The Major Works (English Library)

by Sir Thomas Browne

  148. Matthew 27.5 and Acts 1.18. The former provides the ‘doubtfull word’ απήγξατo, meaning ‘hanged himself’ as well as ‘was strangle’ (M).

  149. The ‘opinioned’ view is by Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, I, iv, 2; the contrary intention is in Genesis 11.4 (‘let us build us… a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad’).

  150. Acts 12.11, where angelos could indeed mean ‘messenger’.

  151. i.e. congregations (R).

  152. i.e. the Koran of the Moslems.

  153. i.e. the Bible.

  154. Philo, Life of Moses, II, 3.

  155. St Augustine in The City of God, XV, 23, sceptically mentions works ascribed to Enoch.

  156. i.e. the Bible.

  157. Enoch’s Pillars were said to have contained inscriptions of all the achievements to his time; but see previous page, note 155.

  158. ‘Pineda in his Monarcia Ecclesiastica quotes one thousand and fortie Authors’ (Browne marg.).

  159. ‘Gunnes, printing. The Mariners compasse’ (MSS. marg.).

  160. i.e. exclamation (literally, ‘Oh that!).

  161. ‘The Samaritan version of the Pentateuch, not printed till 1645, was known to differ slightly from the standard Massoretic version of the Jews’ (R).

  162. i.e. pagan.

  163. i.e. pagan, Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan.

  164. In Nicomachean Ethics, III, 6–9.

  165. i.e. the Christian martyrs.

  166. Corrected from: ‘What false Divinity is it if I say’ (MSS.).

  167. ‘Virgilius’ (MSS. marg.): Bishop of Salzburg, deprived for a time of his See because his theory of antipodes was thought to imply the existence of another world.

  168. i.e. according to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.

  169. John 2.1–10 and Matthew 4.1–3, respectively.

  170. 2 Esdras 4.5: ‘Then said he unto me, Go thy way, weigh me the weight of the fire, or measure me the blast of the wind, or call me again the day that is past’.

  171. Puzzle.

  172. The next section (#28) was not in UA.

  173. Pious frauds.

  174. Daniel 7.9.

  175. i.e. climacteric, a critical period in man’s life. See below, pp. 231 ff.

  176. In his treatise The Cessation of the Oracles. On the background to Browne’s discourse – and to Milton’s version in the Nativity Ode (ll. 145 ff.) – see § 292. See also below, pp. 253 ff.

  177. As above, p. 79, note 96.

  178. i.e. Christ’s (Luke 23.44–5).

  179. ‘In his Oracle to Augustus’ (Browne marg.), quoted in Browne’s translation below, p. 254. The prophecy is attributed to the devil as the inspirer of pagan oracles (as above, p. 74, note 74).

  180. Justin, XXXVI, ii, 12.

  181. In Deuteronomy 34.5–8.

  182. Cf. the fuller formulation below, p. 101: ‘there is in this Universe a Staire…’ etc.

  183. ‘A strange kind of Atheisme to deny witches!’ exclaimed Alexander Ross in 1645: ‘is there such a strict relation between witches and spirits, that hee that denies the one must needs deny the other?’ But Browne’s premise is Henry More’s: ‘No Spirit, no God’ (The Cambridge Platonists, ed. C.A. Patrides [1969], p. 32). See especially above, p. 27.

  184. Sexual desires.

  185. Affected.

  186. ‘That lived without meate upon the Smell of a Rose’ (MSS. marg.). The ‘Maid’ was the impostor Eva Flegen of Mörs, who claimed to have fasted from 1597 for no less than thirty years (§244).

  187. ‘Actives’ are heat and cold; ‘passives’, moisture and dryness (M).

  188. ‘A star in the ascendant reveals many things to those who seek the marvels of nature, that is, the works of God’. ‘Thereby’, a marginal note explains, ‘is meant our good Angel appointed us from our nativity’.

  189. i.e. the world soul according to Plato’s Timaeus (41d–e), here related to the soul of man as the ‘common Spirit that playes within us’ (§198).

  190. ‘The Spirit of God played [‘moved’ in AV] upon the waters, Genesis 1.2’ (MSS. marg., quoted in Latin). Cf. Paradise Lost, I, 19–22: ‘Thou… Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss / And mad’st it pregnant’.

  191. Inserted here (MSS.): ‘Keepe still in my Horizon, for to mee, / Tis not the Sunne that makes the day, but thee’. The lines occur in the poem below, p. 156.

  192. So Diogenes Laertius (VIII, 32) on Pythagoras; and Plato, Phaedo, 107d.

  193. See above, p. 26.

  194. The differences notwithstanding, Browne affirms the continuity of the hierarchical universe, in line with the common belief that there is ‘no vacuum, or vacuity in the world’ (Michael Sendigovius, A New Light, trans. J. French [1650], p. 88). See below, p. 103, note 205.

