The Understanding

A chapter from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. On the faculties of the mind ("Anatomy of the Soul"), subject X - "Of the Understanding." Note the ancestry of the celebrated empiricist notion of the mind, prior to sensory experience, as a tabula rasa, found in Locke et al., and its immediate ancestry in Burton and the Aristotelian tradition he is commenting.

 

 

Subject X. —Of the Understanding

"Understanding is a power of the soul, by which we perceive, know, remember, and judge, as well singulars as universals, having certain innate notices or beginnings of arts, a reflecting action, by which it judgeth of his own doings and examines them" (1). Out of this definition (besides his chief office, which is to apprehend, judge all that he performs, without the help of any instruments or organs) three differences appear between a man and a beast. As first, the sense only comprehends singularities, the understanding universalities.  Secondly, the sense hath no innate notions. Thirdly, brutes cannot reflect upon themselves. Bees indeed make neat and curious works, and many other creatures besides; but when they have done, they cannot judge of them. His object is God, Ens, all nature, and whatsoever is to be understood: which successively it apprehends. The object first moving the understanding is some sensible thing; after, by discoursing, the mind finds out the corporeal substance, and from thence the spiritual. His actions (some say) are apprehension, composition, division, discoursing, reasoning, memory which some include in invention, and judgment. The common division are, of the understanding: agent and patient; speculative and practic; in habit or in act; simple or compound. The agent is that which is called the wit of man, acumen or subtlety, sharpness of invention, when he doth invent of himself without a teacher, or learns anew, which abstracts those intelligible species from the phantasy, and transfers them to the passive understanding, "because there is nothing in the understanding which was not first in the sense" (2) That which the imagination hath taken from the sense, this agent judgeth of, whether it be true or false; and being so judged he commits it to the passible to be kept. The agent is a doctor or teacher, the passive a scholar; and his office is to keep and further judge of such things as are committed to his charge; as a bare and razed table (3) at first, capable of all forms and notions. Now these notions are twofold, actions or habits: actions, by which we take notions of and perceive things; habits, which are durable lights and notions, which we may use when we will. Some reckon up eight kinds of them: sense, experience, intelligence, faith, suspicion, error, opinion, science; to which are added art, prudency, wisdom: and also synteresis (4), dictamen rationis [the dictate of reason], conscience; so that in all there be fourteen species of the understanding, of which some are innate, as the three last mentioned, the other are gotten by doctrine, learning, and use. Plato will have all to be innate: Aristotle reckons up but five intellectual habits: two speculative, as that intelligence of the principles and science of conclusion; two practic, as prudency, whose end is to practise, art to fabricate, wisdom to comprehend the use and experiments of all notions and habits whatsoever. Which division of Aristotle (if it be considered aright) is all one with the precedent; for three being innate, and five acquisite, the rest are improper, imperfect, and in a more strict examination excluded. Of all these I should more amply dilate, but my subject will not permit. Three of them I will only point at, as more necessary to my following discourse.

Synteresis, or the purer part of the conscience, is an innate habit, and doth signify "a conservation of the knowledge of the law of God and Nature, to know good or evil." And (as our divines hold) it is rather in the understanding than in the will. This makes the major proposition in a practic syllogism. The dictamen rationis is that which doth admonish us to do good or evil, and is the minor in the syllogism. The conscience is that which approves good or evil, justifying or condeming our actions, and is the conclusion of the syllogism: as in that familiar example of Regulus the Roman, taken prisoner by the Carthaginians, and suffered to go to Rome, on that condition he should return again, or pay so much for his ransom. The syntheresis proposeth the question; his word, oath, promise, is to be religiously kept, although to his enemy, and that by the law of nature. "Do not that to another which thou wouldest not have done to thyself" (5). Dictamen applies it to him, and dictates this or the like: "Regulus, thou wouldst not another man should falsify his oath, or break promise with thee"; conscience concludes, "Therefore, Regulus, thou dost well to perform thy promise, and oughtest to keep thine oath." More of this in Religious Melancholy.

____

Notes

(1) Melanchton

(2) Nihil in intellectu, quod non prius fuerat in sensu. —Velcurio.

(3) [= tabula rasa, a smooth tablet, "clean slate."]

(4) The pure part of the conscience.

(5) quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri ne feceris.

—oOo—

Intra mittendo, vel extra mittendo

Sobre el clásico debate sobre la percepción visual: si vemos porque nos llegan imágenes del exterior que recibimos por los ojos, o si las proyectamos desde la mente por los ojos a modo de cámaras de cine:

Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (I.I.2.6, "Of the Sensible Soul"):

To the sight three things are required, the object, the organ, and the medium. The object in general is visible, or that which is to be seen, as colours, and all shining bodies. The medium is the illumination of the air which comes from light (1), commonly called diaphanum; for in dark we cannot see. The organ is the eye, and chiefly the apple of it, which by those optic nerves, concurring both in one, conveys the sight to the common sense. Betwixt the organ and object a true distance is required, that it be not too near, or too far off. Many excellent questions appertain to this sense, discussed by philosophers: s whether this sight be caused intra mittendo, vel extra mittendo, etc., by receiving in the visible species, or sending of them out, which Plato (2), Plutarch (3), Macrobius (4), Lactantius (5), and others dispute. And besides it is the subject of the perspectives, of which Alhazen the Arabian, Vitellio, Roger Bacon, Baptista Porta, Guidus Ubaldus, Aquilonius, etc., have written whole volumes.

