It was in 1634 that Herbert first published his Description of the Persian Monarchy now beinge : the Orientall Indyes, Iles and other parts of the Greater Asia and Africk. Four years later a new and enlarged edition appeared under the title of Some Yeares Travels into Africa and Asia the Great; a third edition followed in 1664, and a fourth in 1677. The work is evidently the production of a man of considerable scholarship and activity of mind, and altogether ranks as one of the best records of 17th century travel. 1t is illus- trated with woodcuts, among which the sketch of the dodo, the specimen of the cuneiform inscriptions, and the view of Perscpclis deserve to be mentioned. Herbert’s Threnodia Carolina, or Memoirs of the two last years of the reign of that unparallell’d prince of ever blessed memory King Charles [., was in great part printed at the author’s request in Wood’s Athenee Oxonienses, but it did not appear in its entirety till Dr Charles Goodall published his Collection of Tractsin 1702. <A reprint was issued by G. and W. Nicol in 1813. Sir William Dugdale is understood to have received assistance from Herbert in preparing the fourth volume of the Bfonasticon Angli- canum ; and Mr Drake has printed in the appendix to his Eboracum two papers from Herbert’s pen on the church of St John at Beverley and the collegiate church of Ripon. The best account of Sir Thomas Herbert isthat by Robert Davies, F.8.A., York, which appeared in Lhe Yorkshire Archeological and Topographical Journal, part iii., pp. 182-214 (1870). ‘t contains a facsimile of the long inseription oi Herbert’s tomb.
HERBERT, Lord, of Cherbury (1582–1648). Edward Herbert, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, soldier, diplomatist, historian, and religious philosopher, was born at Eyton in Shropshire in 1582, and was descended from an ancient line of illustrious soldiers, to which the earls of Pembroke belonged. Sent to Oxford in his twelfth year, he married an heiress, his kinswoman, in his fifteenth, and returned to the university to prosecute his “beloved studies.” He was knighted soon after the accession of James I, and for a year or two fulfilled the functions of sheriff of his county. In 1608 he went abroad, at Paris gaining the esteem and love of the old Constable de Montmorency, and beginning an acquaintance with scholars like Casaubon, Gassendi, and Grotius. Next year he served as a volunteer in the Low Countries under the prince of Orange, whose intimate friend he became, and also took part in the cam- paigns of 1614 and 1615. Between the latter campaigns he visited Italy, and on his return was arrested in France for recruiting Huguenots for the service of the duke of Savoy. In 1618 he was sent as ambassador extraordinary to the court of France; and, though recalled fur a few months through the hostility of the French king’s favourite, he soon returnel to Paris as ordinary ambassador. In 1625 he cams back to England, where, with the exception of one or more short visits to Paris, he spent the rest of his life. Created Lord Herbert of Castle Island in 1625, he was raised by Charles I. to the English peerage in 1631 as Baron Herbert of Cherbury. In the civil war he sided at first with the court, and subsequently declared for the par- liament, but the part he played was not a prominent one. His castle of Montgomery was, however, destroyed during the war, and he received an indemnity for his loss from the parliament. He died 20th August 1648.
“Tt is impossible to draw his picture well who hath several countenances,” Herbert says of Henry VIII; Horace Walpole made a bold attempt to sketch Herbert’s character by declaring that in his case “the history of Don Quixote was the hfe of Plato.” To his contemporaries Herbert was mainly known as a high-spirited man of the world, of great knightly and courtier-like accomplishments, who, though stiff and stately, was on the smallest actual provocation ready and able to defend his honour with his sword. He maintained the character of ambassador with dignity, but his diplomacy was not attended by much success. Itisas author that Herbert is chiefly remembered. And though in 1633 the De Veritate received the official imprimatur of the bishop of London’s chaplain, on the strength of the same work the writer was soon after held up to abhorrence as an atheist. As a resolute opponent of empiricism in philosophy, he is unquestionably entitled to rank as one of the heralds of the philosophy of Reid ané the Scottish metaphysicians. In the thevlugical sphere he is justly claimed as the father of English deism, and doubt- less exercised a strong influence on the religious thought of England. His views were not so novelas he thought them to be, but he was an original and very independent thinker; and, as his chief work was published Lut a few years after the Vouum Oryanum, aud many years before any of the works of Descartes or Hobbes, Herbert deserves a marked place in the van of modern speculation.
