| Chapter 1: | Thomas Traherne, Hobbism, and the Seventeenth-Century Sciences: “Handmaids” to Felicity |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
the scientific findings and speculations from a humanist perspective. In Book 8 of Paradise Lost, the angel Raphael sets Adam straight about his priorities by provisionally itemizing Copernicus’ revolutionary findings:
Be Center to the World, and other Starrs
By his attractive vertue and thir own
Incited, dance about him various rounds?
Thir wandring course now high, now low, then hid,
Progressive, retrograde, or standing still,
In six thou seest, and what if sev’nth to these
The Planet Earth, so stedfast though she seem,
Insensibly three different Motions move?
Which else to several Sphears thou must ascribe,
Mov’d contrarie with thwart obliquities,
Or save the Sun his labor, and that swift
Nocturnal and Diurnal rhomb suppos’d,
Invisible else above the Starrs, the Wheele
Of Day and Night; which needs not thy beleefe,
If Earth industrious of her self fetch Day
Travelling East, and with her part averse
From the Suns beam meet Night, her other part
Still luminous by his ray. (8.122–140)
Milton hedges his bet and endorses neither the ancient Ptolemaic nor the modern Copernican system,17 similar to another contemporary, Robert Burton, who also forbears from taking a position on “that main paradox of the earth’s motion, now so much in question” (Pt. 2, Sec. 2, Mem.3) in the “Air rectified. With a digression of the Air” section of The Anatomy of Melancholy.
Milton was hardly antiscience; in Of Education, he includes study of “the principles of Arithmetick, Geometry, Astronomy, and Geography with a generall compact of Physicks” as well as of “the instrumentall science of Trigonometry…navigation.… the History of Meteors, minerals, plants and living creatures as farre as Anatomy” (982–983). But he considers self-knowledge to be the end of all learning because only it