Thomas Traherne and the Felicities of the Mind
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Thomas Traherne and the Felicities of the Mind By James Balakier

Chapter 1:  Thomas Traherne, Hobbism, and the Seventeenth-Century Sciences: “Handmaids” to Felicity
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At the heart of these developments was Bacon’s advocacy of the inductive method, which was so successful that “Restoration science was self-consciously Baconian, its protagonists passionately devoted to the programme of inductive enquiry that Francis Bacon had articulated in the early seventeenth century as a means of superseding the sterile scholastic science of his day.…” (102). But,

Baconianism was at least to some extent a unifying slogan which (partly intentionally) gave an appearance of homogeneity to scientific activities and interests that were in fact extremely heterogeneous, and an over-emphasis on the influence of Bacon has led to a neglect of the more varied stimuli to scientific innovation in the period. (102)

Besides, it would be inaccurate to claim that science itself ruled throughout the seventeenth century. Hunter cautions that

it is dangerous to read backwards from the high prestige that science enjoyed subsequently to assume that it was equally dominant in the Restoration. In fact learned traditions held a respect that science was later to usurp, while the general failure to implement scientifically-inspired reform indicates the indifference that persisted concerning science’s potential. It is important not to lose sight of this ambivalence, in spite of all the period’s positive achievements: for arguably this, more than anything else, is the key to the intellectual character of the age. (119)

The Restoration, overall, was an “intermediate period when Aristotelian science had been dethroned, but no satisfactory, all-embracing alternative had yet emerged” (104–105) and would not do so until science became dominant with the publication of John Locke’s major treatises.

Hunter notes that a “wide range of alternative world-views…were able to coexist within scientific circles at the time” (104), but even so,

the risk [existed] that the appeal to commonsense and the pursuit of a predictable, ordered world would be taken so far as to drain the universe of spiritual forces and moral absolutes altogether.