Thomas Traherne and the Felicities of the Mind By James Balakier

home of a group of virtuosi who met at Gresham College and gave rise to the Royal Society. To elaborate upon Traherne’s familiarity with contemporary science, Robert Ellrodt reports that his Commonplace Book “implies an acquaintance with many of the recent theories on atoms, the cohesion of matter, vacuum, fire, the nature of cold, colors, and motion” (197). Carol Marks further notes that Traherne also copied out information on “the relationship of mind to body…‘difficulties in sciences’ caused by insufficient examination of particulars…; the use of exercises to promote health…; the prolongation of life” (“Thomas Traherne’s Early Studies” 527).

But his interest in science was even more fundamental, for as Day suggests, Traherne’s education at Oxford in the 1650s “must have been a strong influence upon his acceptance of the power of a more natural, ‘empirical reason’” (Thomas Traherne iii). For a “mystical” poet, as he has typically and sometimes dismissively been labeled, Traherne atypically has a healthy respect for the empirical method that was advocated by Francis Bacon.¹⁹ An early notebook, for example, contains passages copied out of Bacon’s De augmentis scientarium(Marks, “Thomas Traherne’s Early Studies” 511). Bacon, the self-styled “Legislator of Science,” did not in reality invent the scientific method, as is commonly thought. It was already in widespread, if informal, use around England when he published Novum Organum in 1620 (Hall 123). But he was a powerful advocate of experimental inquiry, defining this “new” methodology in the unfinished The Great Instauration(1620)as a “lawful marriage between the empirical and the rational faculty” (Francis Bacon: The New Organon 14) in which painstaking observation leads to the careful formulation of laws. Bacon’s method differed from Galileo’s “far more decisively novel” mathematical-deductive method, which through “the incipient use of experiment as a method of proof…served to verify or falsify a previous expectation” (Hall 33–34). Bacon appreciated this role of experiment as a means of corroborating a previously formulated hypothesis but “had not emphasized it…” (34). And even while “the role of experiment” was “inculcated” by Galileo’s major works, “many of Galileo’s experiments (or rather, appeals to experience)