Master of the Charter-house, was born in 1635, and died in 1715. His chief work, originally in Latin, but rendered into English in 1691, was “The Sacred Theory of the Earth.” Written in a day when geological science was yet unborn, it is, of course, full of error and wild speculation; but its eloquence and picturesque grandeur of style redeem it from oblivion. Burnet’s other principal works were, “Archæologia Philosophica”—“On Christian Faith and Duties”—and “The State of the Dead and Reviving.” He held some peculiar religious views, which debarred him from preferment in the Church.
The Sacred Theory of the Earth
We know the highest pleasure our minds are capable of enjoying with composure, when we read sublime thoughts communicated to us by men of great genius and eloquence. Such is the entertainment we meet with in the philosophic parts of Cicero’s writings. Truth and good sense have there so charming a dress, that they could hardly be more agreeably represented with the addition of poetical fiction, and the power of numbers. This ancient author, and a modern one, have fallen into my hands within these few days; and the impressions they have left upon me, have at the present quite spoiled me for a merry fellow. The modern is that admirable writer the author of “the Theory of the Earth.”
The novelty of his ideas, the perspicuity and elegance of his style recommended his works to the attention of the learned.
They, who are indifferent to science, will find, in this “Theory of the Earth,” a philosophical romance which delights by its admirable contrivances, its vigorous language, its noble descriptions of the stupendous objects of nature, its new views of ages and of scenes, which, though they never rolled over this habitable globe, easily might, and which if they did not, one cannot help wishing they had. All that is grand and awful in mundane commotions, in a deluge, or in a conflagration, of a world, is here described, by a pencil that puts the picture before the eyes. Those blissful ages, when storms and winds, and changes of seasons, were unknown in a globe of perpetual spring, when centuries were as years, and the human frame rejoiced in the purity and pellucidness of the atmosphere, which fed instead of corroding it, are here not only presented to the imagination, but almost proved to the understanding. And with a pen of equal power, are sketched the close of the world, the moment when the foundations of the earth sink, its joints and ligatures burst asunder, the mountains melt, and the sea is evaporated.
Apart from his mistakes, his works contain some things relating to the Scriptures worth reading; while the reader ought to be on his guard against their sophistry and skepticism.
As regards ingenuity of hypothesis and majesty of style, the work is beyond praise; as a philosophical system, it is beneath criticism.
With his genius and imagination and consummate scholarship, he is a very different species of writer from his garrulous and mitred namesake: his English style is singularly flowing and harmonious, as well as perspicuous and animated, and rises on fit occasions to much majesty and even splendor.
His pictures of the devastation caused by the unbridled powers of Nature are grand and magnificent, and give him a claim to be placed among the most eloquent and poetical of prose-writers.
The secret of this effect upon his readers was that Burnet was enamoured of his own pre-geological dream. He thought himself inspired with superhuman insight. He believed that it was his divine mission to retrieve the scene of the Golden Age and to chronicle its ruin. He introduces his singular book with no mock-modesty; he confesses that what we are about to read has “more masculine beauty than any poem or romance.” This mystical conviction carried away the learned alike and the unlearned, and even Burnet’s fiercest opponents admitted, as Keill does, that “never was any book of philosophy written in a more lofty and plausible style.” When a vision is presented to us with such gestures of rapture, in accents of such melodious solemnity, it seems almost rude to hint that it is mathematically and geologically absurd. Burnet was like the sorcerer in “Kubla Khan;” the reader had to flee from his enchantment, for “he on honey dew had fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise.” He was so positive that he fell into an opposite extreme of danger, and was accused of scepticism because he would insist that things must have been as he dreamed they might have been.
Burnet’s mind was the mind of a poet; he had just enough science to misguide him, and more than enough learning to gloss over the vagaries of his science. He is quite as much at home in expounding the catastrophe of the future, the final conflagration, as the watery catastrophe of which he believes the traces to be visible everywhere around him. At the same time he has a strong affinity to the rationalizing divines, even more visible in his strictly theological writings, and would not for the world propound anything of whose reasonableness he has not first convinced himself. As a writer he stands high, combining the splendour and melody of a former age with the ease and lucidity of his own.
Burnet’s book is a fanciful explanation of cosmogony and cosmolysis, in which the Deluge is the great event in the past and the final conflagration the great event of the future. From this point of view it is chiefly interesting as an attempt to combine the nascent interest in physical science with the expiring tendency to imaginative romance. Something of the same mixture appears in the manner, for there are touches of the vernacularity, and even the meanness, which was invading style. But on the whole the older magnificence prevails, and Burnet has a just, though probably rather a vague, repute as commanding real eloquence of description, marred at times by a tawdriness which reminds us that we are in the half-century of Lee, not in that of Shakespeare, but showing in prose not a little of the redeeming splendour which Lee shows in verse.
