Smatterings of the Philosopher’s Stone – Chapter 2, Part 6: Personality

There is one error that novels have led us into, though probably only one. While they often leave us with a clearer and better understanding of life than life itself is able to afford us, they have also been known to leave the unfortunate impression that personality is a personal matter – as if it were the private quality that a person retains when detached from the world. The kind of thing that can be put into a separate paragraph called a character sketch. Without any fear of offending those who like character sketches – assuming they like fiction too – I am ready to maintain that character sketches are the most fictional part of fiction. The old poets knew nothing of them; the Greek tragedies had no need of them, and Homer would be astonished to learn that ‘Splendid Hector’ was not a sufficiently detailed description. The events of a novel may be said to be real, to exit, in so far as they tumble out of the abstract into the false reality of the novel one by one in mimicked historicity. The settings may be said to be real insofar as they are feigned to be physical and, in the novel, objective. Even the characters in a novel are ‘real;’ but the personalities are a fiction within the fiction. They are about as real as the figures in a sum, which, just like personalities, always behave in a certain way, but have no business with the world when they are not called into this kind of hypothetical action: personality is fundamentally, even mathematically abstract. You may see a body walking about without a person in it – the thing has been known to happen in ghostless ghost stories; you may even see a person without a body, if you are willing to extend the meaning of ‘sight’: for I suppose that is just what the celestial hierarchies are. But you will not see a personality, either with or without a person. You may see its actions; but it is a spectre, too spectral to be even a ghost. It is not a mere ghost, it is a mere nothing. Worse: it is a mere convenience. It is almost as figmental as the value of money or the political partitions of Antarctica.

Not that this should bother us, if we have any vestiges of sound Platonism left in our blood. For such cases, the Platonists have their own terminology. They prefer to say, in their topsy-turvy way, that personalities do exist, while persons and bodies and souls do not, or at any rate exist less. But for our present purposes, we may quietly lay these startling stabs in the dark aside. It is enough to simply say that personalities do not exist, that they are a fiction and a phantasm, and to reiterate that fiction is often more real than reality itself.

Still, this fiction of personality – it is not a person’s private side by any reconning. It is not what they bring to the world. If anything, it is what the world brings to them: it is in a sense their public side. It is because it is so external that it has no existence of its own: like the image in a mirror or the colour of the ocean or a glint in the eye. It is purely reactive, the sum and quality of one’s reactions. Love, hate, knowledge, ignorance, excitement, ambivalence – these are what makes up a personality, and they are all responses. You do not love in the abstract, you love something; even if by some unprecedented beatitude or tragedy you love everything. Excitement may be general and objectless; but in such cases it is physiological, and represents the mind’s reaction to the body. We could say that people carry their personalities around in their heads (as a man might carry a myth in a briefcase, or the sixteenth century in his pocket), only if we can say that people carry a whole world around in their heads – a whole world of things to respond to. For you cannot love or hate or know or not without things to love and hate and know and not; and a full personality is a full reaction to a whole world. The only real and honest way to give an indication of your personality is by talking about everything else. This is what Browne does; and though he sometimes employs the traditional expedient of such phrases as ‘I believe’ and ‘I feel,’ he is always talking about things more important than himself. Hence he did not write the Medicus Religiosus, the Religious Physician, but rather the Religio Medici, the Physician’s Religion. If he had set out to tell us about himself, his whole self, and nothing but himself, I think he would have written a very boring book. As is, he wrote a book about everything else; and I am willing to accede that he himself is one of the most interesting parts of it.

We feel we learn a lot more about Browne in Part 2, because in Part 2 we hear about a greater variety of topics. In Part 1 there are angels and demons and pagans and stoics; in Part 2 there are snails and shipwrecks and pipe organs and beggars and dreams and marriages and offenses and friendships. Part 2 seems more personal; for it seems somehow more important to know whether someone eats snails than to know whether they believe in angels. This is an illusion. It is far more important to know whether someone walks out amidst the flaming brands and flashing helms of invisible seraphim when they leave the house in the evening, than to know whether they are likely to strike land at the door of a French restaurant. But the illusion exists; and we may allow it; and we may concede that, at the end of the day, opinions on snails really do matter as well. So now that we have come to understand precisely what kind of world Browne inhabits, we are ready to gain a whole new depth of acquaintance, the depth of acquaintance that the rambling eclecticism of Part 2 provides.

As he talks his way through a world of digressions, we discover that Browne is not a cynic. He may feel he has ‘outlived himself;’ he may count the whole world hardly worth a groat – ‘not an inn to live in, but an hospital to die in’ – but it if it is a hospital, it is a hospital of an unprecedented kind, so much and varied delight does it provide him. He is in fact receptive to everything. He says he has no antipathies, and there are only three real exceptions. The crowd he dislikes because it is the people without personality; it swallows individuals in a cruel and indifferent manner, and Browne likes individuals. He speaks to anyone and everyone, to people of all degrees and qualities, he listens more than he talks, he rates friendship as highly as mountains must rate the luxury of a cloudy summit, and the one vice he deeply and truly detests is the vice whereby a man cuts himself off from the best and broadest selection of the citizens of the world – pride. Browne’s mind is extraverted, though his habits must have been on the whole introverted; he enjoys the society of all people, and of all the world – in his archaic language the first would be called ‘charity’, and the second ‘philosophy’; we would call them personability and science. To be outward looking is a fine trait. It is certainly one of the finest personality traits, and even something more. It is personality. It is the very substance beyond the abstraction, the material that people are made of: the more of this quality there is, the more personality; the less, the less. If you have ever met a person who is interested in absolutely nothing, you will know what I mean. A person who hates everything is more humane than them, because at least in hating they take an interest in things. There are personalities that are nuanced and cynical; but there are no personalities that are nuanced and apathetic. To be interesting means being interested. To be a person means being a microcosm. The world must mean something to you if you are to mean anything to the world. Hence the malignance of pride, the once vice Browne detests above all. For the real issue with being full of yourself is that you cannot be full of anyone or anything else. It is something to do with mental prisms and the geometry of the soul: Pride is when someone allows their person to crowd out a greater or lesser proportion of their personality. They become simply unpleasant, and if they have not reserved enough humility for an interest in even such trifles as wit or novelty, they become indistinguishable from their arrogance. They lose their personality.

Besides the crowd and pride, there is a third thing Browne dislikes – high tempers. He thinks, as so many of us think today, that it is an outright breach of charity to impose one’s beliefs on others by force; but in a spirit that takes him further than most of us go today, to the principle that ‘in all disputes, so much as there is of passion, so much is there of nothing to the purpose’; and further even than that, to a resolve to believe that (at least so far as he is concerned) ‘there is no such thing as an injury’ – that he should not be offended even by outright offences. Caveat emptor; it’s not easy to praise such generous self-immolation without self-condemnation. Needless to say, most critics praise his peaceability without realising what they are getting themselves into. But if there is an utter lack of quarrelsomeness in Browne, there is also almost an excess of assertion. He is deferential – but not indecisive. He can flash fires of hyperbole and stake out an peculiar position to hold against the world; but so soon as the smallest part of the world comes to dispute it, he sits down eager ‘to be informed’ and willing to change his mind.

The problem is that Browne is usually quite logical in his positions, and more often than not, the whole world must have gone away disappointed. There must have been more than one occasion like that of the mariner who came to gush about star-gazing: he only knew three stars, and amidst his astronomical effusions never guessed that Doctor Browne, who probably led him on with occasional encouraging nods and vague queries, could name every constellation in his hemisphere. It is this grandiosity, this nimiety, that twists the physician into those startling postures that the world would want to argue him out of. Of such a kind is that thunderbolt about almsgiving – ‘I give no alms to satisfy the hunger of my brother, but to fulfil and accomplish the will and commandment of my God.’ The will and commandment of his God, of course, being that he should satisfy the hunger of his brother; and his point being that mere instinctive charity, the satisfaction of a feeling of pity, is only a second best. But so also with that other opinion of his that has caused such scandal, where he calls ‘this vulgar way of coition’ an ‘odd and unworthy piece of folly’; which he wrote some years before the commencement of his own happy marriage, and in which, when we allow for the bias of his humour, and the winding train of his argument, he is basically correct: more even than eating or sleeping and all the best things in life, sex is laughably incongruous with the dignity of our spiritual nature. It is human humility, and human humour, to accept these contradictions; it seems strange to blame Browne for being able to question them as well as enjoy them. I mention these two opinions because they represent those few kinds of occasions where Browne seems off-putting, and they show that if any one real fault dominates, it is not that he is heartless or puritanical, as some think, but rather that he is reckless with his reasoning. He is never shy of the conclusions his logic might lead him into. But there are more splendid illustrations of the same. One example is the conclusions he draws from that ancient theme, that man is a microcosm. It is ancient, for the Norsemen knew it, when they whispered that the gods had carved the earth from the body of a giant, and the peasants of Hellas knew it, when the spoke of the warring of the elements and the conflicting tempers of superhuman princes. It is the idea that the world, shrunk down, would be essentially anthropoid; or that a human being, writ large, would be truly and comprehensively cosmic. Everything that may be found outside of man may be found inside him; matter and time and space, life of all grades, every branch of science and history, the angels and God himself, all have their part in man. Browne finds the idea striking enough, but more striking still are the endless new conclusions he draws from it. He says, for instance, talking of the Judgement, that the combustion of the world and the destruction of all things is a trifling matter, since, man remaining, all the world will survive in him. He says that no one is ever truly alone, on the one hand because God is always present with them, sure; but on the other, because the whole world subsists in them, and with them, even when they are locked in their 17th century closet. He warns that harsh treatment of oneself leads to harsh treatment of other, but maintains that the blazing and bitter self-reproach of deep repentance is not always out of place, since ‘therein we do but imitate our great self, the world,’ whose violent discords and sudden changes balance each other to maintain the stability of the whole. And he claims that he is a great traveller and universal scientist, simply by being an anatomist. For ‘we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies, wisely learns in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.’

