The Three B's: Bacon, Burton, Browne

From A Critical History of English Literature, by David Daiches:

While churchmen debated the theory and practice of church government, the secular mind of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was meditating an ambitious scheme for laying anew the foundations of human knowledge on which could be reared an ever-increasing understanding and control of nature. To this scheme he gave the general name of the Great Instauration (or Renewal). Reacting against scholastic philosophy and against all a priori thinking and systems of thought derived deductively from premises laid down by authority, the Great Instauration, basing knowledge on observation, would restore a truer relationship between the observing mind and observed nature and so make scientific progress possible. For Bacon, "the furthest end of knowledge" was not theoretical insight but "the relief of man's estate": it was to be "the benefit and use of man." The sequence was to be from observation to understanding to practical application. Bacon proposed to himself six stages in the realization of this scheme, beginning with the classification of existing knowledge, within a precise mapping of all gaps and deficiencies, and proceeding thorugh the development of a new, inductive, logical method (the New Organon) and the collection of basic data to provide lists of examples of the new method in operation, thence to a preliminary report of the achievements of the method, and finally to a full-dress presentation of the new philosophy and method and its results in explaining the natural phenomena of the universe. The sixth and final stage could not of course be reached by any single individual: it represented the eventual aim of human knowledge. Of the other five stages, the first is represented by Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605, with an enlarged Latin version in 1623); the second by the unfinished Latin work, Novum Organum, which appeared together with a general statement of the aims and plans of the Great Instauration (Magna Instauratio) in 1620; and the others only in fragments.

Bacon was not the first to propose an inductive scientific theory, or to attack scholasticism; nor did his writings achieve a philosophic revolution of the kind which Descartes bourght about a generation later. Further, he was not in touch with the actual achievements of contemporary science, was ignorant of and sometimes hostile to new advances in astronomy and medicine and curiously uninfluenced by the revival of Greek science and Platonic mathematics which were so important for the scientific achievements of the Renaissance. Nevertheless he spoke with prophetic eloquence of the new conception of knowledge and its function, popularizing a point of view which was to become increasingly significant later in the century. His diagnosis of much of the accepted philosophy of his time as mere verbal jugglery hand something of the same effect as the work of the more popular of the logical positivists and semanticists of the 1930's: "For the wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of God, worketh acording to the stuff and is limited thereby; but if it work upon itself as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless, and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work but of no substance or profit."

The Advancement of Learning is in two books: the first states and answers arguments that have been brought forward against learning and the second providing a detailed classification of all the kinds of knowledge, with the deficiencies noted. The argument against learning comes from theologians, from politicians, and from the habits and studies of learned men themselves. The first he answers in their own terms; the second he answers by an appeal to history and experience; and in tackling the third he admits that here are "three vanities in studies" which have been responsible for attacks on learning in general. These "vanities" or "distempers" of learning are in ascending order of gravity, fantastic and exhibitionist styles of writing, the kind of logic chopping which degenerates into mere verbalism, and "delight in deceiving and aptness to be deceived, imposture and credulity." The greatest error of all, however, is "mistaking or misplacing the last or furthest end of knowledge"—which is control over nature for the benefit of man. Book I concludes with positive arguments to prove the dignity of learning, both "divine proofs" and divinity to the divines, distinguishing between God's word, as revealed by Him and studied by His ministers, and God's work, the natural world, the province of scientific inquiry; but though the separation between theology and philosophy had been made before (e.g., by William of Ockham), Bacon makes the separation to protect science from religion (to use modern terms) not, as Ockham had done, to protect faith from reason. Thomistic philosophy did not make this separation, subsuming philosophy in theology, but later scholastic thought did sometimes recognize a "twofold truth." Such a division was found useful by seventeenth-century thinkers such as Bacon and Hobbes in providing a clear field for secular thought.

Book II of The Advancement of Learning is a briliant piece of classification, full  of the witty definitions and apt and lively phrases so characteristic of Bacon's vigorous expository style; but in spite of this the modern reader will find this sort of detailed schematization somewhat tedious. Among the many interesting definitions, that of poetry might be singled out, for it is curiously Freudian: "it [poetry] doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things." (The dwindling number of those who profess to believe that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays might reflect on this definition of poetry and consider whether it could possibly be made to apply to Hamlet or Othello.)

