Thomas Traherne and the Felicities of the Mind By James Balakier

were rhetorical” (34). Galileo’s fame, in fact, “[does not] rest chiefly upon his activity as an experimentalist” (56) but upon his flair for reasoning out a solution. He did not consider it important, for instance, to prove experimentally his theory of inertia which, as A. Rupert Hall points out, “was never perfectly demonstrable from the world of experience…” (56). Rather “he insisted that if we apply our imaginative insight correctly to our ordinary experience of the world, we cannot fail to perceive that the law of inertia holds” (56–57). He refuted, in the same vein, Aristotle’s view on localized motion—whereby the heavier of two objects of the same material would drop faster—by means of thought experiments and commonsensical reasoning.²⁰

Traherne was clearly conscious of the value of the empirical model, using it as a framework for the Centuries and the Dobell poems in which (as will be shown respectively in chapters 2 and 3) the structural emphasis on the mutually beneficial relationship of experience and understanding approximates Bacon’s empirical design. All in all, the observational/experiential methodology articulated by Bacon is integral to Traherne’s whole conception of Felicity, his life-renewing discovery. Among a plethora of principles of Felicity enumerated in Century 4, he stresses its overriding importance aphoristically as “Experience will make it Plain” (4.46). The word experience has empirical overtones, for it was approximately synonymous in the seventeenth century with experiment²¹ —a point illustrated by Hobbes, who clarifies that “[t]o have had many experiments, is that we call EXPERIENCE, which is nothing else but remembrance of what antecedents have been followed by what consequents” (Elements of Law 15). The etymology of experience is also tied to the word observation and was used to mean “[k]nowledge resulting from actual observation…” (Oxford English Dictionary def. 7a).

But Traherne’s valuation of Baconian empiricism is qualified like Hobbes’, despite their ideological differences. While they have in common a practical regard for science that underlies their competing epistemologies, they both place rationalism higher as a source of knowledge than experimentation, similar to the view espoused by