This was originally written in September 2013, as part of our Item of the Month series.
Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths, also known simply as Vulgar Errors, was the reigning work of popular science during the period of the English Revolution. In this “Encyclopaedie and round of knowledge,” the physician and scholar Thomas Browne (1605-1682) offered to readers a witty and incisive refutation of the common errors and superstitions of his age.
The fragile volume in Special Collections is drawn from John Anderson’s own library and is the first edition dating from 1646, printed in London by T. H. for Edward Dod at the close of the first English Civil War. Due to the delicate condition of the original, the featured illustrations are taken from the Faber & Faber edition of The Works of Thomas Browne, 1964 and a facsimile copy of the first edition produced by the Scolar Press in 1972, available in the main library.
In the years following its publication Pseudodoxia Epidemica, described as a “cabinet of rarities” (Regan, 1986, p. 163), went through five editions spanning the era of the second and third English civil wars, the long parliament, the execution of King Charles I, the periods of the Commonwealth, Protectorate and personal rule of Oliver Cromwell, the restoration of monarchic rule with Charles II and the beginning of the era of constitutional monarchy. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm would have wryly described these as “interesting times” but to Thomas Browne they represented an age of anarchic folly where the spread of superstition, delusion, rumour and conjecture had reached epidemic proportion: “And being now at greatest distance from the beginning of Error, are almost lost in its dissemination” (BK I, ch. ii).
The erroneous inclination of the people
Browne, whose labyrinthine prose style embodies esoteric, scientific and ironic turns of mind, is something of a contradictory figure and was described by the poet Coleridge as having "a twist in the brain". Both a polymath skeptic and a dedicated theologian, his career traverses the close of the Renaissance, the counterpoint of the Baroque and the dawn of the Enlightenment. Of humanist and misanthropic temperament, he possessed both roundhead and cavalier tendencies. His insights in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (a portmanteau title combining ideological and medical terms) are both lucid and ludic; and whilst he advocates the principles of reason his conclusions are intricately linked to political and cultural revolutions throughout history.
Whilst some commentators stress Browne’s Christian faith and that he “exuded tolerance and goodwill towards humanity in an often intolerant era” we may well be amused to discover that Browne could also be an intolerant and plain speaking curmudgeon. He describes “the people” rather disparagingly as “a confusion of knaves and fools, and a farraginous concurrence of all conditions, tempers, sexes, and ages” whose “determinations be monstrous” and where 170 years after Caxton introduced the first printing press into England the population remained largely illiterate and their ways “inconsistent with Truth” (BK I, ch iii).
In Browne’s view, the general proliferation of error had obscured ordinary people’s capacity for clear judgment to such an extent that it had resulted in the emergence of a new strain of “Popular errors”: unsubstantiated beliefs which nevertheless enjoyed the status of truth, “As for popular Errors, they are most neerly founded upon an erroneous inclination of the people” (BK I, ch. iii). His inventory of the evils which afflict reason comprises “Misapprehension, Fallacy, or false deduction, Credulity, Supinity, adherence unto Antiquity, Tradition and Authority”.
Alongside mankind’s inherited capacity for “false apprehension”, Browne argues, runs a misplaced trust in ancient authorities and a willingness to believe without evidence “An argument from Authority…is but a topical probation…depending upon a naked asseveration […] it carrieth not with it the reasonable inducements of knowledge” (BK I, vii). Among the authorities responsible for any number of tall tales are thinkers of classical antiquity such as Aristotle, Pliny, Diodorus, Siculus, and Strabo, demonstrating that in the realm of knowledge, the provenance of ideas is no guarantee of veracity.
The labyrinth of belief
The title page of Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths taken from a facsimile of the 1646 edition. The Latin motto is taken from the Renaissance scholar and physician Julius Scaliger and reads “To cull from books what authors have reported is exceedingly dangerous; the true knowledge of things must be had from things themselves.”
As Pseudodoxia Epidemica progresses through each of its seven books, Browne navigates his way through a seemingly interminable “maze of error” (BK I, x) and with the aid of his scientific method he pursues and unpicks lasting examples of tangled logic from antiquity to his own time. The first book advances Browne’s thesis ‘Of the first cause of common Errors’ being human nature since the fall of man. The following six mirror the order of creation: from untested assumptions regarding the minerals and vegetables of the earth in Book 2; to myths and common misconceptions about animals in Book 3; the superstitions, irrational prejudices and misapprehension of man in Book 4; the falsification of nature in art in Book 5; whilst the 6th book surveys beliefs regarding the age and creation of the earth, the divisions of the calendar, the conclusions of ancient astronomy and examines testimony regarding distant lands and peoples. The 7th and final book tests the reliability of classical and scriptural authority.