The Novum Organum contains the famous account of "the four classes of idols which beset men's minds," a fine example of the imaginative wit which Bacon so often displayed in making his points. The Idols of the Tribe (deriving from the limitations of human nature), the Idols of the Cave (deriving from personal character and idiosyncrasies), the Idols of the Marketplace (popular superstitions and confusions), and the Idols of the Theatre ("because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage-plays representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion"), all militate against the proper use of observation and reason. Again, this reminds us of a modern semanticist analyzing the sources of verbal confusion or of a psychologist explaining the origins of irrational prejudice. Bacon was not himself a great scientist or a great philosopher; he was a master of prose exposition whose colorful and memorable phrases helped to popularize a new view of science.

The New Atlantis, published incomplete in 1627, is a slight work; it describes how a group of seafarers come upon an unknown island in the South Sea, where they are hospitably entertained and told of the high state of morality and civilization prevailing there, notably of the wonders of Salomon's House, a research institution in the description of which Bacon illustrates his own ideas of how research should be carried on. It all seems rather naïve in an age when scientific research is as highly developed and as much taken for granted as it is now; but it is interesting as providing further evidence of Bacon's desire to popularize his views of the importance of experimental science, that "commerce between the mind of man and the nature of things, which is more precious than anything on earth" as he called it in his Magna Instauratio.

Bacon's Essays—beginning with a volume of ten essays, written in a pungent aphoristic style, in 1597, with expansions and additions and a progressively more discursive style in the volumes of 1612 and 1625, the last containing fifty-eight essays—consist of reflections on human affaires by a practical psychologist who wishes to base his ethical prescriptions on a sound knowledge of human nature. The essay as a literary form had been invented by Montaigne shortly before Bacon adopted it; but Montaigne, with his rambling curiosity about himself and his genial and sceptical humanism, represented a different side of Renaissance thought. The easy flow of Montaigne's prose represented a relaxed self-consciousness far removed from the impersonal wisdom affected by Bacon, whose early essays read almost like a series of proverbs. It is the aphoristic element in his style that makes so many of his sentences—particularly his opening sentences—memorable and quotable. "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer." "Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other." "Revenge is a kind of wild justice . . ." "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune." "A man that hath no virtue in himself ever envieth virtue in others." The essays deal as much with public as with private life, discussing "great place," nobility, "seditions and troubles," empire, and "the true greatness of kingdoms and estates," as well as truth, death, parents and children, marriage, envy, love, and "wisdom for a man's self." He speaks as a man of the world, illustrating his generalizations by references to history (often classical history) and his own experience. Realistic in politics, shrewd but not coldly calculating in practical affairs, Christian in a general theistic way with more than a touch of Stoicism, occasionally rising to somber eloquence in discussing time and change and death or led into the display of a personal enthusiasm as in the essay on gardens, Bacon in his essays is an impressive if hardly an endearing character. There is a moderately Machiavellian side to his thought: "The best composition and temperature is, to have openness in fame and opinion; secrecy in habit; dissimulation in seasonable use; and a power to feign, if there be no remedy." He is reconciled to human nature: "Why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me?" He knows how to relax with a variety of delights, but it is significant that he ends his essay on "masques and triumphs" with the sentence: "But enough of these toys." Montaigne in one way, Bacon in another, are very far from the medieval mind; and they are far, too from some of the more passionate movements of their own time. It is hardly extravagant to suggest that Bacon lives in the same world as Benjamin Franklin, not in that of the author of Piers Plowman, or in that of Spenser or Milton or George Herbert.

Bacon's History of Henry VII (1622) is a conscientious study of that king's policy in the light of which he is able to give an integrated picture of the events of his reign. The work shows Bacon's interest in statecraft, his political and legal knowlege, his command of an effective narrative and expository style, and a historico-psychological imagination which enabled him to put imaginary speeches into the mouths of his characters in the manner of classical historians. Others of Bacon's works, more or less fragmentary contributions to the sixfold plan of thee Great Instauration, were published in various collections of his literary remains after his death.

