The Mind Is a Collection. Sean Silver
into … Nature,” “reducing [it] into a Science,” Locke might remind us that here is habit producing naturalness, a way of seeing concreting itself in a vision.98 The end of natural history is to produce nature as its cause. At work is the hand of the designer; Woodward’s cabinet observably pares back the geological world just as though in a camera obscura, drawing out the lines of its design. What emerges there—what Woodward experiences as emerging—is not Woodward himself but the world’s order and elegance. This is what Woodward calls “nature”; “nature” emerges as the design that may be elicited from an organization of objects as though that design were there already.
Woodward offers his stones as examples of nature—but this is nature cultivated over a long career of seeing the world in a certain way. Woodward’s prose suggests that they are merely examples of the species they may be made to represent, but, all along, the Judgment of Woodward has been lurking there: Woodward’s eye the visive point, silently designing. Woodward was best known not for his collection, exactly, but for a paper he composed shortly after being admitted to the Royal Society, his Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth (1695). The problem taken up by Woodward’s Essay is how to account for layers of rock, when prior theories insist that the Earth and all its inhabitants were created whole in six days of divine labor. Why would the earth not be homogeneous, one perfect sphere as uniform as the word of God? Why would the eye, in gazing at the globe, not be met with a perfect disk, rather than mixed textures and shades, various varieties of landscape? What Woodward proposed was a theory of the biblical Deluge, indeed, a physicalist explanation of the Deluge as a temporary suspension of natural law. Set with the problem of reorganizing a world gone astray, the Creator (Woodward suggests) implemented the simplest and mathematically most elegant solution. He simply suspended gravity for a few days, allowing land and ocean to mix in an unvarying slurry of earth and mud. When gravity was restored, and the excess water drawn off, heaps of rock and earth precipitated out according to their densities.99 The seduction of this theory is that it accounts for strata visible in exposed rock faces. It also explains animal and vegetable inclusions within layers of solid rock. And, finally, it makes intelligible geological wear, which resulted from the “Hurry, Precipitation, and rapid Motion” of the excess water being drawn off.100 As all rivers lead to the sea, so Woodward’s cabinets all tend to this same unfathomable theory of things. The entire visible geological world, according to Woodward’s theory, could thereby be explained by the rapid and violent actions of a few days or even hours, thus coordinating visible geological phenomena with inherited strains of scriptural cosmic history.
This is the best that can be said for Woodward’s system, which was immediately attacked from numerous quarters. John Arbuthnot, among others, took Woodward’s postulate seriously, launching an extended, forcefully reasoned counterargument. But detractors in general preferred the low road of satire; though few offered superior systems, and though Woodward’s system would prove to be an important step toward later understandings of geological strata,101 critics in and out of the Royal Society called Woodward’s theory the “hasty pudding” model of the Deluge, a kitchen metaphor that sinks Woodward’s sublime vision of the liquefied terraqueous globe to a low image of flour, eggs, and suet.102 The Great Deluge was, as one contemporary remarked, “his great beloved catastrophe,”103 just as it was the organizing idea of his collection, the object of imagination that he distributed throughout his cabinet. Woodward’s first scholarly concern was also his last; his system of nature provides what Woodward more than once calls the “Design” of each of his geological essays—what he intends for them to prove. His collection was likewise the opportunity for a repetitive return to the same ideal image of a world he could never have seen. As Woodward elsewhere notes, evidently without irony, “’tis not easie, when once a man suffers himself to grow fond of a subject, not to be at once far transported.”104 The design is, in this sense, the sketch or convenience that allows a collector like himself “to draw a considerable number of Materials into so narrow a Compass” that they might be contained in a single cabinet or volume.105
It is with this backdrop, the sublime backdrop of the Great Deluge, that Woodward’s pebble swims into significance. Woodward’s collection contains a number of extraordinary objects, but they all point toward the same desideratum—the event of the Great Deluge that organizes the stones in his collection. Among these objects is the pebble (specimen no. 226) that Woodward found in a gravel pit near the “New Buildings by Dover Street, St. James,” the geologically generic “gritty Peble of a very light brown colour.”106 Woodward’s description of the pebble stretches over two paragraphs—the object itself could in fact be wrapped up three or four times in the amount of paper it takes to describe it—but what becomes apparent is that this “ridge” is its most interesting feature. The ridge, Woodward surmises, comes from the relative densities of the different layers of sediment that the stone contains. It is by the concretion of these different materials that a single pebble like this can be made to prove the truth of his theory about sedimentation—different layers exhibited in one stone. Moreover, the pebble proves the second part of his theory, the withdrawal of water that shaped the globe as it now is. Such stones, he notes, “have had their Surfaces ground, and worn”; the ridge is raised because it is harder than the surrounding material, and therefore became less worn in the hurry and precipitation of the recession of the waters.107 Woodward’s most characteristic descriptions follow this pattern—a lengthy description of the object itself followed by a return to the Deluge; geology is a reading of patina, his stones, in the common phrase, being the medals of creation. Specimen no. 226 is therefore symbolic, greater than itself, condensing a much larger “Structure of Philosophy” into something that can be arranged into a system. Woodward’s fantasy, which colors all his work, is that the sublime object of the deluge can be contemplated in the compass of a pebble; his stones materialized an imagination.
All objects in the collection work this way, but this little stone is additionally resonant—is in fact biographically special—because, Woodward records, “’twas the first stone I ever took notice of, or gather’d.”108 It was the first object that caught Woodward’s eye, and it anticipates the arrangement of his whole system. This raises a final, suggestive point. Woodward’s discovery of what would become specimen c.226, the object that sparked his passion, the “first stone [he] ever took notice of,” precedes his first remarks on the geological importance of the Deluge by more than a dozen years. Is it possible that the stone, which looks for all the world like a lidded human eye, noticed Woodward, rather than the other way around? Did the stone call out to Woodward, providing the nugget that crystallized a world? Or, could Woodward ever have wondered what the stone might itself have seen, on that precipitous day, if only its eye were open? Could the stone, in other words, have been the oculus to Woodward’s cabinet, looking out on the vanished vista of the forty days’ flood? Viewed this way, the mute and material pebble, fantasmagoric, provided Woodward with his design, rather than the other way around, itself catching Woodward’s eye and providing a pattern for rejection and exclusion of the “exemplars” of his collection. As Jonathan Richardson reminds us, nothing, properly speaking, is invention; what appears to be invention, even Woodward’s astounding theory, is only an idea once gathered, which turns up again as a pattern.109 The stone forgets itself into an organizational principle. The single element, a principle masquerading as an emblem, condenses a synoptic view—indeed, presents the view as a feature of the arrangement. This marks Woodward’s stone, a serendipitous find if ever there was one, as a special object, the material origin of a world-making idea (see Exhibit 9).
Exhibit 7. An Oval Portrait of John Woodward
The single-mindedness of Woodward’s arrangement means that his judgment is everywhere on display. As Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach noted, while being shown Woodward’s collection, one “must listen to his opinion de diluvio et generatione antediluvian et lapidum postdiluvia, till you are sick of it.” He complained of having to listen “ad nauseam” to Woodward’s theories, noting that he “recites whole pages of his writings.” But this is not nearly “the maddest thing of all.” Woodward, this visitor notes, had “many mirrors hanging in every room, in which he constantly contemplates himself.”110 This same visitor was made to wait while Woodward