This is truly thinking things through. To be ready to weigh the harrying of the heavens on a bathroom scales, to infer that his study is home to Arcturus and the Amazon by being home to him, to justify an emotion on analogy with natural disasters – ‘we do but imitate our great self’ – all in response to an old chestnut; that is surely a special kind of discernment, and not unworthy of the name of philosophy. It is sane singularity; it is Browne ‘keeping the road’ in his paradoxical way. He is original even amidst his unoriginality; he revolutionises conservative ideas. And such are the things that make his personality, and that make the author of Religio Medici so compelling. He has not tried to make himself an individual; he has tried to be charitable and sympathetic and logical and wise. But that is how he becomes so individual. He is not self-made, except in the sense that he has made himself receptive to everything else – to people, things, and ideas. So it comes that from this little book about everything that is not Thomas Browne – about God and the devil, about virtue and vice, angels and worlds and salads in churchyards, about relics and Romanists as well as music and mariners – the physician emerges as one of the finest and most winsome characters of the century.

Smatterings of the Philosopher’s Stone – Chapter 2, part 5: Religio Medici, I

When I came to writing this chapter, I had in my mind’s eye swathes of lofty exposition on Platonism and its heir Hermeticism; and I looked forward to it, and I was all the more sure because such good scholars have approached Browne with excellent histories of that philosophy. Only, the idea never left my mind’s eye. It’s not that Browne is not exactly a Platonist, nor that he talks of Stoicism quite as much, or is influenced equally by Aristotle, though all of these are true. It’s not that he knows his stuff well enough to attribute his Platonic ideas to Hermes Trismegistos, who is (above all) not Plato, and also (incidentally) a myth. No; but to my surprise, I found that, in writing an introduction to Browne, Platonism was almost irrelevant. It stocks his imagination – it is a source for many of his ideas – but it is not essential as background. His Christianity is more important, because his object is to discuss Christianity; Christianity is essential to the logic of his thoughts, but Platonism is simply the background to them. You will go completely wrong if you mistake the meaning of his faith, but you will get along tolerably well if you know nothing more of Plato than what Thomas Browne’s own comments make clear.

I would have discussed Puritanism and Arminianism too; and again, I would have been in good company. These are the two conflicting protestant parties that divided Browne’s England, and he seems to steer deliberately between them. Here too I found myself diverted to broader and simpler topics. The author of Religio Medici seems generally resolved to avoid direct comment upon the party struggles of his day, though many of his ideas have some bearing on the issue; and on the whole I found it necessary to respect his resolve. It goes without saying, scholars explain these matters of context precisely because he was consciously avoiding them; but for the same reason they skipped further and further down the list of my priorities until I realised that they were in the end beyond the scope of my work. For Browne succeeds: the book is still read to good effect by people who know little or nothing of the ancient Anglican divide between high church and low church. On the other hand, one does need to know something of the nature of Christianity to understand it; hence this chapter is not about Browne’s relation to the religious ideas of his age, but rather about his relation to the religious ideas he affiliates with. That comes first: the rest is a suitable sequel. For the sources of Browne’s philosophical and religious ideas I commend to you people who have handled them better than I am qualified to do. Meanwhile I have approached this introduction the way I have because I think it is the best way to start; though I could wish a better scholar and a better writer had undertaken the task.

So far I have discussed the opening pages of Religio Medici, which say things that must be understood before the rest of the book can be judged. If my approach differs in any way from better critics, it can be seen in the construction I place on these early pages. He says he is writing about Christianity; and I detect no irony in his voice. But now we move into the body of the work, which may be described as a rabbit’s warren of digression and distraction. Plenty of people have tried their hand at finding the secret structure of the whole, and plenty have given up in despair. For myself, I fancy that, with enough squinting, I can distinguish the diffuse outline of a very logical order framed within the broader masses of the three theological virtues, broken by only two or three major digressions – but I fear Thomas Browne might have been surprised to hear that. The book is full of the kinds of signposts that you find in a rambling conversation: they make sense in their context but they do not make sense of it, and they do not explain the trajectory of the whole. Religio Medici was made to be read, not studied: it is better discussed than analysed. What follows therefore is a summary that does not pretend to present the sum. It will be superficial, in this sense: that it is an attempt to present merely the major landmarks of the book. It is an attempt to give some idea of the contents of the book without getting tangled in the details – the contents of a book that lives in the details.

Ithas two halves. The second is about ‘that other virtue charity’. There are inferences you can draw from this. But the first part, whatever its actual or imagined agenda, is hung upon the inscrutable mystery of Deity, where Browne, who revels in the discovered mysteries of nature, finds his greatest delight. He tells us that he loves to ‘confound his understanding’ with meditations upon God; and to this end he has learnt many valuable lessons from the ancient philosophers and divines. It is only fitting to speak of God in superlatives. Even his mildness is unutterable. The physician writes fantastic paradoxes on these topics: old paradoxes, perplexing exclamations about eternity beyond time and the holy Trinity and the power of God. In all, and above all, about the simplicity of God, the simplicity of God that is more manifold than man. The physician revels in the sheer face of simple but incomprehensible concepts. There are no better words for his attitude than those words of his I have already quoted in part: ‘I know that (God) is wise in all, wonderful in what we conceive, but far more in what we comprehend not, for we behold him but asquint upon reflex and shadow.’

This part of the book is full of surprising twists and turns: not, like other sections of it, because Browne is a paradoxical person, but because he realises that God is paradoxical. Nor only in his nature: his actions too are full of mystery and obliquity. The physician disserts on chance, God’s secret way of working. Like his theology, his reflections on this submerged thread of Divine providence give him a strange joy, precisely because it is inaccessible. The same goes for the miracles and reversals of the Old Testament. In short, everything that belongs to the supremacy of God, whereby he is not only beyond our powers, but even beyond our understanding, exercises his fascination. He is too mature to be a mystic; but his God is mystical.

He is too grounded to be a mystic. He has that kind of reverence that restrains him from losing himself utterly in things that are too high for him. He will walk where he can tread safely, at least some of the time. He feels he ought to. There is a danger in reflecting too much on how God is beyond the reach of our human minds: the danger that we put our human minds beyond the reach of God. Browne expresses the conviction that God does not want to be worshiped in a wholly irrational way. So he steps down to pursue what can be known of God. He does not allow himself to forget God in his rational activities, and he studies God through his science, his ‘humble speculations’. This means that his science is primarily the study of a person, as I noted above; the laws of nature are God’s artistic cannons, which he is free to break, but on the whole chooses to keep, that ‘he may effect his obscurest designs’ in an ingenious and roundabout way. The world is the work of a virtuoso. That is why the scientist is as fascinated by ants as elephants: the sublimity, the majesty of nature do not touch him so much as its flare and artistry. Sublimity and majesty do move him, but in God, not nature. Nature is intricate; God is infinite. Thus even as his study of God through nature winds its way upstream it finds itself brought to a halt by an abrupt crag whence the river falls, and he cannot follow further: the first miracle, the act of creation, beyond which lie ‘the forelaid principles of God’s art,’ the mysterious patters and designs in the mind of God, that no man can scrutinise, except through their reflections.

Thus all creation is cast into sharp perspective by the mystery of divinity. It is the kind of lurid perspective that painters use to warp familiar objects into bizarre and foreign forms, to triangulate torsos, to throw limbs out of joint and all parts out of proportion. ‘Time we may comprehend, it is but five days elder than ourselves, and hat the same horoscope with the world’ – does he realise the audacity of this informality with the fabric of the universe? Even Scripture falls afoul of the immortal God – ‘St Peter speaks modestly’ – ‘St John’s description is too weak’. He soberly assures us – Browne the historian – that he as little respect for archaeology, God being the only real antiquity, and everything else modern by comparison. It is a strange lens he looks through! It has been said that he lacks historical perspective; the fact is that he has almost too much: when the background is eternity, all time has to crowd into the foreground. He estimates all things in history against his certainty that there will come a day when ‘all things confess their ashes’ to God: hence he – Browne the scholar – admits to a wish that all unnecessary books were banished or burnt as mere vanities. He is not wholly sure the invention of the press was a good thing, and he is not in complete sympathy with those still weeping over the loss of the library of Alexandria. History lies flat and prostrate before the infinite majesty of God: the past repeats itself, not even in an upward spiral, but in a simple circle: ideas come and go and return, in all essentials the same, while the truth remains unchanged. Let us be fair; this is probably what was meant by his lack of perspective. Only, he is quite right. Someone bent the trajectory a little after Browne’s time, and a steep and sudden burst of progress left us with the illusion that history has always been climbing at a rapid rate in some direction or another. Browne was far closer to the Spartans than to the Sputniks; he can be excused for sharing the wisdom of Solomon.

One reason it might be thought he lacks historical perspective is that he believes the ancient pagan gods were demons, and it is inferred that his historical judgements must have been deathly black and white. That they weren’t can be established quite easily; it can be seen in his astonishing way of referring to the precept attributed to the Apollo of Delphi, ‘know yourself’. He says, ‘I honour my profession and embrace the counsel even of the Devil himself; had he read such a lecture in Paradise as he did at Delphi, we had better known ourselves, nor had we stood in fear to know God.’ Perhaps he lacks historical perspective here, but only in a special sense – only in the sense that he fails to explain ancient occurrences in modern terms. He believes the principle ‘know thyself’ is a good one, so he cites it as such; he believes as the Greeks did that the oracle was supernatural, so he cites it as such.

This is not his only reference to demons. Were it not for his dizzying discursions into theology, Religio Medici might seem overwhelmingly dark, there is so much about demons and death. And these demons and proper evil spirits: they are dangerous, malevolent, and unruly. He tells us precisely what he believes they are and aren’t able to do; it is an appalling anatomy. They seduce people; there are witches, and witchcraft; and devils spoke to mortals through oracles until they were driven out by the advent of God’s kingdom. ‘The clouds of horror, fear, sorrow, despair’ are ‘the mists of hell,’ the devil makes attempts on the soul of Browne’s own self. There is one reassurance; that the Spirit of God exists too. And if hell is the force of despair, and Demons may carry it about with them, then heaven is the joy of the Lord, and all that is lively and jolly comes from it.

Death too fascinates the physician: death and the end of all things, death that shows the vanity of the world and makes us ashamed of our nature. Yet Browne is not afraid of death. He believes in the resurrection. The fact of mortality cuts two ways for him: it is a comfort as well as a humiliation. The twenty odd pages allotted directly to death are, to be sure, sombre: but, if the paradox may be permitted, they are not morbid. Death is of the two most purely spiritual acts in human life – the other, of course, is birth – and it is on the spiritual that Browne shows his talent to best advantage. His descriptions of the substance of angels are some of the most splendid things he wrote. They are mysterious without being meaningless – indeed, they are astonishingly lucid. This same quality he brings to his discussions of death: he even improves upon it. As a doctor, he has seen enough of the physical face of death; as a Christian and a philosopher, he feels its spiritual significance. Years later, he would write a whole tract on the topic of death, expanding and maturing the insights of Religio Medici, and death has never been more fully and subtly characterised as in this tract Urne Buriall.

These prodigies – death and doom, the rampages of demons, miracles and the mysterious twists of providence – are essential to Browne’s worldview and writing. They are at the back – or front – of Browne’s mind whenever he reasserts the structure and stability of the universe. For example: he talks about a ladder of creatures, ascending in perfect order and proportion from insects through man to God himself – but the inference he draws from this is that, to maintain the proportion, there must be some beings between the divine and the human, and these doubtless can wreak preternatural havoc or bring cataclysmic benefits on earth. Once again, he develops the idea in a tract of its own; this one too audacious for the taste of scholars or dilettantes: The Garden of Cyrus. It proclaims the geometry of nature, its neatness and consistency: but it displays all the while the riotous profusion of nature in plants and beasts and birds and constellations and symbols of all kinds. This is the same kind of logic as that behind his identification of chance with providence: it means that everything has a reason, but that only justifies the unpredictability of the world we live in. He keeps coming back to the idea that man is a microcosm – something equivalent to a snow-globe, with a little more sophistication. Man is an amphibian, spiritual and physical, and in both his physical and his spiritual nature he is a motely encyclopaedia of all things. The same explosive complexity writ large is the universe. When Browne compares the orderly architecture of the world to harmony and music in the ears of God, mark what kind of music he means: tavern music.

Smatterings of the Philosopher’s Stone – Chapter 2, part 4 – Broadmindedness

In the nineteenth section of Religio Medici we find the physician in a striking pose. It is so ludicrous, yet so thoroughly representative, that we feel as though we might at last have found the secret double spring of his sanity and his insanity. He appears before us as an exhaustive scholar, an inexpert layman, a revolutionary of sorts, though a dogmatic conservative, an unyielding fideist and a prying sceptic, a spiritualist and a materialist, a kind of sober extravagance, a walking paradox. In short, he appears before us as an emblem of free thought: and it looks strangely narrow-minded.

This is the situation. He is ready to confirm that ‘religion’ is open to many doubts. With the simple savagery of a monk, he assures us that these doubts are the assaults of the Devil in hell against ‘the edifice of our faith’. Browne is a scholar; he is a deep historian and a scrupulous scientist: we believe him when he tells us that he knows these ‘sturdy doubts’ and ‘boisterous objections’ better than anyone. It must be a struggle to be so intelligent and yet so credulous. He tells us that he had to conquer his doubts ‘on his knees’ – no wonder. It’s the miracles he’s struggling with. Of course.

And then the nature of the doubts bursts out like a bolt from the blue – though the doctor sets about it simply, without the slightest sense of incongruity. The whole thing turns itself on its head and he doesn’t seem to notice. With some surprise we find ourselves in the book of Numbers. For it is the miracle of the bronze serpent in the wilderness, that the Israelites looked on and were healed, that he starts with. His Paracelsian science tells him that such things are not wholly impossible. What if it was just a natural phenomenon, and there was no miracle? Or, he says, take the manna in the wilderness – or Elijah’s altar, that burned with fire from heaven, though it was soused with water. He explains that, alas, they are not entirely beyond the bounds of reason either. And what if the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was natural too – was there perhaps ‘an asphaltic and bituminous nature in that lake before the fire of Gomorrah’? What if none of these were miracles? The Devil! Browne is in deeper than we thought. He doesn’t doubt the historicity of scripture for one moment. He steps out of his laboratory to declare, not that the miracles are too implausible, but that they are too cruelly plausible. It is too easy for whole cities to be engulfed in raging flames: it is too easy for food to fall from the sky. His doubts are not even of the nature of those that think that faith healings might be psychological rather than miraculous. No: he had to beg the Lord for faith that the most impossible miracles were really impossible. I suppose the Almighty has not had such prayers very often. ‘Thus the Devil played at chess with me’. Has he ever played such a game with such a man before or since?

It is Browne’s method to show his orthodoxy by making a clean slate of his unorthodoxy, just as here he shows his faith by confessing his doubts. Doubtless we get a great deal of enjoyment from the comic side of this. Thomas Browne is an eccentric. But he is a reasonable eccentric, and a very sharp eccentric, and it is easy to miss the breadth of his mind, the towering and almost tottering enlightenment he displays in passages like this. He has an astonishing clarity in his murky scholastic mind. When you can get amusement out of a philosopher, you have found something worthwhile, but when you can get amusement out of a good philosopher, you have found something worth a great deal more.

But what is broad-mindedness, and why do we approve of it? Mainly, I suppose, because we disapprove of narrow-mindedness. There is a slight injustice in this. A person might narrow their mind for a number of reasons, many of them quite sane. They might narrow their mind because they are trying to concentrate, or because they do not want to admit something into their head that will unbalance it. They might narrow their mind because they have stretched it and don’t want to break it. There is no point making pointless problems for oneself, after all. Broad-mindedness is like honesty: it is criminal to lack it when it is called for, but it can be dangerous to give it a long leash when it is uncalled for. I do not think we would much like someone who was resolved to think every thought imaginable.

But if we are fixed on appreciating thinkers, we might well pause to admire the open-mindedness of the physician.  He is a Christian – an orthodox Anglican, bound by the rule of his creed. But he is not for that reason narrow-minded. A narrow-minded Christian would not rummage so deeply for problems in the Bible, nor would he confess them so candidly. He has an infinite unconcern about the idea of questioning his faith; he allows absolute himself liberty to scrutinise scripture, to catalogue implied or apparent inconsistencies, and to weigh up the pros and cons of heresies. He also gives himself the freedom to be ignorant, a liberty that the haughty few despise, but every sensible person respects: it is the one who always has an answer for everything that is narrow-minded, not the one whose general good sense extends to the point of admitting occasional uncertainty. True, the Christian faith rests on the correctness and consistency of scripture. But the Christian character rises to a capacity for acknowledging doubts about the details of that vast and varied book.

Freedom of mind shows itself in the ability to change an opinion, but someone whose opinions are constantly changing is not open-minded but unstable. We might charitably grant that they are free to enter and exit the narrow confines of the room, and that they give good evidence of it; but we would subjoin, apologetically, that they seem to be trapped in the narrower confines of a revolving door. For freedom of mind also shows itself in the ability to keep an opinion. When someone can rest their confidence in the superior rationality of their position, while regarding the rationality of other opinions, deliberately, without lowering their eyes, they may be said to be truly broad-minded. That is what makes the discussion of heresies in Religio Medici so splendid: Browne distinguishes himself with his ability to defend and excuse his own past opinions, even though he has long since cast them aside. This one had good motives, another was, after all, reasonable enough. His comments about heresy in the abstract are clear: he is resolved to rule himself by the church, even when it overrules his own idea of plausibility. (He has already told us that it was reason that led him into the church, so we need not fear the implications of this too much.) But he also thinks that every individual is free to form their own opinions: he does not blame himself for his former peculiarities, though neither does he trust his own mental faculties enough to maintain them against the witness of the church. The result? All sorts of philosophies live lively and lifelike in his mind, other than the one he actually holds.

This quality of the physician can be seen in another way. The axolotl of philosophy is the idea that freethinking means original thinking. It is an idea so unfounded and absurd that security is still being grilled for answers as to how it got in. It is a heavy chain that does not allow one near old and unoriginal ideas; when there are so many old ideas on the table, a philosopher might resent the insistence that he does not touch them. He might also starve. Now, the theological doctor’s meditations on God are very unoriginal – and very good. They show that he is a superlatively free thinker. He tells us that his favourite topic is a particular quality of God, his eternity. It is surely one of the most astonishing facts in history that people have, at various points in the past, had original thoughts about eternity. It is almost on a level with telling tall tales about short people, or taking a wrong turn that is a right turn: only it is more like making a square sphere or eating a green orange. There is nothing older than eternity, so it seems monstrous that people should be able to say anything new about it; it has always been the same, so it is almost too much to ask that they should say something different about it. So if we excuse his unoriginality as inevitable, we will readily grant that, if one has the freedom to think about eternity, one does have rather a lot of freedom.

By comparison atheism, and agnosticism when it is simply a bashful atheism, has a tiny amount of freedom. Its universe is too small. It cannot deny it: its point of pride is that it is so simple as to be almost simplistic. Atheism has no qualms in applying Occam’s razor to whole limbs of human thought, and the more limbs lopped, the less room for thought there is. As an historical fact, it did not add science to the human mind, but as an eternal fact it does subtract theology. There is no speculating about God and the beyond and the meaning of life, or indeed about eternity and the eternal, if such things do not exist – if the universe and life within it are simply the incidental bumblings of an absent-minded void, or the apathetic throwaways of a deity that we cannot know. Practically every philosopher in history has to be sent straight out the window, as fundamentally irrelevant to reality. In such a context, Plato is basically wrong, as was Aristotle, and Plotinus; certainly Aquinas, definitely Descartes and Locke and Leibniz and Spinoza. Only at the latter end of history do people start popping up who share enough of the secular worldview to say things of any value to the modern atheist or agnostic, and even they have to admit that their philosophy is largely an effort of the imagination. ‘Life has no meaning, so it must be made,’ ‘there is no God, so we have to invent him.’ The Christian finds in the old philosophers a great deal to disagree with; but the Christian does not think they are talking nonsense when they say that God is everything, or God is the Devil, or man is God, or man is an imprisoned ghost. The Christian thinks they are wrong: but he thinks they are talking about realities. Anyone of Browne’s stripe has a field of thought more expansive than an atheist can ever have: the atheist might be right in the end, and if so they are right to call the philosophers and the Christians deluded. But they cannot call them narrow.

