Editions
The popularity of Pseudodoxia in its day is confirmed by the fact that it went through no fewer than six editions; the first edition appearing upon the eve of the English Civil War, during the reign of Charles I in 1646. No fewer than a further five editions followed; four times during the Commonwealth era of Oliver Cromwell in 1650, twice in 1658, and in 1659. One final edition appeared in (1672) during the reign of King Charles II when the English scientific revolution was well in progress, culminating in Isaac Newton's discoveries. Pseudodoxia was subsequently translated and published in French, Dutch, Latin and German throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Today there is considerable confusion as how best to define Sir Thomas Browne's scientific methodology, described by E.J. Merton thus:
The eclecticism so characteristic of Browne... Browne does not cry from the house tops, as did Francis Bacon, the liberating power of experience in opposition to the sterilizing influence of reason. Nor does he guarantee as did Descartes, the intuitive truth of reason as opposed to the falsity of the senses. Unlike either, he follows both sense experience and a priori reason in his quest for truth. He uses what comes to him from tradition and from contemporary Science, often perhaps without too precise a formulation.E.S. Merton summarised the ambiguities of Browne's scientific view-point thus
"Here is Browne's scientific point of view in a nutshell. One lobe of his brain wants to study facts and test hypotheses on the basis of them, the other is fascinated by mystic symbols and analogies."
The author Robert Sencourt succinctly defined Browne's relationship to scientific enquiry as "an instance of a scientific reason, lit up by mysticism, in the Church of England."
The 1651 book Arcana Microcosmi, by Alexander Rosse, attempted to rebut many of Browne's claims.
Read more about this topic: Pseudodoxia Epidemica
Famous quotes containing the word editions:
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)