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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 this quality.” The “difference,” he insists, is not in an acquired politeness or the discrimination learned through exhaustive education. It resides, on the contrary, in the “internal feeling,” which “must certainly proceed from the transforming power of Imagination, whose rays illuminate the objects we contemplate; and which, without the lustre shed on them by this faculty, would appear unornamented and undistinguished.”²⁸ What is interesting to Duff is not the work of the imagination to collect, to assemble, and to dispose; he insists on its transformative potential, its ability to “shed light” as part of its own autotelic purpose. Indeed, he suspects that the imagination is weighed down rather than developed by experience, that the greatest poet is not the one with the greatest stock of images but the untaught genius: Shakespeare, for instance, or Ossian. The poet is no longer the careful conservator of imaginative materials, not the curator of a treasury of ideas; his imagination emerges as itself “an innate treasure,” working its visions from immediate contact with nature.²⁹ Duff, like Young and Wood, therefore starts from the relatively common claim about the mind’s combinative powers, about its capacity to collect and to organize materials. He however bends his project toward the ultimately triumphant model of the imagination that is differently the engine of the works of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, those poets who shaped nineteenth-century English literature. The ways in which we mostly use the concept of imagination today—as the mind’s special power to produce something out of itself—are vestiges of this twist over the last half of the eighteenth century, and therefore represent a relatively recent shift in meaning in the twenty-five-hundred-year history of Western art.

Collections

As a metaphor, “the mind is a collection” is nearly as old as Western philosophy—but conditions changed in roughly the middle of the seventeenth century, causing it to gain new purchase and conceptual weight. When someone like John Locke conceived of the mind as a cabinet, he was drawing from a long philosophical tradition; the figure of the intellect as a collection already counted nearly two millennia of influence when he made it among the foundational gestures of his empiricism. But Locke’s thoughts were also directed much closer to home; for while Locke spent parts of twenty years compiling his Essay on the Human Understanding, he spent a yet longer span of time compiling a remarkable library of books.³⁰ When he remarks on the work of the memory to treasure up ideas, we should remember that he was what we would call a bibliophile; when he remarks on the importance of histories—collections of facts—in the operation of reason, we should attend to his indexing practices in a library stocked with books of natural history (Exhibit 1).³¹ This is what changed. Locke was a member of one of the earliest generations of private individuals with the means to amass large personal collections of books. Similarly, when Addison compares the mind to a cabinet of medals, we should take note that he was a coin collector (Exhibit 13); when he remarks on the paths that thoughts take, we should remember that he was a gardener, was busy planting at the same time that he was publishing his seminal treatises on both gardening and the pleasures of the imagination (Exhibit 14). When Joshua Reynolds constructed a model of mind as a gallery of images, we should remember that he assembled the single largest collection of paintings outside the Royal Collection and was, in the end, responsible for one of the era’s great experiments in this line: the Royal Academy of Art (Exhibit 21). Finally, as one additional example, when Horace Walpole speaks of wit as a caretaker—as the careful arrangement and disposition of things in the mind—we should remember that he lived in a house that was itself designed to be a flexible receptacle for his vast collection of antiquities (Exhibit 18). When he socked away china, Gothic antiques, coins, medals, paintings, and miniatures in his Twickenham villa, the stakes were higher than hoarding; he was participating in a practice of constructing, and exhibiting, one’s own way of seeing and grappling with the world. Indeed, he was constructing a working space of thought, made precisely to his taste. This was not merely a performance for a visiting public (though it was this also);³² it was a performance, too, for himself. Locke’s library, Addison’s medals, Reynolds’s gallery, Walpole’s villa: each of these is a cognitive ecology in a strikingly literal sense—a space which not only was involved in habits of thought but which turned up as well in its caretaker’s models for mental work.

