The Mind Is a Collection. Sean Silver
and vital as the inspiration and expression of air. What is more, Wordsworth, though he rigorously “let[s] Nature be [his] teacher,” who indeed “watches and receives,” while he “sit[s] alone … on that old grey stone” would seem at least outwardly to be even more profoundly disengaged than the man in the study, who is after all surrounded by, indeed filled with, the breath of others.
We are left wondering, from this point of view, who has found an ecology, which is to say, a proper home. This is in any case the argument recently emerging from such authors as Timothy Morton, for whom the project of recovering an ecological way of thinking must begin before the Romantic movement in the arts. Morton’s project insists that the Romantic poets created an austere other—a so-called Nature—which they taught us differently to idolize; his work aims to recover what it means to be embedded in an ecology, rather than conceptualizing an “environment” as some separate thing out there (“Nature,” “rocks and stones and trees,” or whatever). And while I fully agree with the laudable project of reinvigorating our sense of our connectedness to the world, the world we are so rapidly poisoning, it makes sense from the start to remember what an ecology is. An ecology is not some thing out there. “Eco” means home; ecology is a study of home. What interests us, to begin with, should therefore be the ways that people dwell in spaces and spaces respond to people such that, together, they become habitable to one another. Thinking ecologically means taking the whole network in view; it means thinking of models of mind evolving along with the environments in which they are entangled and embedded. Person and space co-respond; this is a cognitive ecology.
Better, then, to back up—to that poem which ends with homesickness as its effect. Raymond Williams suggests that the best way to recover an ecology is to trace its fantasies of a distant past. The Mind Is a Collection starts in the context of Milton’s Paradise Lost, for Milton offers a means of thinking a big, interconnected world, of posing, in other words, an ecological vision (Exhibits 1–3).86 But it does this with a twist. For The Mind Is a Collection means to do intellectual history through material history, and vice versa. It proposes a renewed awareness of the crossings of material into ideal, ideal into material, sustaining a sensitivity to the ways in which an idea might repeatedly turn up in an object, or an object (or range of objects) might repeatedly constitute an idea. The story of the mind’s metaphors is a story of people’s dialectical bindings to the arrangements of objects they invented, and which paid them back by inventing those people in turn. This will certainly not be like other empirical projects of recovery—an archaeology of mind-stuff—and not only because the objects of consideration, strictly speaking, no longer exist. That is, the stuff is sometimes still there (sometimes not), but what remains are the artifacts that were once part of a vital exchange, the husk of cognitive processes that remain archaeologically dormant. Revisiting these ecologies is not merely a project of reading, or even of consulting the tradition as it has been handed down to us. As Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer say of one of the first and principal of these ecologies (Exhibit 11), it was witnessed, even at the time, as signaling a new moment in cognitive history; henceforth, these authors note, “if one wanted to produce authenticated experimental knowledge … one had to come to this space and to work in it with others.”87 This is precisely what this book sallies out to do. The very messiness, the embeddedness of eighteenth-century thinking in its environments—the way, even, that people actively “grew double” from their libraries—is this book’s most important resource.
This story is distributed over twenty-eight exhibits, which, for conceptual convenience, are organized into cases. Each of these cases (in the way that cases do) offers an argument through material proofs; it strives to materialize a different aspect of the embracing metaphor that hovers above them all: “the mind is a collection.” It begins with the cognitively important environments in which Locke and his near-contemporary Milton dreamed big thoughts in the first place: the library Locke built over the course of a lifetime (Exhibit 1), and the bed in which Milton was believed to have composed Paradise Lost (Exhibit 2). Each of these places coordinated a theory of metaphor, beginning with Locke’s library, which offered him a material model of mental processes. The chapter ends with a magazine called the Museum, designed by its editor and publisher as a place where Locke’s theory of metaphor might be put to work, where ideas might be returned to images. This discussion is developed in the next case (“Design”), which looks at the kinds of spaces that might sustain and perpetuate linkages between matter and mind. These include a camera obscura, the first modern geological museum, the subterranean space where Alexander Pope displayed his rock collection, and an allegorical still life. Each of the spaces captured in these exhibits differently articulates the pressures of organizing things of the world according to a theory of cognition.
Cases 3 and 4 put the brain on the ramble, examining theories of mind elaborated in two different vectors of motion. The third case looks at what it means to think of mental work as running along paths, or, put differently, to experience thinking as walking. Its major coordinating metaphor is “digression” (etymologically, to go or to walk aside); in pursuing this metaphor, this case exhibits the workshop of Robert Hooke, Robert Plot’s histories of the countryside told afoot, and Joseph Addison’s different attempts to model brainwork through vocabularies developed in his strolls behind Magdalen College, Oxford (Exhibits 11, 12, and 14). This is followed by a study of “Inwardness,” tracing attempts to come to terms with the rhetorics of embodiment through vocabularies borrowed from movement. Among the figures important in this case is Samuel Pepys, whose alma mater was Magdalene College, Cambridge; when walking one day from Magdalene, he drank some water from Aristotle’s well, and became the victim of a journey of a different sort, kicking off a heightened familiarity with his own medicalized interior (Exhibit 16). This sort of encounter with inwardness is the subject of the fourth case. The last two cases share a different task. Case 5 displays four attempts to arrive at the central, insoluble aporia of the empiricist epistemology. This is the problem of how anything new might appear from within a container-like mind. That is, if the mind is only the sum of its contents, and its contents are merely what has been gathered from outside, stored, recalled, and rearranged, how might some new product of human ingenuity be said to come into the world? Author Laurence Sterne, anatomist William Hunter, and painter Joshua Reynolds each refigured this problem as a question of “conception” (Exhibits 19–22); this case considers the strategies they developed in their attempts to model conception in a physical system. Indeed, each differently, violently plowed through the bodies of others—especially women—in an effort to arrive at solutions to the questions of origins. This coordination of the bodies of other people suggests the contents of the book’s last case, “Dispossession.” The endlessly repeated account of the mind as a storehouse, though intended as a mere statement of things as they are, is in fact a sorting switch of power. The vast majority of people subject to British law did not share with mainstream theorists the same somatic ground for the development of mind as distinct from body. That is to say, the hungry, the poor, and the disenfranchised naturally constructed, and were constructed by, cognitive ecologies of very different sorts, which differently capture the regime of their immanent dispossession. The end of this catalogue means therefore to call its founding assumptions into question, noting that the very regime of possession, which makes it possible to think of the mind as a collection, is built on the shifting ground of immanent dispossession.
The Mind Is a Collection therefore finds its way from Locke’s library (Exhibit 1) and Milton’s bed (Exhibit 2) to an eighteenth-century lost property office (Exhibit 27) and a specimen of human remains now housed at the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons (Exhibit 28). All of these exhibits, this book argues, are environments where different sorts of thoughts made themselves at home. They are, in other words, home studies: ecologies. They are case studies in eighteenth-century British thought.
CASE 1