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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earth for him, namely Paradise, where he lived in all tranquility and pleasure, having great abundance of worldly goodes, and lacking nothing that he might justly require or desire to have. For as it is sayde, GOD made him Lord and ruler over all the workes of his handes, that he should have under his feete all sheepe and oxen, all beastes of the fielde, all soules of the ayre, all fishes of the sea, and use them alwayes at his owne pleasure, according as he should have neede. Was not this a mirrour of perfection? Was not this a full perfect and blessed estate? Could any thing else bee well added hereunto, or greater felicity desired in this world? (2: 12.1.19–29)

But perhaps the word’s most famous use occurs in Hamlet: “Absent thee from felicity a while” ( 5.2.347). Its etymology, as interesting as it may be, does not, however, capture the extraordinary power and depth Traherne attributes to Felicity. Reading this word within the context of his poetry and prose as a whole will demonstrate its wealth of meaning for Traherne, thereby making it possible to more fully understand how the phenomenon to which it refers in his work constitutes his answer to the Hobbesian materialism of his day.

Traherne and Seventeenth-Century Science:
The “Age of the Infinite”

Traherne gives his alternative to Hobbes’ views efficacy through innovative evocations of the new knowledge and methodology of empirical science. Many scientific advances occurred in England during the seventeenth century. As Michael Cyril William Hunter notes,

Restoration England saw crucial advances in the classification and study of plant and animal life, in the understanding of human physiology, of pneumatics, optics and other physical problems. At the same time, crucial steps were taken in the vindication of the corpuscular theory of matter, in the realignment of chemistry along mechanistic lines, in astronomical observation and in the articulation of a geometrical theory of the movement of the heavens. (101)