This you will see if you turn to the passage where he says ‘I had as lief you tell me that anima est angelus hominis, est corpus Dei, etc.’ The old philosophers who said that ‘man is a thinking animal’ would doubtless have recognised that one could with equal justice define man as an unthinking animal. Ostriches and Ibises may not philosophise, but neither do they romanticise. No species makes such delicious nonsense as humanity. The maker of proboscis monkeys laughed in a way that proboscis monkeys never have, and he only let one species in on the joke. Further, it seems terrible to deny that our reason is much the richer for its access to unreason: we would beg the magmatic core of the earth to drink us in through its fissures, if we ever found ourselves faced with the prospect of constant and unmerciful rationality void of poetry. It is impossible not to concede the justice of Browne’s tastes when he says, ‘where I cannot satisfy my reason, I love to humour my fancy’. It is one of the healthiest comments a philosopher ever made. As a result, freedom of thought means, not just the freedom to follow reason, but freedom of fancy: it means a broad and brilliant imagination. And Browne’s imagination is remarkably free, in two respects. One is that it is so concrete: there are uncounted striking details in the world, and to have ready access to each is one the height of freedom. Every true poet is a scientist: to be a poet is to observe copiously. The other respect in which Browne’s imagination is liberal is the topic touched on above: that his universe is so broad. When he grows weary of the cold light of Aristotelian logic – he knows how to enjoy it in its place, for he says in a much-ridiculed passage, ‘nothing became something, and omniety informed nullity into an essence’ – he can contemplate such thoughts as that ‘soul’ is ‘a person’s angel’ and ‘God’s body’; or that light is God’s shadow. Elsewhere he tells us that nature is ‘the scripture of the heathen,’ and cries, ‘Lucifer keeps his court within my breast;’ these are spiritual metaphors, in which he reaches a height no naturalist can reach; nor is he trapped there, for he tells us that human nature is ‘an amphibian’, and takes ‘all flesh is grass’ to its literal extreme; he says we exist (when compared to God) ‘but by a distinction’, and talks of our faces bearing the ‘mottos’ of our personalities. These are earthly metaphors. To be able to draw images from heaven and hell and all in between – that is breadth. Where there are no religious concepts there is little poetry. It pines.

But since we have touched on Browne’s irrationality, we should discuss one respect in which Browne really does find his religion narrowing his mind. It has been said that Browne is an original character though he is not an original thinker. There is justice in this, if we make allowance for the validity of the physician’s own remark, that ‘every man is not only himself’ since ‘men are lived over again’. But he is unusual, and the orthodoxy of his beliefs restrains a rather wild character. He might well boast this way: ‘in philosophy, where truth seems double-faced, there is no man more paradoxical than myself, but in divinity I love to keep the road’. Not unnaturally, there is some tension as a result: and that is not bad, for a soul that is not in tension is a slack soul. We catch him complaining that it seems ‘there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith’.

He has several outlets for he somewhat thwarted absurdist tendencies; one is his ‘solitary recreation’ of ‘posing his apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, with incarnation and resurrection.’ Another is contemplating the eternity of God. A third is his bizarre way of ferreting out problem passages in scripture, so that he can ‘believe a thing not only above, but contrary to reason, and against the argument of his proper senses.’ The philosopher in him is more ardent for faith per se than the fideist. If it is benighted to shy away from the thought of complete rationalism, it is the philosopher in him, not the Christian, that is benighted. But I do not think it is benighted to like the idea of faith. It is benighted to dislike the idea of reason, which no one can seriously accuse physician of doing. It is not that rationalism is not a sign of maturity, or that faith is not a sign of immaturity. More important is the fact that we are immature; we are in fact children in the universe. There are lizard tribes that are more mature than us, that have undoubtedly attained a greater maturity than us; but they do not seem to have attained the distinction of a thoroughgoing rationalism yet. If, as is the wont in our corner of history, we insist that humankind is no better than any other kind of animal, the logic holds: rationalism is not a sign of maturity. Even if you grant that the alien bipeds that style their hair and expend an intriguing amount of precious time preparing their provender (among other distinctions) do serve some slightly different purpose from the rest of the animal world, you might observe that they are – spite of their best efforts – every bit as feeble and dependant, subject to the tutelage of their elders and their betters, of such distinguished individuals as Lord Death and Dame Fortune, as well as Time, Space, Reality, Psychology, and a host of others that will insist on making their own rules and are perpetually trying petulant experiments on us the individuals of the human race. If, in this context, we are such infants as to be subject to doubts, ignorance, hopes and fears, desires and tastes and preferences and regrets, there is no reason why we should not prize these things as virtues in their proper places; and there is no reason why we should not also prize faith in its proper place, and to allow that it is not at all vulgar to do what we are all constantly doing anyway, and ‘believe a thing not only above, but contrary to reason.’ Meanwhile Browne is narrow enough to acknowledge the restraints religion imposes on his paradoxical tendencies, and free enough to indulge them very variously within those limits.

‘Within those limits’: that is to say, the strait confines of a universe bordering on the infinite at one end and the eternal at the other, a universe inexhaustibly complex in its physical dimensions, while the physical dimensions are themselves a mere shadow of the boundless spiritual edifice that rests above it, the hosts of heaven and hell, the principalities and forces and natures and qualities; open to endless speculation and full of infinite suggestion, because it is all the careful craft of the wisdom of the Immortal Mystery; who, though a mystery, has himself been so plentifully revealed that a lifetime would not suffice to know all that may be known. This author has not erred in his intent. It is not at all impossible to reconcile free thinking and faith. Orthodoxy does not make people close-minded. It is more likely to give them vertigo.

Smatterings of the Philosopher’s Stone – Chapter 2, part 3: On Protestants and the Peace of the Church

The wonder of it is that, being a man of his time, the humble physician can call it ‘uncharitable to fall upon those popular scurrilities and opprobrious scoffs at the Bishop of Rome,’ or say that, not forgetting the ‘general charity he owes to humanity,’ he rather pities than hates ‘Turks, infidels’ and (most maligned of all) ‘Jews.’ He does not think the virtue of orthodoxy overrides the virtue of charity – as if those two high gerents of heaven, Faith and Love, were at odds. He is not flexible in his convictions, but he is most firm on the principle of politeness. Like the great doctors of the church, he is first and foremost a doctor of virtue – and being English, we may translate that, for him, as doctor of decency. It seems to him uncivil to call the Pope the Antichrist, though he is confident in separating himself on the whole from the Pope’s church.

Browne is far from the only charitable spirit in his age, though this certainly does not mark him for the majority. There is a tendency now to praise his peaceable temperament and to say, where he did not take it further, that he was nevertheless far ahead of the standards of his time. And that is true. But something must be said of the standards of his time, if we are to understand the true import of his improvement on them. Even a scientific man of the age of Galileo is likely to be worlds away from us in worldview. The seventeenth century seems to us so modern that we forget that it is the direct heir of the sixteenth century, which seems to us so medieval. For all the previously unthinkable changes that had bent and broadened the world, the seventeenth century gentleman with his tophat and curled mustachios, his frock-coat and his Queen’s English, was mentally still dripping with the weeds of that barbaric age.

It was the time of the clearing of the temple: the wrath of God was now at last visiting itself on the crimes of Christendom. The sins of sinful popes cried out against them, and the degeneracy of popular superstition, imposed on the peasants as much from above as from within, had become so clear as to be decried by all who beheld it. There was, besides, buying and selling in the house of God: the buying and selling of salvation, the simony of prelates and the indulgences that were to become a lasting infamy. And as a result there was schism. This is the background of the Protestant Reformation; but it is also the background of most medieval theology. It was not the protestants who first despaired of the church, or started the vicious game of assigning popes to hell. The greatest Catholic poet of all times had several popes squished together in the inferno centuries before the reformation. Later the foremost Catholic – and anti-protestant – scholar of an age had another pope locked out of heaven: ‘bene est quod porta habemus adamantina,’ says St Peter in disgust, ‘It’s a good thing our doors are made of adamant.’ It was universally agreed that one might justly consign a Pope to hell if they had assigned themself to hell. It was hardly novel when the reformers started calling the pope the antichrist. Everyone agreed that the church had problems: everyone agreed that someone was to blame, and that whoever was guilty of disfiguring the face of God on earth was guilty of a grave and terrible sin. It is hard to argue. Where they disagreed was on the nature of the disfigurement, and who had done the most disfiguring. By the time the Protestants had established themselves and the Romanists had swept out the most outrageous officials in their hierarchy, there were two major camps. The radicals thought it was the conservatives, and the conservatives thought it was the radicals. The Catholics undoubtedly represented a system that had been very corrupt – whether they had mended it sufficiently was still in question. The Protestants were undoubtedly responsible for splintering the church, and whether they had been sufficiently justified was a matter of contention. The Protestants hated oppressive superstition with all the fury of today’s atheists, and the Catholics hated defiant and exclusive sectarianism with all the fury of today’s anti-discrimination lobbyists. The Catholics insisted that they had cleaned up their church, but the Protestants still spied strange stalagmite of stuff, which the Catholics called artistic and the Protestants called grotesque. Everyone believed in ‘one holy, catholic and apostolic church’, and the whole justification for the Protestant position was that the church that called itself ‘Catholic’ was neither holy nor apostolic. Otherwise – they knew it – they were guilty of tearing to pieces the robe of the Lord, dividing what God had made one. The only way to justify Protestantism was to claim that there was reason to protest. If it was not virulently anti-Romanist, it had better not have been born.

If one lights one’s living-room on fire, he does well to expect the rest of the house to join in. There is no use in restraining something whose very essence is to defy restraint. And it is unreasonable to ask Protestants not to protest. In those days it was not a virtue to be conciliatory on the matter of Luther’s schism. Everyone realised this and everyone agreed on it. It could not be a virtue; to play down the grievances would mean making light of the most sacred things in the world. No reasonable Catholic would ask a Protestant to suggest that the differences between them were not so large as to cause tension, though they would of course ask them to become a Catholic. No reasonable Protestant would ask a Catholic to say that the Protestant religion was not heretical – until, of course, the Catholic had repented of his own popish heresies. The matter was not helped by the fact that religious divides tended to coincide with political divides, and that the kings of the West took too active an interest in the religion of their subjects; unsurprisingly swords were had out on religious issues, as were stakes and torches. We might blame them for hating and killing each other for the sake of religion. I do not think we would be wrong to do so. It damages peoples souls. It is, in itself, cruel and irreligious. But they would have a very reasonable retort, and we do well to remember it. They would reply that throughout history, and every bit as much in our own day as in the past, people have done something, if not worse, at least more vile and reprehensible: they have hated and killed each other without reference to anything so important as religion, out of simple greed and malice.