Among the absurd inferences of his own time were inexplicable and comic conclusions such as “the Elephant, whereof there generally passeth an opinion it hath no joints; and this absurdity is seconded with another, that being unable to lie down, it sleepeth against a Tree” and that hunters need only saw down the tree to render the beast immobile; that “a Badger hath the legs on one side shorter then of the other”; that “Crows, Choughs and Deer” can live to ages “exceeding the age of man” in some accounts “surmounting the years of Methuselah” [which according to Genesis. 5:27 was 969 years.]; “That Flies, Bees, &c. Do make that noise or humming sound by their mouth”; that Toads and Spiders share a natural antipathy – (toads, Browne discovers by experiment are in fact naturally very fond of spiders – and will eat them for lunch); that although a peacock may appear vain he can also be embarrassed, bafflingly being “ashamed when he looks on his legs”; that earthquakes are caused by “the motion of a great Bull, upon whose horns all the earth is poised”; and that storks possess a providential geo-politics and having disparaged monarchical government ”are to be found, and will only live in Republikes or free States”. Unsurprisingly Browne finds these assertions “neither consonant unto reason, nor correspondent unto experiment” (BK I, ch vii).
Many of the 17th century beliefs about animals which Browne finds “ridiculous unto reason” persist, however, to this day. Assumptions such as “Moles are blind and have no eyes” can be harmless enough; but debatable beliefs about badgers and queasy tales of the eating of horse flesh, (“that which is refused in one country, is accepted in another”) can have unpalatable consequences; and when faced with the uncategorized consumption of animals where “particular distinctions are overthrown” , Browne seems instead to advocate an enlightened vegetarianism, concluding that “there is no absolute necessity to feed on any” (BK III, ch xxv).
But why shouldn’t the people be free to believe whatever nonsense they like? The answer, for Browne (and for the Enlightenment philosophers who followed him), is that pursuit of objective knowledge is not a fanciful option but the first obligation of the freedom to doubt and that the persistence of delusion is symptomatic of a dangerous and willful “neglect of Enquiry” (BK I, ch v).
Beyond the shell and obvious exteriours of things
Browne’s Address to the Reader, where he introduces “this Encyclopaedie and round of knowledge” with its decorated letter after the fashion of illuminated manuscripts. Taken from a facsimile of the 1646 edition.Pseudodoxia Epidemica follows the method of Browne’s scientific forerunner Francis Bacon who subjected truth claims to the application of reason and the evidence of experience. In his opening address ‘To the reader’, Browne prescribes a healthy dose of skepticism, and appeals to those discerning “Critical Discoursers” who, in keeping with the method of the new science, “look beyond the shell and obvious exteriours of things” in order to better reveal the truth.
Browne portrays himself as an anatomist taking a critical scalpel to the tissue of lies and superstition preserved by “the impossible society of Error”, dissecting its questionable ideas and peeling back the layers of false learning it has accumulated over time. Like his predecessor in anatomy, William Harvey (1578-1657) physician to Charles I, who was the first to accurately describe the circulation of the blood through the human body in 1628, Browne traces the circulation of false information through the body politic and identifies the fallibility of human nature as being both the cause of erroneous belief and the means of its preservation and transmission through history.
The Address, therefore, represents the opening salvo of Browne’s revolution in human understanding, as does his audacious and paradoxical claim that “knowledge is made by oblivion”, explaining that “to purchase a clear and warrantable body of Truth, we must forget and part with much we know”. Surprisingly, for a natural philosopher whose stated intention was not only to change what his readers thought but how they thought, Browne was not a political progressive for the time but a supporter of Charles I. However, he encourages his readers to further “the advancement of learning” and hold prevailing assumptions up to the scrutiny of the “three Determinators of Truth: Authority, Sense, and Reason” (BK I, ch. iii).
