| Chapter 1: | Thomas Traherne, Hobbism, and the Seventeenth-Century Sciences: “Handmaids” to Felicity |
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(as opposed to his recognition as a “political, psychological, and metaphysical philosopher” [Shapin and Schaffer 8]) suffered as a result until the twentieth century. “[W]e are still very far,” Shapin and Schaffer conclude, “from appreciating Hobbes’s true place in seventeenth-century natural philosophy” (8).
While Traherne, like Hobbes and Galileo, privileges reason, his definitive position on science is qualitatively different from theirs. In “A Poetical Reflexion,” which occurs at the end of the entry in the Commentaries titled “Of Aristotle’s Philosophie,” he heralds, after cataloging the impressive accomplishments of physics and geometry, the most essential of the sciences:
And sets the Sun and Stars before our Eys.
In their true Bulks and Motions: but the Mind
Among all those doth not its Object find.
Magnificence it meets with, but in Bliss
Its Rest and Satisfaction seated is.
And all these Motions in her self must end
The Sun and Moon and Stars on her attend
While she enjoyes all Nations; if these be
(As som think) Handmaids to Felicitie,
All other Sciences are Maids to her
And to this Queen they always minister
No Harmony doth any Musick make;
(That of the Spheres will not the Organ take,)
Unless the Melodie concent to this.
Arithmetick it self must count our Bliss,
And finding all her Myriads past by Treasures
Account them too, and adde them to our Pleasures,
All other Sciences are Windows here
And let in Light into this Glorious SPHERE. (3: 205–206)
Science and mathematics are not ends in themselves. They are ultimately in service to the unfoldment of the innermost felicities of consciousness itself, which Traherne considers to be the highest science or knowledge.