually turn into rigid dogma: “we are very sensible how hardly teaching yeares do learn; what roots old age contracteth into errours, and how such as are but twigges in younger dayes, grow Oaks in our elder heads, and become inflexible unto the powerfullest arme of reason.” His book becomes an extended attack on credulity, or “an easie assent, to what is obtruded, or a believing at first eare what is delivered by others.”
4

Browne’s approach is almost scientific, and it shows the influence of the Baconian project—Francis Bacon’s idea that we arrive at truth by observing the natural world and testing our assumptions against reality. After each erroneous assertion, Browne lines up all the authorities on either side, often switching into Latin and Greek for sentences at a time. He then applies his own reason and experience, and sorts out the truth as he understands it. The range of subjects he addresses is overwhelming. To browse Browne’s “Alphabetical Table,” the subject index appended to the fourth edition, is to get a glimpse of the glorious miscellaneity of Browne’s mind. A typical run of entries:

Aqueducts, why commonly adorned with Lyons heads

Arabian learning what

Arcadians, their antiquity. In what sense elder then the moon

Archimedes his burning glasses. His removing the earth

Areopagus, what

Argus

Aristotle. His arguing for the eternity of the world. Never disputed the ebbing and flowing of the Sea. His Maxime touching felicity

Aristotle, a Proselyte of Moses law.
5

Book 3 takes up false beliefs about animals, and the first creature examined is the elephant: “There generally passeth an opinion it hath no joynts; and … that being unable to lye downe, it sleepeth against a tree, which the Hunters observing doe saw almost asunder; whereon the beast relying, by the fall of the tree falls also down it selfe, and is able to rise no more.” Other animals are surrounded by their own legends. Some claimed that the chameleon “liveth onely upon ayre, and is sustained by no other aliment.” But Browne found the claim “very questionable … there are found in this animall, the guts, the stomack, and other parts officiall unto nutrition.” If chameleons ate only air, then “their provisions had beene superfluous.” “That a Bever to escape the
Hunter, bites off his testicles or stones, is a tenent very ancient,” but one should not believe it.
6

Many of the claims Browne responded to came from Scripture: “That a man hath one rib lesse then a woman, is a common conceit derived from the history of Genesis, wherein it stands delivered, that Eve was framed out of a rib of Adam.” Browne noted that simple “reason or inspection” will point out the error, “for if wee survey the Sceleton of both sexes and therein the compage of bones, wee shall readily discover that men and women have foure and twenty ribs, that is, twelve on each side.”
7
He was careful never to disagree with Scripture itself, but he worked hard to stamp out misunderstandings of the Bible.

Some of his challenges to widespread beliefs were subtle, and they show that he cared about precision. What about the belief that “the heart of man is seated in the left side”? Browne found it “refutable by inspection,” which may come as a surprise to anyone who has not studied medicine. But in fact “the base and centre thereof is in the midst of the chest.” The “Mucro or point thereof inclineth unto the left,” but for the most part the heart is in the center.
8

Browne’s style is as distinctive as his strange mission to catalog errors. A perfectly characteristic sentence:

Although who shall indifferently perpend the exceeding difficulty, which either the obscurity of the subject, or unavoidable paradoxologie must often put upon the Attemptor, will easily discerne, a worke of this nature is not to bee performed upon one legge, and should smell of oyle if duly and deservedly handled.
9

Browne never met a sesquipedalian Latinism he didn’t like. He adored making up words, most of them based on obscure Greek and Latin roots. The
Oxford English Dictionary
records
Pseudodoxia
as the first appearance of 589 words, including
alliciency
(attractiveness),
ambilevous
(the opposite of
ambidextrous
),
bombilation
(a humming sound),
cecutiency
(partial blindness),
deuteroscopy
(second view or ulterior meaning),
equicrural
(having legs of equal length),
exantlation
(the act of drawing out, as water from a well),
festucous
(like straw),
lithontriptic
(having the property of breaking up stones in the bladder),
ophiophagous
(feeding on
snakes), and
retromingent
(urinating backward). An improbable number of his words have stood the test of time: he was the first to use
approximate
,
carnivorous
,
continuum
,
hallucinate
,
perspire
,
ulterior
, and
veterinarian
. He was also the first to take existing words and give them new forms, turning
additional
into
additionally
,
electric
into
electricity
,
consistent
into
inconsistent
,
medicine
into
medical
, and
select
into
selection
.

The book at times verges on the unreadable, with the polysyllabic words and the paragraph-long sentences conspiring to keep all but the most learned and devoted readers from understanding a page. But, contrary to expectation,
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
was a hit: there were eight separate editions, several reprintings in Browne’s collected works, and Latin, Dutch, German, and Danish translations. Browne kept revising the text with each new version, and a substantial public was eager to join Browne in his reformation not of the Church but of learning itself.

The two books, the
Index
and the
Pseudodoxia
, seem superficially similar: both are collections of things the faithful should not believe. The most serious problem for the Protestant Browne, though, was exactly the opposite of the one facing the Catholic Church: in his view, people were too inclined to accept arguments on the basis of authority—or, to translate this into Brownish, “the mortallest enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution upon truth, hath beene a peremptory adhesion unto Authority.” The “establishing of our beliefe upon the dictates of Antiquities”
10
was the root of all evil: physicians still looking back to Galen and physicists relying on Aristotle. The new epistemology that would eventually be labeled the scientific method was the way out. For the Church, on the other hand, the problem was an outbreak of freethinking—people taking stances on important matters they were not qualified to consider. Thus the Church reasserted its authority to keep contrary opinions out of circulation. The subtitle of the
Index
could easily be
The Dangers of Skepticism and the Importance of Authority
; the subtitle of
Pseudodoxia
could just as easily be
The Dangers of Authority and the Importance of Skepticism
.