| Chapter 1: | Thomas Traherne, Hobbism, and the Seventeenth-Century Sciences: “Handmaids” to Felicity |
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The invisible force that binds iron filings to a magnet is analogous for Traherne to the “Invisible Communications” that convey the individual to a “World of Joys” (1.26), or Felicity. Later in the first Century, he asserts that “If Lov be the Weight of the Soul, and its Object the Centre. All Eys and Hearts may convert and turn unto this Object: cleave unto this Centre, and by it enter into Rest” (1.59). Traherne draws a comparison between the deeply personal, centralized source of love, which is a definitive point of rest for desire, and the gravitational power issuing from the earth’s core.15 Thus, while other metaphysical poets, following Donne, draw images from the sciences, including astronomy, geography, medicine, and mathematics, Traherne displays a more impassioned and detailed interest than Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, or Henry Vaughan in spatial science. Donne notably had ambivalent feelings about the new philosophy, which he said “calls all in doubt” (“First Anniversary” 205), and its expanded cosmic model. Traherne, contrastingly, felt “aesthetic gratification,” as Nicolson puts it (Breaking of the Circle 177), at the unbounded spaces brought to light by the new astronomy.
The spatial context for his gravitational trope is telling in relation to Traherne’s interaction with science. As original as it may be, it basically corresponds to Aristotle’s fixed geocentric universe to which things move.16 A predilection for the classical, premodern paradigm appears in the second Century, where Traherne states that the sun
This viewpoint is deliberately turned on its head, however, in the subsequent “thought experiment”: