No More Learning

Whoo-ep! KEEP YOUR SEAT, HORACE! ” and the coach
dashed wildly through the procession, upsetting a portion of the
brass band, and violently grazing the wagon which contained
the beautiful young women in white.
Years hence, gray-haired men who were little boys in this
procession will tell their grandchildren how this stage tore
through Mud Springs, and how Horace Greeley's bald head ever
and anon showed itself like a wild apparition above the coach-
roof.
Mr. Monk was on time. There is a tradition that Mr. Greeley
was very indignant for a while: then he laughed and finally pre-
sented Mr. Monk with a brand-new suit of clothes. Mr. Monk
himself is still in the employ of the California Stage Company,
and is rather fond of relating a story that has made him famous
all over the Pacific coast. But he says he yields to no man in
his admiration for Horace Greeley.


## p. 2473 (#33) ############################################

2473
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
(1605-1682)
BY FRANCIS BACON
HEN Sir Thomas Browne, in the last decade of his life, was
asked to furnish data for the writing of his memoirs in
Wood's 'Athenæ Oxonienses,' he gave in a letter to his
friend Mr. Aubrey in the fewest words his birthplace and the places
of his education, his admission as “Socius Honorarius of the College
of Physitians in London, the date of his being knighted, and the
titles of the four books or tracts which he had printed; and ended
with «Have some miscellaneous tracts which may be published. ”
This account of himself, curter than
many an epitaph, and scantier in details
than the requirements of a census-taker's
blank, may serve, with many other signs
that one finds scattered among the pages
of this author, to show his rare modesty
and effacement of his physical self. He
seems, like some other thoughtful and
sensitive natures before and since, averse
or at least indifferent to being put on
record as an eating, digesting, sleeping,
and clothes-wearing animal, of that species
of which his contemporary Sir Samuel
Pepys stands as the classical instance, and SIR THOMAS BROWNE
which the newspaper interviewer of our
own day — that “fellow who would vulgarize the Day of Judg-
ment” — has trained to the most noxious degree of offensiveness.
Sir Thomas felt, undoubtedly, that having admitted that select
company —«fit audience though few) — who are students of the
Religio Medici' to a close intimacy with his highest mental pro-
cesses and conditions, his «separable accidents,” affairs of assimila-
tion and secretion as one may say, were business between himself
and his grocer and tailor, his cook and his laundress.
The industrious research of Mr. Simon Wilkin, who in 1836 pro-
duced the completest edition (William Pickering, London) of the lit-
erary remains of Sir Thomas Browne, has gathered from all sources
- his own note-books, domestic and friendly correspondence, allusions
of contemporary writers and the works of subsequent biographers -



## p. 2474 (#34) ############################################

2474
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
all that we are likely, this side of Paradise, to know of this great
scholar and admirable man.
The main facts of his life are as follows. He was born in the
Parish of St. Michael's Cheap, in London, on the 19th of October,
1605 (the year of the Gunpowder Plot). His father, as is apologetically
admitted by a granddaughter, Mrs. Littleton, “was a tradesman, a
mercer, though a gentleman of a good family in Cheshire” (generosa
familia, says Sir Thomas's own epitaph). That he was the parent of
his son's temperament, a devout man with a leaning toward mysti-
cism in religion, is shown by the charming story Mrs. Littleton tells
of him, exhibiting traits worthy of the best ages of faith, and more
to be expected in the father of a mediæval saint than in a prosperous
Cheapside mercer, whose son was to be one of the most learned and
philosophical physicians of the age of Harvey and Sydenham:—“His
father used to open his breast when he was asleep and kiss it in
prayers over him, as 'tis said of Origen's father, that the Holy Ghost
would take possession there. ” Clearly, it was with reverent memory
of this good man that Sir Thomas, near the close of his own long
life, wrote:–«Among thy multiplied acknowledgments, lift up one
hand unto heaven that thou wert born of honest parents; that inod-
esty, humility, patience, and vera
eracity lay in the same egg and came
into the world with thee. ”
This loving father, of whom one would fain know more, died in
the early childhood of his son Thomas. He left a handsome estate
of £9,000, and a widow not wholly inconsolable with her third por-
tion and a not unduly deferred second marriage to a titled gentleman,
Sir Thomas Dutton, -a knight so scantily and at the same time so
variously described, as a worthy person who had great places,” and
“a bad member” of “mutinous and unworthy carriage,” that one is
content to leave him as a problematical character.
The boy Thomas Browne being left to the care of guardians, his
estate was despoiled, though to what extent does not appear; nor
can it be considered greatly deplorable, since it did not prevent his
early schooling at that ancient and noble foundation of Winchester,
nor in 1623 his entrance into Pembroke College, Oxford, and in due
course his graduation in 1626 as bachelor of arts. With what special
assistance or direction he began his studies in medical science, cannot
now be ascertained; but after taking his degree of master of arts in
1629, he practiced physic for about two years in some uncertain
place in Oxfordshire. He then began a course of travel, unusually
extensive for that day. His stepfather upon occasion of his official
duties under the government “shewed him all Ireland in some vis-
itation of the forts and castles. ” It is improbable that Ireland at
that time long detained a traveler essentially literary in his tastes.


## p. 2475 (#35) ############################################

SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2475
Browne betook himself to France and Italy, where he appears to
have spent about two years, residing at Montpellier and Padua, then
great centres of medical learning, with students drawn from most
parts of Christendom. Returning homeward through Holland, he
received the degree of doctor of medicine from the University of
Leyden in 1633, and settled in practice at Halifax, England.
At this time — favored probably by the leisure which largely
attends the beginning of a medical career, but which is rarely so
laudably or productively employed, - he wrote the treatise Religio
Medici,' which more than any other of his works has established
his fame and won the affectionate admiration of thoughtful readers.
This production was not printed until seven years later, although
some unauthorized manuscript copies, more or less faulty, were in
circulation. When in 1642 “it arrived in a most depraved copy at
the press,” Browne felt it necessary to vindicate himself by publish-
ing a correct edition, although, he protests, its original intention
was not publick: and being a private exercise directed to myself,
what is delivered therein was rather a memorial unto me than an
example or rule unto any other. ”
In 1636 he removed to Norwich and permanently established him-
self there in the practice of physic. There in 1641. he married
Dorothy Mileham, a lady of good family in Norfolk; thereby not
only improving his social connections, but securing a wife of such
symmetrical proportion to her worthy husband both in the graces
of her body and mind, that they seemed to come together by a
kind of natural magnetism. ” Such at least was the view of an inti-
mate friend of more than forty years, Rev. John Whitefoot, in the
Minutes) which, at the request of the widow, he drew up after Sir
Thomas's death, and which contain the most that is known of his
personal appearance and manners. Evidently the marriage was a
happy one for forty-one years, when the Lady Dorothy was left
mastissima conjux, as her husband's stately epitaph, rich with many
an issimus, declares. Twelve children were born of it; and though
only four of them survived their parents, such mortality in carefully
tended and well-circumstanced families was less remarkable than it
would be now, when two centuries more of progress in medical sci-
ence have added security and length to human life.
The good mother — had she ngt endeared herself to the modern
reader by the affectionate gentleness and the quaint glimpses of
domestic life that her family letters reveal — would be irresistible
by the ingeniously bad spelling in which she reveled, transgressing
even the wide limits then allowed to feminine heterography.
It is noteworthy that Dr. Browne's professional prosperity was
not impaired by the suspicion which early attached to him, and soon


