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'The Pansophical Vndertaking is of mighty importance. For what can bee almost greater then to have All knowledge. If it were with the addition to have All love also it were perfection'- Joachim Hübner, cited in Ephemerides 1639, HP 30/4/12A.
From Moriaen's first surviving letter to Hartlib, it is evident that when he arrived in Amsterdam he already had a deep - indeed a missionary - commitment to his friend's project to fund and publicise Pansophy, the vision of universal wisdom being worked out by the Moravian theologian and pedagogue Jan Amos Komensky, or Comenius.Comenius: Versuch eines Umrisses von Leben, Werk und Schicksal des Jan Amos Komensky (Oslo and Prague, 1969), which despite its modest title is a detailed and exhaustive account of his life and work, based heavily and usefully (though at times somewhat uncritically) on Comenius's correspondence and autobiographical writings. Still valuable are the many studies written nearly a century ago by Jan Kvačala, particularly Die Pädagogische Reform des Comenius in Deutschland bis zum Ausgange des XVII Jahrhunderts (Monumenta Germaniæ Pædagogica XVII (Berlin, 1903) and XXII (Berlin, 1904)). The standard English sources are Turnbull, HDC part 3 (342-464), Webster, Great Instauration and 'Introduction' to Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning (Cambridge, 1970), and Hugh Trevor-Roper's rather dismissive and anglocentric 'Three Foreigners: The Philosophers of the Puritan Revolution', in his Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London, 1967), 237-293 (on Hartlib, Dury and Comenius and their impact in England). Wilhelmus Rood's Comenius and the Low Countries: Some Aspects of the Life and Work of a Czech Exile in the Seventeenth Century (Amsterdam, 1970) contains useful material on his stay in the Netherlands and his relations with the de Geer family (discussed later in this chapter). There are vast numbers of articles on more specific aspects of his life, thought and publishing history in the journals Monatshefte der Comeniusgesellschaft, Acta Comeniana and Studia Comeniana et Historica. See also Dagmar Čapková, 'Comenius and his Ideals: Escape from the Labyrinth', SHUR, 75-92, and, on the background to his thought, Howard Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted: Encyclopedism, Millenarianism and the Second Reformation in Germany (PhD thesis, Oxford, 1991), which has developed since this book was first published into Johann Heirich Alsted 1588-1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation and Universal Reform (Oxford, 2000). The references given below are to the thesis. Alsted's influence on the circle is further discussed in Hotson's 'Philosophical Pedagogy in Reformed Central Europe between Ramus and Comenius: a survey of the continental background of the "Three Foreigners"', SHUR, 29-50. See also John Sadler: Comenius (London, 1969), and Daniel Murphy, Comenius: A Critical Reassessment of his Life and Work (Cambridge, 1995). A critical and very stimulating account of Comenius's concept of education in the context of his millenarian Utopianism forms a major strand of James Holstun's A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (New York and Oxford, 1987).ottes schickung auf mich genommen vnd nun mehr mein ganzes werck davon mache zum gemeinen besten […] ich hab mich gleichsam darzu abgesondert vnd devotiret' - Moriaen to ? (probably Hartlib), 16 June 1639, HP 37/25B.en worden als eben diß werckh als dardurch die Schulen vnd vermittelst derselben Ecclesia respublica mundus reformirt werden sollen vnd können' - Moriaen to Hartlib, 28 Oct. 1641, HP 37/92A.
Born in 1592, Comenius studied at the Reformed academy of Herborn, before spending a year at the more traditional University of Heidelberg.Comenius, 23-48. He was at Herborn from 1611-13, at Heidelberg from 1613-14.Johann Heinrich Alsted, 23.Science, Culture and Popular Belief in the Renaissance, ed. Stephen Pumfrey, Paolo L. Rossi and Maurice Slawinski (Manchester and New York, 1991), 119-139, pp. 133-4. The curriculum covered (in order) Greek and Latin grammar and rhetoric, logic, ethics, mathematics (including optics and astronomy), physics and metaphysics. The prominent place of mathematics was a novelty, but in other respects this is very close to the standard university curriculum.
The Reformed educational tradition - or, one should perhaps say, new departure - played a crucial role in shaping the thought of Comenius, as of Hartlib and Dury.Alsted, passim.KK II, 234; see Blekastad, Comenius, 33-35.
Such knowledge was not only to be compendious, it was above all to be 'useful'. 'Useful knowledge' became something of a catchphrase for the Hartlib circle and other 'Second Reformation' thinkers. It should not be misinterpreted as mere utilitarianism. For knowledge to be 'useful' or 'practical' did not simply mean that it would enable people to move around faster or increase crops or build better bridges - though all such things could be useful, provided they were directed to the right ends. It meant above all that it would have an application in the ethical and religious ordering of daily life. What increasingly came to be seen as the empty, abstract, semantic disputations of the scholastic tradition were to be replaced by knowledge that was of practical relevance to the behaviour and beliefs of the individual. 'Practical divinity' in particular, an especial enthusiasm of both Alsted and Hartlib, might not grow more turnips, but was emphatically regarded as 'useful'. 'Usefulness' lay not in the private gain of one individual at the expense of another, but in the mutual profit derived from enhanced social interaction, a profit which in turn redounded to the glory of the Creator whose last and perhaps most important commandment to his creatures was that they should love one another as themselves.
But it should be stressed that if the growing vogue for a curriculum grounded in the practical rather than the theoretical can be described as an important and characteristic feature of the 'Second Reformation' ethos, it was certainly not denominationally exclusive. Like Alsted before him, Comenius drew on a very disparate range of sources, some of them on the face of it mutually exclusive: on Aristotelians as well as Ramists, hermetic mystics as well as rationalists, and thinkers of every shade of Christian, or indeed non-Christian, confessional allegiance.Pansophiæ prodromus (London, 1639), translated either by or by command of Hartlib, together with the Conatuum pansophicorum dilucidatio (London, 1639), as A Reformation of Schooles (London, 1642): 'Let even the Gentiles, and Arabians therefore be admitted to furnish us with such ornaments, as they are able for the beauty of this house of God' (p. 33).Vives on Education (Cambridge, 1913). Campanella (1568-1639) combined an idiosyncratic Neo-Platonism and a fascination with the Renaissance Art of Memory with impassioned championship of new experimental science. See Luigi Firpo's Introduction to Campanella, La Cité du Soleil (tr. Arnaud Tripet, Geneva, 1972) for a succinct but incisive account of his life and thought; also Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964) and The Art of Memory (London, 1966), and Paolo Rossi, Clavis Universalis (Bologna, 1983). On Campanella's reception among Comenians, see Martin Mulsow, 'Sociabilitas. Zu einem Kontext der Campanella-Rezeption im 17. Jahrhundert', Studia Bruniana et Campanelliana, forthcoming. My thanks to Dr Mulsow for supplying me with an advance copy of this very detailed and interesting study. On Bacon and Comenius, see below, pp. 105-10.Christianopolis,Reipublicæ Christianopolitanæ descriptio (Straßburg, 1619). Of the hundred short chapters of this work, ch. 51-78 are devoted exclusively to describing the Christianopolitan education system, while more general educational ideas are discussed throughout. Andreæ translated a work of Vives on poor relief, De subventione pauperum, as Johann Ludwig Vives von Versorgung der Armen (Durlach, 1627).Civitas Solis, debatably the inspiration for Christianopolis.Civitas Solis (1623, but written c. 1602). Andræ's Utopia is often regarded as a pale imitation of Campanella's, but seems to me more like a constructive criticism of it.Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für deutsche Erziehungs- und Schulgeschichte 9 (1899), 209-229 (but Toischer is wrong in his conjecture (p. 217) that Bodinus died soon after 1626; according to Blekastad he died in Prussia in 1651 (Comenius, 334)). It was his Bericht von der Natur- und Vernunfftmessigen Didactica oder Lehr-Kunst (Hamburg, 1621) that gave Comenius the idea of composing the original Czech version of his Didactica magna (Opera didactica omnia I, 3). The work bears the very proto-Comenian motto 'Omnia faciliora facit Ratio, Ordo et Modus' ('Everything is made easier by Reason, Order and Method').Joachim Jungius und sein Zeitalter (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1850), 23-43.Methodus institutionis nova quadruplex (Leipzig, 1617).The Advancement of Learning (1605). In all these works, the stress was on ways of making education practical, relevant to daily life, and compendious. Pansophy was not the product of any particular denominational allegiance, though it is true that the particular circumstances of the Reformed German principalities provided the most fruitful ground for putting such ideas into practice (or at least trying to), while elsewhere they tended to remain at the level of theory, manifesto or Utopian fiction.
