CHAPTER III

THE VULGAR ERRORS

BETWEEN the year 1636, when he finished Religio Medici, and 1646 when he published in folio his massive Pseudodoxia Epidemica, we cannot trace any literary work in which Browne was certainly engaged, other than jotting down and arranging the notes which were to form his "inquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths, which examined prove but Vulgar and Common Errors." A great sensation had been produced in the course of the previous generation by the publication of two books by the French physician Dr. Laurent Joubert, entitled Paradoxa Medica and De Vulgi Erroribus. The vogue of these works had been extraordinary, and when Browne was at Montpellier, they still preserved their celebrity. I cannot help thinking that the names of these famous volumes, and something of their scope, unconsciously affected the Norwich physician in the choice of titles for his great treatise, although he is careful to say that he "reaped no advantage" from the study of Joubert, and that he found De Vulgi Erroribus "answering scarce at all to the promise of the inscription." Joubert exposed mistakes which empirical doctors were in the habit of making in the treatment of disease, but that was not Browne's purpose in any degree.

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Our medicus is very anxious that we should give him credit for the novelty of his design, and we have to admit that the Vulgar Errors (as Pseudodoxia Epidemica is usually and conveniently styled), was a work of considerable originality. It is plain that the form it now takes was the result of accident, not of forethought. The book was composed "by snatches of time"; Browne quaintly remarking that such a work as this is not to be "performed upon one leg." It could not be written rhetorically, as a tour de force, nor, as so much of the so-called rational philosophy of the preceding age had been written, in the study, with Philemon Holland's translation of Pliny open at a desk, and somebody's comment on Dioscorides spread upon the floor. It had to be the result of openair observation and personal experiment. Browne had great difficulties in his pursuit of knowledge; as a physician of steadily growing popularity his door was never quiet nor his leisure unmolested. In the midst of a delicate observation, he was liable to be called away to the bed-side of a patient. But he must have had a perfect system of note-books, to harmonise with his insatiable curiosity, and the arrangement of his scattered material is masterly. His first intention was to write his book in Latin; but he was happily persuaded that he owed "in the first place this service to our country," and secondly that such a work was addressed primarily to the county magnates, to our own "ingenuous gentry," and that they were beginning to have a difficulty in reading Latin at sight. Hence, by great good fortune, Browne deigned to write in English.

He dismissed his bulky folio to the public, not

without a shiver of apprehension. He deprecated the frown of theology. But he knew by experience that people love to preserve their mistakes, and are often heartily vexed to be set right. He was not quite sure of the countenance of his brothers in physic, who might not be pleased at so wholesale a discomfiture of the errors of mankind. But Browne trusted to the scythe of time and to the hopeful dominion of truth, and believed that he would ultimately be regarded as a public benefactor. It is necessary to remind ourselves that his great object was to enforce experimental and exact knowledge, to excite the eye and fix it upon material objects. As a naturalist and a physician, Browne saw the great error of the age to be an obsequious acceptance of traditional accounts of things. which were, really, under our own eyes day after day. Let us pay less humble a service, he says in effect, to the much-vaunted ancients. Albertus Magnus had declared that if you hang up a dead kingfisher by the bill it will "show in what quarter the wind is by an occult and secret propriety, converting the breast to that point of the horizon from whence the wind doth blow." Very well; but on Yare and on Wensum, rivers of Norfolk, there are plenty of kingfishers. Shoot one and hang it up, and see for yourself whether it does show in what quarter the wind is.

Browne's just complaint against the conventional science of his day was that it turned its back on nature in a slavish appeal to tradition. It did not trust to clinical experiment; it repeated for the thousandth time the formulas of Galen and Hippocrates. It did not look carefully at animals and plants, it merely quoted reverently what the disciples of Aristotle had

said. It took for granted, as Browne excellently remarks, that "intellectual acquisition is but reminiscential evocation, and new impressions but the colouring of old stamps which stood pale in the soul before." This latter phrase exactly expresses what it was that Browne had to combat in his more intelligent readers. They had a dim recollection that it was understood that the elephant has no joints, and that, as it cannot lie down, it sleeps erect against a tree. They looked into their old authorities, and found that Diodorus Siculus had said this, and that Strabo had confirmed it. That was enough for them; they had coloured the old pale stamp in their souls, and this they thought to be a sufficient pursuit of knowledge as to the articulation of pachyderms. But Browne wished to show them that "an old and grey-headed error" like this is not to be verified and made gospel of by a reference to what ancient Greek naturalists may have reported, but should be tested anew by living facts. He reminds his contemporaries that "not many years past, we had the advantage in England of an elephant shown in many parts thereof." Did this elephant kneel and lie down? To be sure it did, in the sight of a cloud of witnesses. Why, then, repeat and repeat the result of a lack of careful observation on the part of certain ancient authors, merely because they were ancient?

Browne makes his appearance as the champion of nature, throwing down the gauntlet to those who refuse to look "beyond the shell and the obvious exteriors of things," and who build up theories to account for that which they have only read about, not seen or felt. He is in all this the disciple of Bacon, or

would have been, if he had exactly comprehended what "the lord of Verulam" had designed to teach. It was now a quarter of a century since the Novum Organum, and with it a new great light of natural philosophy, had risen upon the world. There is no doubt for us, and there was probably but little doubt for Browne, that the outline of all future interpretation of the facts of nature was divined by Bacon in his celebrated doctrine of the necessity of the systematic examination of facts. This was his great contribution to thought; and if his tremendous Instauratio, that encyclopædia of knowledge, had ever been carried out, in the third book of it, as Robert Leslie Ellis has said, "all the phenomena of the universe were to be stored up in a treasure-house," and were to be the materials on which the new method of philosophy was to be employed. But it seems certain that Browne was rather dim in his perception of what Bacon's drift had been, and certainly he shrank from an enterprise so vast as Bacon had recommended.

We cannot too often remind ourselves in considering the apparently stationary character of English scientific theory during the thirty years which lay between the death of Bacon and the rise of the Invisible Philosophers, that Bacon was at once far ahead of his time and yet scarcely a stimulating influence. He foresaw, he cast forth brilliant intuitions, but he did not undertake the work which he recommended. He speaks of himself, very justly, as of "an image in a cross-way, that may point out the way, but cannot go it." His genius, colossal as it was, was, after all, finite. In 1591, Bacon, still young and hopeful, told Lord Burghley that he had taken all knowledge for his