 

(1) Lumen est actus perspicui. Lumen a luce provenit, lux est in corpore lucido.

(2) In Phaedone.

(3) De pract. philos. 4.

(4) Saturn. 7, cap. 14.

(5) Lac. cap. 8 de opif. Dei, I. 

La solución al dilema no es tan obvia como podría parecer (y de ahí los debates), pues en el asunto de la percepción física, como en el de la conceptualización de la realidad, es grande el papel constructivo del cerebro a la hora de generar las imágenes y mapas mentales de lo que percibimos como "si estuviese objetivamente allí", y la realidad tiene mucho, en los dos casos, de expectativa autocumplida.  La realidad por la que navegamos a pie o mentalmente, la realidad que vemos como si no la tuviésemos en el fondo de la retina, o la realidad social e interaccional, el mundo mental de convenciones solidificadas e instituciones en el que vivimos, una realidad humana que también es, a la vez, una expectativa autocumplida.

 

Viendo el mundo con la mente

 

—oOo—

Homo Homini Lupus

La frase "Homo homini lupus", el hombre es un lobo para el hombre, suele ser atribuida a Hobbes, y se entiende vulgarmente como una caracterización sumaria de su antropología o teoría política. Craso error, pues Hobbes la utiliza para describir el primitivo o teórico estado de naturaleza de la humanidad, un estado realmente pre-humano de la cultura, el estado de la humanidad antropoide o salvaje tal como la imaginaba Hobbes, frente al estado de cultura propiamente humana en el que vivimos, en el que, precisamente, el hombre no es un lobo para el hombre, pues hay instituciones (incluso entre los a veces llamados "salvajes") que ligan a los hombres entre sí, estructuras y relaciones sociales, normas, leyes y reyes. 

Sí podríamos decir en todo caso que para Hobbes los reyes son lobos para otros reyes, o las naciones lobos para otras naciones, pues no hay (por simplificar, al margen de alianzas inestables, etc.) instituciones ni leyes comunes que rijan a reyes y naciones. No se había inventado la ONU por el siglo XVII, y mal inventada está ahora, así que seguimos más o menos en lo mismo.

Sea como sea, Hobbes ni siquiera es el autor de la frase Homo homini lupus, pues debió leerla en la Anatomía de la Melancolía de Robert Burton. Aquí está el pasaje en cuestión, y la nota en que aparece la famosa frase, en el primer capítulo en el que habla Burton de las desgracias que aquejan a la humanidad—la primera de ellas, la humanidad misma:

To descend to some more particulars, how many creatures are at deadly feud with men! lions, wolves, bears, etc., some with hoofs, horns, tusks, teeth, nails. How many noxious serpents and venomous creatures, ready to offend us with stings, breath, sight, or quite kill us! How many pernicious fishes, plants, gums, fuits, seeds, flowers, etc., could I reckon up on a sudden, some grievous malady, if not death itself! Some make mention of a thousand several poisons: but these are but trifles in respect. The greatest enemy to man is man, who by the devil's instigation is still ready to do mischief, hid own executioner, a wolf, a devil to himself and others (1). We are all brethren in Christ, or at least should be, members of one body, servants of one Lord, and yet no fiend can so torment, insult over, tyrannize, vex, as one man doth another. Let me not fall therefore (saith David, when wars, plague, famine were offered) into the hans of men, merciless and wicked men:

Vix sunt homines hoc nomine digni,

Quamque lupi saevae plus feritatis habent. (2)

[Though men in shape, they scarce deserve the name; 

Their savagery doth put the wolves to shame] 

We can most part foresee these epidemical diseases, and likely avoid them. Dearths, tempests, plagues, our astrologers foretell us; earthquakes, inundations, ruins of houses, consuming fires, come by little and little, or make some noise beforehand; but the knaveries, impostures, injuries, and villainies of men no art can avoid. We can keep our professed enemies from our cities by gates, walls, and towers, defend ourselves from thieves and robbers by watchfulness and weapons; but this malice of men, and their pernicious endeavours, no caution can divert, no vigilancy foresee, we have so many secret plots and devices to mischief one another.

 

(1) Homo homini lupus, homo homini daemon.

(2) Ovid., Trist. lib. 5, elg. 8.

 

(Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, "The First Partition - The First Section, Member, Subsection - Man's Excellency, Fall, Miseries, Infirmities; The causes of them, Everyman, 1.134-5, notes: 466).

El Prusés y el Estado de las Autonomías según Hobbes

—oOo—

Parts and Persons

 The everyday dramatism of the social actor according to Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy:

 

It is not worth, virtue (that's bonum theatrale [a theatrical good], wisdom, valour, learning, honesty, religion, or any sufficiency for which we are respected, but money, greatness, office, honour, authority; honesty is accounted folly; knavery, policy; men admired out of opinion, not as they are, but as they seem to be: such shifting, lying, cogging, plotting, counterplotting, temporizing, flattering, cozening, dissembling, "that of necessity one must highly offend God if he be conformable to the world," Cretizare cum Crete [to do at Crete as the Cretans do], "or else live in contempt, disgrace, and misery." One takes upon him temperance, holiness, another austerity, a third an affected kind of simplicity, whenas indeed he, and he, and he, and the rest are hypocrites, ambidexters, outsides, so many turning pictures, a lion on the one side, a lamb on the other. How would Democritus have been affected to see these things!

