That is the first attractive quality of his science. The second quality, I think, is one we talk about a lot and practice little. He is astonished by the world, as we complacently think we ought to be. He is so generally and generously astonished that he suspects some mystery in it; and he will not let that idea go. He is sure there is something behind it: and, when he looks behind it, he is perpetually discovering secrets. Looked at from one angle, these discoveries would give a modern scientist heart failure. He is not unacquainted with palm-reading; he is not wholly with those who oppose astrology; he trusts, after a fashion, that the planets make music; he intrigues with physiognomy; he finds sufficient witness in nature for the existence of spirits; he ‘has ever believed, and does now know, that there are witches’; and – I dare not say, ‘finally’ – ‘has often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret magic of numbers’. Bear with me, if I claim that in spite of all this – nay, even in all this – he is every inch a scientist. Upon examination, it is the physiognomist and the palm-reader that would pale. We discover that his number-magic finds its highest happiness in tracing the number five, and the shape of the cross, through all nature and history – carefully, and in a most scientific manner, drawing only the inference that all things bear a secret orderliness and beauty. His palm-reading consists in the assertion that, since the works of God in nature are never random, he ‘dares not call them mere dashes, strokes, à la volèe’ – together with the observation that his palm has a rather unusual formation. His physiognomy begins with the dangerous and unscientific observation that the face is the window of the soul, and quickly rushes to the extreme assertion that there is a physiognomy of plants, too – their parts and operations express their natures. An assertion, I might add, so poetic, but so tautologically obvious, that perhaps our scientific judge would be concerned after all. But this is the essence of science. Science is poetic; it is in essence the same as the magical view of the world; there is no less mystery, the world is not less numinous or grandaeval, it is not less subtle or mysterious – it is not even less petulant, for weather will be weather; but the magic is more meaningful, because it follows fixed goals and acts according to its eternal character. There are mysterious meanings in hands and faces, in the forms of beasts and birds and the omens of the skies and the auguries of the entrails. Every face of nature conceals its own secret operations.
He is right, of course, though many today would disagree with his explanation for these great mysteries. In this lies the one real quarrel between Browne and the modern scientist as we conceive them. The proposition that nature is full of mysterious meaning may be taken in two ways: Browne takes it one way, and we expect scientists to take it the other. On the one hand, it is a great vaunt of nature, that nature too is meaningful; on the other hand, it may be a path leading to or from something beyond nature, which puts nature in its place as a mere symbol. It is typical of scientists today to take it as a boast. They are proud to be unpoetic; they are not ashamed to be irreligious. They know that their business is to deal with nature, and to ignore (or disparage) all things supernatural. The spiritual is not their business – nature must be explained on its own terms. Yet as a simple matter of fact, it is equally easy for a scientist to take up an opposite attitude – and this is Browne’s attitude: that in deciphering the strange permutations and eternal consistency of nature, he is decoding messages from spirits – and chiefly from the great Spirit that plays through it all, the Spirit of God. And this is the key to understanding Browne’s science and his philosophy. The rational and scientific spirit that he employs in his researches and experiments springs from the wild and dangerous belief that ‘nature is the art of God.’ He is not a naturalist in his sharp and modern moments as a naturalist or an antiquarian, and a supernaturalist when he turns to consider his outdated religious persuasions. He is always a supernaturalist, and the more so when he is most soundly scientific. It is then that he is most certain that he is reading the writing of God.
We must be careful not to hoodwink ourselves here. It is too easy to fall into that most typically modern form of reasoning, begging the question. We suppose that ancient people viewed the world in spiritual terms, and modern people view the world in a scientific way. The two worldviews are fundamentally at odds. To prove this, we appeal to the great moderns, and contrast them with the great ancients. Now, it so happens that many of the greatest modern scientists were theists, some of them distressingly devout theists; but we can confidently set that aside as a relic of ancient times. And it so happens that a number of the ancient pagans and medieval monotheists were acutely scientific in their methods, but that is beside the point: they were ahead of their times. If I may at all trust my judgement, there is some illogic there.
