Dr Browne’s delight in the inexplicable
The diarist John Evelyn exclaimed: “His whole house and garden is a paradise and cabinet of rarities.” He was talking about the physician Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82).
The Royal College of Physicians takes the theme “a cabinet of rarities” for the current exhibition on Browne at its headquarters, the ultra-modern building by Sir Denys Lasdun from 1964, which some people admire. Plants, animals and antiquities in which Browne took a scientific interest are on show, and manuscripts and books in which he speculated upon them.
As for Browne the man, I admire him for his prose, which flows like a clear river in whose waters may be spied bright and surprising creatures. It is, moreover, impossible after reading a few pages not to like the author.
Browne tried to reconcile religion and science (“natural philosophy” as he called it), but it is chiefly the science that has had to be revised since his day.
To readers of his bestknown book Religio Medici (the religion of a doctor) he presents his “nativity”. This is the astronomical situation of the planets and stars at the moment of his birth. The effects of this were held to influence a life. Such astrological prediction was frowned on by the Church if it pretended to predestine free choices, but it was accepted by the prevalent scientific world view.
Similarly, alchemy was the domain of the natural philosopher, overlapping with natural magic, which also attracted disapproval from the Church when it went as far as converse with spirits, as it did in the life of Dr John Dee in the century before Browne.
Religio Medici was popular in the Victorian age because Browne presents a persona of reason and tolerance. He sees himself as above petty squabbles about external rituals. “At the sight of a Crosse or Crucifix I can dispence with my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my Saviour,” he writes. “Holy water and Crucifix (dangerous to the common people) deceive not my judgement, nor abuse my devotion at all: I am, I confesse, naturally inclined to that which misguided zeale termes superstition.”
Since he was active during the Civil Wars’ religious struggles, Browne was sticking his neck out by publishing his views.
He made some good points in his short book. Natural philosophy, he noted, shared with religion belief in things that were not “inducible by reason” – in other words not apparent from prior principles. Thus no one would believe that a compass needle would point to the north (since the principle on which it worked was unknown at the time) unless he had seen it with his own eyes.
Browne says that he believes in the future resurrection of the dead, even though he does not know how it will be done. If he did know, he adds, it would be no matter of faith but simply of natural philosophy.
Yet the full attractions of Browne’s mind come from his exploration of strange beliefs, chiefly outlined in his long book Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Vulgar Errors.
There were some in his day who found Pseudodoxia Epidemica too sceptical. One was Alexander Ross, who argued that the sun did go round the earth, and (by analogy with the animal called “hay”, a sloth) the chameleon did feed on air.
Browne even touched on Artificial Intelligence. “Every ear is filled with the story of Frier Bacon, that made a brazen head to speak these words, Time is.” But Browne explained it away as a metaphor for a step in alchemy. To me that is a disappointment. I’d rather have wonders that defy explanation than no wonders at all.