To see a man turn himself into all shapes like a chameleon, or as Proteus, omnia transformans sese in miracula rerum [who transformed himself into every possible shape], to act twenty parts and persons at once for his advantage, to temporize and vary like Mercury the planet, good with good, bad with bad; having a several face, garb, and character for every one he meets; of all religions, humours, inclinations; to fawn like a spaniel, mentitis et mimicis obsequiis [with feigned and hypocritical observance], rage like a lion, bark like a cur, fight like a dragon, sting like a serpent, as meek as a lamb, and yet again grin like a tiger, weep like a crocodile, insult over some, and yet others domineer over him, here command, there crouch, tyrannize in one place, be baffled in another, a wise man at home, a fool abroad to make others merry.

To see so much difference betwixt words and deeds, so many parasangs betwixt tongue and heart, men like stage-players act variety of parts, give good precepts to others, [to] soar aloft, whilst they themselves grovel on the ground.

To see a man protest friendship, kiss his hand, quem mallet truncatum videre [whom he would like to see decapitated], smile with an intent to do mischeif , or cozen him whom he elogiums; his enemy, albeit a good man, to vilify and disgrace him, yea, all his actions with the utmost livor and malice can invent.

To see a servant able to buy out his master, him that carries the mace mor worth than the magistrate, which Plato, lib. II de leg., absolutely forbids, Epictetus abhors. An horse that tills the land fed with chaff, an idle jade have provender in abundance; him that makes shoes go barefoot himself, him that sells meat almost pined; a toiling drudge starve, a drone flourish.

To see men buy smoke for wares, castles built with fools' heads, men like apes follow the fashions in tires, gestures, action; if the king laugh, all laugh: 

Rides? majore cachinno

Concutitur, flet si lacrimas conspexit amici?

[Should you smile, a heartier laughter shakes his sides; he sees you weep, and tears drop from his eyes.]

Alexander stooped, so did his courtiers; Alphonsus turned his head, and so did his parasites. Sabina Poppaea, Nero's wife, wore amber-coloured hair,so did all the Roman ladies in an instant, her fashion was theirs.

To see men wholly led by affection, admired and censured out of opinion without judgement: an inconsiderate multitude, like so many dogs in a village, if one bark, all bark without a cause as fortune's fan turns, if a man be in favour, or commended by some great one, all the world applauds him; if in disgrace, in an instant all hate him, and as the sun when he is eclipsed, that erst took no notice, now gaze and stare upon him.

(...)

("Democritus to the Reader," 65-66)

What's the Market? —What's the World?

—oOo—

What's the Market? —What's the World?

 According to Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy:

What's the market? A place, according to Anacharsis, wherein they cozen one another, a trap; nay, what's the world itself? A vast chaos, a confusion of manners, as fickle as the air, domicilium insanorum [a madhouse], a turbulent troop full of impurities, a mart of walking spirits, goblins, the theatre of hypocrisy, a shop of knavery, flattery, a nursery of villainy, the scene of babbling, the school of giddiness, the academy of vice; a warfare, ubi velis nolis pugnandum, aut vincas aut succumbas [where you have to fight  whether you will or no, and either conquer or go under], in which kill or be killed, wherein every man is for himself, his private ends, and stands upon his own guard. No charity, love, friendship, fear of God, alliance, affinity, consanguinity, Christianity, can contain them, but if they be anyways offended, or that string of commodity be touched, they fall foul. Old friends become bitter enemies on a sudden for toys and small offences, and they that erst were willing to do all mutual offices of love and kindness, now revile and persecute one another to death, with more than Vatinian hatred, and will not be reconciled. So long as they are behoveful, they love, or may bestead each other, but when there is no more good to be expected, as they do by an old dog, hang him up or cashier him: which Cato counts a great indecorum, to use men like old shoes or broken glasses, which are flung to the dunghill; he could not find in his heart to sell an old ox, much less to turn away an old servant: but they, instead of recompense, revile him, and when they have made him an instrument of their villainy, as Bajazet the Second, Emperor of the Turks, did by Acomethes Bassa, make him away, or instead of reward, hate him to death, as Silius was served by Tiberius. In a word, every man for his own ends. Our summum bonum is commmodity, and the goddess we adore Dea Moneta, Queen Money, to whom we daily offer sacrifice, which steers our hearts, hands, affections, all: that most powerful goddess, by whom we are reared, depressed, elevated, esteemed the sole commandress of our actions, for which we pray, run, ride, go, come, labour, and contend as fishes do for a crumb that falleth into the water.

("Democritus to the Reader", 64-65)

 

 

The Whole World Plays the Fool

—oOo—

The Whole World Plays the Fool

 

A passage from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy which alludes to the motto for Shakespeare's Globe—without mentioning the Globe itself, only the classical locus. From the introduction, "Democritus to the Reader" (52-53):

Thus Democritus esteemed of the world in his time, and this was the cause of his laughter: and good cause he had.

Olim jure quidem, nunc plus, Democrite, ride;

   Quin rides? vita haec nunc mage ridicula est.   (2) 

 

Democritus did well to laugh of old,

    Good cause he had, but now much more;

This life of ours is more ridiculous

    Than that of his, or long before.

(2) E Graec. epig.