Possibly against common sense, then, theories of the mind as a museum predated collecting, at least as the popular practice that collecting became in the eighteenth century. For it was only around the turn of the eighteenth century that collecting practices caught up to the models of mind that anticipated them. When Hans Sloane was born in 1660, London had only one museum of note open to the public. This was the quirky, cramped Museum Tradescantianum, the lifetime collection of the John Tradescants (father and son) that had been put on display in Lambeth in a building called the Ark.³³ Collecting as a popular practice was therefore relatively new when Locke made bold to call the mind a cabinet, or when Robert Hooke called the mind a Repository. But by the time Sloane died, ninety-two years later, it seemed only natural that he would leave his large and surprisingly diverse collection to the public. During Sloane’s long and productive life, he had accrued the collections of more than two dozen other collectors, putting together his own massive private museum, which was a resource to himself, his friends and his colleagues. In the same period of time, a dozen or so semipublic museums had sprung up in London and surrounding areas. The Tradescants’ museum had been acquired—some say stolen—by Elias Ashmole, but others had moved in to take its place.³⁴ Numerous networks of collectors emerged—whole cultures dedicated to the acquisition, arrangement, and appreciation of prints, shells, stones, coins, paintings, antiquities, and a range of other affordable collectibles.³⁵ The effect was general—a sea-change in how people experienced the world. “In no previous age did writers,” Jean Hagstrum for instance reminds us, “possess such considerable collections of prints and engravings,” and, likewise, “in no previous period in English literature could a poet assume knowledge of great painting and statuary in the audience he was addressing.”³⁶ So when Sloane’s will arranged the terms, and provided the vast and diverse core collection, for the foundation of the British Museum, it signaled what had already become apparent: the politics of possession were changing, and these were reflected in the collections appearing all over town.³⁷

The standard account of the rise of the museum tells the story of the conquest of nature by professionalized collecting; over the course of Sloane’s lifetime, as this standard account has it, those small, intensely personal and idiosyncratic spaces, filled with the quirky, the odd, and the wonderful, gave way to professionalized, organized, and organizing endeavors. The trajectory of Sloane’s own collection would tend to confirm this.³⁸ What before, these studies argue, was an exclusive practice that consisted mostly of the gathering of strange novelties for their own sake was subsumed by an organized and public practice, part of a larger, later bureaucratized, project of natural philosophy.³⁹ This narrative is exactly the argument posed by Susan Pearce, in her influential On Collecting;⁴⁰ it is compelling in part because it is the story often told during the Enlightenment, where widespread linkages between political Whiggism and Newtonian empiricism combined to craft a story of the progressive upsweeping of individual practices into national purposes.⁴¹ Yet the focus on large, institutional museums has obscured the persistence of living collecting practices that flourished outside the regularizing grid of natural historical inquiry. Some of these collections were indeed absorbed into much larger collections. Some were even purchased by, acquired by, or otherwise passed through the hands of Sloane himself (Exhibit 14, for instance). Other collections, however, continue even now to exist more or less as they were originally imagined, the husks of once living cognitive practices, the idiosyncratic spaces of thought.

John Woodward, for instance, owned what he believed to be a Roman shield, which after his death passed from being the most curious of curiosities to being just a relatively minor example of late Renaissance art; it now sits, slightly dusty, in a less-visited room of the British Museum.⁴² It has in other words been swept up into the professionalized telling of material history. But Woodward’s core collection, his collection of mineralogical specimens, persists as specified in the terms of his will; his rocks lie in their original cabinets, in a special room, set aside from the remainder of Cambridge’s geological collection at the Sedgwick Museum (Exhibit 6). Woodward’s museum was in its own way crucial in the development of modern geology, but the very fact that it stands apart, sealed in its own particular room, is one sign that it continues to tell a story different from that of the Sedgwick collection that enwraps it. (Adam Sedgwick, who held the Woodwardian Chair endowed by the will, was the person perhaps most responsible for modernizing geology—but his story was not Woodward’s [Exhibit 7].) What is more, a collector like Woodward, especially irascible Woodward, would have bristled at the suggestion that his cabinet was only a failed experiment waiting to be rescued by mature geology.⁴³ He had a different object in view. Indeed, this object is visible in the museum in a number of different ways, the organizing principle of the museum turning up in its arrangement, but also in several of the objects that the collection itself contains: object as object, thing as end. Looked at this way, Woodward’s collection captures a set of mental habits and a way of ordering the world. It is a relic of a life of activity. Many such collections survive—a few in situ—but they all perfect their own poetics, capturing the mind which composed them (and which they helped produce); they are the material relics of the activities in which the curatorial mind was engaged. When Woodward put pen to paper to describe his cabinet, or Alexander Pope his grotto, Reynolds his gallery, or Hooke his repository, it was with the conviction that the cabinet or grotto or gallery or repository had a particular, complete, and totalizing story to tell—which was in part a story of how each person saw the world and his place in it (see Exhibits 6, 7, 8, 11, and 21).