The reformation of educational theory was crucial to the very notion of Pansophy. Universal knowledge could be attained only by an education that was itself universal, in the fullest sense of the word, teaching (as Comenius put it) 'all things to all people in all ways'.A Reformation of Schooles, 77. Cf. the subtitle of the Didactica magna (Amsterdam, 1657, but written 1637-8): the work claims to exhibit 'Universale Omnes Omnia docendi artificium' ('the universal art of teaching all things to all people').Advancement of Learning was intended as a trail-blazer for the 'Instauratio Magna', the reformation of all science and knowledge, and just as Alsted's (supposedly) all-encompassing Encyclopædia grew out of a practical teaching course,Alsted, 91-158 on the genesis of the Encyclopædia.Prodromus Pansophiæ - literally 'forerunner of Pansophy' - translated as A Reformation of Schooles (1642).
It was as a pedagogue rather than a Pansophist that Comenius first came to the attention of the European intelligentsia. He achieved considerable international fame through his educational writings, principally the Janua linguarum reserata (The Gateway of Languages Unlocked) (1631) long before he became popularly associated with the notion of Pansophy. At this time, Comenius was living in exile in the Polish town of Leszno, he and his co-religionists in the Unitas Fratrum (Unity of Brethren) having been driven out Janua linguarum came about as a direct result of his teaching activity, in response to the paucity of teaching material and the unimaginativeness of the teaching methods he encountered at the Gymnasium. From the outset, however, the work was designed as more than merely a language course. It aimed to exemplify the principle that language education should be an integral part of the broader curriculum rather than a separate discipline, and that the teaching of words should be - and could best be - effected through the teaching of 'things', not alongside it. Instead of memorising irrelevant and uncomprehended phrases and grammatical rules, pupils might far more readily and far more profitably absorb new structures and terminology - either in their own language or in another - in the context of an intrinsically interesting and useful course. And this course was to be, true to the ideals Comenius had imbibed at Herborn, practical, ethical, and encyclopedic.Comenius, 170-76 for a fuller account of the genesis and ethos of the Janua, which Blekastad describes as being - in the Alstedian sense - 'eine kleine Enzyklopädie' (173). See also Comenius's own account in Continuatio admonitionis fraternæ de temperando charitate zelo […] ad S. Maresium (Amsterdam, 1670), English translation by Agneta Lunggren in Milada Blekastad (ed.), Comenius' Självbiografi (Stockholm, 1975), 144-6. This is Comenius's most important autobiographical work. The section dealing with his visit to England also exists in English translation in R.F. Young, Comenius in England (Oxford and London, 1932), 25-51. Despite its somewhat mannered archaism, Young's translation is stylistically far superior to Lunggren's (apart from a number of passages lifted verbatim from Young), which it is painfully obvious was never checked by a native speaker. However, Lunggren's is more literal and includes the whole text, and is furnished with excellent notes.
Others at the school were highly impressed by Comenius's tentative first draft and persuaded him to publish it on the Unity's press. In a remarkably short time, the work achieved a colossal international success, appearing the same year in German, French and English versions.Comenius, 200-203. As she argues, it was almost certainly the work's efficacy as a pedagogical tool that recommended it to the majority of teachers, rather than its philosophical underpinning.Comenius' Självbiografi, 145-147.
Encouraged as well as intimidated by this surge of interest, he found himself contemplating an extension of his project to make it still more practical and compendious. As he later described his reaction:
I came to this point in my thoughts: if it seemed good that the words of a language should be learnt through the guidance of things, it were better that things themselves should be taught through the guidance of words already known. That is, that, when by the help of my Janua linguarum youth had learnt to distinguish things from outside, it should thence become accustomed to explore that which is within things, and to comprehend what each thing is in its essence.Comenius' Självbiografi, 147.
Herein lay the germ of his 'Pansophy': 'a general book […] exhibiting in it all necessary things so that all shameful ignorance would be excluded'.Självbiografi, 148 (cf. Young, Comenius in England, 31). See also A Reformation of Schooles, 46-7.Janua linguarum, the Janua rerum or Gateway of Things. Like Alsted before him, he found what had initially been intended merely as a school book developing under its own momentum into a vision of universal learning.
It was the Janua linguarum that brought Comenius to Hartlib's attention, and in about 1632 he began to correspond with and subsidise the Moravian.Casopis Matice Moravské 52 (1928), 164; condensed German translation by Blekastad, Comenius, 255-6. Comenius mentioned in this letter that he and Hartlib had been in touch for six years. Their first contact (a letter from Hartlib with a financial contribution) is described in Självbiografi, 149, but no exact date is given.Janua rerum. He urged Comenius to send him a plan of the proposed work, and was rewarded, in 1637, with a rough draft outline in manuscript.
Hartlib had settled in England almost a decade earlier, in 1628, full of zeal to further the educational plans of the secret quasi-Rosicrucian society 'Antilia' he had been involved with in Elblag, which sought nothing less than the reformation of the world.or boys] is to be made a priority and laid as the foundation stone of the endeavour'.Review of English Studies New Series 4 (1953), 221-33.HDC, 16-19, 36-9.
Perhaps his most important contribution was to publish the manuscript Comenius had sent him as the Conatuum Comenianorum præludia (Oxford, 1637). He published it, or so he claimed in the preface, because it had aroused so much interest that he had not had scribes enough to produce the requisite copies. Typically enough, it had not occurred to him to ask Comenius's permission to do this, and it was a considerable shock for the Moravian when he suddenly received an unsolicited copy of a book by himself which he was quite unaware had gone to press. As he told Hartlib in the above-mentioned letter of January 1638, the printing had been undertaken without his knowledge, let alone consent: had he been asked, he would never have allowed the work to appear in this imperfect form. At the same time, however, he was evidently flattered and encouraged: he thanked Hartlib for his interest and support, and observed that if his Pansophy ever came to light, it would be due to Hartlib's incitement. And since the work was out, the best thing he could do was to rework it and have it republished in a more satisfactory form as the Prodromus Pansophiæ, also published by Hartlib but this time with Comenius's authorisation, in 1639. Hartlib having thus set the wheels in motion, Comenius was to spend the rest of his life labouring to produce the book of universal wisdom he had proposed in this sketch. Hartlib for his part, together with like-minded friends such as Dury, Haak, Hübner and Moriaen, devoted himself single-mindedly throughout the 1630s to raising funds for Comenius, to disseminating his work, and above all to his great goal of attracting Comenius himself to England to supervise the 'great instauration' of learning he believed was about to take place there.