Never so much cause of laughter as now, never so many fools and madmen. 'Tis not one Democritus will serve turn to laugh in these days; we have now need of a "Democritus to laugh at Democritus" (3); one jester to flout at another, one fool to fleer at another: a great stentorian Democritus, as bit as that Rhodian Colossus. For now, as Sariburiensis said in his time (4), totus mundus histrionem agit, the whole world plays the fool; we have a new theatre, a new scene, a new Comedy of Errors, a new company of personate actors; Volupiae sacra  [the rites of the goddess of pleasure] (as Calcagninus willingly feigns in his Apologues) are celebrated the world over, where all the actors were madmen and fools, and every hour changed habits, or took that which came next (5). He that was a mariner to-day is an apothecary to-morrow; a smith one while, a philosopher another, in his Volupiae ludis [in these fêtes of the goddess of pleasure]; a king now with his crown, robes, ceptre, attendants, by and by drove a loaded ass before him like a carter, etc. If Democritus were alive now, he should see strange alterations, a new company of counterfeit vizards, whigglers, Cuman asses, maskers, mummers, painted puppets, outsides, fantastic shadows, gulls, monsters, giddy-heads, butterflies. And so many of them are indeed (if all be true that I have read) (6). For when Jupiter and juno's wedding was solemnized of old, the gods were all invited to the feast, and many noble men besides. Amongst the rest came Chrysalus, a Persian prince, bravely attended, rich in golden attires, in gay robes, with a majestical presence, but otherwise an ass. The gods, seeing him come in such pomp and state, rose up to give him place, ex habitu hominem metientes [measuring the man by his garb]; but Jupiter, perceiving what he was, a light, fantastic, idle fellow, turned him and his proud followers into butterflies (1): and so they continue still (for aught I know to the contrary) roving about in pied coats, and are called chrysalides by the wiser sort of men: that is, golden outsides, drones, flies, and things of no worth. Multitudes of such, etc.        

            ubique invenies

Stultos avaros, sycophantas prodigos.

[You will find everywhere miserly fools and spendthrift sycophants.]

Many additions, much increase of madness, folly, vanity, should Democritus observe, were he now to travel, or could get leave of Pluto to come see fashions, as Charon did in Lucian, to visit our cieties of Moronia Pia and Moronia Felix (2): sure I think he would break the rim of his belly with laughing. Si foret in terris rideret Democritus [were Democritus alive, how would he laugh!], seu (3), etc.

(3) Plures Democriti nunc non sufficiunt, opus Democrito qui Democritum rideat. —Era. Moria.

(4) Polycrat. lib. 3, cap. 8, e Petron.

(5) Ubi omnes delirabant, omnes insani, etc., hodie nauta, cras philosophus; hodie faber, cras pharmadopola; hic modo regem agebat multo satellitio, tiara, et sceptro ornatus, nunc vili amictus centiculo, asinum clitellarium impellit.

(6) Calcagninus, Apol. Chrysalus e caeteris auro dives, manicato peplo et tiara conspicuus, levis alioquin et nullius consilii, etc. Magno fastu ingredienti assurgunt dii, etc.

(1) Sed hominis levitatem Jupiter perspiciens, At tu (inquit) esto bombillo, etc., protinusque vestis illa manicata in alas versa est, et mortales inde Chrysalides vocant hujusmodi homines.

(2) [Provinces of Moron ia, or Foolsland, in Joseph Hall's Mundus Alter et Idem.]

(3) Hor.

A satirical Roman in his time thought all vice, folly, and madness were all at full sea, Omne in praecipiti vitium stetit (4) [every vice was in headlong career]. 

(4) Juven.

Josephus the historian taxeth his countrymen Jews for bragging of their vices, publishing their follies, and that they did contend amongst themselves who should be most notorious in villainies (5); but we flow higher in madness, far beyond them, 

Mox daturi progeniem vitiosiorem, (6)

[And yet with crimes to us unknown, 

Our sons shall mark the coming age their own,]

and the latter end (you know whose oracle it is) is like to be worst. 'Tis not to be denied, the word alters every day; Ruunt urbes, regna transferuntur [cities fall, kingdoms are transferred], etc., variantur habitus, leges innovantur [fashions change, laws are altered], as Petrarch observes (7), we change language, habits, laws, customs, manners, but not vices, not diseases, not the symptoms of folly and madness, they are still the same. And as a river, we see, keeps the like name and place, but not water, and yet ever runs, Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum (8); our times and persons alter, vices are the same, and ever will be; look how nightingales sang of old, cocks crowed, kine lowed, sheep bleated, sparrows chirped, dogs barked, so they do still; we keep our madness still, play the fools still, nec dum finitus Orestes [and the play is not yet finished]; we are of the same humours and inclinations as our predecessors were; you shall find us all alike, much at one, we and our sons, Et nati natorum, et qui nascuntur ab illis, and so shall our posterity continue to the last. But to speak of times present.

(5) De bello Jud. l. 8, capt. 11. Iniquitates vestrae neminem latent, inque dies singulos certamen habetis quis pejor sit.

(6) Hor.

(7) Lib. 5, epist. 8

(8) Hor.

—oOo—

Robert Burton on the Democratic Party

 

From the Anatomy of Melancholy, p 42:

 

'Tis an ordinary thing with us to account honest, devout, orthodox, divine, religious, plain-dealing men idiots, asses, that cannot or will not lie or dissemble, shift, flatter, accomodare se ad cum locum ubi nati sunt [adapt themselves to the station in which they were born], make good bargains, supplant, thrive, patronis inservire, solennes ascendendi modos apprehendere, leges, mores, consuetudines recte observare, candide laudare, fortiter defendere, sententias amplecti, dubitare de nullis, credere omnia, accipere omnia, nihil reprehendere, caeteraque quae promotionem ferunt et securitatem, quae sine ambage felicem reddunt hominem, et vere sapientem apud nos [fawn upon their patrons, learn the usual methods of getting on, be scrupulous in the observance of laws, manners, customs, praise in glowing terms, defend with vigour, adopt others' opinions, doubt nothing, believe everything, endure everything, resent nothing, and do all the other things which lead to promotion and safe position, which make a man fortunate beyond all question, and truly wise, according to our notions]; that cannot temporize as other men do, hand and take bribes, etc., but fear God, and make a conscience of their doings.