These being the divisions within western Christendom, it is small wonder that the outer walls were manned by an equally ferocious hostility. The Muslim Turks made no secret of their ambition to kill the prince of Europe and heave their yoke upon the shoulders of the Christians, and the Jews remained obstinate that they had done well to kill Christ – and they hated Christians because they feared them. On all sides there was hatred because on all sides there was fear and danger.

But Sir Thomas Browne’s peaceability is not the peaceability of someone who has given up on fighting, or refuses to see the danger. The vigour of it springs from the fact that he has not; the fact that he is able to understand the concerns of his age more fully than we who do not live in it. The critics find what they call his ‘irenic temperament’ the most genial thing about him. They say that he has almost fully extricated himself from the bigoted assumptions of his age. He is, so to speak, a far better historian than them: so much better that he seems to have fully entered into the mindset of the seventeenth century. If he complains about the violence with which his own views are defended, it is not because, like his encomiasts, he has wavered in his faith or is disillusioned about religion. It is because he is a rational man.

Witness the very first paragraph. He assures us that he has given some consideration to the matter of his religion; he finds the Christian faith most worthy of acceptance, and is earnest enough on that count that he fervently wishes all others could attain the blessings of the same faith – he pities them if they do not. There is no sense in hating someone for a misfortune like that. And the Christian virtue of love forbids it. He would share their misfortune of unchristianity if he hated them for their unchristianity. How can one do less than love the unbelievers if one is a fervent believer? This is the first sally of Browne’s logic in Religio Medici. He expresses it with a simple solemnity, and it is clearly the work of a rational mind, but he hints by certain words like ‘zeal’ and ‘glory’ that this is not the reasoning of a cold and calculating mind.

In the same vein you will find that he sufficiently regrets the damage done by ‘the ambition and avarice of prelates’ to be a confirmed protestant, and that he quite recognises that the Pope considers him an heretic, but – the virtue of love still holds good – he considers it unchristian to curse the Pope in turn. He has no problem with worshiping in a Catholic church, because he finds nothing in his protestant convictions to suggest that Catholics, whatever their faults, worship the wrong God. Or again, he is ready to believe, with all protestants, that many Roman Catholic rituals are ‘dangerous to the common people’ – but to call all ritual ‘superstitious’ is misguided, because even those who are safe from any trace of superstitious belief may be – Browne is – brought into a deeper devotion by rituals. The physician does not need to resort to any stronger arguments, though they would be ready to hand. He does not say, as others have said, that the stars seem ritually inclined, and the seasons seems to have a liking for spectacle; he does not descant upon the practice of the early church, or assert the importance of tradition; in defending the practice of the Catholics, he makes no Catholic arguments. It is as a protestant that he approves of them. The logic of his lenience is the same logic that makes him reject the Roman Church in the first place: he rejects the Roman rituals because he believes they lead to superstition, and therefore he accepts them where he sees that they do not. All this – his attitude towards rituals, towards the Romanist Church, towards the Pope – is good sense. It is religious good sense. It is seventeenth century good sense, even though the seventeenth century generally lacked it: the kind of good sense that could only be had by someone who had not ceased to believe in pope and protestant and ritual and superstition alike. No one now praises the physician like this: ‘he was such a narrow fundamentalist that he loved even Catholics and Jews.’ No one pays tribute to him by saying, ‘he was so far beyond his generation in his devotion to the church that he would welcome all people, regardless of their religion.’ But really, that is the only accurate way to praise him.

Smatterings of the Philosopher’s Stone – Chapter 2, part 2: A Critical Misunderstanding

‘For my religion, though there be several circumstances that might persuade the world I have none at all, as the general scandal of my profession, the natural course of my studies, the indifferency [impartiality] of my behaviour and discourse in matters of religion, neither violently defending one, nor with that common ardour and contention opposing another; yet in despite hereof I dare, without usurpation, assume the honourable style of a Christian: not that I merely owe this title to the font, my education, or clime wherein I was born, as being bred up either to confirm those principles my parents instilled into my unwary understanding, or by a general consent proceed in the religion of my country: but having, in my riper years, and confirmed judgement, seen and examined all, I find myself obliged by the principles of grace, and the law of mine own reason, to embrace no other name but this; neither doth herein my zeal so far make me forget the general charity I owe unto humanity, as rather to hate than pity Turks, infidels, and (what is worse) Jews, rather contenting myself to enjoy that happy stile, than maligning those who refuse so glorious a title.’

There is always a danger in using the words of others. Whatever is gained by the beauty of the quotation may be lost in the jar of the styles, and the quote itself may be marred. A particularly good style, like a particularly bad style, may be marred by any kind of contrast; good spells and bad spells may both be broken by countercharms. On the other hand a good style may show up whatever it is compared with, and the critic may thus discredit himself by letting the light of the critiqued through. For a critic in my position, that is, of course, almost the best of all possible outcomes: if the reader were to set aside the stumbling suggestions of the present writer to make their own reasonable judgements on the original, his work is done. There is, however, a sufficient reason for inserting this sample of Browne’s stately prose and slow sentences. In it are the essentials of his argument, and it betrays them with such simplicity as might otherwise be lost in the subsequent meanderings of his thoughts. There is something else in it too, if only accidentally: a hint of the kind of caution we must take when striding across the centuries to meet him.

The argument I need not repeat, except to explain it further. As a rational man, he is also a Christian man, and he wants to show that the two are not at odds: that it is not a heresy to be a doctor, nor does reason dilute theology. Here he puts the argument in the form of a defence: he asserts that despite the appearances, he is what he is. He is justifying himself and explaining himself, like a soldier of the mind standing trial for his actions and attitudes. Thus far the argument is straightforward, and exactly what we might expect it to be.

But let us dwell for a moment on this fable of the soldier on trial, for it shall illustrate the peculiarity of Browne’s case. Not to make the soldier too much like the cavalier and bearded antiquarian, let this soldier be clean shaven and tidy; but he has been on campaign for a long time, and there is a heaviness about his brow and dark rings beneath his eyes. His clothes are worn but clean: there are no loose threads, no smears, no stains. I suppose his philosophy is to be as essentially a soldier as he can, to fit his role perfectly. It is a soldier’s duty to uphold order. Is it any less his duty to kill creases than to kill Cossacks, if both are breaking the peace?

Now, with due consideration of the risks, he has availed himself of the postal system, to send a nice note to his mother, and the burden thereof is thus: that he has unfailingly brushed his teeth twice a day, and no eye can testify that it has ever lighted on a stain on his clothes, though, to his dismay, he has not had the chance to wash them for a week: but he wipes each spot of mud so soon as it comes to his ever-vigilant attention. That, further, he has ever regarded the disorderly recreations of his undisciplined companions with scorn and distaste, so that his mother need not worry about him in the slightest; and so on, and so forth.

The collector of the post was a short and portly man with all the signs of a deep British respectability. He delivered the letter as far as the next station, where it was picked up by a tall and quiet collector, who took it to the third station, where it was taken by an absent-minded student filling in for the regular postman; and he, taking a wrong turn, was waylaid by Huns.

The great Attila, the Scourge of God, was notorious throughout the civilised world for his savagery, but he was notorious among his omophagous subjects for his cleanliness, which extended so far as regularly wearing clean clothes and remaining sober amidst the debauchery of his court. Apart from these eccentricities, and a curious delight in reading intercepted postcards, he was every inch a barbarian. When this particular postcard fell into his hands, it caused him a perplexity bordering on amusement. As it happened, his beard was still dripping with the juice of a tough lump of raw flesh, which he had not sat on long enough to soften; his tunic of mouse-skins was, on this occasion, still stained with the filth of a recent massacre, and he was just setting himself to recline on his crude equivalent of a throne, when the missive was brough to him. For a while he puzzled over the dreadfully incriminating comments made by the young dragoon. He did not quite understand the reference to the brushing of teeth, but in its context it sounded suspiciously civil; the comment about wiping stains from his clothes was of course dangerously pretentious, and best buried in oblivion; and as to his obvious antisocial tendencies, it was simply beyond belief for the disingenuous despot: even he, who feared no man’s opinion, sometimes tried to hide it when he felt disinclined to carouse with his soldiery. After a while, he broke out into a snorting chuckle of uncomprehension, looked askance, and filed the postcard away in his saddlebag with the leftover meat. He had decided that this soldier must be a curiosity, whose modest entertainment value resided in his quaint and unparalleled individuality, made, and mangled, by the unfortunate stain of a civilised nature.

Something of the same kind has happened with the physician, if we allow that he really was rather unique, and certainly not tidy to the point of lifelessness, while we are in some respects dissimilar to the Huns. The twentieth-century critics were willing to believe that he was unique and entertaining, if not quite ingenious; but they were blind to the differences between their values and his, and considered what are actually signal successes to be self-incriminations. This cast of enlightened critics found that the central argument kept slipping their minds: it was apparently hard for them to remember that the physician was not out to prove his reasonability in spite of his religion, but rather to prove is religion in spite of his reasonability. They were not bad critics: they proved admirably able to be dazzled by his insights; they had no trouble when it came to paraphrase and précis; but then in a burst of sudden silliness they would cry, “and here he forgets himself, and sinks into superstition”. By superstition, they mean traditional Christianity: and if we allow that sense – though it is hardly reasonable – Browne’s primary purpose is to prove that he is very superstitious.

If this doctor lived in our own day, he would perhaps be more concerned to prove that he is not superstitious – that traditional Christianity is not superstitious. Living when he did, he had to labour against disapproving critics who said that he was not a Christian; but in our own day his project would be to explode these approving critics, who only regret that he is a Christian. Thus we are led to the second reason I have reproduced his opening words in full: it shows in what sense Thomas Browne was a man of his time.