Comenius repeatedly cited Francis Bacon as an exemplar and an inspiration. As has been mentioned, Bacon was one of the three authors he most The Advancement of Learning to be addressed to Charles I.HDC, 350.passim.The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (London, 1967), xv and xvi.
Bacon's great philosophical synthesis had been fragmented: his 'experiments of light' had been transformed into inflamed apocalyptic speculations, his 'experiments of fruit' into the uncontrolled elaboration of gadgets. Still, it was Baconianism of a kind, and the men of the country party took it seriously.The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (London, 1967), especially Part Two, chapter 4, 'The Royal Society and "Pansophia"', 193-234. See also Webster's devastating essay review of the book, 'The Origins of the Royal Society', History of Scence 6 (1967), 106-128.
This is not the place to venture an analysis of the full range of Bacon's multi-faceted thought and the even more various interpretations that have been put upon it. But it should be pointed out that the fact that many of the Hartlib circle took a lively interest in Bacon does not mean they followed him (or their conception of him) slavishly or uncritically. In Moriaen's case, there is no firm evidence he had read Bacon at all, and nothing to suggest he set much store by him if he had. The only mention of him in all the surviving letters is a less than ecstatic reaction to a catalogue Hartlib had sent him of Bacon's extant manuscripts: 'there will doubtless be many excellent things among the writings left by Verulam'.en werden ohne zweiffel viel treffliche sachen sein' - Moriaen to Hartlib, 26 May 1639, HP 37/24A.
What is particularly relevant here is that in at least one important respect Baconian inductivism was recognised as the antithesis of pansophic universality. Inductivism, by definition, proceeds from the particular to the general, requiring long and diligent labour in what Bacon called the 'inclosures of particularity'Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning Human and Divine, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding et al. (London, 1857-74) III, 359.Natural Histories, Bacon made promises as grandly universal as any of the claims of Pansophy:
let such a history be once provided and well set forth, and let there be added to it such auxiliary and light-giving experiments as in the very course of interpretation will present themselves or will have to be found out; and the investigation of nature and of all sciences will be the work of a few years.Preparative Towards a Natural and Experimental History (Parasceve), Works IV, 252.
Yet after all the enthusiasm of his descriptions of data-collection and experimentation, the 'investigation of nature and of all sciences' in 'a few years' sounds here oddly perfunctory, almost an anti-climax. Bacon is more convincing when presenting his method as a quest never to be concluded, 'an Advancement of Learning, 268.'Brief Lives,' chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the Years 1669 and 1696 (Oxford, 1898) I, 75-6.
Among Hartlib's papers is an anonymous catalogue of natural creatures and phenomena, set out in what is clearly supposed to be a typological sequence, preparatory no doubt to something approaching a Baconian Natural History, and bearing the appealingly self-deprecatory title, 'An imperfect Enumeration of natural thinges'.The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (London, 1967), which is very impatient with those who see Bacon as a mere fact-finder, and Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge, 1974).Prodromus that Bacon's proposals, though laudable, were inadequate for the project he had in mind. Bacon's inductive method
requireth the continuall industry of many men, and ages, and so is not onely laborious, but seemeth also to be uncertaine in the event and successe thereof […] it is of no great use, or advantage towards our designe of Pansophy, because […] it is onely intended for the discovery of the secrets of Nature, but wee drive and aime at the whole universality of things.A Reformation of Schooles, 35.
Inductivism (by this analysis at least) starts at the bottom, in the realm of raw data, and works its way up tentatively and speculatively to more general rules that can never be more than provisional. This will seem to some an over-simplification of Bacon's ideas, to others a valid critique of their ability to deliver what they promised. In either case, it was the view Comenius took, and that is the point at issue here. What Pansophy set out to do was to discern from the outset a pattern whereby the lineaments of infinity might be conceptualised, and to grasp (insofar as human capacity permitted) the principles according to which the universe is ordered. This of course presupposes a conviction that the universe is ordered, and my contention is that the mounting (though still largely unformulated) sense that the explosion of information and technology was beginning to undermine that conviction, or that article of faith, was the challenge that made the reassurance of Pansophy seem so urgently necessary. The question raised by much reading of pansophic texts is: if these people are so confident of universal harmony and order, why do they reaffirm it so insistently?
The amount of knowledge available to the scholar was increasing at an unprecedented rate, thanks to the rapid advances in the technology both of scientific investigation itself and of its dissemination in print. Acceptance of the Copernican-Galilean model of the universe did away with the notion of a bounded, and hence potentially knowable, sub-lunary sphere. (Comenius himself throughout his life stubbornly refused to accept the evidence for heliocentricity.) Meanwhile, exploration and microscopy were revealing a hitherto unimagined wealth of subjects for investigation and a hitherto unimagined complexity in what had previously seemed simple and comprehensible organisms. Above all, the enormous increase in the output of literature was making it, for the first time in history, impossible for an educated and tolerably wealthy individual to keep broadly abreast of the current state of knowledge on all subjects in the known world. It was the consequent rise of specialisation, and the increasingly clear demarcations drawn perforce between different branches of knowledge, that led to this sense of losing a grip on the totality, coherence and fundamental unity of Creation. As Comenius put it in the Prodromus,
Good God! what vast volumes are compiled almost of every matter, which if they were laid together, would raise such heapes, that many millions of years would be required to peruse them? […] Hence comes that (so commonly used) parcelling and tearing of learning into peeces, that men making their choyce of this, or that Art, or Science, take no care so much, as to looke into any of the rest.
Who knowes not that this is so? and who sees not, that this distribution, and sharing of Arts, and Sciences, proceeds from this supposition, That it is not possible for the wit of one man to attaine the knowledge of them all?A Reformation of Schooles, 6.
J.V. Andreæ, an acknowledged inspiration to and keen supporter of Comenius, was similarly distressed by the sheer quantity of information humankind was confronted with, and lamented (to cite another Hartlib-sponsored translation):
Now in the worlds weaknesse, most humane affairs are committed to Learning, the masse whereof is become infinite, which fills not the world so much with truth as falsehood, not so much with solidity as curiosity.A Modell of a Christian Society, (original Latin Societas Christianæ imago, Tübingen, 1620, translation London 1647), reprinted by George Turnbull in Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 74 (1955), 151-161, 155. The original, preserved in a single printed copy in Wolfenbüttel and two manuscript copies in the Hartlib Papers reads: 'Nam cum hoc Mundi senio omnia propemodum humana, literis concredita sint, qvarum moles in immensum excrevit, & non tàm veritate qvàm falsitate, soliditate qvàm Vanitate Orbem adimplevit' (HP 55/19/5B).
