Margaret Lenore Wiley - Subtle Knot: Creative Skepticism in Seventeenth-Century England

SINCE 'all experience is an arch,' one normally spends more of his time looking through it than examining its composition. Yet the individual would be both blind and ungrateful who did not try, on occasion, to call the roll of those influences upon his thought and life of which he is most aware, realizing all the while, of course, that one neither knows what he is nor dares to lay at the door of others the responsibility for what he has thus far become.

This book, for better or for worse, is one of the results of the kind of home my parents and grandparents provided, in which both literature and religion were made abundantly available, without either's having been strained through the sieve of dogma, and where actions spoke louder than words. It stems also from approximately eight years of listening, during youth, to the literate and inspired sermons of the late Dr. Harold H. Griffis in Portland, Oregon, and from an overlapping period of six years of listening to the equally literate and inspired lectures of the late Professor Barry Cerf at Reed College, who made accessible hitherto unexplored realms of the world's literature, philosophy and religion and who struggled persistently, often against stubborn resistance, to bring some order out of the chaos of my undergraduate mind. It was Professor George Williamson who, in a course in seventeenth-century literature at the University of Oregon, first suggested that a study of the co-existing scepticism and faith of the seventeenth century might enable me to make a pattern out of certain trends which I had appreciated without being able to identify. In spite of the dangers inherent in such a topic, Professor Kenneth B. Murdock at Harvard undertook to stand by and offer both moral and bibliographical assistance while I struggled to write something which would satisfy both my own intellectual needs and the standards of a great university. His continuing faith in the project has been invaluable. The very practical suggestion that I should publish separate

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articles on the five sceptics before bringing out the book was made by Dr. Helen C. White of the University of Wisconsin.

To professional philosophers I am indebted for more light than I have been able to make constructive use of, notably to Professor Arthur O. Lovejoy of Johns Hopkins University and to the late Professor Felix Kaufmann of the Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research.

Most of the ideas in this book have been beaten into their present shape by conversations with long-suffering friends, teachers and students during the past twenty-five years, for this is the only way one can become articulate. Those individuals who have survived this process will recognize bits of conversation reflected here and there; the others have been perhaps mercifully spared the embarrassment of being held even remotely responsible for the following pages.

My deep gratitude is due to the Oregon Branch of the American Association of University Women for a fellowship grant in 1937-38, which provided the necessary leisure for research and for the re-evaluation of old ideas.

Permission has been granted by the editors of The Hibbert Journal, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and The Western Humanities Review for the inclusion of portions of the book which have already appeared in the form of articles.

BROOKLYN COLLEGE M. L. W. December, 1950

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