## p. 2476 (#36) ############################################

2476
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
deepened into conviction, that he was addicted to literary pursuits.
He was in high repute as a physician. His practice was extensive,
and he was diligent in it, as also in those works of literature and
scientific investigation which occupied all snatches of time,” he
says, “as medical vacations and the fruitless importunity of uroscopy
would permit. ” His large family was liberally reared; his hospitality
and his charities were ample.
In 1646 he printed his second book, the largest and most operose
of all his productions: the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Inquiries into
Vulgar and Common Errors,' the work evidently of the hora subsecive
of many years. In 1658 he gave to the public two smaller but
important and most characteristic works, Hydriotaphia' and 'The
Garden of Cyrus. ' Beside these publications he left many manu-
scripts which appeared posthumously; the most important of them,
for its size and general interest, being Christian Morals. ?
When Sir Thomas's long life drew to its close, it was with all the
blessings “which should accompany old age. His domestic life had
been one of felicity. His eldest and only surviving son, Edward
Browne, had become a scholar after his father's own heart; and
though not inheriting his genius, was already renowned in London,
one of the physicians to the King, and in a way to become, as after-
ward he did, President of the College of Physicians. All his daugh-
ters who had attained womanhood had been well married. He lived
in the society of the honorable and learned, and had received from
the King the honor of knighthood. *
Mr. John Evelyn, carrying out a long and cherished plan of see-
ing one whom he had known and admired by his writings, visited
him at Norwich in 1671. He found Sir Thomas among fit surround-
ings, “his whole house and garden being a paradise and cabinet of
rarities, and that of the best collections, especially medails, books,
* As for this business of the knighting, one hesitates fully to adopt Dr. John-
son's remark that Charles II. (had skill to discover excellence and virtue to
reward it, at least with such honorary distinctions as cost him nothing. ” A
candid observer of the walk and conversation of this illustrious monarch finds
room for doubt that he was an attentive reader or consistent admirer of the
(Religio Medici, or (Christian Morals); and though his own personal history
might have contributed much to a complete catalogue of Vulgar Errors,
Browne's treatise so named did not include divagations from common decency
in its scope, and so may have failed to impress the royal mind. The fact
is that the King on his visit to Norwich, looking about for somebody to
knight, intended, as usual on such occasions, to confer the title on the mayor
of the city; but this functionary,- some brewer or grocer perhaps, of whom
nothing else than this incident is recorded, - declined the honor, whereupon
the gap was stopped with Dr. Browne.


## p. 2477 (#37) ############################################

SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2477
never
.
plants, and natural things. ”* Here we have the right background and
accessories for Whitefoot's portrait of the central figure:
“His complexion and hair
answerable to his name, his stature
moderate, and habit of body neither fat nor lean but ei oápkos;
seen to be transported with mirth or dejected with sadness; always cheerful,
but rarely merry at any sensible rate; seldom heard to break a jest, and
when he did, apt to blush at the levity of it: his gravity was natural
without affectation. His modesty
visible in a natural habitual blush,
which was increased upon the least occasion, and oft discovered without any
observable cause.
So free from loquacity or much talkativeness, that
he was something difficult to be engaged in any discourse; though when he
was so, it was always singular and never trite or vulgar. ”
A man of character so lofty and self-contained might be expected
to leave a life so long, honorable, and beneficent with becoming dig-
nity. Sir Thomas's last sickness, a brief but very painful one, was
"endured with exemplary patience founded upon the Christian philos-
ophy,” and “with a meek, rational, and religious courage,” much to
the edification of his friend Whitefoot. One may see even a kind of
felicity in his death, falling exactly on the completion of his seventy-
seventh year.
He was buried in the church of St. Peter Mancroft, where his
monument still claims regard as chief among the memorabilia of that
noble sanctuary. t
At the first appearance of Browne's several publications, they
attracted that attention from the learned and thoughtful which they
have ever since retained. The Religio Medici' was soon translated
into several modern languages as well as into Latin, and became
* These two distinguished authors were of congenial tastes, and both cul-
tivated the same Latinistic literary diction. Their meeting must have occas-
ioned a copious effusion of those long-tailed words in osity and ation »
which both had so readily at command or made to order. It is regrettable
that Evelyn never completed a work entitled 'Elysium Brittannicum) which he
planned, and to which Browne contributed a chapter (Of Coronary Plants. ”
It would have taken rank with its author's (Sylva) among English classics.
+In the course of repairs, «in August, 1840, his coffin was broken open
by a pickaxe; the bones were found in good preservation, the fine auburn
hair had not lost its freshness. ” It is painful to relate that the cranium was
removed and placed in the pathological museum of the Norwich Hospital,
labeled as the gift of some person (name not recalled), whose own cranium
is probably an object of interest solely to its present proprietor. «Who knows
the fate of his own bones ?
We insult not over their ashes,” says Sir
Thomas. The curator of the museum feels that he has a clever joke on the
dead man, when with a grin he points to a label bearing these words from
the (Hydriotaphia): – «To be knaved out of our graves, to have our skulls
made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned into pipes to delight and sport our
enemies, are tragical abominations escaped in burning burials. ”


## p. 2478 (#38) ############################################

2478
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
the subject of curiously diverse criticism. The book received the
distinction of a place in the Roman Index Expurgatorius,' while from
various points of view its author was regarded as Romanist, an
atheist, a deist, a pantheist, and as bearing the number 666 some-
where about him.
A worthy Quaker, a fellow-townsman, was so impressed by his
tone of quietistic mysticism that he felt sure the philosophic doctor
was guided by “the inward light,” and wrote, sending a godly book,
and proposing to clinch his conversion in a personal interview. Such
are the perils that environ the man who not only repeats a creed in
sincerity, but ventures to do and to utter his own thinking about it.
From Browne's own day to the present time his critics and com-
mentators have been numerous and distinguished; one of the most
renowned among them being Dr. Johnson, whose life of the author,
prefixed to an edition of the Christian Morals) in 1756, is a fine
specimen of that facile and effective hack-work of which Johnson
was master. In that characteristic way of his, half of patronage,
half of reproof, and wholly pedagogical, he summons his subject
to the bar of his dialectics, and according to his lights adminis-
ters justice. He admits that Browne has great excellencies and
“uncommon sentiments, and that his scholarship and science are
admirable, but strongly condemns his style: “It is vigorous, but
rugged; it is learned, but pedantic; it is deep, but obscure; it strikes,
but does not please; it commands, but does not allure; his tropes
are harsh and his combinations uncouth. ”
Behemoth prescribing rules of locomotion to the swan! By how
much would English letters have been the poorer if Browne had
learned his art of Johnson!
Notwithstanding such objurgations, some have supposed that the
style of Johnson, perhaps without conscious intent, was founded upon
that of Browne. A tone of oracular authority, an academic Latinism
sometimes disregarding the limitations of the unlearned reader, an
elaborate balancing of antitheses in the same period, -- these are
qualities which the two writers have in common. But the resem-
blance, such as it is, is skin-deep. Johnson is a polemic by nature,
and at his best cogent and triumphant in argument. His thought is
carefully kept level with the apprehension of the ordinary reader,
while arrayed in a verbal pomp simulating the expression of some-
thing weighty and profound. Browne is intuitive and ever averse to
controversy, feeling, as he exquisitely says, that many have too
rashly charged the troops of error and remain as trophies unto the
enemies of truth. A man may be in as just possession of the truth
as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender. ” Calmly philosophic,
he writes for kindred minds, and his concepts satisfying his own
intellect, he delivers them with as little passion as an Æolian harp