 

 

—oOo—

In Minerva's Tower

Democritus Junior to the Reader

An Introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy

Holbrook Jackson's introduction to Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (Everyman's Library, 1932)

It is ironical that a treatise of melancholy should have become one of the great entertainments among English writings; but the irony is accidental, for if the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy was not precisely of the breed of Mark Tapley he was no hypochondriac, and had no intention of compiling a doleful work. Robert Burton was a good-humoured pessimist, and unless he himself had told us we should not have guessed that he was addicted to a melancholy, lamentable enough for him, but most fortunate for us because it was the first cause of a delightful book. For proof of his fundamental amiability we must recall Bishop Kennett's stroy which tells how Burton, when the melancholy weighed upon him, would leave his study in Christ Church, Oxford, stroll down to Folly Bridge and recreate himself by listening to the vigorous back-chat of the bargees. He confesses, however, that he wrote the Anatomy to relieve his own melancholy. We do not know whether the disease yielded to the treatment, but we do know that, for over three centuries, his work has been a prophylactic against the megrims, and his kindly if irascible soul still goes marching on in successive editions of his masterpiece, blazing new trails of pleasure among the generations succeeding that which was enriched by his presence.

There are few details of his life, and few are necessary, for if ever author were embodied in a book or if ever book were the presentment of an author, that author was Robert Burton and that book the Anatomy of Melancholy. The biographical facts are that he was born at Lindley Hall in Leicestershire on 8th February, 1577, the fourth of a family of nine; that he went to the Free School at Sutton Coldfield and later to Nuneaton Grammar School; that he entered Brasenose College in 1593, was elected a student of Christ Church in 1599, took his B.D. in 1614, became  Vicar of St. Thomas, Oxford, two years later, and was presented with the living of Seagrave in Leicestershire, by his patron George, Lord Berkeley, in 1630. He was a ready versifier in both Latin and English, contributed to several academic anthologies, and in his thirty-first year wrote Philosophaster, a satirical comedy in Latin verse. This, his first sustained work, was rewriten in 1615  and performed by the students in the Hall of Christ Church in 1617.(1)

(1). Philosophaster remained in MS. until 1862, when it was edited by William Edward Buckley and published by the Roxburghe Club. The first translation was made by Paul Jordan-Smith and published by Stanford University, California, in 1931. 

The Anatomy of Melancholy was published in 1621, and went through five editions during the author's life. The last edition which he saw through the press was that of 1638, for in the following year he died at the age of sixty-three and was buried in the Cathedral of the University where his brother William, author of the Description of Leicestershire (1622), erected a monument to his memory in the form of a portrait bust, tinted to the life, after the manner of those times.

His life was uneventful. "I have lived," he says, "a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life, mihi & musis in the University as long almost as Xenocrates in Athens, ad senectam fere,  to learn wisdom as he did, penned up most part in my study." This we may accept literally, although he was a parson, and for some years a pluralist parson, with the duties of his incumbencies, which he probably reduced by delegation or neglect. Yet it would be unsafe to conclude that even so large and complicated work as the Anatomy was necessarily a whole-time job. Diligence and an enjoyment of drudgery can accomplish miracles in the spare time of a busy life. Burton may have been reclusive, but he was no hermit. Apart from his position as a clerk in Holy Orders, there is evidence of other activities: he was librarian of his college, and for a year at least, a Clerk of Oxford Market. Primerily, however, he was a scholar and a bookman agreeably cloistered in his own rooms, with plenty of books (2), or in the admirable library of "the most flourishing College in Europe," or the Bodleian, endeavoring by his researches into the causes and cure of melancholy to be more than "a drone"  or "an unprofitable and unworthy member of so learned and noble a society," and to avoid writing "that which should be in any way dishonourable to such a royal and ample foundation."

(2). He owned about 2,000 volumes, which he bequeathed to the library of his College and the Bodleian.

Such a man might have lapsed into pedantry; but although he uses a pedantic method his outlook is far from it, and he himself has few of the vices of the schoolman. Nor is his solemn vocation reflected in his style. The Anatomy, indeed, is often unparsonic; even his admonitions are tolerant and urbane, whilst his conversation was said to be lively, although, as Thomas Hearne is careful to record, "very innocent." But of such details we know little, for it is a curious fact that, although a familiar figure in the university life of his day and a popular author, he shared with Shakespeare an almost complete immunity from contemporary gossip. Beyond the documentary evidence of his offices and the few autobiographical details dotted about his book, no contemporary references of any importance have come to light, and Burton had been dead over fifty years before Anthony à Wood's character of him appeared in the Athenae Oxonienses. Wood never met him, but talked with those who had. But even then the Oxford historian is not essential, for as likely a character could be drawn from the hints and admissions in Burton's own book.

"He was," says Anthony Wood, "an exact Mathematician, a curious calculator of Nativities, a general read Scholar, a thro'-pac'd Philologist, and one that understood the surveying of Lands well. As he was by many accounted a severe student, a devourer of Authors, a melancholy and humorous Person; so by others, who knew him well, a Person of great honesty, plain dealing and Charity. I have heard some of the Ancients of Christ Church often say that his Company was very merry, facete and juvenile, and no man did surpass him for his ready and dextrous interlarding his common discourses among them with Verses from the Poets or Sentences from classical Authors, which being then the fashion in the University, made his Company more acceptable."