Smatterings of the Philosopher’s Stone – Chapter 2, part 1: On Moderation

It goes without saying that we live in an age of extremes; chiefly because it goes with a lot of saying. As a matter of fact, we live in an age of moderation, too, and, it may be, of more moderation than extremes. Of course there are those who would abolish private property, whom we call socialists, and there are those who would abolish public property, whom we call conspiracy theorists. There are those who would reinvent gender, and those who would uninvent gender; there are those who would dispense with the West and there are those who would dispense with humankind. There are luddites and flat-earthers, ultra-atheists and fundamentalists, Buddhist ascetics and environmentalist ascetics. Whether there are more extremes in our century than in previous centuries, and whether they represent a greater portion of the population, I do not pretend to know; which of the extremes are best, and which are necessary, everyone is at liberty to decide for themselves. But whether all extremes should be avoided because they are extremes is a question of great moment, and it is that question that concerns us here. We all realise, even us extremists, that if the world swung to any extreme, even our own, it would be cataclysmic and calamitous. It might be worthwhile, it might bear good fruit; but it would be a revolution nonetheless. That means it would be dangerous, and if the wrong revolution had its way, we dare not think of the results. It is dangerous to play with fire, though we might with due consideration do so; and it is dangerous to play with revolution, even if a revolution is necessary.

But it is also dangerous to play with moderation. Taken too far, moderation would send the world up in flames as rapidly as any revolution. I say this with regard to a particular variety – unfortunately a particularly popular variety. It is one thing to be neither communist nor capitalist because you are something quite different – I take the example merely for its convenience; and as the Swiss are neither French nor German, because they are something else. Again, you might be neither because you have not thought about the topic; and that is respectable, since you are not likely, by yourself, to have much say in the social structure of your society. But it is quite another thing to be neither communist nor capitalist because either would be too extreme; to be nothing else, if not pure and undefined moderation; to see merit in both, but believe they take their ideas too far, as if ideas are redeemed by being lukewarm. This is the philosophy of the idle oracle, μηδὲν ἄγαν, nothing in excess, both sides have merits, but both are over the top. And it is a powerful thing, this affable unenthusiasm; it too is a firebrand. The day when the world as a whole falls into this apathy will be a fearful day, a day of darkness and thick gloom, a day when all things will be thrown into immeasurable confusion. Nation will fall before nation and the land will be thrown into the sea, when amiability reigns supreme. A simple land dispute will be enough to ignite the world: for though wars and the clashing of passions will be no more, doubts and disputes will remain, and they will be settled by no definite decision, but by a vague dismissal, and vast swathes of uncertain territory will spring up between all sovereign states. The states themselves will be set in silent upheaval, and they will fall into uncomplaining anarchy as all sorts of rival rules and rival rulers spring up, and merit is found in all, but nothing is taken too far, and nothing is taken exclusively. The sea has always fought the land for supremacy, but that quarrel too will come to an end, when, as was the case with Holland of old, all lands will become netherlands, neither lands nor seas. And when the blue planet has become the bog planet, and the flat-earthers have been pacified by the tender of a hemisphere, or perhaps a hollow bowl, the revolution against all revolutions will climb the ladder of the stars, leaving the nebulae more nebulous than ever before, and gradually upsetting any sense of clarity and definition, until at last it finds, beyond the blazing ramparts of the world, half a God on half a throne, who is himself half Hindu, half Christian, half Muslim, half Shinto, and may not, in fact, be God, after all. The real God (if he is different) may or may not have been killed by Nietzsche, but which is the case will not then be considered a matter of much importance. Nothing will  be left intact, because clarity requires decisiveness.

For this philosophy of compromise is not a matter of agreeing to disagree; it is a matter of agreeing to dismiss. When you agree to disagree, you leave it understood that one of you is right, and the other is wrong, and who is what may in time become apparent, and then you will be compelled to agree. It is a risky business. But to agree to dismiss, or to agree not to be too precise, is only saved from being risky by being hopeless. In the end, you might not be wrong, but you certainly will never be right, and in one sense you will inevitably be more wrong than others who were decisive and were decisively wrong. They at least tried to be right.

To understand any philosophy worthy of the name, one must realise that this halfway house philosophy is not the only house halfway. It is possible to be moderate without being vague or compromising, and it is possible to be moderate without being lukewarm. It is even advisable, in many cases. With those who have the good sense to say they are neither hot nor cold because they do not yet know which is better, we have no concern at present, except to note that they exist, and, though neither hot nor cold, they have this in their favour, that they are not lukewarm by preference. But the possibility of being very precise in one’s opinions without being one-sided is one of the fundamental facts in many questions of philosophy. Even the extreme positions can only be properly appreciated when we recognise that they represent rejection not only of the other extreme, but also of a defensible middle position; and those who take up a moderate stance are often misjudged when we assume they are moderate because they lack enthusiasm or have no strong opinions.

The basic premise of Religio Medici is that Browne is neither an atheist nor an anti-intellectual, not because he lacks strong opinions, but because he has strong opinions. He does not waver because he sees unique merits in both sides; rather he sees merits that each of them lack in a third position, his own. Nor does he think they have gone too far: he simply thinks they have gone wrong. The same may be said of another conflict that makes itself felt in this little treatise, the conflict of sects. He is neither a Roman Catholic nor an extreme Protestant – once again, not because he lacks religious convictions, but because he has them, and those convictions are neither Romanist nor Puritan, but something else altogether. And in this case we might add that he respects both the Catholics and the Puritans, but not because he sees each as having its own unique merits, and believes that no one position is perfect anyway: rather he respects their opinions because he thinks it is right to respect peoples’ opinions. Thus we may say that on these two great questions of religion he is not lukewarm and compromising, but in a way fanatical while moderate; and we may add that he is uncompromisingly respectful.

That is the tenor of the little book called Religio Medici. It is masked by two circumstances, one of which is praiseworthy in him, and the other blameworthy in us. In the first place, there are issues in which he confesses himself uncertain; and, being a man of real humility, and intrepid curiosity, he does not try to make them seem smaller than they are. Thus though it is true that he is sometimes willing to concede ignorance and openly resort to speculation and scepticism, the claim that Religio Medici is speculative and sceptical is indefensible. Yet this is precisely what some critics say. For in the second place, there is that general assumption that to be moderate is to be undogmatic. People will read Browne and praise all that is moderate as undogmatic, and all that is dogmatic as extreme. This is an insane estimation: it is sometimes the exact opposite. He is often noticeably dogmatic about his moderate positions; and at times it is his mere fancies that are extreme.

The point may be put another way. We are always apt to read our own ideas into authors we like; and one critic, doubtless enthralled by Browne and disgusted by theology, infers that Browne, like him, had no interest in theology. If I may speculate about the critic, who is an outstanding biographer, but tends to wear his convictions on his sleeve, I would venture to say that he associates theology with dogma and dogma with narrow-mindedness; but he is sure that Browne is not narrow-minded, so he is sure that Browne does not care for theology. Now, this is precisely the kind of reasoning we cannot allow, for it is precisely the reasoning that Religio Medici was written to refute. The thesis of the book is that though Browne is a scientist and a liberal-minded man, he is still a Christian, and not only a Christian, but a committed Christian, and even a theological Christian. He states this in no uncertain terms at the beginning of the book, and he is still proclaiming it, with a built-up richness, in  the last words of the book.

Another critic describes Browne as ‘above all undogmatic’; and he has made the same mistake. Browne is not undogmatic, he simply has better, sounder dogmas than the average Englishman of his time. For he is moderate, peaceable, and amiable, and it is his unbending dogmas that make him so.

I stress this principle from the outset, not simply because it is important in itself, nor because so many critics who have not considered it have made such strange comments about Browne as a result, but rather because it is the central thesis of Religio Medici. Insofar as that rambling and reflective journal has any theme binding it together, the theme is that a broad-minded and moderate man can like Browne can still have a deep and dogmatic theology. As I have said, this is the theme he announces at the outset; and it is about time that I quoted the passage in full.

Smatterings of the Philosopher’s Stone – Chapter 1, part 7 (conclusion)

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.

Smatterings of the Philosopher’s Stone – Chapter 1, part 6

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.

Smatterings of the Philosopher’s Stone – Chapter 1, part 5

The two revolutions contaminated each other in both directions. Thirty years after the publication of Copernicus’ work, the revolution on earth spread to the heavens, and strange beasts and birds were discovered in the sky – the mysterious nova stella, the ‘new star’ first recorded by Tycho Brahe; the comet, or ‘Long-haired Star’ of Halley, long known, but now by Kepler shown to be beyond the sphere of the moon; the spots on the sun – the spot of Jupiter – the moons of Jupiter – the rings of Saturn. By 1647 there was a competent atlas of the moon in circulation, marred only by the fact that it did not mark capital cities or national highways. Save for the lack of life and its luxuriance, the heavens were as full of prodigies as the earth.

More important is the fact that the revolution in the heavens climbed down Jacob’s ladder and threatened to swallow the revolution on earth. It landed first on the young man Galileo, who applied the kind of mathematical laws that govern the swinging circuits of stars to the swinging circuits of pendulums. And though he, too, was an explorer – chiefly an explorer of the skies – he was first and foremost a physicist describing motion on earth. In doing so he added a new limb to modern science. When faced with a dodo, a scientist’s best resort is to describe its strange qualities and compare it with its closer avian cousins. There is no rhyme or reason to the productions of nature; they are always functional, and they are always ingenious, but they are always unpredictable. But Galileo discovered that if you drop the dodo, it will behave very predictably. It will in fact behave with a mathematical regularity astonishing for a bird of the dodo’s intelligence. It will not diverge in the slightest from the strict formula described by the mysterious symbols in ‘s = ½at²’. With complete disregard for the complexity of the dodo, these scientists discovered the simplicity of all things. They were empiricists and observationalists, in that they insisted on checking all their data with their own eyes; but they produced an account of the world readily accessible even by the blind, and by the anti-empiricists. While one party of scientists were exploring the visible dimension of nature, the other were exploring the invisible dimension of nature. The first group is represented by L’Encyclopédie, a systematic and philosophical collection of curiosities compiled by Diderot and D’Alembert, and the first modern encyclopaedia. The second is represented by a particular geometrical textbook that makes frequent reference to entities bearing remarkable parallels in name and nature to entities observed in the real world, written by a man named Newton, and called, significantly, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. The scientific revolution was animated not by one, but by two spirits.