Each of these places offered a materially contingent model of cognition, formalizing thought as embedded in, and routed through, materially constructed worlds.⁴⁴ They are particularly metaphorically rich, spaces which are themselves instantly recognizable as metaphor (sketchbooks and ledgers of accounts, for example) or which are the material rudiments of master metaphors governing other, subordinate metaphors (books, libraries, cabinets). The library, Jennifer Summit notes, has long articulated a problem of knowledge meant to be understood as a basic problem of cognition; the library came to be not a mere sorting and storage unit but a material experiment in experiences of doubt and certainty. Libraries and librarians are in this sense historically and evolutionarily linked in mutually reflexive processes of “sorting, selecting, preparing, and internalizing information”; the library made possible a model of thinking based on the storage, recall, and arrangement of little nuggets of knowledge, differently called facts, information, or ideas.⁴⁵ The same processes at work in the library might therefore be understood to be at work in the mind, a vocabulary developed among the objects of learning shifted into ways of thinking about intellection generally. Such a space actively enabled the “creative, rather than static” work of memory, providing a model of how a conservative faculty might be made productive.⁴⁶ And, as the library made possible such a modeling, it responded as well to developments in how the mind was understood, a point made explicitly clear in John Evelyn’s “Method for a Library According to the Intellectual Powers.” Epistemological theory, in this respect, has real consequences for how the world is arranged, and vice versa, a process visible, for instance, in the library of John Locke (Exhibit 1).

Metaphor

The empiricist revolution was not originally a revolution “out there,” as though it were a communal effort to create better rocket fuels or cancer drugs; it was, on the contrary, very much a revolution beginning “in here,” a project of mental discipline, meaning to match conceptual systems to an observable world of things. The central pillar of Bacon’s empiricist program was his effort to establish “in the human intellect … a true pattern of the world as we actually find it and not as someone’s own private reasoning hands it down to him.”⁴⁷ The language appropriate to this project, as the argument goes, was suspicious of metaphor. The number of new philosophical languages developed in and around the Royal Society attests itself to the importance of matching labels to things, without the slippage introduced when words are made to do double work.⁴⁸ In thinking about the place of metaphor in the empiricist project, historians of science have been quick to quote such moments as Locke’s eloquent attack on eloquence—where Locke, among other things, derides the use of tropes and figures in the pursuit of truth. And, to the extent that he was generally uncomfortable substituting a more poetic word where a prosaic one would do (his own powerful deployment of images notwithstanding), this is a generally accurate description of the empiricist project. Locke insists, in a much-cited passage, that “all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment.”⁴⁹ In this sense, Locke may be said to be echoing Francis Bacon, John Wilkens, Henry Power, and a host of scholars in the same, ultimately Aristotelian tradition, who were working to transform communication from a medium of persuasion to a medium of transmission, replacing eloquence, in the common formulation, with plain facts.⁵⁰

Many of the passages in which the plain style is most eloquently defended are, however, themselves promoted by dazzling turns of metaphorical prose. Take, for instance, Robert Boyle’s famous defense of the plain style: “Our design is only to inform Readers,” Boyle insists, “not to delight or perswade them…. To affect needless Rhetorical Ornaments in setting down an Experiment,” he continues, “were little less improper than it were … to paint the Eye-glasses of a Telescope.”⁵¹ Understood this way, metaphor would merely be, as Richard Rorty points out, like “using italics, or illustrations, or odd punctuation or formats. All these,” he writes, “are ways of producing effects on your interlocutor or your reader but not ways of conveying a message”;⁵² they are, in other words, relics of an age where communication was understood to involve rhetorical persuasion rather than the conveyance of a message. This is a keynote of the empiricist project; language in the empiricist mode is meant to be a medium for facts, information, or ideas.⁵³ Yet Boyle’s appeal at the very least adjusts itself through a strikingly posed rhetorical ornament—which Boyle himself surely recognized. Boyle in other words encourages us to be suspicious of metaphor through a suspicious metaphor; he paints his own eyepiece. This is the first way that plain anti-rhetoricality itself leans on a set of rhetorical conventions, indeed encases itself in a rhetorical purpose, for its inbuilt work is after all to persuade.⁵⁴