—oOo—

If Bacon separated God's word and God's work in order to be able to concentrate freely on the latter, Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82) divided his attention between the two, investigating the facts of nature with a Baconian empiricism (though with a religious excitement at the ingenuity of the Creator thus revealed, which Bacon wholly lacked) and at the same time glorying in his acceptance by faith of religious mysteries on which his imagination loved to dwell. Browne was both Baconian experimentalist and Christian mystic, author both of Pseudodoxia Epidemica (generally known as Vulgar Errors), an exposure of erroneous notions about nature held by the credulous, and of Religio Medici, a discursive statement of his religious faith with a deliberate emphasis on wonder and mystery. The impact of the "new philosophy" in the seventeenth century naturally differed according to the temperament of the individual. Browne had a "unified sensibility" in the sense that he could move freely between mystery and experiment and saw no conflict between the duty of the man of science and that of the man of religion. This is related to his genial autobiographical manner of discussion and his interest in what might be called philosophy as play; if in discussing one kind of truth you are also aware of another kind, you will not be too intense in your method of presenting either.

The relation—sometimes the conflict—between science and religion becomes henceforth an important aspect of English thought. Although seventeenth-century theological controversy for the most part ignored the new science, its effects were indirectly visible in the great debate between those who believed optimistically in inevitable progress and those who held that the world was steadily declining. The classic statement of the pessimisic position was Godfrey Goodman's massive work, The Fall of Man, or the Corruption of Nature Proved by the Light of our Natural Reason, published in 1616. This was answered by George Hakewill's Apology of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World,published in 1627, with enlarged editions in 1630 and 1635. The argument as to whether the world had steadily declined from an original Golden Age or was steadily progressing and improving represents two poles of human thought which are perhaps always with us; but the seventeenth century saw the conflict brought into focus with particular clarity. It was this debate which underlay the conflict between Ancients and Moderns which developed later in the century; whether the classical literature of the Greeks and Romans represented a summit of human literary achievement which later ages could never quite reach, or whther modern refinement and ingenuity could surpass the achievements of the ancient world, was an argument which flowed from the larger debate on the decline of the world. The narrowing of the issue in this way reflects a contraction o the intelelctual universe of the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth centuries as compared with that of the earlier seventeenth century. The comfortable deistic solution of the science-religion conflict, making God the First Cause who retired from the universe after the creation, the divine watchmaker who made and wound up the watch before leaving it to be admired and investigated by the pious and the curious, was the eighteenth-century systematization of a position implicit in Bacon. Scientific progress then becomes increasingly successful in discovering how the watch was made and how it works, while literary progress is measured by the degree to which writers equal or perhaps even excel the great achievements of the classical world.

Sir Thomas Browne remained at the still center of the controversies of his day, cultivating an inclusive tolerance which enabled him to reconcile almost anything with almost anything else. Religio Medici—which circulated for some time in manuscript, and appeared in two unauthorized editions in 1642, before the appearance of the authorized edition in 1643—might almost be called an exercise in inclusiveness of thought and feeling. The very title—"the religion of a doctor"—emphasizes a reconciliation of traditional opposites, the numinous and the scientific; for, as Browne points out in the very first sentence, the world does not generally consider doctors to have any religion at all. His favorite image is the circle, his favorite concept the microcosm. The prose of Religio Medici is so richly harmonized that one might almost say that its meaning is conveyed vertically rather than horizontally. Browne's constant endeavor is to break down distinctions and include all things in a single context. In sentence after sentence he reaches out to embrace apparent contradictions and bring them together; each sentence—or at least each paragraph—is thus a microcosm of the book as a whole. Consider, for example, his discussion of the relation between Protestants and Catholics:

We have reformed from them, not against them; for (omitting those Improperations and Terms of Scurrility betwixt us, which only difference our Affections, and not our Cause,) there is between us one common Name and Appellation, one Faith and necessary body of Principles common to us both; and therefore I am not scrupulous to converse and live with them, to enter their Churches in defect of ours, and either pray with them, or for them.

Here we have the whole of Religio Medici in little: reformation does not imply disagreement; any admission of difference is softly tucked away within brackets; and at the end there is the cunning suggestion that praying for somebody (which would really indicate that we are concerned for him because he is not of our faith) amounts to the same thing as praying with him (which indicates that we are of the same faith). The actual statement of the case—an appeal for toleration—is reinforced by stylistic devices and by every kind of quasi-logical suggestion that can be derived from language.