## p. 2479 (#39) ############################################

SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2479
answering the wind, and lingers not for applause or explanation.
His being
« Those thoughts that wander through eternity,"
he means that we too shall “have a glimpse of incomprehensibles,
and thoughts of things which thoughts but tenderly touch. ”
How grandly he rounds his pregnant paragraphs with phrases
which for stately and compulsive rhythm, sonorous harmony, and
sweetly solemn cadences, are almost matchless in English prose, and
lack only the mechanism of metre to give them the highest rank as
verse.
«Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the
grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omit-
ting ceremonies of bravery in the infancy of his nature;) ( When
personations shall cease, and histrionism of happiness be over; when
reality shall rule, and all shall be as they shall be forever:” — such
passages as these, and the whole of the Fragment on Mummies,' one
can scarcely recite without falling into something of that chant which
the blank verse of Milton and Tennyson seems to enforce.
That the Religio Medici? was the work of a gentleman before
his thirtieth year, not a recluse nor trained in a cloister, but active
in a calling which keeps closest touch with the passions and frailties
of humanity, seems to justify his assertion, I have shaken hands
with delight [sc. by way of parting] in my warm blood and canic-
ular days. ” So uniformly lofty and dignified is its tone, and so.
austere its morality, that the book might be taken for the fruit of
those later and sadder years that bring the philosophic mind.
Its
frank confessions and calm analysis of motive and action have been
compared with Montaigne's: if Montaigne had been graduated after a
due education in Purgatory, or if his pedigree had been remotely
crossed with a St. Anthony and he had lived to see the fluctus
decumanus gathering in the tide of Puritanism, the likeness would
have been closer.
«The Religio Medici,” says Coleridge, is a fine portrait of a
handsome man in his best clothes. " There is truth in the criticism,
and if there is no color of a sneer in it, it is entirely true. Who
does not feel, when following Browne into his study or his garden,
that here is a kind of cloistral retreat from the common places of
the outside world, that the handsome man is a true gentleman and
a noble friend, and that his best clothes are his every-day wear?
This aloofness of Browne's, which holds him apart in the still air
of delightful studies,” is no affectation; it is an innate quality. He
thinks his thoughts in his own way, and the style is the man”
never more truly than with him. One of his family letters mentions
the execution of Charles I. as a “horrid murther, and another speaks


## p. 2480 (#40) ############################################

2480
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
as
of Cromwell as a usurper; but nowhere in anything intended for the
public eye is there an indication that he lived in the most tumultu-
ous and heroic period of English history. Not a word shows that
Shakespeare was of the generation just preceding his, nor that Milton
and George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, numerous as are the par-
allels in their thought and feeling and in his, were his contempo-
raries. Constant and extensive as are his excursions into ancient
literature, it is rare for him to make any reference to writers of his
own time.
Yet with all his delight in antiquity and reverence for the great
names of former ages, he is keen in the quest for new discoveries.
His commonplace books abound in ingenious queries and minute
observations regarding physical facts, conceived in the very spirit of
our modern school:-“What is the use of dew-claws in dogs? ” He
does not instantly answer, a schoolboy in this Darwinian day
would, “To carry out an analogy; but the mere asking of the ques-
tion sets him ahead of his age. See too his curious inquiries into the
left-footedness of parrots and left-handedness of certain monkeys and
squirrels. The epoch-making announcement of his fellow-physician
Harvey he quickly appreciates at its true value: “his piece De
Circul. Sang. ,' which discovery I prefer to that of Columbus. ” And
here again a truly surprising suggestion of the great results achieved
a century and two centuries later by Jenner and Pasteur - concerning
canine madness, whether it holdeth not better at second than at
first hand, so that if a dog bite a horse, and that horse a man, the
evil proves less considerable. ” He is the first to observe and describe
that curious product of the decomposition of flesh known to modern
chemists as adipocere.
He is full of eager anticipation of the future. "Join sense unto
reason,” he cries, and experiment unto speculation, and so give life
unto embryon truths and verities yet in their chaos.
What
libraries of new volumes after-times will behold, and in what a new
world of knowledge the eyes of our posterity may be happy, a few
ages may joyfully declare. ”
But acute and active as our author's perceptions were, they did
not prevent his sharing the then prevalent theory which assigned to
the devil, and to witches who were his ministers, an important part
in the economy of the world. This belief affords so easy a solution
of some problems otherwise puzzling, that this degenerate age may
look back with envy upon those who held it in serene and comfort-
able possession.
It is to be regretted, however, that the eminent Lord Chief Justice
Hale in 1664, presiding at the trial for witchcraft of two women,
should have called Dr. Browne, apparently as amicus curia, to give


## p. 2481 (#41) ############################################

SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2481
his view of the fits which were supposed to be the work of the
witches. He was clearly of the opinion that the Devil had even more
to do with that case than he has with most cases of hysteria; and
consequently the witches, it must be said, fared no better in Sir
Matthew Hale's court than many of their kind in various parts of
Christendom about the same time. But it would be unreasonable for
us to hold the ghost of Sir Thomas deeply culpable because, while
he showed in most matters an exceptionally enlightened liberality of
opinion and practice, in this one particular he declined to deny the
scientific dictum of previous ages and the popular belief of his own
time.
The mental attitude of reverent belief in its symbolic value, in
which this devout philosopher contemplated the material world, is
that of inany of those who have since helped most to build the
structure of Natural Science. The rapturous exclamation of Linnæus,
“My God, I think thy thoughts after thee! ) comes like an antiph-
onal response by “the man of flowers to these passages in the
(Religio Medici? : « This visible world is but a picture of the invisi-
ble, wherein, as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal
shapes, and as they counterfeit some real substance in that invisible
fabric. ” “Things are really true as they correspond unto God's con-
ception; and have so much verity as they hold of conformity unto
that intellect, in whose idea they had their first determinations. )
his. Bacon
FROM THE RELIGIO MEDICI
I
Could never divide myself from any man upon the difference
of an opinion, or be angry with his judgment for not agree-
ing with me in that from which within a few days I should
dissent myself. I have no genius to disputes in religion, and
have often thought it wisdom to decline them, especially upon a
disadvantage, or when the cause of truth might suffer in the
weakness of my patronage. Where we desire to be informed, 'tis
good to contest with men above ourselves; but to confirm and
establish our opinions, 'tis best to argue with judgments below
our own, that the frequent spoils and victories over their reasons
may settle in ourselves an esteem and confirmed opinion of our
own. Every man is not a proper champion for truth, nor fit to
take up the gauntlet in the cause of verity: many from the
V-156


## p. 2482 (#42) ############################################

2482
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
as
ignorance of these maxims, and an inconsiderate zeal for truth,
have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain
trophies unto the enemies of truth. A man may be in as just
possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender;
'tis therefore far better to enjoy her with peace, than to hazard
her on a battle: if therefore there rise any doubts in my way, I
do forget them, or at least defer them, till my better settled
judgment and more manly reason be able to resolve them; for I
perceive every man's own reason is his best Edipus, and will,
upon a reasonable truce, find a way to loose those bonds where-
with the subtleties of error have enchained our more flexible and
tender judgments. In philosophy, where truth seems double-
faced, there is no more paradoxical than myself: but in
divinity I love to keep the road; and though not in an implicit,
yet an humble faith, follow the great wheel of the Church, by
which I move, not reserving any proper poles or motion from the
epicycle of my own brain: by these means I leave no gap for
heresy, schisms, or errors.
man
As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties
in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they
never stretched the pia mater of mine: methinks there be not
impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith; the deep-
est mysteries ours contains have not only been illustrated, but
maintained, by syllogism and the rule of reason. I love to lose
myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an O altitudo!
'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those
involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, with Incarnation
and Resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan and
my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learned of Ter-
tullian, “Certum est quia impossibile est. ” I desire to exercise
my faith in the difficultest point; for to credit ordinary and vis-
ible objects is not faith, but persuasion. Some believe the better
for seeing Christ's sepulchre; and when they have seen the Red
Sea, doubt not of the miracle. Now contrarily, I bless myself
and am thankful that I live not in the days of miracles, that I
never saw Christ nor his disciples; I would not have been one
of those Israelites that passed the Red Sea, nor one of Christ's
patients on whom he wrought his wonders: then had my faith
been thrust upon me; nor should I enjoy that greater blessing
pronounced to all that believe and saw not. 'Tis an easy and