Herbert’s first and most important work is the De Veritate prout distinguitur a Revelatione, aVerisimili, a Possibili, ct a also (Varis, 1624; translated into French, but never into English). 1t com- bines a theory of knowledge with a partial psychology, a metho- dology for the investigation of truth, and a scheme of natural religion. The author’s method is prolix and often far from clear ; the book is no compact system, but it contains the skeleton and much of the soul of a complete philosophy. Giving up all past philoso- phizings as useless, Herbert professedly cndeavours to constitute a new and true system. Truth, which he detines as a just conforma- tion of the faculties with one another and with their objeets, he dis- tributed into four classes or stages :—(1) truth in the thing or the truth of the object ; (2) truth of the appearance ; (3) truth of the appre- hension (conceptus) ; (4) truth of the intellect. The faculties of the mind are as numerous as the differences of their objects, and are aecordingly innumerable ; but they may be arranged in four groups. The first and fundamental and most certain group is the Natural Instinct, to which belong the xowad %yvorm, the Notitie Conia unes, which are the ‘‘reccived principles of demonstration,” existiig in every sane and sound man, against which it is nefas to dispute. The second group, the next in certainty, is the Seasus Internus (under which head Herbert discusses amongst others love, hate, fear, conscience with its communis notitia, and freo will); the third is the Sensus Eeternus ; and the fourth is Discursus, reasoning, to which, as being the least certain, we have recourse when the other faculties fail. The ratiocinative faculties proceed by division and analysis, by questioning, and are slow and gradual in their inove- ment ; they take aid from the other faculties, those of the zstinclus aaturalis being always the final test. Herbert's categories or ques- tions to be used in investigation are ten in number,—whether (a thing is), what, of what sort, how much, in what relation, how, when, where, whence, wherefore. No faculty, rightly used, can err ‘‘even in dreams”; badly exercised, reasoning becomcs the source of almost all our errors. The discussion of the nofitic@ com- munes is the most characteristic part of the book. The exposition of thein, though highly dogmatic, is at times strikingly Kantian in substance. ‘So far are these elements or sacred principles from being derived from experience or observation that without scme of them, or at least some one of them, we can neither experience nor even observe.” Unless we felt driven by them to explore the nature of things, ‘it would never occur to us to distinguish one thing from another.” It cannot be said that Herbert proves the existence of the eommon notions ; he does not deduce them or cyen give any list of them. But each faculty has its common notion ; and they may be distinguished by six marks, their prioré/y, inde- pendence, universality, certainty, necessity (for the well-being of man), and dmmediacy. Law is based on certain common notions 5 so is religion. Though Herbert expressly defines the scope of his book as dealing with the intcHect, not faith, it is the common notions of religion he has illustrated most fully; and it is plain that it isin this part of his system that he is chiefly interested. The common notions of religion are the famous five articles, which became the charter of the English deists:—(1) that there is a supreme god ; (2) that he ought to be worshipped ; (3) that virtue and picty form the chief part of that worship; (4) that sins should be repented of; (5) that there are rewards‘and punishments in another life. To these doctrines, which constitute the faith of the true catholic and orthodox church, it ig not casy to add anything that can make men more virtuous or godly. There is little polemic against the received form of Christianity, but Herbert’s attitude towards the church’s doetrine is distinctly negative, though he admits the possibility, under certain conditions, of specific and super- natural revelation. In the De Religione Gentilium (Lond., 1645) he gives what may be called, in Hume's words, ‘‘a natural history of religion.” By examining the heathen religions Herbert finds, to his great delight, that under all their absurdities the five great articles were recognized. The heathen, yearning for the supreme God, saw Him in His works and worshipped Him in the most glorious of His creatures, the heavenly bodies. Jt was crafty pricsts who insisted on the necessity of multifarious rites and ceremonies, and developed full-fledged polytheism. The same vein is maintained in the tracts De Causis Erroruwm and De Religione Laici. Herbert's first his- torical work is the Expeditio Buckinghami Ducis (1656), an account