Religio Medici begins with a definition of the author's brand of Christianity, a definition which gradually expands to include, by a "general charity to Humanity," virtually all faiths professed by men. Though a member of the Church of England ("there is no Church whose every part so squares onto my Conscience; whose Articles seem so consonant unto reason, and as it were framed to my particular Devotion, as this whereof I hold my Belief, the Church of England"), Browne "could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgment for not agreeing with me in that from which perhaps within a few days I should dissent my self." By various quasi-logical and autobiographical devices he brings all humanity into the circle of his own faith. Faith and reason are at first distinguished:

As for those wingy Mysteries in Divinity, and airy subtleties in Religion, which have unhing'd 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 deepest 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! . . . I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with the odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, Certum est, quia impossibile est. I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point; for to credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but persuasion.

But though faith and reason are thus opposed, they are eventually reunited, if not logically at least symbolically, by being discussed in terms of each other and by the inclusion of both in a third term, such as God's Wisdom, which created the world to be "studied and contemplated by Man: 'tis the Debt of our Reason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for not being Beasts." God's work and God's word are distinguished, but again only to be reunite: Nature is the Art of God. This being so, "there are no Grotesques in Nature." Every created thing is beautiful and wonderful in its way. Man himself is a little world. "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 wisely learns in a compendium what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume." God's work is also a book, like His word. "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 expans'd unto the Eyes of all; . . . "

Religio Medici continues with the adducing of examples showing the inclusive attitude at work. Both the miraculous and the scientific explanations of the same phenomenon are accepted; atheism is explained away as never having existed; pagan gods are included in the Christian scheme; soul and body, life and death, are so defined as to include each other. Martyrdom is deprecated as symbolizing an exclusive rather than an inclusive attitude. And even when Browne has reluctantly to concede that salvation is granted by God only to Christians, he adds significantly: "Yet those who do confine the Church of God, either to particular Nations, Churches, or Families, have made it far narrower than our Saviour ever meant it." Part II of the work is, logically enough, a discussion of charity, the state of mind which favours maximum inclusion. It is essentially an autobiographical illustration of his own charitable and tolerant disposition: "Methinks there is no man bad, and the worst, best." He can exclude nobody from his charity, and as "every man is a Microcosm, and carries the whole World about him," his own tolerance takes on universal dimensions. The work concludes with the author's submission to the will of God.



Browne's style, with its coupling of Anglo-Saxon and Latin words and its sentences composed of an arrangement of fairly short clauses rising and falling in a carefully contrived cadence, is in many respects a reflection of his sensibility. "Do but extract from the corpulency of bodies, or resolve things beyond their first matter, and you discover the habitation of Angels, which if I call the ubiquitary and omnipresent Essence of God, I hope I shall not offend Divinity: for before the Creation of the World God was really all things." The Latinisms here are introduced with a deliberate relish; they reflect that savoring of words and attitudes which is part of Browne's literary character. But it is worth noting that this sentence works up to a crucial statement which is itself expressed (except for the one word "Creation") in words of Anglo-Saxon origin: "for before the Creation of the world God was really all things." Browne's stylistic artifice is perhaps more obvious in Hydriotaphia (Urn Burial) and The Garden of Cyrus, published together in 1658. In the former, the digging up of some old sepulchral urns "in a field of old Walsingham" provokes Browne to eloquent meditation on burial customs of the past and on the mysteries and solemnities of mortality. The opening sentence of the Epistle Dedicatory sets the tone of the work:

When the Funeral pyre was out, and the last valediction over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred Friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes, and, having no old experiences of the duration of their Reliques, held no opinion of such after-considerations.

Historical curiosity, philosophical speculation, mystic contemplation, and the suggestiveness and sonority of a rich and carefully manipulated vocabulary, combine to make Hydriotaphia a remarkable piece of virtuosity. The antiquarian, the Platonic mystic, the Christian moralist, and the artist all contribute to the total effect, but the artist is generally in the ascendant. "We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations; and being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, which maketh Pyramids pillars of snow, and all that's past a moment." The artifice here is patent, as it is in the well-known passage beginning "What Song the Syrens sang, . . ." which includes the remarkable sentence: "But to subsist in bones, and be but Pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration." The Garden of Cyrus, in its riot of speculation concerning the quincunx pattern in heaven and earth, combines a scientific air with a poetic tone in a strange and fascinating way. Sometimes, the vocabulary is almost a parody of the scientific: "The Reticulum by these crossed cells makes a further digestion in the dry and exuccous part of the Aliment perceived from the first Ventricle." But more characteristic is the famous paragraph which begins the concluding movement of the work:

But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low, and 'tis time to close the five ports of knowledge; we are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasms of sleep, which often continueth precogitations; making Cables of Cobwebs, and Wildernesses of handsome Groves. Beside Hippocrates hath spoke so little, and the Oneirocritical Masters have left such frigid Interrpetations from plants, that there is little encouragement to dream of paradise itself. Nor will the sweetest delight of Gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dullness of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the Bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a Rose.

No more fascinating evidence exists of the coexistence in the seventeenth century of new scientific ideas and old notions of authority, and of the "hydroptic thirst" for all knowledge, ancient and modern, than the vast encyclopedic treatise by Robert Burton (1577-1640), The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, with several revised editions between 1625 and 1651. This work, now regarded as a rich anthology of curious notions, picturesque anecdotes, and varied quotations from both ancients and moderns, was intended as a scientific examination of the various distempers of the mind to which Burton gives the generic name "melancholy"—a medical and psychological work in which all known knowledge on the subject would be presented. If it has long been valued as a source of quaint or suggestive quotations or as a work to be dipped into and relished for its oddity,this is because the comprehensiveness of Burton's aim, the transitional nature of the age he lived in, and his own mixture of sympathy, curiosity, erudition, superstition, and common sense, gives his work a texture and a flavor that can be found neither in the medieval world nor in the modern scientific world after the foundation of the Royal Society. The organization of the book into discussion of the symptoms, causes, and cure of different kinds of melancholy is logical enough, but no central principles provide coherence to the whole. Unbounded curiosity about man and a humane and sensible concern for his welfare are perhaps Burton's chief qualities; they are sufficient to give a tone but not to provide a method or a principle of integration to his work. The elaborate and detailed synopses to each "partition" of the work testify to Burton's methodological intentions, but the digressions and the illustrative anecdotes remain the most memorable parts of his book. The long section on "heroica or love melancholy," with its powers, causes, symptoms, and cures, is the richest part of the book to modern eyes, and its quizzical yet sympathetic tone, its profusion of information with a refusal to come down on any side of a controversy, is characteristic of Burton. We must not forget, however, that Burton was an Anglican priest by profession, and when he discusses religious melancholy, as he does in his final section, he mingles religious consolation with the humanist advice to avoid extremes and extravagances. "Thy soul is eclipsed for a time, I yield, as the sun is shadowed by a cloud; no doubt but those gracious beams of God's mercy will shine upon thee again, as they have formerly done: those embers of faith, hope and repentance, now burned in ashes, will flame out afresh, and be fully revived." This is a somewahat different Burton from the writer who, discoursing on the "prognostics" of love melancholy, remarks:

Go to Bedlam for examples. It is so well known in every village, how many have either died for love, or voluntarily made away themselves, that I need not much labour to prove it; Nec modus aut requies nisi mors reperitur amoris [love knows no limit or escape save death]: death is the common catastrophe to such persons.

Mori mihi contingat, non enim alia
Liberatio ab aerumnis fuerit ullo pacto istis.

[Would I were dead, for nought, God knows,
But death can rid me of these woes.]

But quotation can give no conception of the variety and multiplicity of Burton's extraordinary work, in which religion and science intermingle, medicine and psychology are set against a cosmic background, and ironic observations of the human comedy are made the excuse for a display of an almost irresponsible erudition. Burton's prose style is flexible and varied; he can be colloquial, pedantic, picturesque, or epigrammatic. The perpetual interlarding of his English with Latin quotations produces a strange mosaic effect. Perhaps it can be said that Burton had no style: there is too much variety and digression. The Anatomy of Melancholy is, however, a remarkable work, a significant symptom of the times and a tour de force without parallel in English literature.

Leviathan