So Browne’s manner of speaking is medieval. His worldview is medieval. He is not a physicist like Newton: his manner of thinking is medieval. He knows much that most medieval scholars did not know, and a little that no medieval scholars knew, but that is hardly a measure of enlightenment. If to be scientific is to be like a twenty-first century scientist, he is benighted. But by a better standard, Browne is eminent, and valuable, as a scientist, not just as a writer. He is consciously accurate and inquisitive. He loves learning and discovery, he uses his eyes to confirm or refute his theories, and bases his historical ideas upon an immense capacity for research. He does not fit the category we have made for scientists in our own day, and may be far below the standard set by our own scientists in what they call science; but he is far above the standard of our times in what he calls science. And that science that he employs himself in is a great and noble thing in itself; and it is the basis of most of our modern knowledge; and it is an art that most of us find ourselves employed in, in a much more amateur degree, and in our confusion have not recognised as science. To say that he is inferior to Kepler is as senseless as to say that Kepler was inferior to Luther, or to say that Churchill was inferior to Einstein. One cannot lose a game of chess unless one is playing chess, and if Kepler is playing chess, Browne is playing hockey. In that sense there is no comparison between the theorists and the explorers; and if science is what Kepler did, Browne was not a scientist. But science is not just what Kepler did; not if science means breadth and accuracy of knowledge, and not even if science means the knowledge that makes us modern. In a sense quite different from Kepler and Newton, or Darwin or Einstein, Browne is a scientific virtuoso.
I have not laboured to explain the kind of science Browne excelled in, and the kind of excellence he had in that science, simply to prove that he merits the distinction, rather unimpressive by itself, of being a scientist, or devotee of knowledge. Suffice to say, he was, and that in a time when devotees of knowledge were (if possible) more genuinely valuable than at most periods in history. But something more important and impressive rests on that title: that he is one of the great scientific writers, a great philosopher of science, and not simply a great practitioner of science. When once we are content to call him a scientist, his virtues as a scientific writer are apparent; but generally, because of his presumed inadequacy as a scientist, they are taken as tokens of his failure. Now, if there is a widespread feeling today that in some sense science has failed us as a philosophy, then it is self-sabotage to rule out the philosophy of a scientist, who is a good scientist, because his philosophy of science is not the same as ours. And if Browne is a good scientist, and is pleased to express a perspective on science that is quite different from our own, we might find it interesting to listen.
In the first place, it is one of his most scientific qualities, that he has not unlearned the art of nescience. He knows how to be ignorant. You will not find, in the preface of a modern encyclopaedia, such phrases as this: ‘we find no open tract or constant manuduction [guidance] in this labyrinth, but are oft-times fain to wander in the America and untravelled parts of Truth.’ Granted, you will find one element of these confessions – as boasts – everywhere present when you turn to the academic articles of today’s scientists. They all claim to be wandering in the untravelled parts of truth. If they do not make some such claim, they will be laughed out of court. They must constantly break new ground; they must never simply follow a guide or tread well-travelled territory. But to the majority of us – even to most scientists, and to all scientists much of the time – truth does not seem so uncertain and confusing. This is a great reversal: for it is really the most scientific thing in the world to realise that truth is a labyrinth, and that we are rather lost; yet science itself has destroyed our sense of that. One does not make a map unless one needs directions, but once we have made a map we no longer feel the need for directions. Similarly one does not understand the scientific spirit unless one starts from error and ignorance, and once error and ignorance have been dispelled, the scientific spirit goes with them. It is a good thing that we are still beset on all sides by new ignorances and discovered errors, or there would be no such thing as twenty-first century science. But it is not the people who write popular science books that are truly scientific. They could be as benighted in spirit as any literate dullard in a dark-age monastery. The true scientists, the explorers in the labyrinth of confusion and superstition (no longer religious, but Newtonian, or even Einsteinian superstitions) – these people can scarce communicate their discoveries to us, so technical or minute or distant are their fields. There are as few true scientists in our own day as there have ever been, though we live in a scientific age.
Science, as it is currently conducted, leaves us with a false impression in this matter. It leaves us the impression that we know all about the world, and that the maze of truth has been illumined; the fact that there is more knowledge to be had by simply reading books than any one person can carry in their head leaves people thinking that mysteries and doubts are not ready to hand. So long as this attitude dominates, there is nothing more infantile than the modern mind: it is so swaddled in trustfulness that it has nowhere to move its hands. So what if the milk it is fed is the truth? It is still just milk.
As soon as we are set on our own feet in the labyrinth of knowledge we realise that it is just that: a labyrinth. We may trust to the usual authorities for information, but that trust itself reminds us that we are lost and dependent. Beyond that there are darker and more innavigable matters. What are we to make of it all? How does it all fit together? Why did the world of electron clouds and quarks see the stabbing of Caesar – and why is the world of opaque elements also the world of lights? There are of course what some are inclined to call the ‘questions of religion’ (though religion is really a matter of answers): ‘Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Is there something beyond nature?’ Set them aside, though, and we are no better off. There are still these prodigious questions: ‘What is the physical world? And what are we? Why are there four fundamental forces, and not five?’ Once start walking the maze, and we realise how lost we are. I am sure I have a liver, a future, and a love of Dante. But do I have a liver, a future, and a love of Dante in the same sense? Why do such things exist, not only in the same universe, but in the same tiny space? What is the most direct path between them? The usual solution, a concession to practicality and to ignorance, is to sort them out neatly by putting one in a book of science, another in a book of philosophy, and the third in a book of literary criticism. Or, if we must bring them together, we might put them all in an encyclopaedia, each in its own little box, under a separate head, organised either topically or alphabetically. The world is not organised topically, as the coalition in my person of a liver, future, and love of Dante shows. Need I add that it is not organised alphabetically either?
These are not insoluble questions. They are however scientific questions, in the sense that they are the questions of a true scientist. Browne is a scientific writer because these concerns are visible in his work. In this sense, Newton is not much of a scientific writer, though he wrote much science. You may help a man in a maze in two ways. One the one hand you may give him a map, so that he understands the whole, though he has not moved an inch. On the other hand you may tell him your own experiences in threading the maze; and this is more likely to start him walking. So with Browne, whom we see wandering in all parts of human knowledge with his dim lamp of reason and experience.
Truth seems like a labyrinth in Browne, partially because his knowledge is incomplete, but largely for other reasons. The first reason is that it is in his works knotty and mixed – which, as I have said, truth really is, though we have contrived to forget it. There is no boundary between biblical criticism and botany; all nature is known through the mouth of man, and comes from the hand of God, and the human, the subhuman and the superhuman mingle indiscriminately in his investigations. The ancient, the modern, and the timeless are all the same. For us, I think we shall never get it out of our heads that the atom is modern, and the galaxies are modern, and nature is modern. We call them timeless, and mean modern. When we think of a tiger in the wild, we imagine it as David Attenborough would present it, not as an ancient Assyrian would have seen it; as if ‘tiger’ meant ‘tiger as seen through an advanced film camera.’ When we think of molecules, we might remember that we are made of them, but we do not so readily recall that Cleopatra’s infamous nose was made of them. I observed above that Browne does not make these distinctions. More generally, he does not leave the impression that much modern science, with its evolutionary taxonomy and distinct branches leaves. Browne certainly knows how to categorise animals and plants, but he does not categorise the branches of knowledge. He readily treats the same subjects philosophically, anatomically, historically, and theologically.
theparsnipoftime 