Sir Thomas Browne / by Edmund Gosse.

  • Edmund Gosse
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sir Thomas Browne / by Edmund Gosse. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    as Browne did, on the “figurative sense” of Scripture. He, too, was careful to put in conciliatory, ingratiating phrases now and then about the Church, and he found strong backers among the Oratorians and the Jansenists. He put the results of science and religion apart, in separate pigeon-holes, excluding each from communication with the other, but he did it with impunity. Even the Jesuits, with whom alone in a Catholic country the man of science was likely to come into collision, were apt to be indulgent in these matters. They seem, as a rule, to have tolerated discussion of physical conditions, so long as the author- ity of the Church was not formally impugned. But the English Puritans were far less tolerant; they looked with grave suspicion on all those who went prying about to unravel the secrets of the physical world. And as the seventeenth century proceeded, in France as well as in England, the tendency was not to liberality but to a sterner formalism. The desire ‘‘to live in peace and to continue the course of life he had begun” was Descartes’ excuse for suppressing the Traité du Monde in 1633, when the condemnation of Galileo had scared him ; and, meanwhile, the temper of Port-Royal grew more and more adverse to science, as it appeared to the Jansenists that it encouraged libertinism. We shall have to insist on this when we touch on the extraordinary contrast between Browne and Pascal, whose attitude to science presently led them into paths diametrically opposite. For the moment we need but remind ourselves that the state of social and political confusion in England was directly beneficial to Browne in giving him immunity in his perilous C
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