There was, for some Pansophists at least, altogether too much 'curiosity' in the inductive method championed by Bacon: too much emphasis on data and not enough on the broader and nobler vistas promised by their conception of 'right method'. He was, as it were, looking through the wrong end of the newly-invented telescope. Bacon had emphasised that no detail should be omitted from the Natural Histories, specifically prescribing the inclusion of
things the most ordinary, such as it might be thought superfluous to record in writing […] things mean, illiberal, filthy […] things trifling and childish […] and lastly, things which seem over subtle, because they are in themselves of no use.Preparative Towards a Natural and Experimental History, Works IV, 258-9. What is under discussion here, it should perhaps be stressed, is the description Bacon gave in this work of what the Natural Histories should be, not the content of the Natural Histories he himself actually produced, which hardly meet his own specifications.
At least one proponent of 'vulgar Baconianism' found this concern for 'things mean, illiberal, filthy' too vulgar to take:
To mangle tyrannise etc over the Creatures for to trie experiments or to bee imploied so filthily about them as to weigh pisse etc as Verul. prescribes is a meere drudgery curiosity and Impiety and no necessity for it.Eph 40, HP 30/4/54A.
The same commentator, who I strongly suspect is Hübner,Ephemerides of 1639 and 40, something like half the entries being attributed him. The opinion and the blunt, somewhat truculent manner of its expression are consistent with Hübner's original writings.
It is sufficient if wee had a true History out of every country of the meere outward shapes operations etc. and so of all Mechanical things and their several manners of working […] This would not require a sæculum as Verul. projects but within 10. years come to a very great perfection if it were set down by every Country.Eph 40, HP 30/4/54B.
There is a suggestion of urgency, or at least of hurry, in this which points up another important ingredient in the positively missionary fervour with which Pansophy was preached, and that is the idea of preparing the way of the Lord. It is important to avoid over-generalisation. Not all Pansophists were millenarians and not all millenarians were Pansophists. Comenius, like Alsted, certainly did hold millenarian views, but that does not mean everyone who supported his overall programme agreed with him on this particular point. As has already been argued, it is not possible to determine what stance either Hartlib or Moriaen took on this subject, and the same can be said of Hübner. It was not, however, necessary to accept any particular exegesis of Biblical prophecy to share a widespread sense that some sort of culmination of human history impended - especially not for men whose homeland was experiencing what was at the time the most destructive war in European history. It was a political and intellectual atmosphere that provided a constant reminder to all readers of Scripture to guard against the error of the foolish virgins of Matthew 25, who were not prepared for the moment of the Bridegroom's arrival, and were shut out from the wedding.
A 'sæculum', therefore, could seem an uncomfortably long time. Bacon's choice of a motto from Daniel - 'many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased'Prodromus refers twice to the same citation, pointing up the millenarian implications.A Reformation of Schooles, 4 and 29. Cf. Popkin, 'The Third Force', 43-5, on the importance of this passage for the influential Millenarian William Twisse, whose Doubting Conscience Resolved (1652) was written for and published by Hartlib.
The mere amassing of knowledge, then, was only part of the task in hand: more fundamental, and far more urgent than the inductive method allowed for, was the arrangement of it in such a fashion that the parts might contribute to the comprehension of a whole that was more than their sum. Hence the obsession with 'right order', 'true Logick' and so forth.SHUR, 51-74.
Again, this runs directly counter to the spirit of Bacon, who, with regard to the study of 'the book of God's word' (the Bible) and 'the book of God's works' (Nature), exhorted people to beware that 'they do not unwisely mingle these things together'.Advancement of Learning, Works III, 268.Præludia made by Hieronim Broniewski, a lay elder of the Unitas Fratrum, against which Comenius had to defend himself before the synod of the Brethren in 1638 and 39.Comenius, 257-260, and Comenius's own somewhat hyperbolical accounts in a letter to Hartlib of autumn 1638, KK II, 34-36 and MPG I, 139-141 (in both cases misdated August 1639: see Blekastad, Comenius, 260, n. 174) and Självbiografi, 151. Broniewski's Annotatiunculæ quædam in præludia Comeniana ad Portam Sapientiæ are at HP 7/82/1A-4B and are reproduced in HDC, 452-7.Pansophia of Peter Lauremberg (Rostock, 1633) was that it 'contained nothing appertaining to divine wisdom or the mysteries of salvation' and was consequently 'unworthy of so sublime a title'.Självbiografi, 148-9 (Young, Comenius in England, 32-33).Prodromus was that studies were 'not sufficiently subordinate to the scope of eternity'.A Reformation of Schooles, 6.A Treatise of Husbandry (London, 1638) and A Discovery of Infinite Treasure (London, 1639), the treasure in question being the supposedly inexhaustible wealth of well-husbanded nature. The works are aimed emphatically at the ordinary farmer rather than the large landowner and are very practical (and pragmatic) in tone. Plattes was supported for a time by Hartlib but died in poverty. See the entry on Plattes in the Oxford DNB, and mine in Thoemmes Biographical Dictionary of Economists (Bristol, 2004); also Hartlib's Legacie of Husbandry (London, 1651).Eph 39, 30/4/18B; the remark is not attributed but it sounds to me like Hübner again.
The greatest philosophers should addresse themselves more to God in prayers and in a holy life and so they should finde out more the secrets of Nature then ever they have done.
Eg. wee see it in Cartes glasses [i.e. Descartes' parabolic lenses] though his demonstrations bee never so punctual yet it will not doe the reason is because that God is so little regarded in this matter as if humane wit were able to accomplish all. And it may bee an obvious smal matter is only wanting which God hides of purpose from his and other eys.Eph 39, 30/4/26B. This is almost certainly Hübner. On 'Cartes glasses', see above, pp. 22-3.
Another important diversion from Bacon, which I suspect may well be a conscious modification of his portrayal of the world, is that to his 'book of God's word' and 'book of God's works', which between them comprehend the whole of knowledge could we but learn to read them aright, Comenius added the book of Man's mind.Conatuum pansophicorum dilucidatio: 'My intent was to epitomize those bookes of God, Nature, Scripture and mans Conscience' (Reformation of Schooles, 65); cf. Panaugia, trans. A.M.O. Dobbie (Shipton on Stour, 1987), 13; Pampædia, trans. A.M.O. Dobbie (Dover, 1986), 130.
[Man] being the last accomplishment of the creation, and the most absolute Image of his Creator, containing in himself onely the perfections of all other things, why should he not at last habituate himselfe to the contemplation of himselfe, and all things else?A Reformation of Schooles, 27. Cf. Panorthosia, trans. A.M.O. Dobbie (Sheffield, 1993), 25: I say that you must be Everything in yourself, as a genuine portion of mankind and a true image of God and Christ. For if every individual Being is an image of the Universe […] every member of human society ought also to represent human society as a whole, so that […] one may be or know or wish or do what all men are or know or wish or do.'
The slightly hysterical insistence on order, pattern and universality in the writings of the pansophists represents the microcosm-macrocosm theory in its death throes.
In Hübner's memorably surreal simile,
Truths or things being knowen out of their due order are like to an Elephant's Snout or proboscis. The vse of them cannot bee so evidently sic] perceived as when they are linked together which the Pansophia will best performe.Eph 39, HP 30/4/10A. There is again no clear indication that Hübner is being cited, but the style and content overwhelmingly suggest him.
The sense of this, I take it, is that a stray and unrelated piece of data is as redundant and absurd as this 'proboscis' must have appeared to Europeans seeing an elephant for the first time, but that just as the trunk turns out to be not only useful but absolutely integral once the organic context of the elephant is grasped, so 'due order' will illuminate the interdependence and mutual relevance of all fragments of knowledge. Comenius was to make almost exactly the same point, albeit more prosaically, when defining what he called the 'syncretic' method of analysis:
to understand things in isolation, as men generally do, is a minor part of [the learning process], but to understand the harmony of things and the proportions of all the related parts is the vital factor which brings pure and all-pervading light to men's minds.Pampædia, 85.
