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Experience, The Mother of Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert Withington
Robert Withington*
Affiliation:
Smith College
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Abstract

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Type
Comment and Criticism
Information
PMLA , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , June 1942 , pp. 592
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1942

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References

Note 1 in page 592 Ben Jonson, in Timber, s. v. “Scientia,” observes that “Knowledge is the action of the soul, and is perfect without the senses, as having the seeds of all science and virtue in itself, but not without the service of the senses; by those organs the soul works.” In Rastell's Nature of the Four Elements (1519) we find a character named Experyens, who does not suggest “experiment.” If he is the author's “mouthpiece,” as Miss Nugent calls him (PMLA, lvii, 83), he may represent the memory of Rastell's own experience, or he may be an expositor who gives data furnished by “a text and a map or globe.” (Ibid., p. 80.)