  195. ‘A rational and immortal essence’ (MSS. marg., quoted in Latin).

  196. The angels’ ‘intuitive knowledge’ (mentioned later) is also affirmed in Milton’s discrimination between the ‘discoursive’ reason of men, and the ‘intuitive’ of the angels (Paradise Lost, V, 487–90).

  197. The ‘specificall difference’ is the innate characteristic of a given species; ‘accidents and properties’ are all external appearances and attributes.

  198. Peculiar.

  199. Being, entity, person; but also ‘person of the Trinity’ (Coleridge) in the sense that the angels intuitively comprehend the relations within the triune Godhead.

  200. So the apocryphal book of Bel and the Dragon, 36 and 39, and Acts 8.39–40; respectively.

  201. Luke 15.10.

  202. ‘Let there be light’ (Genesis 1.3). The ‘great Father’ is St Augustine.

  203. Non-essential quality (R).

  204. The angels are the best part of the creation ex nihilo (‘out of nothing’). But Browne is probably being as playful as Donne was in ‘Aire and Angels’. See also below, p. 105.

  205. ‘God hath joyned all things in the world, per media, by middles; as first, hee hath coupled the earth and water by slime; so the ayre and the water by vapours…’ etc. (John Weemes, The Pourtraiture of the Image of God [1627], p. 49; in §95). Cf. above, p. 101, note 194.

  206. Genesis 1.26 and 2.7.

  207. Elevated.

  208. Sir Walter Ralegh detailed at some length the basis of the common claim: ‘because in the little frame of mans body there is a representation of the Universall, and (by allusion) a kind of participation of all the parts therof, therefore was man called Microcosmus, or the little world…’ (Ralegh, pp. 126 f.).

  209. See above, p. 25.

  210. The negative is added from P by Sanna (below, p. 551), as required by the sense. ‘Whereof’ refers to the invisible world; ‘the other’, to the visible.

  211. ‘The element of fire’ (MSS. marg.) which Moses failed to mention in Genesis 1.

  212. Acts 7.22: ‘Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians’.

  213. Primum mobile, the outermost sphere of Ptolemaic cosmology.

  214. i.e. earthly (literally ‘below the moon’).

  215. Proverbs 16.4.

  216. i.e. by flood (Genesis 9.9 ff.).

  217. Qualification. The rest of this section was not in UA.

  218. i.e. not only generation.

  219. ‘An excellent Burlesque on some parts of the Schoolmen, tho’ I fear an unintentional one’ (Coleridge). ‘Omneity’ literally means allness; and ‘nullity’, nothingness.

  220. Genesis 2.7: ‘God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life’.

  221. i.e. the soul’s incorruptibility and immortality.

  222. Plato, Phaedrus, 24c; Aristotle, On the Soul, II, 4, and III, 5.

  223. In The Nature of Things, I.

  224. ‘Traducianism’ proposes that the soul is transmitted by the parents to the children; ‘creationism’, that each soul is created anew at conception or birth.

  225. ‘In creation it is infused,
in infusion it is created’. The quotation appears to derive from Peter Lombard, Sentences, II, xxvii, 2 (R). Antimetathesis: ‘a figure in Rhetorick where one word is inverted upon another’ (MSS. marg.).

  226. Uncertain, dubious.

  227. i.e. not dependent on any bodily organ.

  228. Blend.

  229. i.e. the soul is the instrument of reason, as the body is that of the senses.

  230. The rest of the sentence (to ‘so receive it’) was not in UA.

  231. ‘Truly sublime and in Sir T. Brown’s best manner’ (Coleridge).

  232. Corrected from ‘Restauration’ (MSS.). Cf. above, p. 67, note 32.

  233. Isaiah 40.6.

  234. Made into flesh.

  235. The one was changed into a pillar of salt (Genesis 19.26); the other’s hair was ‘grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws’ (Daniel 4.33).

  236. ‘O Adam, what hast thou done?’ (2 Esdras 7.48; cf. Genesis 3.13).

  237. Discussed more fully below, pp. 130 ff.

  238. Corrected from ‘desire death’ (MSS.). Also inserted here (MSS.): ‘It is a symptome of Melancholy to be afraid of death, and yet sometimes to desire it; this latter I have often discovered in my selfe, and thinke noe man ever desired life as I have sometimes Death;’

  239. Corrected from ‘too carelesse’ (MSS.), in line with the emphasis here on hope (cf. below, p. 133, note 1).

  240. See below, p. 454, note 26. Cf. Browne’s own age (mentioned below, pp. 112 and 153).

  241. i.e. being potentially in possession of our three ‘souls’ (as above, p. 73, note 66).