The key was method. This quotation is strongly reminiscent of the encyclopedic ideas of Keckermann and Alsted. But it was becoming increasingly apparent to the younger generation that Alsted had not gone nearly far enough in the methodising of his compendium. And Comenius, much as he respected his former teacher, surely had him among others in mind when he complained
that as yet in all the bookes that ever I saw, I could never find any thing answerable unto the amplitude of things; or which would fetch in the whole universality of them within its compasse: whatsoever some Encyclopædias, or Syntaxes, or books of Pansophy, have pretended to in their titles.A Reformation of Schooles, 15.
What was needed, but had never been attempted, was a method that would so
square and proportion the universall principles of things, that they might be the certain limits to bound in that every-way-streaming variety of things: that so invincible, and unchangeable Truth might discover its universall, and proportionate harmony in all things.A Reformation of Schooles, 15.
One anonymous German correspondent of Hartlib actually cited Alsted as an exemplar of unmethodical writing, incidentally providing a vivid description of the sense of distress and confusion induced by lacking a predetermined sense of order:
there are many things that one does not know where to put. And so is obliged to leave them buried in the dung of many scattered useless aphorisms, or with Alsted to submit I know not what idiotic farragoes of arts and particulars of systems to the usual misbegotten arrangement, as the confusion of his Encycopædia ought sufficiently to have shown him.sic] gnugsam solt zue verstehen geben haben' - HP 36/4/50A: from a long anonymous tract on combatting atheism, undated but composed c. 1638/9.
'Farragoes of arts' is a sarcastic reference to the seventh and last book of Alsted's Encyclopædia (1630), entitled 'Farragines disciplinarum' (lit. Alsted, 156.
Another commentator, writing in favour of the notion of Pansophy (though not in this instance with particular reference to Comenius), observed that a work might contain the greatest confusion that had ever been seen in writing, but nonetheless, provided the author treated his proposed subjects solidly and thoroughly, 'we shall nonetheless think him worth more than a thousand Alsteds with all their supposed methods'.Eph 39, 30/4/2A.
Ironically, this can now seem a very apt description of much of Hartlib's papers, particularly the Ephemerides in which the remark is recorded. There is an unresolved dichotomy between a genuine appreciation of the multifariousness of raw fact and a passionate need to discern the divine order that would reveal its coherence. Hartlib collected stray facts with tireless zeal, and can often seem less than meticulous in applying Bacon's precept that 'whatever is admitted must be drawn from grave and credible history and trustworthy reports'.Novum organum, second book of aphorisms, aphorism 29: Works IV, 169.
The bullfinch, if J.S. Kuffler's report in the Ephemerides of 1656 is to be believed, is
One of the most Musical birds and that is most susceptible to bee taught any kind of melodies or songs […] as Mr Morian hath found by experience who himself hath taught him Psalms etc etc for which hee hath beene famed over all Amsterdam.Eph 56, 29/5/89A.
However much this report owes to the inventor's fertile imagination, it is a telling and rather attractive image of the idea of Moriaen built up by his correspondents in England. And it is certainly not inconceivable that Moriaen tried to teach a bullfinch psalm tunes, and possibly believed he was making progress with the project. To persuade a bird to apply its God-given voice to explicitly divine melodies would have provided a splendid example of the divine spark latent in all created things, and of the potential for humankind to apply its divinely-appointed dominion over Nature to the specific end of glorifying God.
Music was regarded at this period as a branch of mathematics - which is emphatically not to say it was seen as a merely abstract or intellectual process. On the contrary, the divine spark discernible in music extended throughout its parent discipline, offering unique insights into the lineaments of Creation. In the idealised pansophic educational programme of J.V. Andreæ's Christianopolis, the mathematical part of the course, described in chapters 61 to 63, begins with arithmetic - for whoever does not know arithmetic knows nothing -, proceeds to geometry - which teaches us to understand 'the pettiness of our little body in the narrow confines of the grave and the tiny ball of this little earth' -, and concludes with the 'secret numbers', comprehensible only by revelation, which provide an insight into the means by which God has measured the universe. From this course, the Christianopolitans proceed directly to music (chapters 64-66), which is depicted as a form of spiritual sustenance.
Moriaen's love of music figures in miniature, like a microcosm, his love of mathematics, and the expansion in the purview of mathematics taking place at the time in turn figures the expansion of learning in general that he and Hartlib anticipated. It was harmony that fascinated him in mathematics, as in music, the abstract beauty of numerical patterns - though in his eyes these patterns were not abstract, they were applicable in all fields of learning, including those that would today be considered the least 'scientific', and were simply easier to discern in this area than in others. Mathematics provided the reassurance that there was an ordered harmony to the universe, for 'in this errant and deceitful world, there is hardly anything sure and certain left us besides mathematics'en vnd verführischen welt [… ist] vnß extra Mathesin fast nichts sichers vnd gewißes vbergelaßen' - Moriaen to Hartlib, 31 Jan. 1639, HP 37/5A.
The music of the spheres might no longer literally be believed in, since the spheres in question had turned out not to exist, but their metaphorical charge - the concept of universal harmony - was redeemable by mathematics. Moriaen was captivated by the idea that an infinite number of problems can be solved by a single verified principle, and saw in this the model for all subjects after the pansophic reformation of learning. He observed with specific regard to mathematical works sent him by Hartlib that
all my life I have been eager beyond measure for such things, but now even more so, since through them I can picture forth the possibility of Pansophy to myself and others. By this means I have already stopped the mouths of many gainsayers and convinced many doubters.en auß der maßen begierig all meine tage gewest nun aber desto mehr weil Ich mir vnd anderen possibilitatem Pansophiæ dardurch einbilden kan, damit Ich berait etliche wiedersprecher stumme vnd zweiffeler glaubig gemacht habe' - Moriaen to Hartlib, 24 March 1639, HP 37/13B.
It was this passion that informed his interest in and sustained support for the leading mathematician among the pansophists, John Pell.John Pell (1611-1685) and his Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish: the mental world of an early modern mathematician (Oxford, 2005), in the light of which I have made numerous revisions to this sub-chapter. That Moriaen's mathematical gifts were widely known and respected is evidenced by the fact that he was one of the expert witnesses Pell at least considered approaching for support in his controversy with Longomontanus over the latter's supposed quadrature of the circle. Moriaen did not in fact contribute to the debate (or if he did, Pell forebore to publish his contribution), but the suggestion puts him in the company of Descartes, Joachim Jungius, Adolf Tassius and the professors of Gresham College, all of whom Pell did approach. See Malcolm and Stedall, John Pell, 116.
During his lifetime, Pell (1611-85) was held in colossal esteem as a mathematician. As a young man he became a schoolteacher and for a few months in the latter half of 1630 served in Hartlib's abortive school in Chichester. After this folded in November that year, the two men remained friends, and Hartlib finally persuaded the mathematician to settle in London in 1638.John Pell, 25-32 and 61.Brief Lives II, 127 and 129. The first two comments are from a memo to Aubrey from Haak.