Boyle’s deployment of the showy metaphor of the painted eyepiece distracts attention from a different level of metaphorical work, threading its way through his prose.⁵⁵ The focus on metaphor as a rhetorical choice ignores the more fundamental role that metaphor plays as a coordinating condition, a necessary and irreducible process in the grand project of producing, in the mind, an empirically true pattern of the world. This second form of metaphorical borrowing builds concepts out of bodily intersections with the world—so, for instance, “perswade” means “make sweet,” “inform” means “give shape to,” “delight” leans on the Latin for “attract,” and so on. There are in fact two forms of metaphor to be considered, and distinguished from one another—a point not lost on Boyle’s contemporaries. On the one hand, there is metaphor as a rhetorical substitution of one word or phrase (with all its attendant baggage) for another. This is the painted eyeglass. On the other, there is metaphor as the linkage between material world and ideal pattern, between sensory rudiments and their conceptual wages. This is “perswade,” “inform,” “delight.” The first sort of metaphor has its uses, even in the plain style, though it is met with general distrust. As Locke reminds us, such rhetorical substitution is “fancy passing for knowledge”; “what is prettily said,” Locke elegantly continues, “is taken for solid.”⁵⁶ But the second sort is a necessary element in the linguistic linking of ideas and things, the guarantee, in fact, that mental work may be traced to a material foundation; it insinuates the central mandate of the empiricist project, to seek knowledge “in the consideration of the things themselves,” into the texture of the medium used to carry out that project.⁵⁷ What is more, and this is really the critical thing, this second sort of metaphor was witnessed as the critical linkage making possible the construction of a mental reality patterned on the world of things. As Locke notes, “it may lead us a little towards the original of all our notions and knowledge, if we remark how great a dependence our words have on common sensible ideas.”⁵⁸ This is, of course, a metaphor theory of language, which rises in the early empiricist tradition to underwrite conceptual knowledge generally.⁵⁹ Metaphor registers the conviction that arises from our regular experience of the connections between objects and effects.⁶⁰

Thomas Reid insists, disapproving the whole time, that the “terms and phrases, by which the operations of the mind are expressed in all languages … are drawn from supposed similitude of body to mind.”⁶¹ Reid’s project voices a doubt—one that I share—that metaphor itself invents a distinction between embodied action and conceptual understanding in order to stitch it back together; it may be, as an important counter-strand of theorists have all along suspected, that there is in the end no reason to establish the distinction in the first place. This doubt is raised by John Milton (Exhibit 2), among others, and will be a recurrent theme of this book. For now, it is enough to note that metaphor is the critical mechanism that is made repeatedly to guarantee the answering of the mental world to the call of the physical, and vice versa. “Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact,” Ralph Waldo Emerson would later remind us, is “found to be borrowed from some material appearance.”⁶² Indeed, “express” is itself such a borrowing (noticed by Milton), shifting patterns obtaining in a material source domain into a conceptual target: express means “breathe out,” and this is precisely what Emerson and Reid and Milton have done; they have breathed mental operations into language. As the earlier Samuel Johnson⁶³ remarked in his correspondence with George Berkeley, the mind can only make itself known to itself through such “expressions (modifications, impressions, etc…)” which “are metaphorical,” which rely on relations between the sensory objects. This is how expression works—just like “modification” or “impression,” two similarly vexed metaphors. “It is scarce possible,” Johnson concluded, “to speak of the mind without a metaphor.”⁶⁴