  242. ‘That skinne wherein the childe is wrapped in the mothers wombe’ (Cockeram).

  243. Place. St Paul ‘was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter’ (2 Corinthians 12.4).

  244. i.e. refining of gold. Cf. Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist.

  245. Inserted here (P only): ‘I have therefore forsaken those strict definitions of Death, by privation of life, extinction of naturall heate, separation &c. of soule and body, and have fram’d one in hermeticall way unto my owne fancie; est mutatio ultima, qua perficitur nobile illud extractum Microcosmi [i.e. death is the final change, by which that noble portion of the microcosm is perfected], for to mee that consider things in a naturall and experimentall way, man seemes to bee but a digestion or a preparative way unto that last and glorious Elixar which lies imprison’d in the chaines of flesh’.

  246. i.e. to make me less bashful or more bold.

  247. ‘How terribly changed from that!’ (Aeneid, II, 274). Said of Hector, whose shade Aeneas meets in Hades.

  248. i.e. in our children: the ‘fruitfull issue’ just mentioned. On man’s futile efforts to survive on earth, see further Hydriotaphia (below, pp. 261 ff.).

  249. The Book of Life (Revelation 20.15).

  250. ‘Who willed his friend not to bury him, but to hang him up with a staffe in his hand to fright away the Crowes’ (Browne marg.). So Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, I, 43.

  251. Lucan, Pharsalia, VII, 819.

  252. Alike long-lived.

  253. ‘The Jewish computacion for 50 yeares’ (MSS. marg., in M).

  254. ‘The planet of Saturne makes his revolution once in 30 yeares’ (MSS. marg., in M).

  255. The (German) emperors are Rudolph II, Matthias, and Ferdinand II; the four Ottoman emperors: Ahmed I, Mustapha I, Osman II, and Murad IV; and the four Popes: Leo XI, Paul V, Gregory XV, and Urban VIII. The exception is Christian IV of Denmark (d. 1648).

  256. ‘Dogdayes. Certain dayes in July and August, so called of the Starre Canis, the Dogge: which then rising with the Sun, doeth greatly increase the heate thereof’ (Bullokar).

  257. ‘A french word for Anticks’ (MSS. marg., in M).

  258. Traditionally said to have been thirty-three (cf. Luke 3.23).

  259. Bend.

  260. The rest of this section, and the whole of the next (#43), were not in UA. Inserted here instead (MSS.): ‘The course and order of my life would bee a verie death unto others; I use my selfe to all diets, aires, humours, hunger, thirst, heate; [when] cold, I cure not my selfe by heate; when sicke, not by physicke; those that understand how I live may justly say I regard not life, nor stand in feare of Death’.

  261. On Old Age, ΧΧΙΠ (84).

  262. Which rejuvenated him at Medea’s intercession (Ovid, Metamorphoses, VII, 159 ff.).

  263. Regarded as one of the ultimate constituents of matter.

  264. i.e. ball or skein (of thread).

  265. The generally accepted limit of the world’s history (see below, p. 308, note 18).

  266. Who refused to ‘curse God, and die’ (Job 2.9–10).

  267. i.e. compared to.

  268. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, I, 8.

  269. The rest of this section was not in UA.

  270. i.e. from death (during his incarnate life on earth).

  271. Seneca, Of Providence, VI, 7.

  272. ‘That tyme when the moone is in conjunction and obscured by the Sunne, the Astrologers call horæ combustæ (MSS. marg., in M).

  273. Symbolic senses (R).

  274. ‘Remember you are to die’.

  275. Remember the four last things’. The eschatological discourse to the end of Part I (p. 132) adapts several traditional concepts (§96). Cf. the sermon in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, itself indebted to a late seventeenth-century treatise (see MP, LVII [1960], 172–98).

  276. Lucan, Pharsalia, VII, 814–15.

  277. An important qualification to the widespread belief in the world’s ever-increasing decay (see §53). Hydriotaphia also dwells on the ‘great mutations of the world’ (below, pp. 261 ff.), while The Garden of Cyrus provides the broader context.

  278. ‘I (MSS.), changed to ‘Some’ because the passage departs from the literal interpretation of Genesis 1.

  279. So Milton’s God beholds the newly created world ‘how good, how fair, / Answering his great Idea’ (Paradise Lost, VII, 556–7). See above, p. 31.

  280. Matthew 24.2 ff., 2 Peter 3.7 ff., etc.

  281. On the theory of accommodation operative here, see above, p. 21f.

  282. i.e. convictable.

  283. Matthew 24.36: ‘Of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven’. On the prophecy attributed to ‘Elias’ (Elijah), see below, p. 439, note 31.