To our minds, the revolution of discovery may seem, on the whole, somewhat less scientific than the Copernican revolution, when we consider that Copernicus made his discovery by laying aside old theories and examining evidence, while Columbus made his discoveries by sailing a little further than most, and the humanists invented scholarship from the happenstance that gave them more manuscripts than they had possessed before. Now, we must realise how much of our modern science was obtained in this way. The art of going to look, the art of reporting and the art of organising, between them built up the bulk of our knowledge. It is true that the basics of our worldview were not discovered in that way. If there were three continents, and not seven, our worldview would be substantially the same. If we did not know about the dinosaurs, we would probably not have different opinions in religion or philosophy. The spirit of Solomon did not make us modern. That is why typical histories of the scientific revolution scarcely mention these great progresses. You will not find in them the biography of Magellan, or the history of Padua’s gardens. You will rarely find the bare names of Gesner and Fuchs, though the one was the father of zoology and the other of botany. Tycho Brahe will be praised, but not for his catalogue of stars. Viète and Napier will be ignored as irrelevant, for they only contributed to the paltry art of abstract mathematics. Valla and Erasmus will be neglected, because they only contributed to the negligible science of scholarship. But Copernicus will be there. Galileo will be there. Kepler will make his appearance. And Newton will be accorded his crown. What is the standard of distinction? Why are the astronomers in favour, and the biologists out of favour? It is not a matter of relative importance. It is not a matter of originality, for just as the botanists and zoologists and explorers continued old traditions and fulfilled what were, in the end, medieval dreams, so also the astronomers merely made new discoveries using medieval methods. The great difference is that the astronomers were theoretical in their approach to nature. They sought out, not the facts of nature, but the logic of nature. The anatomists and zoologists took a new census of the world, and revised the old accounts of its population and particulars. The astronomers revised the law code. They are responsible for the fact that scientific revolution changed not only the world viewed but also the worldview in the West.

When that is understood it is possible to account for the general feeling that Browne is less than scientific, though he is in fact thoroughly scientific, and the fact that he appears more medieval than his contemporaries, though in fact it is not so. If by ‘scientific’ we mean ‘like our own scientists,’ he is not very scientific. If we use the present as the standard by which we judge the past, he will fall far short of his age – his operations resemble those of a twenty-first century scientist very little. It is in the mathematical revolution that the modern spirit is most apparent, though it accounts for only a small part of the modern mind. All of us carry around in our heads an enormous amount of general knowledge, and most of us carry around in our heads very few scientific formulae; but when we imagine a scientist, we expect them to be full of formulae. The kind of expertise we expect of Browne is not the kind of expertise Browne has.

Now, it should be enough to prove that the kind of expertise Browne had was vital in his own age. But I will not limit myself to that. It is a fact that the kind of expertise Browne had was, in spite of us, vital to the creation of our age. I do not say we each know more today than our ancestors of six hundred years ago; but we certainly know a greater variety, since our world stretches to seven continents, ten planets, and six thousand global years of human history. These things were not discovered by calculation: they were discovered by observation. It was not Newtonian calculations that derived Sargon from Akkad, but a spade and linguistics. Nor was it the subtle process of addition that increased the continents from three to seven: it was sails and sailors. In spite of this, Galileo seems more modern than Browne. If it comes to it, Newton seems more modern than Diderot. The reason is not that Galileo is more modern than Browne, or Newton more modern than Diderot. One might with equal justice deduce the explanation that Browne and Diderot are more modern than Galileo and Newton. At any rate, more modern people are like Browne than are like Galileo. That is to say, more of us are concerned with processing and comprehending the vast amounts of information that are fed to us, than with investigating in detail the formulae they follow.

Most of us, that is, are broader than we are deep. The science we are fed today is dogmatic. Most of us do not discover things for ourselves, but sift through the things we are told in the hopes of finding the probable truth. Often we do not even sift; we simply take for truth what we cannot believe would be fabricated. The practice we follow is that of the researchers and investigators, not of the mathematical analysts. But then, those of us who do not consider ourselves scientists expect our scientists to be clear and dogmatic; we expect science to be assertive and lucid; if fascinating, still factual, if intriguing, yet indubitable. We are mere researchers ourselves, but expect our experts to talk like the mathematicians. That is why, when we read Browne with his scientific rumours, tracing through ancient tomes reports of the phoenix, to conclude that the evidence for it is insufficient, we feel a little superior: he ought to simply assert what to us seems evident: he is not omniscient and therefore seems unscientific. It does not matter that we ourselves know that the phoenix does not exist purely from books, and not because we have searched the whole world for one. But when we read the dry calculations of the Principia Mathematica, we happily forget that the author dabbled in alchemy and allegorised prophecies: he speaks like a scientist, so he seems modern.

That should not cast suspicion on Newton; it should rather cast suspicion on us. We are the ones who find Newton so scientific and Browne so unscientific. Newton speaks in the spirit of Pythagoras, who said that all is number; and Browne speaks in the spirit of Solomon, who said that the wise man stores up knowledge. And today, the streets are not filled with minor Newtons. They are filled with minor Solomons. Perhaps the spirit of Solomon did not make us modern, but it is one of the basic traits of the modern mind. Newton may have done a great deal to make us what we are, but few of us think like Newton. It is our broad knowledge, not deep knowledge, that makes our identity. It is not the precision but the preponderance of our knowledge that underlies our philosophies. To people such as us the nature of Newton is alien and the nature of Browne is familiar. We do not desire to be more abstract in our view of the world, and to see in all movements the operation of inertia, in all elements the immigrations and emigrations of electrons, and in the tides the geometry of gravity. Sooner we would be more concrete in our view of the world. This is the basis of most of our leisure employment; it explains, for instance, why we prefer to read real stories with characters rather than bare and undeveloped plot structures. It is the reason for the existence of tourism. The arch-heresy in tourism is Newtonianism: the idea that a tide is a tide wherever it is on earth, and a mountain is a mountain whether it be in England or in India. The sacred creed of the tourist is that a mountain is not a mountain: that the Himalayas are not the same as the Andes, as a kiwi is not the same as emu. The only thing keeping tourism afloat is that we are not all scientists of the Newtonian kind. If a man turned that science into a philosophy, it would strip all things of their individuality, and all the infinite variations of the world of their freshness. Read as philosophy, there is a deep and destructive disillusionment in the Principia Mathematica. ‘Of natural effects of the same kind the causes are the same: as of respiration in man and beast, the fall of a stone in Europe and America, light in a kitchen fire and in the sun, light reflected from the earth and from the planets.’ The principle, of course, any scientist would agree with: the spirit, taken to its extreme, not even Newton could bear. But that is the extreme Newton verges on. Browne verges on the other.

For though Browne would agree with the principle, and can speak of the ‘mystical mathematics of the city of Heaven’, he is not a stranger to the strangeness of nature, its complexity, its variety, and the individuality of all things. He chooses to know many things rather than the ‘one thing necessary’. He knows almost the limits of nature though he has only a mediocre knowledge of its laws. That, for him, as for Vesalius, and for Magellan, is what it means to be scientific. And they are not wrong. Did Newton know more of the world than the explorers? They certainly had a richer relationship with it.

Smatterings of the Philosopher’s Stone – Chapter 1, part 4

The revolution in scientific theory was deep, though perhaps narrow as a result. It begins with Copernicus, and ends, if it has ended, with Newton. In a broad sense, it did not discover new entities, but rather rediscovered old entities. It began with the theory that the earth orbits the sun and is in sympathy with the theory that matter is empty space and irrational energies. Neither earth nor the sun nor matter are new discoveries. In fact, they are some of the most basic realities – we learn to call them familiar almost before we are out of the womb, long before it is revealed to us that they are not so familiar after all. The method of this science is mathematical, and it measures more than it explains. It is an art for specialists; it is the art of empirical calculation.

The revolution in research, as I am compelled to call it, was broad, though it might be seen as shallow. It is impossible to say precisely where it began, but we will not be far off if we nominate Columbus, and say that it begins with him and ends, if it has ended, with Diderot. It is this revolution, something quite distinct from the work of Newton, that accounts for the great difference in scale between the medieval mind and our own minds. The medieval thinker is not less intelligent, nor less diligent, but he has less information to deal with. He may even be a better thinker as a result; but at the expense of having less to think about. All the greatest thoughts and truths are there for him, but far fewer of the insignificant truths. He has less information to sort through. The revolution lies in the fact that, between the invention of the printing press and the printing of the first encyclopaedia, such a vast amount of knowledge and information was introduced into the Western World. If all scientists worked like Galileo and Kepler and Newton, the stock of knowledge would have increased only very slightly; the truths uncovered would be vitally important, but they would be very few. And yet the stock of knowledge was vastly increased, and much of the new information was of what we would call a scientific nature. If we had to point to scientists associated with this, they would not be lacking: all those of the type of Vesalius and Boyle and Hooke.

Both revolutions, the revolution in theories and the revolution in research, were scientific, in that both were empirical, and contributed incalculably to the modern mind. But they are opposite in that one said, look, and you shall see; and the other said, think, and you shall realise that you do not see. To discover America, you merely pull back the curtain of the Atlantic, and believe what you see. To discover gravity, you must pull back that curtain of the senses, and see with your intellect what with your senses and your commonsense you cannot see. Commonsense, aided by the senses, tells you that things fall because they are heavy, or through some kind of magnetism. Commonsense says that a heavier object falls faster. The scientist first dispels commonsense, by dropping cannonballs from the leaning tower of Pisa, and then sidelines the senses, by describing mathematically the precise rate of the fall. You will not find a single person on earth who can testify that, with their unaided senses, they saw the inverse square law in operation. At best they saw something that tallied with it. In the end, modern scientific theories are a scourge to the senses: the experts can tell us whatever they like – it might even contradict the witness of the senses – and we will have to believe them, for the very good reason that they are generally right and our senses are almost systematically wrong. If we can believe in quantum mechanics, what can we not believe in? The earth does not seem to move, and, as the court of clergymen pointed out, the wisest ancients all speak as though it does not. ‘And yet,’ as Galileo might have said, though he did not – ‘and yet it moves’.

