| Chapter 1: | Thomas Traherne, Hobbism, and the Seventeenth-Century Sciences: “Handmaids” to Felicity |
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Now Traherne’s and Hobbes’ models of cognition are radically different. Hobbes asserts the corporeality of thoughts; Traherne as a Platonist alternatively sees them, as he states in the Dobell poem “Thoughts I,” as “Transcendent Perfect Pleasures” (l. 27). However, in a surprising way their views seem to overlap. Especially in his “Thoughts” poems, a subset occurring in the Dobell manuscript in which he integrates Felicity into the thought process,22 Traherne ambiguously refers to thoughts as “things” or objects. His two-sided view on thoughts is present in “Thoughts I,” in which he takes inventory of the power of felicitous thought:
Ye that inform my Soul with Life and Sight!
Ye Representatives, and Springs
Of inward Pleasure!
Ye Joys! Ye Ends of Outward Treasure!
Ye Inward, and ye Living things!
The Thought, or Joy Conceived is
The inward Fabrick of my Standing Bliss.
It is the Substance of my Mind
Transformd, and with its Objects lind.
The Quintessence, Elixar, Spirit, Cream.
Tis Strange that Things unseen should be Supreme. (ll. 49–60)
His rhapsodizing about thoughts bears some resemblance to Hobbes’ cognitive theory. Traherne refers to them as substantial “Things” that constitute the “Inward Fabrick” or “Substance” of the mind. They also exhibit that most universal of Hobbesian traits, motility—they are always in dynamic motion. It appears that as antithetical as their philosophies may be, there is a finer line between their notions of cognition than Traherne’s denunciations of Hobbes would lead one to believe. Significantly, Hobbes and Traherne both model the mind as a tabula rasa, or “clean paper.”23 As Hobbes archly explains in Leviathan: