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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    his sensibility in these matters, nor the “continual sight of anatomies, skeletons, or cadaverous relics, like vespilloes or grave-makers,” made him stupid. Oddly enough, he attributes something of his freshness of mind in face of the mysteries of mortality to his study of the Philosopher’s Stone, which, he declares, ‘“ hath taught me a great deal of divinity.” We find our- selves wandering, under the charge of this urbane and learned guide, through a strange twilight of mingled intelligence and credulity. On the subject of the resurrection of the body, which very naturally rises out of the consideration of its tendency to decay, Browne makes a kind of con- fession which is in his best manner. We must quote but a fragment of its long-drawn music :— “T believe that our estranged and divided ashes shall unite again; that our separated dust, after so many pilgrimages and transformations into the parts of minerals, plants, animals, elements, shall at the Voice of God return into their primitive shapes, and join again to make up their primary and pre- destinate forms. As at the Creation there was a separation of that confused mass into its species, so at the destruction thereof there shall be a separation into its distinct individuals. ... Let us speak naturally and like philosophers. The forms of alterable bodies in these sensible corruptions perish not; nor, aS we imagine, wholly quit their mansions, but retire and contract themselves into their secret and unacces- sible parts, where they may best protect themselves from the action of their antagonist. A plant or vegetable consumed to ashes to a contemplative and school-philosopher seems utterly destroyed, and the form to have taken his leave for ever. But to a sensible artist the forms are not perished, but withdrawn into their incombustible part, where they lie secure from the action of that devouring element. This is made good by experience, which can from the ashes of a plant
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