| Chapter 1: | Thomas Traherne, Hobbism, and the Seventeenth-Century Sciences: “Handmaids” to Felicity |
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(Tuveson 21). It was given impetus by Galileo, who first saw, through the increasingly stronger lenses of his “new spyglass,” with “ocular certainty” the ever-unfolding “congeries of innumerable stars” (Galileo 49). Furthermore, his sighting of lunar mountains, which “seemed proof that the moon and probably the planets were worlds like our own” (Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory 131), fired speculation on the possible existence of a plurality of worlds. Suddenly, the size of the universe grew beyond the existing Ptolemaic spatial model, and consequently, “there seemed no limit to discovery, invention, knowledge.” In fact, “Man’s potentialities seemed as unlimited as Nature’s” (Nicolson 131, 142).
The imaginative punch of these discoveries is evident from Bishop Francis Godwin’s speculative space fantasy The Man in the Moon, which was written in Latin between 1599 and 1603 and published posthumously in an English translation in 1638. In Godwin’s narrative, the sea traveler Gonsales trains twenty-five wild swans to carry him aloft. As they tower ever upward, he witnesses the motion of the earth, which convinces him of the validity of Copernicus’ theories. Moreover, after eleven days of flight, he and his swans arrive at the moon, which he describes in a way that echoes Galileo’s “spectacles.” In disseminating the findings of the new astronomy, if in diluted nonscholarly form, Godwin’s text is similar to Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1615), published posthumously in 1634, and to Christian Huygens’ The Celestial Worlds Discover’d: or Conjecture Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants, and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets, published, also posthumously, in 1698. Fictional works such as these capitalized upon the thrilling new vistas opened up by advances in astronomy.
Notably, Traherne responded to this new sense of outer space with a concomitant awareness of the vastness of inner space unmatched by other writers. In the open-ended fifth Century, for example, he catalogs infinity as “the Amplitude that enlargeth us, and the field wherin our Thoughts expaciate without Limit or Restraint, the Ground and Foundation of all our Satisfactions.…” He then asserts that “It surroundeth us continualy on evry side, it filles us, and inspires us. It is so Mysterious, that it is wholy within us, and even then it wholy seems, and is without us” (5.2). Traherne is not, of course,