The information of reason
It is Pseudodoxia Epidemica’s later books, where Browne surveys Mankind, which perhaps hold the greater significance for contemporary readers and commend him to us most. Of particular importance are his essays on the persistence of capital punishment; his dismantling of anti-semitic assumptions; his attack on xenophobia in the same chapter, “there will bee found no easie assurance to fasten a material or temperamental propriety upon any nation”; and his resistance to the racial myths and metaphorical interpretations prevalent in the 17th century such as a “darkness in the cause” of “the blacknesse of Negroes” (BK VI, ch. x). Browne treats these still controversial subjects with an ironic humour throughout and notably never considers himself to be infallible. He might perhaps, however, have held his own belief in Witchcraft to greater account (Victoria Silver, 2008).
In his attack on the anti-semitism common among his contemporaries and countrymen: “that an unsavoury odour is gentilitious or national unto the Jews”, Browne contests that “If rightly understood, we cannot well concede; nor will the information of reason or sence induce it”, concluding that “the reason alleged for it [is] in no way satisfactory” (BK IV, ch x). Turning instead the assumption on its head, Browne argues against a presumption that any of the tribes of man can elect to set themselves apart from another on the basis of race or creed; that any race or faith which “pretended to be pure, must needs have suffered inseparated commixtures with nations of all sorts […] either by commerce or conquest”” (BK IV, ch. x).
A thousand inseparated word forms
Just as Browne saw races and cultures as being unavoidably mixed in the crucible of the Renaissance, his prose style which fuses Latin diction, neologisms and scientific terms embodies the “inseparated commixtures” he thought necessary to describe the methodologies, discoveries and disciplines of the new learning.
As R. H. Robbins point out, Browne is recorded as coining over a hundred words, in the OED, many of which are new to English and still in common usage. However, Joseph Regan has uncovered that, incredibly, there are over 1000 words in English for which there is evidence that Browne was the first recorded user, having identified over 800 entries in the OED (Regan, 1986,p. 4, 15). Medical, scientific and observational terms such as: ambidextrous, anomalous, approximate, bisect, carnivorous, coexistence, computer (although his coinage of this term is disputed), cryptography, disruption, electricity, follicle, generator, hallucination, herbaceous, indigenous, jocularity, literary, locomotion, medical, network, polarity, precarious, recurrence, suicide, therapeutic, ultimate, variegation and vitreous have all been attributed to Thomas Browne.
The common interest of Truth
Implicit in Pseudodoxia Epidemica is the contention that perhaps the greatest error of any age is to assume “the common interest of Truth”. Little wonder then, that the term “indoctrination” is also attributed to Browne. However, in his disquieting vision, the people are not simply characterised as slavish consumers of deceits but instead are actively involved in perpetrating “Heresies” and “Pious Frauds”, lies and illusions against one another in the pursuit of their own self-interest. It is a world where “brutal Faculties controll the suggestion of Reason”; where “Pleasure and Profit [are] already overswaying the instructions of Honesty” (BK I, ch i); where the business of politicians is “to deceive the people” (BK I, ch iii); and where “the frailty of our own Oeconomie” leads the people “unto corruption” (BK I, ch x).
In its determination, therefore, to confront both historical and contemporaneous forces of disinformation, the Pseudodoxia Epidemica of Thomas Browne can be read as one of the founding documents of the Enlightenment. It affirms the freedom to doubt over adherence to dogma and although playful in tone it imparts a serious lesson: that the first responsibility of free enquiry is to defend against powerful interests, “we are not Magisterial in opinions, nor have we Dictator-like obtruded our conceptions; but in the humility of Enquiries or disquisitions, have only proposed them unto more ocular discerners. And therefore opinions are free, and open it is for any to think or declare the contrary”.
As a result, the works of Thomas Browne have influenced numerous writers and free-thinkers across centuries and continents, spanning literary, scientific, philosophical and sociological domains. In the main library collection it is possible to cite essayists such as William Hazlitt and George Orwell, philosophers such as Thomas Carlyle and writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, G. K. Chesterton, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Louis Borges and W.G. Sebald to confirm the extent of his influence. Further, it is Browne’s eclectic mixture of the esoteric and the empirical, exploring both the nature of truth claims and the foundation of evidence which Barbour and Preston (2008) note is now at the forefront of interdisciplinary study of the early modern era.
Significantly, when John Anderson summed himself up the year before his death as being both “A scientific and literary man”, he acknowledged his own roundhead and cavalier tendencies and did so in terms supplied by the scientific method of Thomas Jefferson and the vocabulary of Thomas Browne.
Duncan Birrell, Library Assistant