We know how he looked from his portraits, of which there are three: a painting in oils at Brasenose, the engraved miniature by Le Blon in the emblematic frontispiece of the Anatomy, and the painted bust in the Cathedral at Oxford. From these sources we may compose a portrait of our English Democritus among his books in the agreeable setting of a famous and already venerable college: a thick-set, plumpish man, with dark brown beard or formal cut; there is a satiric glint in the large eyes, and intelligence and memory are revealed in the monumental forehead; his nose is enterprising and he has the soap mouth of the well-opinioned, corrected by an indulgent nether lip. It is the face of a character such as England often produced in those days and sometimes even now: a competent, thoughtful, self-sufficient face, with a hint of shyness which might indicate a preference for a shelteered life rather than a life of adventure, unless it were adventures among books. And from this composite presentment we may safely infer a genial yet reclusive, diffident yet self-opinionated man, who might be friendly but not demonstrative, tolerant yet irascible, and who whould suffer fools sadly rather than gladly.

Yet when we have said all and listened attentively to Anthony Wood we have not probed very far into the soul of Robert Burton. We have not yet divined that entity which is he and none other. The Anatomist is, indeed, somewhat of a paradox. Like most interesting men, he is not quite consistent. He preaches the happy mean and does not practise it. His book is always excessive. He overloads every statement. It is the most sententious book ever written, yet it reads trippingly as a novel. It is packed with common sense and uncommon nonsense. He is never tired of apologizing for his long-windedness, and immediately starts expatiating again. He fears that he will go too far in his exposition of love-melancholy, and does. He was never married, but marriage has no mysteries for him. He laughs at humanity and weeps over the sorrows and stupidities of men. He is scientifical and superstitious at one and the same time. He is as frank as a pornographer and as mincing as a prude. He mixes facetiae with theology. He is not a deliberate humorist, yet he is often funnier than the professional wag. He is most frivolous whn he is most earnest; and when he is frank and colloquial he is most profound. Like Whitman, he is large and multitudinous. He spills himself and the whole of ancient learning into his books and adroitly turns the medley into an ordered theme which, because of its great size, may weary his reader but never bore him.

Robert Burton was a bookman first and last. He lived among books and upon them, and devoted the greater part of his life to the writing of an epitome or quintessence of the books of all times. His treatise is the legitimate offspring of a bookish mind, and although it is largely a distillation of authors it is an original work. The Anatomy looks like a crude assembly of quotations and is indeed a vast mobilization of the notions and expressions of others, yet it is not they but the rifler who is revealed on every page, it is he, notthey who peeps from behind every quotation. The reason is clear. He is an artist in literary mosaic, using the shreds and patches he has torn from the work of others to make a picture emphatically his own. Books are his raw material. Other artists fashion images out of clay, contrive fabrics and forms of stone, symphonies of words, sounds, or pigments Burton makes a cosmos out of quotations. He raids the writings of the past, which he often finds neglected or in ruins, and reassembles them in a structure of his own, much as the ruins of Rome were pillaged by the builders of the Renaissance and worked into the temples and palaces of a new civilization.

His apologies for this fascinating literary structure seem supefluous, but they are due neither to mock modesty nor to a sense of inferiority. Burton never lacked proper conceit. He was convinced of his ability to accomplish his task and he believed in his own sagacity.  Authors rarely compile works running into half a million words without being encouraged by the conviction that they are doing something worth doing. His apologetics were, of course, a convention; no seventeenth-century work was complete without a prefatory vindication. He not only excuses himself for his subject and his manner of presenting it, he apologizes even for his title. He wrote about melancholy not solely, it would seem, to relieve himself of that distemper, as he asserts in one place, but because he thought it "a subject most necessary and commodious, less common and controversial than Divinity, which I do acknowledge to be the queen of professions." His title to-day seems explicit enough. It is unnecessary for him to cite precedents, for anatomies were almost as common then as anthologies are now. But if it is a little odd, he will let it stand, since "it is a kind of policy in these days to prefix a phantastical title to a book which is to be sold—for as larks come down to a day-net, many vain readers will tarry and stand gazing, like silly passengers, at an antic picture in a painter's shop, that will not look at a judicious piece." For the same reason he commits his treatise, in the main, to the English language. "It was not mine intent," he says, "to prostitute my muse in English," but if he had composed his work in Latin he could not have got it printed: "Any scurrile pamphlet is welcome to our mercenary stationers in English," he complains, "but in Latin they will not deal." But we do not join him in reviling those mercenary publishers, for if they had not thought of their profits they would have robbed us of ours, and Burton, like so many flourishing wits, would lie smothered in oblivion.

His style is peculiar only as it is linked with a method which demands lavish quotations and citation. He is a master of both these arts. The quantity, audacity, and aptness of his quotations have always astounded and refreshed his readers; and he is easily the greatest collector and coordinator of apophthegms in an age which had many notable specialists in that craft. Stripped, however, of these characteristic and entertaining encumbrances. Burton's prose is direct and normal. It has a brisk, staccato style, which guarantees the fluency of his long and leisurely book. He is often charged with eccentricity; but if we allow for the inevitable quaintness created by time such a charge cannot be upheld. Burton is a self-conscious quoter and a deviser of processions of glittering words and epithets, but he is no mere phrase-maker. He does not invent a phrase for its own sake, and then stand back to admire it as one feels Browne doing and Donne doing. His style is too colloquial for that. It is like good talk. You can hear the cadence of a disputatious yet friendly voice tirelessly advising and expounding, but always redeemed from monotony by an apt twist or a whimsical turn, and when these fail, he brings up his reserves of curious tales which he marshals with ingenuity and gusto.