From as early as 1639, Moriaen was active in seeking opportunities in the Netherlands for the mathematician, who numbered Dutch among the many languages he was fluent in. His efforts on Pell's behalf earned him the one mention in print that can ever have caught the eye of non-specialists: a passing reference by Haak preserved in Aubrey's Brief Life of the mathematician:
[Pell] communicated to his friends his excellent Idea Matheseos in half a sheet of paper, which got him a great deal of repute, both at home and abroad, but no other special advantage, till Mr John Morian, a very learned and expert Gentleman, gave me [Haak] notice that Hortensius, Mathematical Professor at Amsterdam, was deceased, wishing that our friend Mr Pell might succeed.Brief Lives II, 130. On the 'Idea Matheseos', see below, p. 114.
This reason the post became vacant was not in fact that HortensiusNNBW I, 1160-64.
Moriaen was one of Pell's first contacts in Amsterdam, and helped the shiftless mathematician to settle in to his new surroundings, taking it on himself to find him lodgingsDNB's statement that Pell was appointed in 1643, though I should have realised that this is incompatible with the evidence of Moriaen's letter, which describes the inaugural lecture as a recent event and mentions that Pell had not yet found settled accommodation. The appointment was in fact made on 27 April 1644. See Malcolm and Stedall, John Pell, 5 and 102-3.
This was a vain hope. Pell published little besides the Idea mentioned by Aubrey, which is not in itself a mathematical work, and which, furthermore, was brought out not on Pell's initiative but on Hartlib's. His biographer in the old DNB severely remarks that 'Pell's mathematical performance entirely failed to justify his reputation'.DNB XLIV, 262. The Oxford DNB entry is less damning but still distinctly luke-warm (and still gets the date of Pell's appointment at Amsterdam wrong). For a more balanced assessment and detailed analysis of Pell's mathematical achievements, based on his manuscript remains rather than his few printed works, see Jacqueline Stedall's 'The Mathematics of John Pell', which constitutes the second part of Malcolm and Stedall, John Pell (pp. 245-328).Idea of Mathematics was distributed by Hartlib alongside Dury's writings on exegetical and Hübner's on political method as an exemplar of and advertisement for the vision of universal learning adumbrated in Comenius's Præludia and Prodromus.
Pell's Idea, which Hartlib published in 1638,Idea of Mathematics', Durham Research Journal 18 (1967), 139-48. Wallis's dating is borne out by Pell's reference in a letter of October 1642 which cannot be to anyone but Hartlib to 'my letter to you, which you caused to be published just this time four years' (Correspondance de Mersenne XI, 311). Various more or less wild conjectures have been made about the date of the Idea's original composition. According to a mock-up title page in the Hartlib Papers (HP 14/1/6A), it was written in '1634 or m.' (= 'or more' or 'or magis'?), but this only proves that Hartlib himself, possibly writing many years later, could no longer remember the date more precisely than that it was no earlier than 1634. Turnbull thought it might have been conceived as early as 1630, when Pell sent Hartlib 'a rude draught of his Method' (HDC, 88), but Noel Malcolm shows that this refers to a different and much less ambitious pedagogical 'method', possibly for language teaching (John Pell, 31). By Pell's own account, he wrote the work 'about 3 months' before Hartlib published it, i.e. in summer 1638 (Pell to Hartlib, August 1655, BL MS Add. 4364 f. 139r). Elsewhere, in a handwritten annotation to a Latin copy of the Idea, he dates the composition with still more precision to '23 July 1638'. See Malcolm and Stedall, John Pell, 69.Idea of Mathematics, ed. P.J. Wallis, in Durham Research Journal 18 (1967), 139-148, p. 143.
An instruction, shewing how any Mathematician that will take the paines, may prepare himselfe, so, as that he may, though he be utterly destitute of bookes or instruments, resolve any Mathematicall Probleme as exactly as if he had a complete Library by him.
This work was distributed around Europe by Hartlib and Haak:John Pell, 71-3.Idea of Mathematics, 145.Correspondance de Mersenne VIII, 580-584; Pell to Mersenne, 21 Nov. 1639 (ibid., 622-630); Mersenne to Pell, 10 Dec. 1639 (ibid., 685-688). See also Wallis's useful summary of the early reception of the Idea, Durham Research Journal 18 (1967), 145-7.
It was the universal validity of mathematical principle that made it illustrative of Pansophy. The notion that mathematical principle is universally and abstractly valid was itself a relative novelty at the time. Jacob Klein suggests in an illuminating study that the very concept of number was undergoing a radical transformation at precisely this period.Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1968).
is not symbolic. It always intends determinate numbers or units of measurement, and it does this without any detour through a 'general notion' or a concept of a 'general magnitude'. […] It does not identify the object represented with the means of its representation, and it does not replace the real determinateness of an object with a possibility of making it determinate, such as would be expressed by a sign which, instead of illustrating a determinate object, would signify possible determinacy.
Modern mathematics, by contrast, which Klein sees as originating with Vieta, Stevin and Descartes, 'turns its attention first and last to method as such. It determines its objects by reflecting on the way in which these objects become accessible through a general method'.
Pell was not alone in seeing Vieta as an epochal figure in the field. Marin Mersenne, one of the foremost mathematicians of France, who corresponded regularly with Haak and Pell in 1639 and '40, was eager for a single-volume edition of Vieta to be brought out, and commissioned Abraham and Bonaventura Elsevier of Leiden to print it.Correspondance de Mersenne VII, 33 and 106-9).Correspondance de Mersenne VII, facing p. 109.Correspondance de Mersenne XI, 308. The letter is also given in Robert Vaughan, The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1839) II, 347-54. The Moriaen letters in question are those of 2 and 9 Oct. 1642, HP 37/112A-114B, in which Moriaen stated that he had recommended Pell to the Elseviers and urged him to contribute to the edition.
Jungius's closest friend and colleague at the Hamburg Gymnasium, the mathematics professor Johann Adolf Tassius, was another correspondent who followed enthusiastically the progress of the pansophic project, and he too received a copy of Pell's Idea from Hartlib. KK I, 32-36. Hartlib said he was sending 'eine andre Idæam Conatuum Mathematicorum eines andern Authoris [than J.L. Wolzogen], darvon ich des H. vnparteyliches judicium mit dem ersten erwarte' (63r; KK I, 36), which given that this is precisely the period when Hartlib was distributing the Idea is almost certainly a reference to it.
entreated Mr Pell to elaborate the Analyticall Method which Vieta hath begun to shew but hath not perfected. For if wee have (sayth hee & it is true in all Sciences) The true principles once of Theory & the Method of proceeding from principles to find Conclusions infallibly & sufficiently made knowne wee neede noe more for the resolution of all questions that can bee propounded of what kind soever they bee. For Questions & Cases in all Sciences are infinite but the Rules to find out truth in every thing are few.
This perceived centrality of Vieta and the enthusiasm for him shared by both Pell and Moriaen is important to my argument here because Vieta exemplifies with particular clarity how the new mathematics, the new focus not on individual problems but on method as such, could be seen as a model for Pansophy. To quote Klein one last time:
In Vieta's 'general analytic' this symbolic concept of number appears for the first time […] The condition for this whole development is the transformation of the ancient concept of arithmos and its transfer into a new conceptual dimension. The thoroughgoing modification of the means and aims of ancient science which this involves is best characterized by a phrase […] in which Vieta expresses the ultimate problem, the problem proper, of his 'analytical art': 'Analytical art appropriates to itself by right the proud problem of problems, which is: TO LEAVE NO PROBLEM UNSOLVED' ('fastuosum problema problemarum ars Analytice […] iure sibi adrobat, Quod est, NULLUM NON PROBLEMA SOLVERE').In artem analyticen Isagoge, 1591; the capitalisation is Vieta's.
