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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vicissitudes of Night and Day, the Early Sweetness and Spring of the Morning the Perfume and Beauty in the cool of the Evening, would all be swallowed up in Meridian Splendor: all which now entertain you with Delights. The Antipodes would be empty, perpetual Darkness and Horror there, and the Works of God on the other side of the World in vain. (2.9)

Traherne’s reversal of the Aristotelian order of the heavens by ascribing motion to the earth rather than to the sun is done for the sake of projecting the tumultuous effects it would produce. Yet in Commentaries of Heaven, he is less sure of the cosmic order, as the entry for “Astronomie” shows:

The fixed Stars are always Equi-distant from the Poles, and move with such an unanimous consent as if they were fixed (like Nailes) in one Sphere: The Wandering Stars are som times neerer to, and som times further from the Poles. They are the 7. Planets, of old conceived to move in 7. several Spheres, that like so many Wheels carried them about. Their Names are Saturn Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Mercury, Venus and the Moon. Saturn Jupiter and Mars are above the Sun, Mercury Venus and the Moon beneath. The Moon and Mercurie, and consequently all the rest move about the Sun, as the Sun doth about the Earth. Copernicus thinks that the Earth moveth about the Sun in like maner. four Stars are lately discovered by the Help of Telescopes to attend Jupiter and move about it, as the Moon doth about the Earth…. Saturn is noted to move upon his own Centre and in figure to be like a Goblet with Ears capable of the Observation. (3: 318)

Evidently, Traherne is open to the new cosmology after all, if not necessarily convinced of its veracity. He here discards the notion of crystalline spheres, accepts the motion of the other planets around the sun, takes note of the fact that Saturn has its own “Centre” of gravity, and is receptive to the existence of a plurality of worlds, which followed from Galileo’s sighting of the Jovian moons. His tentativeness is quietly underscored by his mention of Copernicus’ heliocentric model. Like John Milton, who pointed out the absurdity of knowing everything about the heavens and not knowing one’s Self, Traherne considers