## p. 2483 (#43) ############################################

SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2483
necessary belief, to credit what our eye and sense hath exam-
ined: I believe he was dead and buried, and rose again; and
desire to see him in his glory, rather than to contemplate him
in his cenotaph or sepulchre. Nor is this much to believe; as
we have reason, we owe this faith unto history: they only had
the advantage of a bold and noble faith who lived before his
coming, who upon obscure prophecies and mystical types could
raise a belief and expect apparent impossibilities.
In my solitary and retired imagination,
“Neque enim cum lectulus aut me
Porticus excepit, desum mihi”.
a
I remember I am not alone, and therefore forget not to contem-
plate Him and his attributes who is ever with me, especially
those two mighty ones, His wisdom and eternity: with the one I
recreate, with the other I confound my understanding; for who
can speak of eternity without a solecism, or think thereof with-
out an ecstasy ? Time we may comprehend: it is but five days
older than ourselves, and hath the same horoscope with the world;
but to retire so far back as to apprehend a beginning, to give
such an infinite start forward as to conceive an end in an
essence that we affirm hath neither the one nor the other, it
puts my reason to St. Paul's sanctuary: my philosophy dares
not say the angels can do it; God hath not made a creature that
can comprehend him; it is a privilege of his own nature: I am .
that I am, was his own definition unto Moses; and it was
short one, to confound mortality, that durst question God or
ask him what he was. Indeed he only is; all others have and
shall be; but in eternity there is no distinction of tenses; and
therefore that terrible term predestination, which hath troubled
so many weak heads to conceive, and the wisest to explain, is in
respect to God no prescious determination of our states to come,
but a definitive blast of his will already fulfilled, and at the
instant that he first decreed it; for to his eternity, which is indi-
visible and all together, the last trump is already sounded, the
reprobates in the flame and the blessed in Abraham's bosom.
St. Peter speaks modestly when he saith, a thousand years to
God are but as one day; for to speak like a philosopher, those
continued instances of time which flow into a thousand years
make not to him one moment: what to us is to come, to his


## p. 2484 (#44) ############################################

2484
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
eternity is present, his whole duration being but one permanent
point, without succession, parts, flux, or division.
we owe
The world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied
and contemplated by man; 'tis the debt of our reason
unto God, and the homage we pay for not being beasts; without
this, the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was
before the sixth day, when as yet there was not a creature that
could conceive or say there was a world. The wisdom of God
receives small honor from those vulgar heads that rudely stare
about, and with a gross rusticity admire his works: those highly
magnify him whose judicious inquiry into his acts, and delib-
erate research into his creatures, return the duty of a devout and
learned admiration.
«Natura nihil agit frustra,” is the only indisputable axiom
in philosophy; there are no grotesques in nature; not anything
framed to fill up empty cantons and unnecessary spaces: in the
most imperfect creatures, and such as were not preserved in
the ark, but, having their seeds and principles in the womb of
nature, are everywhere where the power of the sun is— in these
is the wisdom of His hand discovered; out of this rank Solomon
chose the object of his admiration; indeed, what reason may not
go to school to the wisdom of bees, ants, and spiders ? what wise
hand teacheth them to do what reason cannot teach us? Ruder
heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature — whales,
elephants, dromedaries, and camels; these, I confess, are the
colossi and majestic pieces of her hand: but in these narrow
engines there is more curious mathematics; and the civility of
these little citizens more neatly sets forth the wisdom of their
Maker. Who admires not Regio-Montanus his fly beyond his
eagle, or wonders not more at the operation of two souls in those
little bodies, than but one in the trunk of a cedar? I could
never content my contemplation with those general pieces of
wonder, the flux and reflux of the sea, the increase of the Nile,
the conversion of the needle to the north; and have studied to
match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected
pieces of nature, which without further travel I can do in the
cosmography of myself: we carry with us the wonders we seek
without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we are
that bold and adventurous piece of nature which he that studies


## p. 2485 (#45) ############################################

SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2485
wisely learns in a compendium, what others labor at in a divided
piece and endless volume.
Thus there are two books from whence I collect my divinity:
besides that written one of God, another of his servant nature,
that universal and public manuscript that lies expansed unto the
eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one have discovered
him in the other. This was the Scripture and Theology of the
heathens: the natural motion of the sun made them more admire
him than its supernatural station did the children of Israel; the
ordinary effect of nature wrought more admiration in them than
in the other all his miracles: surely 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. Nor do I so
forget God as to adore the name of nature; which I define not,
with the schools, to be the principle of motion and rest, but that
straight and regular line, that settled and constant course the
wisdom of God hath ordained the actions of his creatures, accord-
ing to their several kinds. To make a revolution every day is
the nature of the sun, because of that necessary course which
God hath ordained it, from which it cannot swerve but by a
faculty from that voice which first did give it motion. Now this
course of nature God seldom alters or perverts, but, like an excel-
lent artist, hath so contrived his work that with the selfsame
instrument, without a new creation, he may effect his obscurest
designs. Thus he sweeteneth the water with a wood, preserveth
the creatures in the ark, which the blast of his mouth might
have as easily created; for God is like a skillful geometrician, who
when more easily, and with one stroke of his compass, he might
describe or divide a right line, had yet rather to do this in a
circle or longer way, according to the constituted and forelaid
principles of his art: yet this rule of his he doth sometimes per-
vert to acquaint the world with his prerogative, lest the arro-
gancy of our reason should question his power and conclude he
could not. And thus I call the effects of nature the works of
God, whose hand and instrument she only is; and therefore to
ascribe his actions unto her is to devolve the honor of the prin-
cipal agent upon the instrument; which if with reason we may
do, then let our hammers rise up and boast they have built our
houses, and our pens receive the honor of our writing.
I hold
there is a general beauty in the works of God, and therefore no


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2486
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
deformity in any kind of species whatsoever: I cannot tell by
what logic we call a toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly, they being
created in those outward shapes and figures which best express
those actions of their inward forms. And having passed that
general visitation of God, who saw that all that he had made was
good, that is, conformable to his will, which abhors deformity,
and is the rule of order and beauty: there is no deformity but
in monstrosity, wherein notwithstanding there is a kind of beauty,
nature so ingeniously contriving the irregular parts that they
become sometimes more remarkable than the principal fabric. To
speak yet more narrowly, there was never anything ugly or
misshapen but the chaos; wherein, notwithstanding, to speak
strictly, there was no deformity, because no form, nor was it yet
impregnate by the voice of God; now nature is not at variance
with art, nor art with nature, they being both servants of his
providence: art is the perfection of nature: were the world now
as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos; nature hath
made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are arti-
ficial; for nature is the art of God.
I have heard some with deep sighs lament the lost lines of
Cicero; others with as many groans deplore the combustion of the
library of Alexandria; for my own part, I think there be too
many in the world, and could with patience behold the urn and
ashes of the Vatican, could I, with a few others, recover the
perished leaves of Solomon. I would not omit a copy of Enoch's
Pillars had they many nearer authors than Josephus, or did not
relish somewhat of the fable. Some men have written more than
others have spoken: Pineda quotes more authors in one work
than are necessary in a whole world. Of those three great in-
ventions in Germany, there are two which are not without their
incommodities. It is not a melancholy utinam of my own, but
the desires of better heads, that there were a general synod; not
to unite the incompatible difference of religion, but for the bene-
fit of learning, to reduce it, as it lay at first, in a few and solid
authors; and to condemn to the fire those swarms and millions
of rhapsodies begotten only to distract and abuse the weaker
judgments of scholars, and to maintain the trade and mystery of
typographers.
Again, I believe that all that use sorceries, incantations, and
spells are not witches, or, as we term them, magicians. I con-


