probably have remembered him little. Pity!
some may think, for himself at least, that he had not lived earlier,
and still believed in the mandrake, for instance; its fondness for
places of execution, and its human cries "on eradication, with hazard
of life to them that pull it up." "In philosophy," he observes,
meaning to contrast [150] his free-thinking in that department with his
orthodoxy in religion--in philosophy, "where truth seems double-faced,
there is no man more paradoxical than myself:" which is true, we may
think, in a further sense than he meant, and that it was the
"paradoxical" that he actually preferred. Happy, at all events, he
still remained--undisturbed and happy--in a hundred native
prepossessions, some certainly valueless, some of them perhaps
invaluable. And while one feels that no real logic of fallacies has
been achieved by him, one feels still more how little the construction
of that branch of logical inquiry really helps men's minds; fallacy,
like truth itself, being a matter so dependent on innate gift of
apprehension, so extra-logical and personal; the original perception
counting for almost everything, the mere inference for so little! Yes!
"A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be
forced to surrender," even in controversies not necessarily maladroit.

The really stirring poetry of science is not in guesses, or facile
divinations about it, but in its larger ascertained truths--the order
of infinite space, the slow method and vast results of infinite time.
For Browne, however, the sense of poetry which so overmasters his
scientific procedure, depends chiefly on its vaguer possibilities; the
empirical philosophy, even after Bacon, being still dominated by a
temper, resultant from the general unsettlement of men's [151] minds at
the Reformation, which may be summed up in the famous question of
Montaigne--Que scais-je? The cold-blooded method of observation and
experiment was creeping but slowly over the domain of science; and such
unreclaimed portions of it as the phenomena of magnetism had an immense
fascination for men like Browne and Digby. Here, in those parts of
natural philosophy "but yet in discovery," "the America and untravelled
parts of truth," lay for them the true prospect of science, like the
new world itself to a geographical discoverer such as Raleigh. And
welcome as one of the minute hints of that country far ahead of them,
the strange bird, or