Metaphor is in this sense the leaning of concepts on haptic experience; as it is true in cases of metaphor, so, too, is it true for “metaphor” itself, all along and right from the beginning, even for the person who inaugurates the claim that metaphor is a sort of “ornament.” This is the view of Aristotle, who lists metaphor among his list of rhetorical choices, thinking, of course, of metaphor in the sense of the painted eyeglass. As Paul Ricoeur notices, however, in order “to explain metaphor … Aristotle creates a metaphor, one borrowed from the realm of movement,” for “metaphor” simply means “transfer,” “translate,” or “carry across.” “The word metaphor” Ricoeur continues, “itself is therefore metaphorical because it is borrowed from an order other than that of language,” thereby offering a special form not just of language but of “all meaningful linguistic entities.”⁶⁵ And where else could this other order be, for Aristotle or anyone else in his tradition, but in the evidence of the senses, which after all provide (by Aristotle’s account) everything that is in the mind? Where else might concepts be referred, but toward embodied experience, what Ricoeur calls “movement”? This haptic twist, the grounding of language in embodiment, has more recently been called the “bottoming out” of metaphor, where the endless cycles of linguistic reference, of conceptual frames defined by means of other, analogous frames, ultimately ground themselves in “an order other than that of language.”⁶⁶ Such “absolute metaphors,” Hans Blumenberg elsewhere avers, are the “foundational elements of philosophical language.” They are “translations,” he insists (hearing the etymology of metaphor),⁶⁷ which “resist being converted back into authenticity and logicality.” They touch a structured experience of being in the world.⁶⁸ The critical thing to notice is that this work of metaphor, operating silently but continually to link sense to idea, idea to sense, does not fly in the face of empiricist rationality; it is in fact a product of the long empiricist movement, stretching from its very early formulation in De Anima and depositing itself in the seminal work of men like Boyle, Locke, and even Berkeley. For a wide range of eighteenth-century writers, the plain style emerged as a careful management of a language foisted upon metaphor, and was experienced as such. The plain style was in this sense an accomplishment in the management and rerouting of cognitive contact with the world through an inherited set of semiotic displacements, a revivifying of the dead metaphors of language.⁶⁹

It is worth insisting on this because the usual story of cognition and metaphor starts with a handful of thinkers in the twentieth century. Beginning with Max Black, this tradition swept aside what they called the long-standing “comparison” theory of metaphor (metaphor as painted eyeglass) in order to rediscover a different vector of metaphor as a fundamental element in cognitive work.⁷⁰ But these insights have been built into metaphor from the start; witness Aristotle’s “metaphor,” as “carrying across.” And as Aristotle witnessed metaphor in these two forms, so too the major defenders of the plain style, Locke among them, generally avoided metaphor of the rhetorical sort, even while rigorously subscribing to a metaphor theory of language. Metaphor indeed provided the stability of meaning. Viewed in this context, these thinkers constructed a model of linguistic expression that looks to modern eyes strikingly like the seeds of a situated account of cognition. The difference is that Locke and others turned to metaphor in part to witness the distinction that they expected it to erase; metaphor helped shore up a distinction between mind and body even while it sought to coordinate them. The metaphor “the mind is a collection” historically emerges as a summary example of this tendency. On the one hand, it serves to distinguish mind from body, idea from thing: as the world is out there, so it is in here too, container to container. In this sense, metaphor developed out of the conviction that the mind was distinct from the collections it took for its models. On the other, it coordinates a more general linkage between object and idea, the assertion that the mind might be a true reflection or microcosm for the world it perceives.⁷¹ This is the latticework of metaphor, continually reminding us that ideas retain, and refer us to, their somatic origins. Accordingly, the widespread conviction that the mind was a collection helped invent the distinction between “out there” and “in here”—even while relying for the distinction upon complex methods of stitching them back together. Metaphor, in this sense, creates the basic problem of epistemology that it seeks to solve, both opening and partially closing the question of how the mind comes to know the world in which it moves.