Here is some more knavish self-trickery. One phrase commonly found in accounts of the scientific revolution is the phrase ‘occult qualities’. The idea is that the medieval believed that when you threw a stone, an occult quality carried it through the air and then dragged it into the ground; and when you played with magnets, there were more occult qualities at work. The early modern scientists, the books inform us, triumphed over these occult qualities by replacing them with scientific forces like gravity and magnetism. Now, verbally, this is correct; the new scientists did replace an old science of ‘occult qualities’ with their new theories. But the impression it gives is almost utterly false. It hardly matters what the authors mean, if the readers unanimously misinterpret them. And to me it seems likely enough that ‘occult qualities’ sounds to most readers like ‘qualities of the occult’. But when the old alchemists spoke of these qualitates occultae they were perhaps more innocent of animism than usual; for all that they meant, and all that the Latin does mean, is ‘secret forces’ – ‘unknowns’. The jest in it all is that the cause of gravity is just as unknown to us as it was to them, though it is true that the learned of our age have a nicer acquaintance with the exact measurements of its operations. If we spoke Latin with strict accuracy, gravity itself is a qualitas occulta. But to us, gravity is a good term, because it is a term we use, and occult qualities is a bad term, though the principle it expresses is sound enough, because it is a term they used: and it has the added advantage of making them sound more ridiculous than they were. How candid can it be to assume that our ancestors believed that every rock that has ever described its graceful and predictable arc is carried along by an evil spirit? Would that their evil spirits were so respectably regular! It would take a gentleman of more inspired unadventurousness than any that ever drank East India tea on an Augustan lounge to believe, with real credence, that the malicious regularity of falling raindrops was the work of a million individual devils conspiring against the placid stability of the world as it should be. The medieval scientists certainly believed in devils: devils that could suspend gravity, devils that could seduce a man with all the riches and glory of this earth and drag his soul down to hell. They did not believe in a diabolical bureaucracy in charge of making sure that magnets always functioned as they should and trees falling in forests made the right noises. It would scarce be an exaggeration to say that all medieval people believed that God was behind gravity, for they were certainly theistic, and if to believe in God is superstitious, then to that extent they were superstitious. But it would not be any more an exaggeration to say that none of them believed that gravity was a part of the occult. There is nothing at all ‘occult’ about ‘occult qualities.’ We would be better off calling them ‘occluded qualities.’ But because the standard term is used with reference to medieval science, scarce one in a hundred readers doubts that the medievals were capable of seeing capricious devils in the most invariable operations of nature.
In short, we persuade ourselves all too easily that modern science replaced an entirely and uncompromisingly superstitious view of the world. And conversely, we persuade ourselves that the old theistic and spiritualistic view of the world has been replaced by modern science. The kind of credulity we use to persuade ourselves of these things does us no credit. The kind of consequences that have followed from this do us no credit either. If the spiritualists of today are anti-scientific, and have cut themselves off from the learned world to brood in pure and deliberate superstition, it is because we have learned to insist that the scientific and the spiritual are implacable enemies. And if the science of today is so arrogant in asserting that it has all the answers we have ever sought – and so unimaginative in insisting that we think of everything in approved scientific terms, and, worse, standard scientific terminology – it is for the same reason. It is not because science is scientific that it encroaches on religion in matters where it is really incompetent to give answers, and is, on a bad day, so patronising towards the imagination: any number of sound and sober scientists of even our own day show that. It is because we have decided, as matter of course, that it is unscientific to believe in anything spiritual.
Perhaps it is: in the same way, though, that eating breakfast is an unscientific matter. And yet nothing is more necessary for the progress of science than the unscientific consumption of breakfast. All true lovers of science may and should pray to whatever God or absence thereof they acknowledge that they shall not see the day all scientists resolve to abstain entirely from food, so as to enter more fully into the scientific spirit. It will be a sad day. It will be almost as sad as the day all scientists decide they are too grown up to believe in God.
But Browne’s finest science is fully dependent on his deep supernaturalism. Without it, I dare say, the world would be quite empty for him. He would be disconsolate. We would try to persuade him that, whether or not there is a God behind it, the universe is the same, and that nature for an atheist is identical with nature for a Christian. He would not listen. He would tell us that is not the case, for what he had taken for a subtle system of hieroglyphics and letters are actually just scribbles, written by nobody for nobody. How would we comfort him? We would tell him that he still has the duty and the privilege to trace them – that his interest in them should be unchanged. He would reply, ‘not so’: what he calls ‘the debt of reason we owe to God’ we call ‘the natural curiosity of mankind’, and if the curiosity fails, and discouragement or bewilderment set in, there is no higher calling to stir him up once more to his joyous and exultant researches. The vigour that animates anatomy, for him, is the same vigour that bends a man’s knee before an altar.
One of the most delightful aspects of this attitude, as I observed above, is that he is not afraid to talk of palm reading and plant physiognomy. That is, he treats science as a secret and spiritual art. He speaks of the music of the spheres – the old Aristotelian doctrine, that the great mechanism of the heavens makes an ineffably beautiful music as its parts grind on each other. And yet he speaks of it in this wise: ‘There is music wherever there is a harmony, order, or proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres; for those well-ordered motions and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony.’ He calls tavern music ‘a sensible (audible) fit of that harmony which,’ from the workings of the world, ‘intellectually sounds in the ears of God.’ Browne himself is straining his ears to catch snatches of this music. How fine an art he is called to! No magician has a higher sense of the spiritual significance of his work.
