The Mind Is a Collection. Sean Silver

      INTRODUCTION

      Materials of Thinking

      The Mind Is a Collection approaches mental life from a material point of view; it begins from the start, redeveloping eighteenth-century British philosophies of mind as they looked to the world of things. The central strand of Enlightenment epistemology—a strand persisting in the modern era—leans against a certain guiding metaphor. In its most general form, the metaphor is this: the mind is a collection. This figure takes different forms, ranging from literary ornaments and the etymologies of concepts to elaborately intended material models and theories of brainwork. As a unifying trope, it also inhabits different shapes, different metaphorical sources or material models. If, in the Romantic era, the mind at work might be compared to a lamp or an Aeolian harp,¹ in the Augustan period, the mind was more likely to be a museum, cabinet, library, or mere heap of particulars; it might be a treasury, repository, desk of drawers,² bottle of spirits,³ or series of medals;⁴ it might also be a sink of detritus,⁵ a lodging house,⁶ a pen full of wild animals,⁷ or a sack of feathers.⁸ All of these models were differently in play—and voiced at least once—but the grand metaphor was never quite new. This figure, which runs like a subterranean river, percolates up in numerous treatises, manuals, and handbooks on the anatomy of the mind.⁹ Imagining the mind “as a storehouse was a topos,” writes one authority on the subject, “but one with constantly changing imagery.” In fact, for some of the figures in this study, the mind was a storehouse of topoi.¹⁰ Container-like, it is characterized by its contents; the mind, in short, is a collection.

      Let’s start with what this has meant for theories of the imagination. As it was understood in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Britain, the imagination was not a particularly creative power; it was not esemplastic, supernatural, or divine. As Joseph Warton put it, in the course of a defense and celebration of Alexander Pope, “All is imitation…. The geniuses, apparently most original, borrow from each other.”¹¹ The writing process did not involve inspiration, at least as we understand it now—though it was sometimes figured as a sort of conference with the muses, who give their name, after all, to the museum. In the recent words of Alex Page, the mind was thought to be “a rather passive organ, capable of receiving, of rejecting but not of initiating, disposed to appreciate, very much dependent on a well-stocked memory.”¹² John Dryden, a poet who claimed to find his inspiration in translation, did not understand the imagination as a creative faculty at all. His imagination, as he witnessed it happening, was the playground of sensory material; invention, as he understood it, was the finding out of images to match an argument.¹³ His mind was the sandbox of ideal objects that were collected, overseen, judged, and arranged by the twin and mutually countervailing faculties of wit and reason.¹⁴ “There is little reason,” Simon Stern has recently concluded, to suppose that “originality (understood as novelty or creativity) played even a tacit role” in poetic attribution or in the ownership of ideas, for originality was in any case thought to be the reworking of things already existing.¹⁵ The well-wrought poem—or, indifferently, museum—presents an image of the world that reflects what is already known; “all is derived,” writes Richard Hurd; “all is unoriginal. And the office of genius is but to select the fairest forms of things, and to present them in due place and circumstance.”¹⁶ This helps account for the popularity of genres that make no special claim to novelty, including imitations, translations, anthologies, abridgements, parody, and the mock-epic.¹⁷ True wit, in this aesthetic, does not rely upon originality, or the spontaneous burst of genius. Poetic borrowing, which verges at times on plagiarism, is the very ground of poetic production.

      It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the very idea of the mind as collection was itself borrowed—not invented whole but inherited from many centuries of dominant sway. The conceptual core of the analogy originates in a persistent strain of Aristotelianism, transmitted to Restoration natural philosophy by way of Renaissance humanism, and becoming broadly enough shared through at least the first half of the eighteenth century and embedded enough in tradition that it often passed without comment.¹⁸ Aristotle imagines the mind as a treasury, storehouse, or repository; Zeno imagines a chest or locker, Thomas Aquinas a reliquary or treasury, Cassiodorus a system of pigeonholes and cages, Hugo of St. Victor a sacculus, or purse, Chaucer’s monk a monastery with a complex system of cells, each stuffed with books.¹⁹ For Edmund Spenser, the human brain might be allegorized as a vast library of histories;²⁰ for Robert Burton it becomes a collection, library, or monastery filled with cells; for Kenelm Digby, it is a string of beads or a bowl full of currants.²¹ This brings us almost up to date, for this is the tradition inherited by thinkers like John Locke, who was pleased to think of the mind as a cabinet, or Joseph Addison, who thought of the mind as a drawer of medals.²² All these accounts share a form; they all model mental activity on the observable features of collections of things. And they hinge on a certain conviction, repeating a particular phrase often enough that it almost becomes a password or shibboleth. This is the claim, often in exactly these words, that “there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses”: nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu. It is a thought as old as the Summa of Thomas Aquinas—and indeed older, for Saint Thomas himself borrows it from a mistranslation of Avicenna, who had it from Aristotle.²³

      This is of course radically different from what the imagination has come to mean. The imagination in its Romantic form—the active, energetic faculty called in the late eighteenth century “the god within”²⁴—was largely fashioned through an extended episode of forgetting, slowly disentangling the productive work of creativity from the collecting and collating processes which, in the eighteenth century, were thought to make it work.²⁵ Edward Young, William Duff, and Robert Wood, three of the mid-eighteenth-century thinkers most commonly identified as forerunners of the Romantic spirit, all split their allegiances between the established, conservative activities of the imagination and an emerging sense that it contained untapped creative, restorative potentials. The modern reader can therefore be somewhat mystified by what seem to be the conservative aspects of works with titles like Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition, Duff’s Essay on Original Genius, and Wood’s Essay on the Original Genius … of Homer. Each of these essays begins by celebrating the mind’s capacity mimetically to reproduce the things of the world yet ends in what has become a familiar place: with the celebration of genius, autonomous invention, or creativity.

      This shift from the curatorial model dominant in the early eighteenth century to the organic model characteristic of Romanticism is most evident in Duff’s 1767 Essay on Original Genius, recently called by John Dacey “the first major inquiry into the creative process.”²⁶ Dacey is thinking of what we mean by “creativity” today, but his reading of Duff at first seems unlikely, for Duff begins by advancing the conventional, conservative view. The imagination, Duff observes, is that faculty “whereby the mind … assembles the various ideas conveyed to the understanding by the canal of sensation, and treasured up in the repository of the memory, compounding or disjoining them at pleasure.”²⁷ This is a clear example of the imagination in the eighteenth-century sense, and the phrase would not be out of place in the mouth of Addison or even Francis Bacon. But then, quite suddenly, Duff’s essay takes a strikingly modern turn. Those of “a just and elegant taste,” Duff writes, are equipped to appreciate the same objects—the example he gives is the Basilica of St. Peter—with attendant emotions very different from those experienced by someone “destitute of