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SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2487
ceive there is a traditional magic not learned immediately from
the Devil, but at second hand from his scholars, who, having
once the secret betrayed, are able, and do empirically practice
without his advice, they both proceeding upon the principles of
nature; where actives aptly conjoined to disposed passives will
under any master produce their effects. Thus, I think at first a
great part of philosophy was witchcraft, which being afterward
derived to one another, proved but philosophy, and was indeed
no more but the honest effects of nature: what invented by us
is philosophy, learned from him is magic. We do surely owe
the discovery of many secrets to the discovery of good and bad
angels. I could never pass that sentence of Paracelsus without
an asterisk or annotation: «Ascendens astrum multa revelat
quærentibus magnalia naturæ, i. e. , opera Dei. ” I do think that
many mysteries ascribed to our own inventions have been the
courteous revelations of spirits, — for those noble essences in
heaven bear a friendly regard unto their fellow natures on earth;
and therefore believe that those many prodigies and ominous
prognostics which forerun the ruins of States, princes, and pri-
vate persons are the charitable premonitions of good angels,
which more careless inquiries term but the effects of chance and
nature.
Now, besides these particular and divided spirits there may be
(for aught I know) an universal and common spirit to the whole
world. It was the opinion of Plato, and it is yet of the Her-
metical philosophers: if there be a common nature that unites ,
and ties the scattered and divided individuals into one species,
why may there not be one that unites them all? However, I
am sure there is a common spirit that plays within us, yet
makes no part of us: and that is the Spirit of God, the fire and
scintillation of that noble and mighty essence which is the life
and radical heat of spirits and those essences that know not the
virtue of the sun; a fire quite contrary to the fire of hell: this is
that gentle heat that brooded on the waters, and in six days
hatched the world; this is that irradiation that dispels the mists
of hell, the clouds of horror, fear, sorrow, despair; and preserves
the region of the mind in serenity: whosoever feels not the
warm gale and gentle ventilation of this spirit (though I feel
his pulse) I dare not say he lives; for truly without this, to me
there is no heat under the tropic; nor any light, though I dwelt
in the body of the sun.


## p. 2488 (#48) ############################################

2488
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
11
1
!
I believe that the whole frame of a beast doth perish, and is
left in the same state after death as before it was materialled
unto life: that the souls of men know neither contrary nor cor-
ruption; that they subsist beyond the body, and outlive death by
the privilege of their proper natures, and without a miracle; that
the souls of the faithful, as they leave earth, take possession of
heaven: that those apparitions and ghosts of departed persons are
not the wandering souls of men, but the unquiet walks of devils,
prompting and suggesting us into mischief, blood, and villainy;
instilling and stealing into our hearts that the blessed spirits are
not at rest in their graves, but wander solicitous of the affairs
of the world: but that those phantasms appear often, and do
frequent cemeteries, charnel-houses, and churches, it is because
those are the dormitories of the dead, where the Devil, like an
insolent champion, beholds with pride the spoils and trophies of
his victory in Adam.
This is that dismal conquest we all deplore, that makes us so
often cry, “Adam, quid fecisti ? " I thank God I have not those
strait ligaments, or narrow obligations to the world, as to dote on
life, or be convulsed and tremble at the name of death: not that
I am insensible of the dread and horror thereof; or by raking
into the bowels of the deceased, continual sight of anatomies,
skeletons, or cadaverous reliques, like vespilloes or grave-makers,
I am become stupid or have forgot the apprehension of mor-
tality; but that marshaling all the horrors, and contemplating the
extremities thereof, I find not anything therein able to daunt the
courage of a man, much less a well-resolved Christian; and there-
fore am not angry at the error of our first parents, or unwilling
to bear a part of this common fate, and like the best of them to
die - that is, to cease to breathe, to take a farewell of the ele- •
ments, to be a kind of nothing for a moment, to be within one.
instant of a spirit. When I take a full view and circle of myself
without this reasonable moderator and equal piece of justice,
Death, I do conceive myself the miserablest person extant: were
there not another life that I hope for, all the vanities of this
world should not entreat a moment's breath from me; could the
Devil work my belief to imagine I could never die, I would not
"outlive that very thought. I have so abject a conceit of this
common way of existence, this retaining to the sun and elements,
I cannot think this to be a man, or to live according to the dig-
nity of humanity. In expectation of a better, I can with patience
1


## p. 2489 (#49) ############################################

SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2489
embrace this life, yet in my best meditations do often defy
death: I honor any man that contemns it, nor can I highly love
any that is afraid of it: this makes me naturally love a soldier,
and honor those tattered and contemptible regiments that will
die at the command of a sergeant. For a pagan there may be
some motives to be in love with life; but for a Christian to be
amazed at death, I see not how he can escape this dilemma
that he is too sensible of this life, or hopeless of the life to come.
I am naturally bashful; nor hath conversation, age, or travel
been able to effront or enharden me; yet I have one part of
modesty which I have seldom discovered in another, that is (to
speak truly) I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed
thereof: 'tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures that
in a moment can so disfigure us that our nearest friends, wife,
and children, stand afraid and start at us. The birds and beasts
of the field, that before in a natural fear obeyed us, forgetting
all allegiance, begin to prey upon us. This very conceit hath in
a tempest disposed and left me willing to be swallowed up in
the abyss of waters, wherein I had perished unseen, unpitied,
without wondering eyes, tears of pity, lectures of mortality, and
none had said, “Quantum mutatus ab illo! ” Not that I
ashamed of the anatomy of my parts, or can accuse nature for
playing the bungler in any part of me, or my own vicious life
for contracting any shameful disease upon me, whereby I might
not call myself as wholesome a morsel for the worms as any.
am
Men commonly set forth the torments of hell by fire and
the extremity of corporal afflictions, and describe hell in the same
method that Mahomet doth heaven. This indeed makes a noise,
and drums in popular ears: but if this be the terrible piece
thereof, it is not worthy to stand in diameter with heaven, whose
happiness consists in that part that is best able to comprehend
it -- that immortal essence, that translated divinity and colony of
God, the soul. Surely, though we place hell under earth, the
Devil's walk and purlieu is about it; men speak too popularly
who place it in those flaming mountains which to grosser appre-
hensions represent hell. The heart of man is the place the Devil'
dwells in: I feel sometimes a hell within myself; Lucifer keeps
his court in my breast; Legion is revived in me. There are as .
many hells as Anaxarchus conceited worlds: there was more


## p. 2490 (#50) ############################################

2490
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
than one hell in Magdalen, when there were seven devils, for
every devil is an hell unto himself; he holds enough of torture
in his own ubi, and needs not the misery of circumference to
afflict him; and thus a distracted conscience here is a shadow or
introduction unto hell hereafter. Who can but pity the merciful
intention of those hands that do destroy themselves ? the Devil,
were it in his power, would do the like; which being impossible,
his miseries are endless, and he suffers most in that attribute
wherein he is impassible, his immortality.
I thank God, and with joy I mention it, I was never afraid of
hell, nor never grew pale at the description of that place; I have
so fixed my contemplations on heaven, that I have almost forgot
the idea of hell, and am afraid rather to lose the joys of the one
than endure the misery of the other: to be deprived of them is a
perfect hell, and needs, methinks, no addition to complete our
afflictions. That terrible term hath never detained me from sin,
nor do I owe any good action to the name thereof. I fear God,
yet am not afraid of him; his mercies make me ashamed of my
sins, before his judgments afraid thereof; these are the forced •'
and secondary method of his wisdom, which he useth but as the
last remedy, and upon provocation: a course rather to deter the ·
wicked than incite the virtuous to his worship. I can hardly
think there was ever any scared into heaven; they go the fairest
way to heaven that would serve God without a hell; other mer-
cenaries, that crouch unto him in fear of hell, though they term
themselves the servants, are indeed but the slaves of the Al-
mighty.
That which is the cause of my election I hold to be the cause
of my salvation, which was the mercy and beneplacit of God,
before I was, or the foundation of the world. “Before Abraham
was, I am,” is the saying of Christ; yet is it true in some sense,
if I say it of myself; for I was not only before myself, but
Adam — that is, in the idea of God, and the decree of that synod
held from all eternity: and in this sense, I say, the world was
before the creation, and at an end before it had a beginning;
and thus was I dead before I was alive; though my grave be
England, my dying place was Paradise; and Eve miscarried of
me before she conceived of Cain.
Now for that other virtue of charity, without which faith is a'
mere notion and of no existence, I have ever endeavored to ·