The Anatomy is great in size and scope. It ranges over all times and place, diving into the past, dipping into the future, and even glancing ironically at the present. Although his theme is melancholy, he contrives by a method of intermission and digression to glance at almost every human interest or endeavour. The work is thus a commentary unpon the life and habits of the human race. It is a bridge between medieval and modern thought: the swan song of authoritarian scholasticism (all that Glanvill condemned in his Scepsis Scientifica), and an anticipation of the method of deduction from observed facts. He adopts the traditional form of the conspectus of his time. The work is arranged in three "partitions" and numerous "sections," "members," and "subsections," the titles and sub-titles being set out synoptically at the beginning of each part. In addition to the parts and chapters proper there are several admitted "digressions," often the size of a treatise, and "as satirical Preface conducing to the . . . Discourse" which fills seventy-eight pages, folio, in the definitive edition.

Sir William Osler described the Anatomy as "the greatest medical treatise written by a layman." But apart from the main theme there are sections which, although organically related to it, are complete essays in themselves. Some of these do pioneer work. The long and fascinating chapter called "A Digression of Air" is the first essay in climatology, and the section on "Religious Melancholy" is the first study of that subject. His psychological study of sex anticipates Havelock Ellis, and his repudiation of romantic love, Bernard Shaw; his chapters on "Jealousy" contain all the ingredients of the post-war problem-novel; whilst buried in the famous preface is a Utopia which suggests Wells. Burton is revealed as a sound political economist, a little-Englander, a protectionist, an opponent of monopolies, an enemy of war, an avocate of better highways, the extension of inland waterways, the reclamation of marshlands, the building of garden villages, and the granting of old age pensions.

The Anatomy of Melancholy is one of those books which possess something like human character and behaviour, the kind of book which seems to have grown. Few books are more definitely or more curiously imbued with their authorship. The Anatomy is Burton, and Burton the Anatomy. To read it is to read him: to read him is to talk with him, to know him as we know the great persons of fiction, or those few writers who have so projected themselves into their works as to have achieved for their own personalities what the great novelists and dramatists have achieved for the characters of their stories and plays. Burton, like Montaigne, Pepys, and Lamb, has made a fiction of himself, stranger and more interesting than fact.

It was born in 1621, when Burton was forty-five: a small quarto, of nearly nine hundred pages, exceedingly plump for its size. During the following  seventeen years it continued to grow and improve through four editions, 1624, 1628, 1632, and 1638, each in small folio, but, after the author's death in 1639-40, decline began. Inferior printing and paper set in with the edition of 1651, the first reprint after Burton's death and the last to contain his corrections. In 1660 another edition appears, still more degenerate in character, and the seventeenth-century editions end with the lanky folio of 1676, from which all charm and character have gone. There were no further editions for a hundred and twenty-four years. No book of the century exhibits more clearly the personal influence of author upon printer. The hand of Burton is revealed in all the editions up to 1638. There are innumerable chantes, often small and even whimsical, sometimes considerable, which bear evidence of a taste and fancy other than what at that time spontaneously issued even from the Oxford printing office. The author, true bookman as he  was, must have had many an exciting wrangle with his publishers, Henry Cripps and Leonard Lichfield, "Printer to the famous University," coming out, as I gather, victoriously, for he has contrived also to leave his own mark upon the typography of the book into which he had put so much of himself.

The appreciation of Burton is a test of bookishness, and although he has never lacked readers, even during the dark age, 1677-1799, when no edition of the Anatomy appeared, there have not been lacking those who have belittled and misrepresented him. I am not concerned at the moment with his defence, even if it were necessary, which it is not, for there is no reason why any one should read him unless he wishes to do so. Burton is for the Burtonian. But it is necessary to refer to the misrepresenters, both ancient and modern, because many of them have sinned ignorantly. Critics and commentators have not always taken the trouble to read, still less understand the book, hence much popular nonsense, of which Hallam's description of the Anatomy as "a sweeping of the miscellaneous literature from the Bodleian Library," and Lowell's

A mire ankle-deep of deliberate confusion,
Made up of old jumbles of classic allusion.

are typical specimens

Burton has been oftener damned with faint praise than scoffed at by the ignorantly learned. I know of only one downright depreciator, the Manx poet, T. E. Brown. In a vigorous and humourless essay, contributed to the New Review in 1895, this minor poet and major schoolmaster can find no good word for our good Burton. His learning is but a "parade," the "product of omnivorous folio-bolting and quarto-gulping, urged on and sustained by inordinate vanity"; his method naught but a "pseudo-method," a mere "affectation of method and order." Brown concedes, however, that Burton has "slanging power . . . a wondrous hurly-burly of invective"; and his conclusion reveals a sneaking, if slightly priggish regard. Like Charles Lamb, he is opposed to reprints of the Anatomy. "I do not know a more heartless sight than the reprint of the Anatomy of Melancholy," says Lamb. "What need was there of unearthing the bones of that fantastic old great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the newest fashion to modern censure? What hapless stationer could dream of Burton ever becoming popular?" Brown is not so generous or so romantic. An old Burton has a charm, he admits, but only "in an old library; old dust embalms it, old memories haunt it. It is worth seeking there": and he thinks it ought to be read there in situ. "Neglect, decay," he admonishes, "must be the fate of all such ponderous eccentricities. And to smarten them up, and turn them out spick-and-span, radiant and raw, into the form of literature, is a doubtful sort of proceeding. They belong to the cave, and scholars are their natural friends and custodians. Leave them to the scholars." Brown was wrong, but there is evidence that he had at least read his Burton.

