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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    troubled about large views of scientific philosophy. With much that is curiously in common with Des- cartes—of whom, however, he never once makes mention in any portion of his writings—he differs radically from him in the breadth of his vision. Both of these remarkable men seem to have held, simul- taneously, views with regard to the conditions of science which were entirely new, and which appear to us singularly exact and just. But while Descartes pushed his deductive system beyond the limits of prudence, and dared to revolutionise physics and mathematics, Browne, a more timid philosopher if a more original and charming writer, shrank from the reduction of the universal essence of things to a theory. It is a vain, but a tempting speculation to wonder what kind of an influence Browne would have exercised if—instead of living (as it would seem) side by side with Descartes yet ignorant of his existence— Browne had been born a generation later, and sub- jected to the full tide of Cartesian ideas. We might have possessed a more powerful philosopher, but, almost certainly, a less fascinating artist. For, before we have reached the middle of Religio Medici, we have discovered that it is an artist with whom we have to deal, and not a philosopher. There seemed a chance, as the argument opened, that we should find here the apology of a new mind. But we are soon persuaded that our medicus belongs to the class of those who are, as Huxley put it, the mirrors of their age, not to the class of those who express the thoughts which, in two or three centuries, will be the thoughts of everybody. Browne is not, we discover, an inaugurator of this species. He stands,
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