## p. 2491 (#51) ############################################

SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2491
nourish the merciful disposition and humane inclination I bor-
rowed from my parents, and regulate it to the written and pre-
scribed laws of charity: and if I hold the true anatomy of
myself, I am delineated and naturally framed to such a piece of
virtue; for I am of a constitution so general that it consorts
and sympathizeth with all things: I have no antipathy, or rather
idiosyncrasy, in diet, humor, air, anything. I wonder not at
the French for their dishes of frogs, snails, and toadstools; nor
at the Jews for locusts and grasshoppers; but being amongst
them, make them my common viands, and I find they agree
with my stomach as well as theirs. I could digest a salad gath-
. ered in a churchyard as well as in a garden. I cannot start at
the presence of a serpent, scorpion, lizard, or salamander: at the
sight of a toad or viper I find in me no desire to take up a
stone to destroy them. I feel not in myself those common
antipathies that I can discover in others; those national repug-
nances do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the
French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch: but where I find their
actions in balance with my countrymen's, I honor, love, and
embrace them in the same degree. I was born in the eighth
climate, but seem for to be framed and constellated unto all: I
am no plant that will not prosper out of a garden; all places, all
airs, make unto me one country; I am in England, everywhere,
and under any meridian; I have been shipwrecked, yet am not
enemy with the sea or winds; I can study, play or sleep in a
tempest. In brief, I am averse from nothing: my conscience
would give me the lie if I should absolutely detest or hate any
essence but the Devil; or so at least abhor anything but that we
might come to composition. If there be any among those com-
mon objects of hatred I do contemn and laugh at, it is that
great enemy of reason, virtue, and religion — the multitude: that
numerous piece of monstrosity which, taken asunder, seem men.
and the reasonable creatures of God, but confused together,
make but one great beast and a monstrosity more prodigious .
than Hydra: it is no breach of charity to call these fools; it is
the style all holy writers have afforded them, set down by Solo-
mon in canonical Scripture, and a point of our faith to believe
Neither in the name of multitude do I only include the
base and minor sort of people: there is a rabble even amongst
*the gentry, a sort of plebeian heads, whose fancy moves with
• the same wheel as these; men in the same level with mechanics,
so.


## p. 2492 (#52) ############################################

2492
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
though their fortunes do somewhat gild their infirmities, and
their purses compound for their follies.
1
1
I must give no alms to satisfy the hunger of my brother, but
to fulfill and accomplish the will and command of my God: I
draw not my purse for his sake that demands it, but His that
enjoined it; I believe no man upon the rhetoric of his miseries,
nor to content mine own commiserating disposition; for this is
still but moral charity, and an act that oweth more to passion
than reason. He that relieves another upon the bare suggestion
and bowels of pity doth not this so much for his sake as for
his own; for by compassion we make others' misery our own, and
so, by relieving them, we relieve ourselves also. It is as erro-
neous a conceit to redress other men's misfortunes upon the com-
mon considerations of merciful natures, that it may be one day
our own case; for this is a sinister and politic kind of charity,
whereby we seem to bespeak the pities of men in the like occas-
ions. And truly I have observed that those professed eleemosy-
naries, though in a crowd or multitude, do yet direct and place
their petitions on a few and selected persons: there is surely a
physiognomy which those experienced and master mendicants
observe, whereby they instantly discover a merciful aspect, and
will single out a face wherein they spy the signatures and marks
of mercy.
For there are mystically in our faces certain characters
which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that can-
not read A B C may read our natures. I hold moreover that
there is a phytognomy, or physiognomy, not only of men, but of
plants and vegetables; and in every one of them some outward
figures which hang as signs or bushes of their inward forms.
The finger of God hath left an inscription upon all his works,
not graphical or composed of letters, but of their several forms,
constitutions, parts and operations, which, aptly joined together,
do make one word that doth express their natures. By these
letters God calls the stars by their names; and by this alphabet
Adam assigned to every creature a name peculiar to its nature.
Now there are, besides these characters in our faces, certain
mystical figures in our hands, which I dare not call mere dashes,
strokes à la volée, or at random, because delineated by a pencil
that never works in vain; and hereof I take more particular
notice, because I carry that in mine own hand which I could
never read of or discover in another. Aristotle, I confess, in his


## p. 2493 (#53) ############################################

SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2493
acute and singular book of physiognomy, hath made no mention
of chiromancy; yet I believe the Egyptians, who were nearer
addicted to those abstruse and mystical sciences, had a knowledge
therein, to which those vagabond and counterfeit Egyptians did
after pretend, and perhaps retained a few corrupted principles
which sometimes might verify their prognostics.
It is the common wonder of all men, how, among so many
millions of faces, there should be none alike. Now, contrary, I
wonder as much how there should be any: he that shall consider
how many thousand several words have been carelessly and with-
out study composed out of twenty-four letters; withal, how many
hundred lines there are to be drawn in the fabric of one man, shall
easily find that this variety is necessary; and it will be very hard
that they shall so concur as to make one portrait like another.
Let a painter carelessly limn out a million of faces, and you shall
find them all different; yea, let him have his copy before him, yet
after all his art there will remain a sensible distinction; for the
pattern or example of everything is the perfectest in that kind,
whereof we still come short, though we transcend or go beyond
it, because herein it is wide, and agrees not in all points unto
Nor doth the similitude of creatures disparage the
variety of nature, nor any way confound the works of God. For
even in things alike there is diversity; and those that do seem to
accord do manifestly disagree. And thus is man like God; for in
the same things that we resemble him we are utterly different
from him. There was never anything so like another as in all
points to concur; there will ever some reserved difference slip in,
to prevent the identity, without which two several things would
not be alike, but the same, which is impossible.
its copy.
Naturally amorous of all that is beautiful, I can look a whole
day with delight upon a handsome picture, though it be but of
an horse. It is my temper, and I like it the better, to affect all
harmony; and sure there is music even in the beauty, and the
silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an
instrument: for there is music wherever there is 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. Whatsoever is harmonically,
composed, delights in harmony, which makes me much distrust


## p. 2494 (#54) ############################################

}
5
2494
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all church
music. For myself, not only from my obedience, but my partic-
ular genius, I do embrace it: for even that vulgar and tavern
music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me
a deep fit of devotion and a profound contemplation of the First
Composer; there is something in it of divinity more than the ear
discovers: it is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the
whole world and creatures of God; such a melody to the ear as
the whole world, well understood, would afford the understand-
ing In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intel-
lectually sounds in the ears of God. It unties the ligaments of
my frame, takes me to pieces, dilates me out of myself, and by
degrees, methinks, resolves me into heaven.
I will not say,
with Plato, the soul is an harmony, but harmonical, and hath its
nearest sympathy unto music; thus some, whose temper of body
agrees and humors the constitution of their souls, are born
poets, though indeed all are naturally inclined unto rhythm.
There is surely a nearer apprehension of anything that de-
lights us in our dreams than in our waked senses: without this,
I were unhappy; for my awaked judgment discontents me, ever
whispering unto me that I am from my friend; but my friendly
dreams in the night requite me, and make me think I am within
his arms. I thank God for my happy dreams, as I do for my
good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable
desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happiness; and
surely it is not a melancholy conceit to think we are all asleep
in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as mere
dreams to those of the next; as the phantasms of the night to
the conceits of the day. There is an equal delusion in both, and
the one doth but seem to be the emblem or picture of the other;
are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps, and the
slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul.
It is the ligation of sense, but the liberty of reason; and our
waking conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps. At
my nativity my ascendant was the watery sign of Scorpius; I
was born in the planetary hour of Saturn, and I think I have a
piece of that leaden planet in me. I am no way facetious, nor
disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company; yet in one
dream I can compose a whole comedy, behold the action, and
apprehend the jests, and laugh myself awake at the conceits
we