This side of science comes from what historians and scientists call, with a rare flash of humour, the Copernican revolution. To understand the reason for this, one must understand the state of astronomy in the time of Copernicus. At the time, astronomy was, in practice, applied geometry. It was recognised that the stars and planets were regular and repetitive in their motions, but there were varying degrees of complexity. The stars were simple: they went around the earth every day, and had a yearly cycle as well. The sun, likewise, rose and set each day, and moved from North to South and North again by a fixed amount every year. The other planets – of which there were six, including the moon – were more complex, so more complex formulae were found to account for their seemingly erratic regularities. They moved now fast, now slow, now forward, now backward. Every time the astronomical tables recording the paths of the planets were improved, the accounts became more complicated or more flawed. For they rested on several assumptions which were, in fact, false, though they were, equally, quite reasonable. One assumption was that the planets orbited the earth, as, from our perspective, they do. Another assumption was that the planets moved in circles. As they did not seem to be moving around the earth in simple circles, it was inferred from the start that they must move in circles grafted onto the circles that orbited the earth – on epicycles. These assumptions were in their way reasonable. So was the assumption that nothing changed beyond the moon: four thousand years of astronomical observation had not uncovered anything directly suggesting the contrary.

So geometrical difficulties existed, and no new information to shed light on the stars was forthcoming. Hence the revolution in astronomy was not the result of a new discovery, nor even of a new method. On earth, explorers were uncovering continents in the oceans and manuscripts in the monasteries. But there would be no New World in the sky, unless some start should shoot down from the astral sphere to fight the sun for the dominion of the day. There would be no new scholarship of the sky, for there were no new manuscripts of Mars. Nor would there be a new botany of the moon, or an anatomy of Saturn. Hence the revolution in astronomy would not rest on the discovery of new marvels, but on shuffling the numbers and rearranging the old elements. It would be abstract, not concrete. It would be a revolution of logistics.

Here then is the familiar story: Copernicus published a book retaining the old system of cycles and epicycles, but grafting all the planetary epicycles onto the circle of the sun. Which, in the end, is as good as to say, everything revolves around the sun, and the earth might as well. Copernicus thought it did; his successor Tycho Brahe, though agreeing that the planets circle the sun, thought that the sun still circled the earth. On either system, the calculations became simpler, though there were still discrepancies in the figures: and having broken one of the indubitable laws of commonsense (that the great light that moves across the sky each day does, indeed, move across the sky) it became necessary to break another. Hence the bold vandal Kepler, who had a much greater desire for accuracy, not only agreed with Copernicus, but concluded that the planets do not orbit in orbits or cycle in circles, but rather orbit and cycle in ellipses: and the sun not quite at their centre.

These discoveries in astronomy are responsible for the mathematical side of the scientific revolution. We may almost say the mathematical revolution, for, as I have insisted, it is quite distinct in manner and style from the other side of the revolution, the revolution in research. The first revolution justifies one old term for what we call science, the term ‘natural philosophy’. The other revolution, which I shall shortly discuss, justifies the other old term, ‘natural history’. The one changed our understanding of the known universe, the other increased the scope of the information to be understood. The one analysed, the other annaled the world. The one comprehended the facts, the other collected the facts. No one now would doubt that Copernicus and Kepler were scientists, and enlightened men. As for the Copernican revolution, no one doubts it was a scientific revolution. As for the revolution in research, it strikes us as less scientific, and in some respects almost as accidental. But it is problematic to credit the one and criticise the other. By itself, the Copernican revolution would have improved our worldview little. The revolution in research was every bit as essential to the development of what we call science, and should call modernity. But let us trace its development.

Where it began is hard to say, for the medievals had always been obsessed with information. It was medieval man who first thought up systematic theology, and they majored on the bestiary. One of the most typically medieval faults in poetry is the habit of cataloguing: giving too much information. But to like to know is not the same as knowing; and one may like to know without putting in the required effort to find things out. If you trust the experts, you need not turn to your own experiments. Medieval scholars had an enormous faith in the theories of their experts; nearly as much faith as we have in the theories of our experts. Would it not be naïve to say that we are never misled by the bias or inexperience of our experts? In any case, it is certain that they frequently were.

In the time leading up to Copernicus, it suddenly became clear on all fronts how much further good thinkers could go than the experts, if they set their mind to it. At the same time, a wealth of information that the experts knew nothing about flooded in, through the early inter-continental ships, through the tubes of telescopes, and through the introduction of Greek into the educational curriculum. In the same century the printing press was invented, and the book trade blew up at an unbelievable rate. Where there had been a habit of laboriously ransacking a few dozens of books for quotes and curiosities, there was now the habit of swimming in hundreds of voluminous volumes. Where there had been the pastime of experimenting with optics, there was now a fully-fledged, ground-up rewriting of the old account of the material world. Where there had been luxuries brought in from the East second hand by mediterranean ships, there was now plentiful supply brought direct round the coasts of whole continents and from worlds hitherto unknown.

As a result of exploration, which took Europeans into every nook and cranny of the world, geography was the first science to be revolutionised. It is not typical to think of this as science, perhaps because exploration paid, and some think science should not. The same people think that technology is the natural result of science, and on both counts they are confused. The labour of exploration, though its motive was mercantile, was a work of investigation, of accurate observation and recording, and therefore it was scientific. Not the least significant distinction of modern life and thought is that it incorporates seven continents and global communication; not the least significant distinction of modern maps is that they do not trail off into vague unknowns ‘where be dragons’. There is no mystery of the East now; and there is no Hy Brasil or isle of paradise in the West. But if science can be motivated by mercantilism, the marvel is not that it was, in the matter of exploration, but rather that it was not, in the matter of invention. The myth that technology and science are inextricable is not new; it was current during the scientific revolution itself, for it was Francis Bacon who said that knowledge is power. He might have realised that knowledge is not power: knowledge is knowledge. Telescopes and microscopes came out the scientific revolution: the scientists helped themselves. But the first stirrings of practical technology for the improvement of life had to wait another century and more; and when they came, they came from tradesmen, not scientists. Those tradesmen and their Industrial Revolution are a whole different story.

 After geography, the next science to be revolutionised was anatomy. Modern anatomy has learnt to proclaim that humans are essentially apes. It began with a furious insistence that humans are not essentially apes. This original insistence tells us something more profound about its nature: it tells us that it is a science of discovery and of details. There are indeed certain broad resemblances between humans and apes – a family resemblance, if you will, or a hint of parody, as I suspect; but the details are different. The ancient expert whose textbooks lasted the length of the middle ages, Galen, had treated the difference as negligible, and had explained the human body by experimenting on apes. For this, and other reasons, his textbooks were rather imperfect, and it fell to a young professor named Vesalius to correct him. Correct him he did; but the spirit of correction quickly spilled over into a spirit of vindictive opposition. Galen the teacher became Galen the rival. He had to be surpassed and outdone in every way possible. There was an indignant independence – the old authority had deceived them. There were a boost in confidence – careful re-examination of the human body revealed a great deal of new information. It was as though a new science had been invented, though that was not the case. Only, a new life and spirit had been breathed into anatomy by these felt slights and felt successes.

Meanwhile, a dozen other sciences were flourishing on a diet of discovery; it filled the universities and drove a wedge through the church. The great influx of information was not a coordinated effort. The experimentalists were for abolishing the authorities, so that among them Galen and Aristotle fell into disrepute. The men of letters were still discovering new authorities, so that in the universities Galen and Aristotle – besides Homer and Plutarch and Sophocles and Thucydides – were fêted like kings. The explorers were not necessarily interested in either the science or the scholarship – and, since they were gambling on big money, they might have been inclined to sneer at both. Whatever the disunion in their ranks, though, their accomplishments were in the end the same: to increase the stock of raw information by deliberate and concentrated exploration. If we think that the increase of knowledge and the spirit of accuracy that brought it about are scientific, we cannot deny even the humanists of the universities their part in science. It was not white coats in laboratories that made the modern scientific mind.

While de Gama and Magellan were mapping the coastlines in boats, Eustachi and Fallopio were dissecting cadavers in small theatres. Mathematicians felt the winds of revitalisation too, in yet another environment – their ships being chairs and their cadavers quadratics. The scholars of plants prospered, the investigation of animals progressed. Observational astronomers discovered new stars, mapped out moons and scrutinised the faces of the planets. Metallurgy became systematic under the hands of Agricola. On all sides knowledge was increased. The microscope and the telescope, the barometer and the scientific clock revealed secrets beyond the reach of the hand and mind of man. After his long, forced medieval reverie on the vanity of all earthly things, Solomon had returned to his house of wisdom.

This is the context in which we find Browne. Like Vesalius, he is an investigator of details. He is not a whit less keen, devoted, or perceptive than the rest of them. If they were scientists, he too is a thoroughgoing scientist. It is, however, necessary to say a word or two about why he made so few and little discoveries himself. We must not let this detain us long: for in a large part, perhaps, it is owing to time and chance, which happen to all. For the rest, we must remember that a scientist and an innovator are two different things. A scientist is someone who pursues knowledge, not someone who finds the unknown. One of the more unique traits in Browne is that he has an interest in the details of all things: he is at least an historian, a botanist, an anatomist, a linguist, a theologian, and a philosopher: and before me I have an essay that lists no less than 27 distinct disciplines in which he was learned. He was as deep in book-learning as in empirical observation; and as he read omnivorously, he observed omnivorously. For this very reason his discoveries are small and disconnected; but it would be a mistake to think he is superficial. He is, perhaps, not as intense in any one field as most of the names that go down in scientific history, but he is thoroughly competent in all that he does. The small discoveries prove that. It was not by being superficial that he discovered grave-wax or called into doubt the origin of the word ‘dread’. It was by being a scientist.

In this regard, he was almost more of a scientist than his peers, even though that made him a less indispensable scientist. If science is driven by curiosity, his curiosity is second to none. If science is about exploring the knowledge available to human beings, his explorations took him much further than most. Vesalius made great discoveries in the human body, but scarce left the human body. Browne was accomplished in every field.