| Chapter 1: | Thomas Traherne, Hobbism, and the Seventeenth-Century Sciences: “Handmaids” to Felicity |
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Traherne and Cognitive Science
Traherne’s metaphorical conception of the sciences as handmaids to happiness is thus relevant to Hobbes’ view in that both men judge the experimental program to be fundamentally limited and the mind to be the true source of reliable principles. Consistent with their rationalist orientation, Traherne and Hobbes make use of thought experiments to prove their points. This practice parallels Galileo’s partiality for such conceptual experiments over actual tests and trials. Hobbes conducts a mental experiment in The Elements, for example, to show how chaotic a society without rules and regulations would be because of humanity’s base propensities. His evocation of “the state of nature” in Leviathan and other texts also illustrates this method of getting at some deeper truth through conducting a thought experiment or “conceptual exploration” (Martinich 261). Traherne also enlists a thought experiment, for example, in a compelling passage from Select Meditations in order to make accessible the reality of the “Naked Soul.” If reduced to its essential state, the mind would see “Infinite Space…within it”:
In another mental experiment, he tells his reader to “[l]et all your Affections extend to this Endles Wideness” (Centuries 2.92) that she may know the full scope of her silent self. Yet Traherne’s perspective on the relation of science to the individual clearly goes further than Hobbes’, offering an alternative to his sensory-based model of cognition.
Cognitive science may be defined as “an empirically based effort to answer long-standing epistemological questions” such as “what it means to know something and to have accurate beliefs” (Gardner 6, 5). Although an interest in cognition can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, it is considered in the late Renaissance in the new light of empirical science