This is precisely the ultimate goal proclaimed (a little less portentously) in Pell's Idea: to 'resolve any Mathematicall Probleme'. It was cited too - verbatim this time - by Moriaen, soon after receiving a copy of the Idea, when enquiring how far Pell's method extended: 'I should be glad to know whether Mr Pell's logic extends as far as Vieta's nullum non problema solvere'.ii Logistica so weit erstrecke als des Vietæ Nullum non problema soluere' - Moriaen to [Hartlib?], 27 Dec. 1638, HP 37/166A.Idea into practice? If he was, then surely it would be possible - and this is where the leap of faith comes in - to apply analogous means to attain the same end in all other Comenius in England, 74.
Again, the contrast with Bacon is instructive. Revelling in the concrete and the specific, Bacon clearly thought mathematics rather a bore:
For it being in the nature of the mind of man, to the extreme prejudice of knowledge, to delight in the spacious liberty of generalities, as in a champagne region, and not in the inclosures of particularity; the Mathematics of all other knowledge were the goodliest fields to satisfy that appetite.Advancement of Learning, Works III, 359-360.
But to Moriaen, Dury and Tassius (assuming Dury quoted him accurately), mathematics was not a matter of 'spacious generalities', it was a paradigm of 'right method' such as might be applied in any subject, theology not excepted.
This application of 'method' and the extent to which it was novel, even revolutionary, in the mathematics of the period, is exemplified in Moriaen's mild boast about his own abilities as a mathematics teacher: in a fifteen minute lesson, he claimed, he could teach anyone tolerably competent in addition and multiplication to calculate any power of any number, the secret being that he did not attempt to teach by rote but from first principles.way of looking at the universe, which would enable the student to draw infinite conclusions from the natural symmetry of all things, just as a mathematician using only the basic principles of multiplication can extend a pattern of numbers into infinity:
I say, we would have such a booke compiled, which alone, instead of all, should be the Spense, and Storehouse of Universall Learning […] by reading whereof, Wisdome should of its own accord, spring up in mens minds, by reason of the cleare, distinct and perpetuall coherence of all things […] that so all things which may be known (whether Naturall, Morall, or Artificiall, or even Metaphysicall) may be delivered like unto Mathematical demonstrations, with such evidence and certainty, that there may be no roome left for any doubt to arise.A Reformation of Schooles, 25. Similarly on p. 51: 'Neither in the delivery of these things, though evidently true, do wee presuppose any thing […] but we premonstrate rather, that is we deduce one thing out of another continually, from the first principles of Metaphysickes, untill we come to the last, and least differences of Things: and this with such evidence of truth, as the propositions of the Mathematicians have, so that there is a necessity of yeelding to the last as well as to the first, for the continuall, and nowhere interrupted demonstration of their truth.'
Dury too, seeking an epistemological tool with which to produce a foolproof method of Scriptural analysis, turned to mathematics as a paradigm. This he described in his Analysis demonstrativa, which Hartlib sent Moriaen in manuscript in March 1639.Analysis consists of a compilation of extracts from letters to Joseph St Amand of November and December 1637 (HP 1/4/19A-22B), and is further elaborated in another letter to him of 26 February 1640 (HP 1/4/1A-8B). Moriaen intended to have it published, but whether he in fact did so remains unclear (see above, p. 39).
the end of this Method which I vse is to apprehend it [the wisdom of Scripture] demonstratively that is infallibly./ Soe that a man shal be able to demonstrat every thinge which he doth apprehend to be certainly true a priori noto et infallibili [from things previously and infallibly known] till he come to the first principle of infallibility which noe man can deny, for that by a continuall orderly concatenation of apprehentions the vnderstandinge is ledd by infallible degrees from one intellectual obiect to another till it gather them all vp together in one summe soe that it can all at once apprehend the whole, and all the parts thereof distinctly & conionctly in theire severall relations each to other and each to the makeinge vp of the whole, and I can not compare the manner of proceedinge better then to an arithmeticall addition or multiplication wherein one summe beinge added to another maketh vp the third and many summes or numbers beinge added into one, make vp a greate totall summe, soe it is in this method of apprehendinge intellectuall obiects one obiect is added to another to make vp a third which is common to both and many obiects are reckoned or summed vp together to make a totall summe and generall conclusion of some intellectuall matters[.]
Just as Vieta and Pell maintained that the application of right method to mathematics would leave no problem unsolved, so Dury thought the same could be done for the exegesis of Scripture. It seems these musings had their genesis as the resolution of a personal crisis of faith at least four years earlier, at a time when Dury almost despaired of resolving the inherent ambiguities of natural language: 'Dury himself,' wrote Hartlib in 1635, could at one time
finde no certainties almost in any thing, though hee was able to discourse as largely of any thing as any other. Yet solidly and demonstratively hee knew nothing, till hee betooke himself to the Scriptures and lighted upon the infallible way of interpreting them.Eph 35, HP 29/3/14A; transcript in HDC, 167. Cf. Popkin, 'The Third Force', 40-42. Popkin argues persuasively that it was the millenarian writings of Joseph Mede that first suggested to Dury the way out of his labyrinth.
Dury apparently claimed to have confuted Descartes' scepticism to his face with this method: though the French philosopher denied the possibility of such certain knowledge, Dury stuck to his guns and Descartes, 'being brought to many absurdities, left of'.Eph 35, HP 29/3/14A.Analysis demonstrativa, but the ideas and the language used in this later work bear the clear imprint of the Comenian Præludia Hartlib had just published when Dury wrote the Analysis. The mathematical analogy provided Dury with the assurance he needed that a merely human language could be interpreted with absolute and universal certainty, at least so long as it had the guarantee unique to Scripture of an originally divine inspiration. And he pushed the analogy rather further than Comenius had done. Though he foresaw the obvious objection that natural language does not correlate directly to extra-linguistic reality in the same way that mathematical language does, he denied it - not, significantly, by argument, but by an assertion of faith in method:
But here you will say howe can this be done aswell and demonstratively in obiects intellectuall as in arithmeticall numbers? I will answere you that the one can be done aswell as the other yf the right obiects be represented to the minde, and yf the right method of summinge vp the same, be made vse of. For I in this businesse must doe as Mathematicians in theire demonstrative sciences vse to doe, I must take a postulatum to be given or granted vnto me, vpon which the whole grounde of these demonstrations will rest, Nowe this Postulatum is a thinge which I suppose noe rationall man will denye, vizt that yf the vnderstandinge can apprehend truely the simple axiomes of a discourse, and that yf those simple axiomes truely apprehended, be rightly ioyned together, that the compound which resulteth from the same in the vnderstandinge cannot be false; vpon this one Postulatum (which yf neede were might be proved by a Mathematicall demonstration of lynes and figures) relyeth the whole demonstrability of this Analyticall Method.Analysis demonstrativa, HP 1/4/20A-B.