## p. 2495 (#55) ############################################

SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2495
thereof. Were my memory as faithful as my reason is then
fruitful, I would never study but in my dreams, and this time
also would I choose for my devotions; but our grosser memories
have then so little hold of our abstracted understandings that
they forget the story, and can only relate to our awaked souls a
confused and broken tale of that that hath passed. Aristotle,
who hath written a singular tract of sleep, hath not, methinks,
thoroughly defined it; nor yet Galen, though he seem to have
corrected it: for those noctambuloes and night-walkers, though
in their sleep do yet enjoy the action of their senses; we must
therefore say that there is something in us that is not in the
jurisdiction of Morpheus; and that those abstracted and ecstatic
souls do walk about in their own corps, as spirits with the bodies
they assume, wherein they seem to hear, see, and feel, though
indeed the organs are destitute of sense, and their natures of
those faculties that should inform them. Thus it is observed
that men sometimes, upon the hour of their departure, do speak
and reason above themselves. For then the soul, beginning to
be freed from the ligaments of the body, begins to reason like
herself, and to discourse in a strain above mortality.
FROM (CHRISTIAN MORALS)
WHEN
HEN thou lookest upon the imperfections of others, allow
one eye for what is laudable in them, and the balance
they have from some excellency, which may render them
considerable. While we look with fear or hatred upon the teeth
of the viper, we may behold his eye with love. In venomous
natures something may be amiable: poisons afford anti-poisons:
nothing is totally or altogether uselessly bad. Notable virtues
are sometimes dashed with notorious vices, and in some vicious
tempers have been found illustrious acts of virtue, which makes
such observable worth in some actions of King Demetrius, An-
tonius, and Ahab, as are not to be found in the same kind in
Aristides, Numa, or David. Constancy, generosity, clemency,
and liberality have been highly conspicuous in some persons not
marked out in other concerns for example or imitation. But
since goodness is exemplary in all, if others have not our vir-
tues, let us not be wanting in theirs; nor, scorning them for
their vices whereof we are free, be condemned by their virtues


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2496
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
1
wherein we are deficient. There is dross, alloy, and embasement
in all human tempers; and he flieth without wings, who thinks
to find ophir or pure metal in any. For perfection is not, like
light, centred in any one body; but, like the dispersed seminal-
ities of vegetables at the creation, scattered through the whole
mass of the earth, no place producing all, and almost all some.
So that 'tis well if a perfect man can be made out of many
men, and to the perfect eye of God, even out of mankind.
Time, which perfects some things, imperfects also others. Could
we intimately apprehend the ideated man, and as he stood in
the intellect of God upon the first exertion by creation, we might
more narrowly comprehend our present degeneration, and how
widely we are fallen from the pure exemplar and idea of our
nature: for after this corruptive elongation, from a primitive and
pure creation we are almost lost in degeneration; and Adam
hath not only fallen from his Creator, but we ourselves from
Adam, our Tycho and primary generator.
If generous honesty, valor, and plain dealing be the cog-
nizance of thy family or characteristic of thy country, hold fast
such inclinations sucked in with thy first breath, and which lay
in the cradle with thee. Fall not into transforming degenera-
tions, which under the old name create a new nation. Be not
an alien in thine own nation; bring not Orontes into Tiber;
learn the virtues, not the vices, of thy foreign neighbors, and
make thy imitation by discretion, not contagion. Feel something
of thyself in the noble acts of thy ancestors, and find in thine
own genius that of thy predecessors. Rest not under the ex-
pired merits of others; shine by those of thine own.
Flame not,
like the central fire which enlighteneth no eyes, which no man
seeth, and most men think there is no such thing to be seen.
Add one ray unto the common lustre; add not only to the num-
ber, but the note of thy generation; and prove not a cloud, but
an asterisk in thy region.
Since thou hast an alarum in thy breast, which tells thee
thou hast a living spirit in thee above two thousand times in an
hour, dull not away thy days in slothful supinity and the tedious-
ness of doing nothing. To strenuous minds there is an inquiet-
ude in overquietness and no laboriousness in labor; and to
tread a mile after the slow pace of a snail, or the heavy meas-
ures of the lazy of Brazilia, were a most tiring penance, and
worse than a race of some furlongs at the Olympics. The


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SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2497
rapid courses of the heavenly bodies are rather imitable by our
thoughts than our corporeal motions; yet the solemn motions
of our lives amount unto a greater measure than is commonly
apprehended. Some few men have surrounded the globe of the
earth; yet many, in the set locomotions and movements of their
days, have measured the circuit of it, and twenty thousand miles
have been exceeded by them. Move circumspectly, not meticu-
lously, and rather carefully solicitous than anxiously solicitudi-
nous. Think not there is a lion in the way, nor walk with
leaden sandals in the paths of goodness; but in all virtuous
motions let prudence determine thy measures. Strive not to
run, like Hercules, a furlong in a breath: festination may prove
precipitation; deliberating delay may be wise cunctation, and
slowness no slothfulness.
Despise not the obliquities of younger ways, nor despair of
better things whereof there is yet no prospect. Who would
imagine that Diogenes, who in his younger days was a falsifier
of money, should, in the after course of his life, be so great a
contemner of metal? Some negroes, who believe the resurrection,
think that they shall rise white. Even in this life regeneration
may imitate resurrection; our black and vicious tinctures may
wear off, and goodness clothe us with candor, Good admoni-
tions knock not always in vain. There will be signal examples
of God's mercy, and the angels must not want their charitable
rejoices for the conversion of lost sinners. Figures of most
angles do nearest approach unto circles, which have no angles at
all. Some may be near unto goodness who are conceived far
from it; and many things happen not likely to ensue from any
promises of antecedencies. Culpable beginnings have found com-
mendable conclusions, and infamous courses pious retractations.
Detestable sinners have proved exemplary converts on earth, and
may be glorious in the apartment of Mary Magdalen in heaven.
Men are not the same through all divisions of their ages: time,
experience, self-reflections, and God's mercies, make in some
well-tempered minds a kind of translation before death, and men
to differ from themselves as well as from other persons. Hereof
the old world afforded many examples to the infamy of latter
ages, wherein men too often live by the rule of their inclina-
tions; so that, without any astral prediction, the first day gives
the last: men are commonly as they were; or rather, as bad
V-157


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2498
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
|
1
1
dispositions run into worser habits, the evening doth not crown,
but sourly conclude, the day.
If the Almighty will not spare us according to his merciful
capitulation at Sodom; if his goodness please not to pass over a
great deal of bad for a small pittance of good, or to look upon
us in the lump, there is slender hope for mercy, or sound pre-
sumption of fulfilling half his will, either in persons or nations:
they who excel in some virtues being so often defective in
others; few men driving at the extent and amplitude of good-
ness, but computing themselves by their best parts, and others
by their worst, are content to rest in those virtues which others
commonly want. Which makes this speckled face of honesty in
the world; and which was the imperfection of the old philoso-
phers and great pretenders unto virtue; who, well declining the
gaping vices of intemperance, incontinency, violence, and oppres-
sion, were yet blindly peccant in iniquities of closer faces; were
envious, malicious, contemners, scoffers, censurers, and stuffed
with vizard vices, no less depraving the ethereal particle and
diviner portion of man. For envy, malice, hatred, are the qual-
ities of Satan, close and dark like himself; and where such
brands smoke, the soul cannot be white. Vice may be had at
all prices; expensive and costly iniquities, which make the noise,
cannot be every man's sins; but the soul may be foully inqui-
nated at a very low rate, and a man may be cheaply vicious to
the perdition of himself.
Having been long tossed in the ocean of the world, he will
by that time feel the in-draught of another, unto which this
seems but preparatory and without it of no high value. He will
experimentally find the emptiness of all things, and the noth-
ing of what is past; and wisely grounding upon true Christian
expectations, finding so much past, will wholly fix upon what is
to come. He will long for perpetuity, and live as though he .
made haste to be happy. The last may prove the prime part of
his life, and those his best days which he lived nearest heaven.
Live happy in the Elysium of a virtuously composed mind,
and let intellectual contents exceed the delights wherein mere
pleasurists place their paradise. Bear not too slack reins upon
pleasure, nor let complexion or contagion betray thee unto the
exorbitancy of delight. Make pleasure thy recreation or inter-
missive relaxation, not thy Diana, life, and profession. Volup-
tuousness is as insatiable as covetousness. Tranquillity is better
1
1


