The Mind Is a Collection. Sean Silver
The Mind Is a Collection
MATERIAL TEXTS
Series Editors
| Roger ChartierJoseph FarrellAnthony Grafton | Leah PricePeter StallybrassMichael F. Suarez, S.J. |
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
THE MIND
IS A COLLECTION
CASE STUDIES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY THOUGHT
SEAN SILVER
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Silver, Sean, author.
The mind is a collection : case studies in eighteenth-century thought / Sean Silver.
pages cm — (Material texts)
Coordinates with an online site.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4726-8 (alk. paper)
1. Collectors and collecting—History—17th century—Case studies. 2. Collectors and collecting—History—18th century—Case studies. 3. Museums—Curatorship—England—London—History—17th century—Case studies. 4. Museums—Curatorship—England—London—History—18th century—Case studies. 5. England—Intellectual life—17th century. 6. England—Intellectual life—18th century. 7. Imagination (Philosophy) I. Title. II. Series: Material texts.
AM344.S58 2015
001.0942’09032—dc23
2015013299
CONTENTS
PREFACE: WELCOME TO THE MUSEUM
1. John Locke’s Commonplace Book — 2. John Milton’s Bed 3. Mark Akenside’s Museum
4. Robert Hooke’s Camera Obscura — 5. Raphael’s Judgment of Paris 6. A Gritty Pebble — 7. An Oval Portrait of John Woodward 8. A Stone from the Grotto of Egeria — 9. Venus at Her Toilet
10. The Iliad in a Nutshell — 11. A Full Stop 12. A Conical Roman Tumulus — 13. The Reception of Claudius 14. Addison’s Walk
15. William Hay’s Stone — 16. Two Calculi Cut and Mounted in a Small Showcase 17. An Ampulla of the Blood of Thomas Becket — 18. A Blue-Bound Copy of The Mysterious Mother
19. A Blank Sheet of Paper (1) — 20. A Folio Sheet with Two Sketches of a Single Conception — 21. A Triumph of Galatea — 22. Joshua Reynolds, William Hunter
23. A Shilling — 24. A Book of Accounts — 25. A Blank Sheet of Paper (2) 26. A Ring Containing a Lock of Hair — 27. The Lost Property Office 28. The Skeleton of Jonathan Wild
PREFACE: WELCOME TO THE MUSEUM
Welcome to The Mind Is a Collection. Gathered here are twenty-eight exhibits from seventeenth-and eighteenth-century London. Taken together, they tell a story about the development of modern theories of mind. Each of these exhibits is posed as a case study of a certain way of thinking—objects assembled as the vehicle and proof for theories of cognitive work. The era spanning roughly 1660 to 1800 was a special period in philosophy and the arts; it witnessed the widespread development of what has come to be called philosophical dualism, the strange split between mind and body that now seems to most of us to be intuitive. The general account, as it was worked up by authors, philosophers, painters, and poets, runs like this: the mind is a disembodied entity absolutely and fundamentally unlike the messy physical world in which it finds itself. It observes the world from a distance; it takes in a batch of simple sensations; it reviews them—comparing, arranging, combining, dividing; it husbands them up; it stores them for later recall. It tells the body what to do—especially by way of gathering more sensations, for, in this scheme, the body’s purpose is to be a vehicle for the mind. This is not therefore just one dualism; it is a system of dualisms, whereby one thing is split into two: subject is parted from object and “me” from “mine,” but also conscious awareness is parted from the mind’s contents, the power of thinking from thoughts, ourselves from our memories. It is not just that the mind is understood to be separate from the body, or even that the body (in much the same way) is understood to be separate from its environment. It is also that the working parts of the mind (its “faculties”) are understood to be separate from the materials upon which they work (its ideas). These are the basic outlines of philosophical dualism, which, I am suggesting, is in effect several dualisms. We are the inheritors of this peculiar seventeenth-century innovation.
The problem with the dualist account of mind emerges when we realize that this rarified substance, this mind-stuff, is so absolutely unlike the coarse world in which we move and breathe that it offers no way of speaking about itself. There is a primal paradox here, a remnant of the violence of the dualist split. The mind comes with no instruction manual, nor any ready-made vocabulary. The only way