Volume 1

The works of Sir Thomas Browne : including his unpublished correspondence, and a memoir / edited by Simon Wilkin.

  • Thomas Browne
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The works of Sir Thomas Browne : including his unpublished correspondence, and a memoir / edited by Simon Wilkin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    Browne considers the oracles as evidently and indubi- tably supernatural, and founds all his disquisition upon that postulate.2 He wonders why the physiologists of old, having such means of instruction, did not enquire into the secrets of nature: but judiciously concludes, that such questions would probably have been vain; for, in matters cognoscible, and formed for our dis- quision, our industry must be our oracle, and reason our Apollo. The pieces that remain are, A prophecy concern- ing the future state of several nations; in which Browne plainly discovers his expectation to be the same with that entertained lately with more confidence by Dr. Berkeley, that America will be the seat of the fifth empire: and Museum clausum, sive Bibliotheca abscondita; in which the author amuses himself with imagining the existence of books and curiosities, either never in being, or irrecoverably lost. These pieces I have recounted as they are ranged in Tenison's collection, because the editor has given no account of the time at which any of them were written. Some of them are of little value, more than as they gratify the mind with the picture of a great vscholar, turning his learning into amusement; or shew upon how great a variety of enquiries the same mind has been successfully employed. The other collection of his posthumous pieces, pub- lished in octavo, Lond. 1722,3 contains Repertorium; or some account of the tombs and monuments in the cathedral of Norwich ; where, as Tenison observes, z postulate.] His perfect conviction confession of the devil himself, in his ora- of the Satanic influence exerted in oracles cle to Augustus. is strongly expressed in a passage of his :t 1722.] This date was taken from a lieligio Medici, vol. ii, p. 42, respecting copy which had a reprint title. The the ground of his belief of their cessation book was published in 1712.—See Bre- tt the coming of Jesus Christ:—viz. the face to vol. iv.