His appreciators extend from his own day to ours. He received honourable mention from Anthony Wood, and he gets a good word even from malicious Thomas Hearne, who incidentally gives a hint of the fallen prestige of the Anatomy during the first half of the eighteenth century. "No book sold better formerly," he writes in his diary (1734), "than Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, in which there is a great variety of learning, so that it hath been a common-place for filchers. It hath a great many impressions, and the book-seller got an estate by it; but now 'tis disregarded, and a good fair copy (although of the seventh impressions, and the book-seller got an estate by it; but now 'tis disregarded, and a good fair copy (although of the seventh impression) may be purshased for one shilling, well bound. . . ." Twenty years later, Dr. Thomas Herring, Archbishop of Canterbury, told a friend to "look into" the Anatomy, as Burton was "one of the pleasantest, the most learned and the most full of sterling sense.  . . . the wits of Queen Anne's reign, and the beginning of George the first's were not a little beholden to him."

The legend of Burton as a crib for the lazy and a mine for the creative is well established. The Anatomy is a lucky-bag, whether you are a plagiarist, legitimately predatory, or an adventurous reader, like Dr. Johnson, whom it "took out of bed two hours sooner than he wanted to rise." Many authors of genius have rifled Burton to the advantage of our literature. John Ferriar, in his Illustrations of Sterne, reproves Laurence Sterne for incorporating into Tristram Shandy so much of the Anatomy, "once the favourite of the learned and the witty, and a source of surreptitious learning to many others." Wharton's discovery that Milton was not above taking hints from Burton, when composing Il Penseroso, is the occasion for a neat appreciation of the Anatomy: "The writer's variety of learning, his quotations from scarce and curious books, his pedantry sparkling with rude wit and shapeless elegance, miscellaneous matter, intermixture of agreeable tales and illustrations, and perhaps, above all, the singularities of his feelings cloathed in an uncommon quaintness of style, have contributed to render it, even to modern readers, a valuable repository of amusement and information."

These references indicate continuous interest over a period which knew not Burton in person or in a new edition. With the turn of the century the Anatomy comes once more into favour. Byron tells Moore that it is the most useful book "to a man who wishes to acquire a reputation of being well read, with the least trouble." But Lamb was probably its rediscoverer. It was well within his zone of research and appreciation. He composes an amusing pastiche of its style, and it is doubless through him that Keats and his friends hear of it. Charles Brown gives the poet a copy of the 1813 edition in 1819. Keats reads the volume through "carefully with pen in hand, scoring the margins constantly," annotating and indexing special passages on the last fly-leaf. In the very year of the gift he writes "Lamia," which is based upon a well-known passage in the Anatomy. From then until now interest in the book grows. Dibdin possesses "the cubical quarto of 1621, the tapering folio of 1678 [sic], and all the intermediate editions," and "these copies were all bound in picked russia by Faulkner; for then, Charles Lewis 'was not'." "What an extraordinary book it is," he exclaims, "and what an extraordinary portion of it is the chapter on 'Love Melancholy'! I was grateful for the octavo reprint of it, which has gone through two editions; but Burton has not yet been clothed in the editorial garb whcih ought to encircle his shoulders." A hundred years have passed away, and although over forty editions of the Anatomy have appeared, Dibdin's wish has not yet been carried out. But Burton is not without honour even in our hurried days, for he has perhaps more readers now than ever he had, and in the last decade Mr. Francis Meynell has admitted him into the distinguished company of the Nonesuch Press. An American edition with "an all-English text" has been published under the editorship of Mr. Floyd Dell and Mr. Paul Jordan-Smith, and now the Anatomy achieves apotheosis as a popular classic in the honoured ranks of Everyman's Library.

Holbrook Jackson

1932.




The following is a list of the chief works of Robert Burton:

The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621. Revised editions, 1624, 1628, 1632, 1638, 1651. Reprinted, 1660, 1676. No further reprints appeared until 1800, when a two-volume edition was published. Since then many editions have been issued in one, two, or three volumes.
    An edition in two volumes, folio, illustrated by E. McKnight Kauffer, was published by the Nonesuch Press in 1925.
    The first American edition was published in Philadelphia, 1836.

Philosophaster. A satirical comedy, written in Latin, 1606-17. First edition, 1862. Edited by William Edward Buckley, and published by the Roxburghe Club. First edition in English, translated and edited by Paul Jordan-Smith, Stanford University, California, 1931. This edition includes for the first time Burton's minor writings in prose and verse.

For information about Burton and his books see:

(a) Oxford Bibliographical Proceedings and Papers. vol. 1. pt. 3. "'Robert Burton and the Anatomy of Melancholy,' Papers by Sir William Osler, Professor Edward Bensly, and others. Edited by F. Madan, M. A." 1926.

(b). Bibliographia Burtoniana:  A Study of Robert Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy," with a Bibliography. By Paul Jordan-Smith. 1931.

The Three B's: Bacon, Burton, Browne

—oOo— 

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