Dury's method of breaking Scripture down into simple unambiguous axioms, and then recomposing it by 'right method' to arrive infallibly at the text's true meaning met with Moriaen's warm approval, despite his habitual scepticism about Dury's irenical projects. What especially appealed to him in this work was no doubt the eschewal, so unusual in Dury, of consideration of particular doctrines as they had been elaborated, and the return instead to first principles and to a single true method that would transcend all doctrine. And he wholeheartedly agreed that mathematical principle could be applied to religion, despite the scepticism of misguided rationalists such as Descartes:
for many will believe only what they can see, and although they cannot but believe when shown a mathematical certainty, yet will they not believe that such a method can be discovered and practised in religious knowledge, and especially in theology; such a one is M. Descartes.er glaub nicht außer den augen vnd ob sie woll gleuben müßen dati certitudinem Mathematicam so glauben sie doch nicht das man einen solchen methodum in relig. scientijs sonderlich aber in Theologia finden vnd practisiren könne vnder welchen auch Mr des Cartes ist' - Moriaen to Hartlib, 24 March 1639, HP 37/14A: the remark is made with specific reference to Dury's Analysis demonstrativa.
It has to be said that mathematical concision is not one of the merits of Dury's system. I have quoted it at some length here to illustrate the insistent, almost defensive iteration of the mathematical analogy. Dury wanted to represent the literal sense of Scripture as a series of equations with incontrovertible solutions, and though he did go on to say that there is also a deeper sense accessible only to 'the Spirituall man who hath received vnderstanding to discerne Spirituall things Spiritually',Analysis demonstrativa, HP 1/4/3A; cf. 1 Corinthians 2.
The attraction of such a view was that if assent could be 'compelled' by 'mathematical' demonstration of the single unambiguous true meaning of Scripture, religious disputation could be done away with at a stroke. It is a strikingly passive form of analysis:
the only Prudency to be vsed in this Method is to bringe a mans vnderstandinge to a spirituall Captivitie vnder the sense of the Letter […] Soe that the vnderstandinge is ledd and becometh wholly passive[:] as an eye that seeketh somethinge is meerely passive in respect of the obiects that it reflecteth vpon, soe must the vnderstandinge be in respect of the words of sacred scripture.
This distinctly echoes the mathematical analogies of the Præludia, and foreshadows the passive assent to mathematical demonstration recommended by Comenius in Panaugia (Universal Light), the second part of the Consultatio:
The ways of light have been so well designed by God's skill that there is nothing vague about them.
They have been made to conform to such unchanging laws that everything about them can be proved with mathematical certainty.
By the same theory the intellectual light of wisdom can rightly be governed by unchanging laws of method so that in the process of teaching and learning nothing is left vague and uncertain but everything operates with mathematical precision.Panaugia, trans. A.M.O. Dobbie (Shipton on Stour, 1987), ch. 11, para. 101, p. 71.
If you use your eyes, you will see the same thing as I do and there can be no difference between us.
Such was the vision: the laws of method would teach people to see, and once they had learned to see they would realise they were all looking at the same thing. Comenius too repeatedly stressed the irenical nature of his Pansophy, which he predicted would lead to the healing of all schism within Christianity and the conversion of the infidels.Reformation of Schooles, 26.
All academic and doctrinal disputes would fall away, the Aristotelian would lie down with the Ramist, the Galenist with the Paracelsian, the Lutheran with the Calvinist, the Jew with the Christian; all would assent to the self-evident truth as meekly and dispassionately as they could all assent to a demonstrable mathematical equation. In fact, as Dury and Moriaen were well aware, people did not always assent meekly to mathematical demonstrations but that, presumably, only meant that at least one of the disputants had not fully grasped the right method. All that was lacking was a proper, incontrovertible exposition of that method, and doubt and division would be at an end, the earth would be filled with the knowledge of the LordReformation of Schooles, 26).Reformation of Schooles, 24.en sondern auch die Ienige so herbeÿ schaffen was zur arbeit von nothen ist' - Moriaen to Hartlib, 13 Dec. 1638, HP 37/1B. Bezaleel and Aholiab were the craftsmen selected by God to build the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 31:1-6).
It is not clear whether Moriaen and Hartlib were already in touch when the latter set himself up as a champion of Pansophy, or whether it was the quest for people through whom to distribute copies of the Præludia that first inspired Hartlib to contact Moriaen (perhaps on the recommendation of Dury or Haak). In either case, it is evident from the earliest of Moriaen's surviving letters to Hartlib (13 December 1638) that he had been fairly bombarded with Dutch Calvinists, 181.
His previous experience of relief work for the Palatine exiles, and the contacts he had made during his previous career, must have made him an ideal candidate for such a role. His years in Frankfurt and Cologne had given him access to the largely clandestine information network of the German Reformed Church, and in the early years of his correspondence with Hartlib, references recur to largely unspecified sources of information in those cities, notably to an agent ('Comißarius') in Frankfurt, and one Budæus in Cologne, through whom he distributed literature sent him by Hartlib.Comenius, 334 and Unbekannte Briefe, 18) cautiously suggests this may be the Swedish mathematician Niels Buddaeus (1595-1653), but this cannot be right, since Moriaen's Budæus died on 11 Sept. 1642, as he told Hartlib the following month (HP 37/112A).
Fundraising for Comenius had been Hartlib's principal occupation since the early 1630s - well before the appearance of the Præludia. His goals, as has been said, were to relieve Comenius's personal circumstances, to publish his works, to supply him with amanuenses and to enable him to visit England. Hartlib also supplied material for the pansophic project: in 1633, Comenius thanked him, through his then collaborator Jan Jonston, for promising to send manuscript copies of (unspecified) works by Bacon.The Letters of Jan Jonston to Samuel Hartlib (Warsaw, 2000), 67 (original) and 106 (translation).Dutch Calvinists, 203.HDC, 35).PræludiaHDC, 35, n. 4.
Similar efforts by Hartlib on behalf of Comenius personally and the promotion of his work continued until 1641 and are partially documented among his surviving papers,Acta Comeniana 11 (1996), 71-87 and 141-57.
In 1639. Moriaen approached the newly-arrived Reformed minister in The Hague, Caspar Streso. As a student in England, Streso had benefited from the charity of Austin Friars, and he was later commissioned to distribute donations from the church to the exiles in Anhalt.Dutch Calvinists, 180; Hessels III, nos. 2569 and 2654.An Exhortation for the Worke of Education Intended by Mr Comenius, which has since vanished without trace.HDC, 88-109), and is mentioned nowhere else in the surviving papers.
The clearest indication of the leading role played by Moriaen and Rulice in the Continental campaign for Comenius is Hartlib's use of them to distribute the Moravian's work. He gave away almost three hundred copies of what he described as 'the new Comenian Booke' - evidently one of the works he had himself commissioned publication of, either the Præludia, or more probably (Moriaen's letters suggest), its second edition, the Prodromus. Moriaen features twice on Hartlib's list of people to whom he sent this work, first as recipient of five copies, then - doubtless in response to his repeated statements that the more publicity he received the better - as co-recipient, with Rulice, of fifty, the largest single consignment by a considerable margin from the total of almost 300 distributed.HDC, 343) thinks it likelier that the work in question is the Præludia, but Moriaen's acknowledgement of a number of copies of the Prodromus which had been passed on to him by Rulice (12 May 1639, HP 37/23A) would seem rather to suggest the latter. Hartlib's undated list may, however, refer to an earler consignment of Præludias not mentioned in the surviving letters.
In more concrete terms, Moriaen could report that by 24 March 1639 he had raised 200 Imperials, which he sent directly to Comenius to cover his immediate needs while waiting for more to come in.