Cognitive Ecologies

The traditional way to think of metaphor is as a one-way vector from source domain toward the target or figurative domain.⁷² The most intuitive reading of Augustan theories of the mind’s conservative work is that they depended upon the material models available: the abstract flowing from the concrete, or, ideal superstructure building upon material foundation. In the special case of metaphor as what governs the production of ideas, the metaphorical turn would be said to import a host of material relationships into the grammar of the utterance. Indeed, thinking of metaphor as moving from source to target is a habit we inherit from the mental models of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not the least of which is Locke’s notion of ideas as originating in sensory experience. Conceptualizing metaphor in this way helps to explain the sudden flowering of certain instances of the argument: Hooke’s system of the mind as a repository (Exhibit 11), or Pope’s complex figure of the “toyshop” of Belinda’s heart (Exhibit 9). “The mind is a collection” would therefore smuggle into theories of mentation a host of practices developed in the accrual, storage, and display of artifacts: ideas are the objects of cognition; the mind is a sorting machine; mentation is chiefly analytical or comparative; and so on.⁷³ There is, however, an additional twist, a reverse flow governing the market between material and ideal. When it comes to the guiding model of the eighteenth-century mind, it becomes critical to remember that this model is more than a model, or, it is a metaphor that must be understood to double back on itself, producing the material foundation by which it is supported. When Pope described the mind with features like a chest of drawers (Exhibit 8) or Addison described the mind as though it were a garden (Exhibit 14), it was in part because Pope and Addison alike could point to actual chests of drawers and actual gardens by way of clinching their models.⁷⁴ The twist is this: they were also designing chests and planting gardens with those same intellectual models in view. And so, changing at the same time as theories of mind were cognitive environments themselves. Opportunities to collect or to own surpassed and reshaped the metaphors that had long stood as models for the mind, just as mental models subsequently surpassed and reshaped the collections upon which they were based. Libraries, museums, cabinets, dressing tables, workshops, gardens, paper, desks, account books, and offices (Exhibits 1, 3, 6–7, 9, 11, 14, 18, 24, and 27) formed especially dense sites of the practical glossing of theory; collecting emerged as a performance of the root workings of intellection, the mind finding itself in place. And, as I have suggested, the reverse will prove to be true as well: theories were founded upon arrangements of things in space.

The dialectical to-and-fro between material models and conceptual resources, the chicken-and-egg reflexivity of source and target,⁷⁵ is prevalent enough in the literature that it marks a kind of keynote. It may even suggest a unified field of thought. Graham Richards, for instance, argues that only the trope of “mental machinery” makes a prehistory of psychology possible. Before George Henry Lewes and J. S. Mill, William James and Sigmund Freud, there was no science of psychology, no category under which to file books, no heading in a commonplace index; there was, however, a consistent strain of metaphorical, mechanistic modeling of the mind. Psychology, Richards remarks, is what makes thinking itself an object of thought, and it proceeds, in this early phase, by erecting material models in order to subject them to conceptual work. “The only thing that can be known about the soul or the human,” writes one authority on the subject, “are the technical gadgets with which they have been historically measured at any given time.”⁷⁶ By shifting conceptual relationships onto material models, the intellect makes itself its own subject; the reflexivity afforded by metaphors of mind—metaphors that displace cognitive processes into observable models—offers a way of gathering up the materials of a field that did not yet recognize itself as such.⁷⁷ So, too, commenting generally on the tendency of “social structures” materially to “reproduce” themselves, Pierre Bourdieu locates the central engine whereby folk models of mind witness themselves in their environments, and environments re-emerge as folk models. “The mental structures which construct the world of objects,” writes Bourdieu, “are constructed in the practice of a world of objects constructed according to the same structures.” This is what he calls the habitus, a space of being structured to an experience, and this, too, is managed by a metaphorical commerce. Coordinating living space and living mind is, for Bourdieu, overseen by the continual flux of equivocally bidirectional metaphors; metaphor is, in this sense, the basic medium of the mind, what governs the passage from material to ideal and back again. “The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects,” Bourdieu concludes, “which is itself but an endless circle of mutually reflecting metaphors.”⁷⁸

Libraries, cabinets, and museums hold a special place in the history of metaphor because they are themselves designed as source domains. In this special case—in the special case of the metaphor for mind—the metaphor’s semiotic vector doubles back on itself, the target domain shaping its particular, idiosyncratic sources in all their patterns and products. The cabinet, the museum, the library, and so on are therefore not to be confused as a single metaphor. They offer distinct source domains developed in consultation with developing, existentially felt models of the intellect. We might think of these as environments—except that “environment” suggests a space or habitat distinct from the observer who stands within it, when anyone standing outside the system would argue that person and space evolve together. Environment is a lousy word.⁷⁹ Better, then, to call these “ecologies,” studies of habitation or home.⁸⁰ It is the nature of an ecology that it evolves just like any network.⁸¹ Changes in a part kick off responses in others. In a cognitive ecology, we would say that the tools of thought evolve along with the thinker, and vice versa. The hitch, the trick of the Enlightenment, is that these ecologies nurture theories of detachment; the mind witnesses itself in a series of innovations founded upon difference.