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SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2499
we
a
race
than jollity, and to appease pain than to invent pleasure. Our
hard entrance into the world, our miserable going out of it, our
sicknesses, disturbances, and sad rencounters in it, do clamor-
ously tell us came not into the world to run
of
delight, but to perform the sober acts and serious purposes of
man; which to omit were foully to miscarry in the advantage
of humanity, to play away an uniterable life, and to have lived
in vain. Forget not the capital end, and frustrate not the oppor-
tunity of once living. Dream not of any kind of metempsychosis
or transanimation, but into thine own body, and that after a
long time; and then also unto wail or bliss, according to thy first
and fundamental life. Upon a curricle in this world depends a
long course of the next, and upon a narrow scene here an end-
less expansion hereafter. In vain some think to have an end of
their beings with their lives. Things cannot get out of their
natures, or be, or not be, in despite of their constitutions. .
Rational existences in heaven perish not at all, and but partially
on earth; that which is thus once, will in some way be always;
the first living human soul is still alive, and all Adam hath
found no period.
Since the stars of heaven do differ in glory; since it hath ·
pleased the Almighty hand to honor the north pole with lights
above the south; since there are some stars so bright that they
can hardly be looked upon, some so dim that they can scarcely
be seen, and vast numbers not to be seen at all even by arti-
ficial eyes; read thou the earth in heaven and things below
from above. Look contentedly upon the scattered difference of
things, and expect not equality in lustre, dignity, or perfection,
in regions or persons below; where numerous numbers must
be content to stand like lacteous or nebulous stars, little taken
notice of, or dim in their generations. All which may be con-
tentedly allowable in the affairs and ends of this world, and in
suspension unto what will be in the order of things hereafter,
and the new system of mankind which will be in the world to
come; when the last may be the first, and the first the last;
when Lazarus may sit above Cæsar, and the just, obscure on
earth, shall shine like the sun in heaven; when personations shall
cease, and histrionism of happiness be over; when reality shall
rule, and all shall be as they shall be forever.


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2500
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
1
FROM HYDRIOTAPHIA, OR URN-BURIAL)
IN
1
THE Jewish Hypogæum and subterranean cell at Rome was
little observable beside the variety of lamps and frequent
draughts of the holy candlestick. In authentic draughts of
Antony and Jerome, we meet with thigh bones and death's-
heads; but the cemeterial cells of ancient Christians and martyrs
were filled with draughts of Scripture stories; not declining the
flourishes of cypress, palms, and olive, and the mystical figures
of peacocks, doves, and cocks; but iterately affecting the por-
traits of Enoch, Lazarus, Jonas, and the vision of Ezekiel, as
hopeful draughts and hinting imagery of the resurrection -- which
is the life of the grave and sweetens our habitations in the land
of moles and pismires.
The particulars of future beings must needs be dark unto
ancient theories, which Christian philosophy yet determines but
in a cloud of opinions. A dialogue between two infants in the
womb concerning the state of this world, might handsomely
illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof methinks we yet
discourse in Plato's den, and are but embryon philosophers.
Pythagoras escapes, in the fabulous hell of Dante, among
that swarm of philosophers, wherein, whilst we meet with Plato
and Socrates, Cato is to be found in no lower place than Pur-
gatory. Among all the set, Epicurus is most considerable,
whom men make honest without an Elysium, who contemned
life without encouragement of immortality, and making nothing
after death, yet made nothing of the king of terrors.
Were the happiness of the next world as closely apprehended
as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live; and unto
such as consider none hereafter, it must be more than death to
die, which makes us amazed at those audacities that durst be
nothing and return into their chaos again. Certainly, such spirits
as could contemn death, when they expected no better being
after, would have scorned to live had they known any. And'
therefore we applaud not the judgments of Machiavel that
Christianity makes men cowards, or that with the confidence of
but half dying, the despised virtues of patience and humility
have abased the spirits of men, which pagan principles exalted;
but rather regulated the wildness of audacities, in the attempts,
grounds, and eternal sequels of death, wherein men of the boldest


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SIR THOMAS BROWNE
2501
we
exten-
spirits are often prodigiously temerarious. Nor can
uate the valor of ancient martyrs, who contemned death in the
uncomfortable scene of their lives, and in their decrepit martyr-
doms did probably lose not many months of their days, or parted
with life when it was scarce worth the living; for (beside that
long time past holds no consideration unto a slender time to
come) they had no small disadvantage from the constitution of
old age, which naturally makes men fearful, and complexionally
superannuated from the bold and courageous thoughts of youth
and fervent years. But the contempt of death from corporal
animosity promoteth not our felicity.
our felicity. They may sit in the
orchestra and noblest seats of heaven who have held up shaking
hands in the fire, and humanly contended for glory.
Meanwhile, Epicurus lies deep in Dante's hell, wherein we
meet with tombs inclosing souls which denied their immortal-
ities. But whether the virtuous heathen, who lived better than
he spake, or, erring in the principles of himself, yet lived above
philosophers of more specious maxims, lie so deep as he is
placed; at least so low as not to rise against Christians who,
believing or knowing that truth, have lastingly denied it in their
practice and conversation -
were a query too sad to insist on.
But all or most apprehensions rested in opinions of some
future being, which, ignorantly or coldly believed, begat those
perverted conceptions, ceremonies, sayings, which Christians pity
or laugh at. Happy are they which live not in that disadvantage
of time, when men could say little for futurity but from reason;
whereby the noblest minds fell often upon doubtful deaths and
melancholy dissolutions. With those hopes Socrates warmed his
doubtful spirits against that cold potion; and Cato, before he
durst give the fatal stroke, spent part of the night in reading the
immortality of Plato, thereby confirming his wavering hand unto
the animosity of that attempt.
It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man,
to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is
no farther state to come, unto which this seems progressional,
and otherwise made in vain. Without this accomplishment, the
natural expectation and desire of such a state were but a fallacy
in nature. Unsatisfied considerators would quarrel at the justice
of their constitutions, and rest content that Adam had fallen
lower; whereby, by knowing no other original, and deeper igno-
rance of themselves, they might have enjoyed the happiness of


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2502
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
1
1
inferior creatures, who in tranquillity possess their constitutions,
as having not the apprehension to deplore their own natures;
and being framed below the circumference of these hopes, or
cognition of better being, the wisdom of God hath necessitated
their contentment. But the superior ingredient and obscured part
of ourselves, whereto all present felicities afford no resting con-
tentment, will be able at last to tell us we are more than our
present selves, and evacuate such hopes in the fruition of their
own accomplishments.
But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and
deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of
perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids ?
Erostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana; he is almost
lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian's
horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felici-
ties by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal
durations; and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon.
Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there
be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand re-
membered in the known account of time? Without the favor of
the everlasting register, the first man had been as unknown as
the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only chronicle.
Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content
to be as though they had not been; to be found in the register
of God, not in the record of man.