The intoxicating sense of the grand significance of all things might, by itself, lead to danger. His certainty that he is reading coded messages from God might cause him to find all sorts of false meanings in nature; and it doubtless contributed to the host of superb and very wrong cosmological theories that sprang up in the time of the scientific revolution. In Browne it is checked and restrained by another conviction that springs from his supernaturalist worldview and underpins his scientific investigations: the conviction that what is beyond nature is grander than what is within nature. The same thought, that all nature is full of secret meaning, might lead to high-handed carelessness with the facts, but that same view, considered another way – that nature is merely a bearer of meaning – means that he treats it with the humility that is essential to true understanding. It is perhaps better to turn to his own argument to display the logic. He has been discussing the counsel of God in one of his spectacular meditations; and he has risen as high as he can go, and the scientist in him has been swallowed by the theologian. Note well that here he is at his most intense, not, as with the alchemists of his day, when he is discussing the secrets of nature. He is speaking of God, and his tone is assertive and hieratic. Then he breaks off. He admits his limitations – and elects natural philosophy, science, as an alternative more fitted to his humble capacity: ‘These are contemplations metaphysical, my humble speculations have another method, and are content to trace and discover those expressions he (God) hath left in his creatures, and the obvious effects of nature; there is no danger to profound these mysteries, no Sanctum Sanctorum in philosophy… those highly magnify him whose judicious inquiry into all his acts, and deliberate research into his creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admiration.’
This is the honest caution of our science. ‘There is no danger to profound these mysteries’. Mysteries they are; and holy they are; but there are no mysteries so mysterious as to be dangerous, and nought so holy as to be a Holy of Holies, to which common access is forbidden. They are, after all, but symbols. The things symbolised exist: and the things symbolised we approach through faith. As for the symbols, there is nothing particularly lofty in the investigation of them. To interpret them is a divine task; to trace them is a humble duty. We ourselves realise that in practice science is a humble and even hum-drum task. Progress is not made by the majestic leaps of inference that are responsible for most of the dead pseudo-science that fills the geological record of cosmology. It is made by painstakingly putting off interpretation until the facts have been collected and understood. And Browne understands this.
But once again, it is essential that we remember where this attitude comes from. It does not come from a secular side of Browne that contradicts his supernaturalism; he is not divided between two personalities, one which makes meanings out of everything and believes in Christian doctrine with a primitive credulity, and the other which is largely modern, very sane, and soberly scientific. If he painstakingly collects and examines the facts before jumping to conclusions, it is because he believes it is his duty; and it is because he believes that science is humbly observing ‘the expressions God hath left in his creatures’. The modern secular scientist is confident that his disregard for God is what distinguishes him from his sillier spiritualist forebears. But Browne is simple enough to assume that what distinguishes him from his sillier forebears is that he, unlike them, does not disregard God; that he has a greater respect for God, and is resolved to observe the works of God more closely and carefully. He, too, reproaches the careless indolence of the Middle Ages, and as bitingly as we could wish: but not because they confounded science with theology or with the occult. On the contrary: ‘The heathens knew better how to join and read these mystical letters than we Christians, who cast a more careless eye on these common hieroglyphics, and disdain to suck divinity from the flowers of nature’!
All the elements of nature refract the supernatural; but in a natural way. Herein lies Browne’s philosophy, and herein lies the beauty of his works. The current state of the Western mind stems almost entirely from our failure to believe that. Postmodernism is a reaction against modernism; modernism said that all was scientific, not spiritual; postmodernism says that all is spiritual, not scientific. The very notion of a revolt against a scientific and clear-headed worldview – the very notion that there is no such thing as meaning, or that meaning is what you make it – is pure madness, and I think the most postmodern people would be only too glad to agree; and it is the madness that results from the idea that meaning and facts are at war with each other. But where does that come from, if not the despotic modern myth, that science and spirituality, science and poetry, science and emotion, are at loggerheads?
The general solution, among Christians, is to simply squeeze both into the picture; to say, first, that there is the natural world and there is the supernatural world, and that God created nature; and then, secondly, that there is the natural world and there is the human spirit, so that science and, say, singing are both justified. This is of course basically correct; only, in reality they are more inextricably mixed than most Christians are capable of conveying. In Browne there is much we may disagree with, but with it there is a lofty and robust philosophy; this is a man who thinks the ugliest creatures in creation beautiful, because they convey such secrets to our untutored judgments; this is a man who is so bold as to say, ‘conceive light invisible, and that is a spirit’; who can find God’s image so far the most exalted of creation, that he carries around in his body ‘all Africa, and her prodigies’; and therefore this is a scientist whose philosophy runs deeper than our own.
theparsnipoftime 