Thinkers of the seventeenth century are often accused of having installed, at the very core of the new epistemology, a strange break between mind and matter, subject and object. Indeed, many of the names most commonly mentioned in histories of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, fairly or unfairly, have become labels for certain kinds of dualism. Although an important countertradition exists,⁸² Gilbert Ryle traces the “dogma of the ghost in the machine” to René Descartes, making him stand for the distinction between res extensa and res cogitans; Rorty blames the tradition flowing from Descartes to Locke for showing that “mind was imaginable apart from body”; Steven Pinker is just one of many people who blame Locke for making mainstream the doctrine of the blank slate, even though he knows that the attribution is false.⁸³ But there is a paradox here; these dualisms are founded on a more profound entanglement. The very distinction between subject and object, self and property, is elaborated in and through the embeddedness of intellect in its material surroundings. The development of the critical distinction between mind and matter, the dualist distinction that is the glory and achievement of the empiricist moment, was itself accomplished in the messy flow of cognitive activity through embedded practices—a heuristic abstraction from curatorial habits. There is, in Timothy Morton’s recent formulation, no thought that is not an ecological thought.⁸⁴ There is nothing in the mind, no, not even in the empiricist mind, which was not first in the sensorium.

The Design of the Book

The reflexivity between minds and collections is the subject of this book—and it immediately raises a question of method. We in general think of the Enlightenment as articulating a false distinction between subject and object, thinker and thought, whereas later literary movements—Romanticism especially—represented an attempted return to a nostalgic organicism. This is why environmentalist criticism, or ecocriticism, often launches its project of establishing more fully ecological modes of thinking by returning to Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and others of the High Romantic moment. The mind is not a mirror, the argument runs, that merely reflects whatever it sees; it is a lamp, which illuminates the very things it beholds. We are not collections of experiences but Aeolian harps, whose strings are plucked by the winds of Nature. One set of metaphors is replaced by another, which would seem to be more attuned to the effects that environments have upon the people through which they move, and vice versa. In a coarse-grained sense, this is certainly true; this is after all the story Romanticism tells about itself. The one who toils and troubles with his books—who murders to dissect, Wordsworth reminds us—will “surely grow double”; he will split himself into mind and body, self and other. We are meant, on the contrary, to come forth “into the light of things,” to “let Nature be [our] teacher.”⁸⁵ And a turn to metaphors that eschew distinctions between mind and matter, person and thing would seem to go a long way toward erasing the divisions installed by the metaphor theory of language in the first place.

But a fine-grained analysis tells a different story; the Romantic turn may indeed have hardened up distinctions between self and other, subject and Nature. Wordsworth’s argument in “The Tables Turned” is that the man in his study is profoundly disconnected from things—like the “freshening lustre” of the sun, or the “sweet … music” of the woodland linnet. But a perverse reader might note that the scholar’s entanglements present the very problem to begin with. He is so deep in his reading, so embedded in his books, that he neglects what Wordsworth takes to be the world’s ebb and flow. Paradoxes abound; the reader is type and figure of the man who murders to dissect, thereby signaling a radical split from a living ecology, but he is nevertheless up to his elbows in gore in pursuit of the nature of things (see Exhibit 20), and this surely signals a different set of profound investments. The man in his study is himself capable of the sorts of turns of phrase that would certainly signal the kind of monism Wordsworth might have approved. It is he who asks Wordsworth to “drink the spirit breathed” from the authors of books, kicking off Wordsworth’s exhortation in the first place. There is a fine echo, here, of embodied practice, of ideas as the echoes of carnal engagement, for the scholar’s request hears the haptic memory of “spirit” in what is “breathed”; learning, even the learning of the sort beginning with the desire to speak with the dead, is as somatically intimate 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.