Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend by Sir Thomas Browne

Author:Sir Thomas Browne [Browne, Thomas, Sir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Essays
Published: 1996-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

* "In qua me non inferior mediocriter esse."—<i>Pro Archia Poeta</i>. whose cure not only, but whose nature is unknown,—I can cure the gout or stone in some, sooner than divinity, pride, or avarice in others. I can cure vices by physick when they remain incurable by divinity, and they shall obey my pills when they contemn their precepts. I boast nothing, but plainly say, we all labour against our own cure; for death is the cure of all diseases. There is no <i>catholicon</i> or universal remedy I know, but this, which though nauseous to queasy stomachs, yet to pre- pared appetites is nectar, and a pleasant potion of im- mortality.

<i>Sect.</i> 10.—For my conversation, it is, like the sun's, with all men, and with a friendly aspect to good and bad. Methinks there is no man bad; and the worst best, that is, while they are kept within the circle of those qualities wherein they are good. There is no man's mind of so discordant and jarring a temper, to which a tuneable disposition may not strike a harmony. <i>Magnae virtutes, nec minora vitia;</i> it is the posy<95> of the best natures, and may be inverted on the worst. There are, in the most depraved and venomous disposi- tions, certain pieces that remain untouched, which by an <i>antiperistasis</i><96> become more excellent, or by the excellency of their antipathies are able to preserve them- selves from the contagion of their enemy vices, and persist entire beyond the general corruption. For it is also thus in nature: the greatest balsams do lie en- veloped in the bodies of the most powerful corrosives. I say moreover, and I ground upon experience, that poisons contain within themselves their own antidote, and that which preserves them from the venom of them- selves; without which they were not deleterious to others only, but to themselves also. But it is the cor- ruption that I fear within me; not the contagion of commerce without me. 'Tis that unruly regiment within me, that will destroy me; 'tis that I do infect myself; the man without a navel<97> yet lives in me. I feel that original canker corrode and devour me: and therefore, <i>"Defenda me, Dios, de me!"</i> "Lord, deliver me from myself!" is a part of my litany, and the first voice of my retired imaginations. There is no man alone, because every man is a microcosm, and carries the whole world about him. <i>"Nunquam minus solus quam cum solus,"</i>* though it be the apothegm of a wise man is yet true in the mouth of a fool: for indeed, though in a wilderness, a man is never alone; not only because he is with himself, and his own thoughts, but because he is with the devil, who ever consorts with our solitude, and is that unruly rebel that musters up those disordered motions which accompany our sequestered imaginations. And to speak more narrowly, there is no such thing as solitude, nor anything that can be said to be

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