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CASE 1

METAPHOR

1. John Locke’s Commonplace Book — 2. John Milton’s Bed 3. Mark Akenside’s Museum

This book is the catalogue of a museum of embedded cognition, so what better place to start than an actual bed, especially a bed which is also a favored seat of the muses? The time is roughly 1663; the Stuart monarchy had recently returned to the throne of England, kicking off what is widely recognized as a rich phase of cultural, scientific, and economic development. The place is a dilapidated garret in St. Giles-without-Cripplegate, around the corner from Grub Street, a low-rent district populated by writers. The poet is John Milton (1608–1674), now totally blind but at work on his most visionary poem. The best portrait of the author in his space of thinking is by Jonathan Richardson; Richardson was a minor portraitist, but his most influential image was possibly this brief verbal sketch of Milton, for it has given rise to numerous interpretations—by Fuseli, Delacroix, George Romney, and others. Many of these interpretations capture Milton in an armchair, with a curtained bed merely suggested in the background, but Richardson is not so demure. Milton, Richardson writes, “frequently Compos’d lying in Bed in a Morning…. I have been Well inform’d, that when he could not Sleep, but lay Awake whole Nights, he Try’d; not One Verse could he make; at Other times flow’d Easy his Unpremeditated Verse, with a certain Impetus and Æstro, as Himself seem’d to Believe. Then, at what Hour soever, he rung for his Daughter to Secure what Came.”¹ Who visited Milton, while he lay in his curtained bed? His daughter was there, but this was after the fact. Also present, we know because he says so, was Milton’s Muse. She was an inconstant bedfellow; Milton pleads in the invocation of Paradise Lost for her to “sing,” relaying to his amanuensis whatever would come. And while the daughter always arrived late to the event, the Muse was there before the fact; she kicks the whole machine into motion, “visit[ing]” his “slumbers nightly, or when morn / Purples the east.” This, then, is a museum in the word’s primitive sense: a site or seat of the muses. It provides one popular way of thinking about poetic production as a sort of “inspiration.” This is Milton’s word, which Richardson effaces: Milton’s Muse, elsewhere named Urania, the Muse of astronomy, “inspires / Easy [his] unpremeditated verse.” Indeed, the scene is so apt as a site of poetic inspiration that Milton himself painted a similar scene of dream-work in the poem he composed with Urania’s aid (see Exhibit 2). All the elements are there: blindness and insight, poverty and inspiration, sublimity and the solitary seeker. This condensation of themes helps account for the popularity of Richardson’s description; Milton in his chamber would become a Romantic-era set piece.

But this is partly to misread the scene—as Richardson himself would have known. Richardson believed the mind to be a collection of images, and painting to be a process of judicious culling and arrangement. What is more, Milton would have agreed. When Milton has Adam sketch for Eve his understanding of the mind’s work, it is a straight version of what Richardson would later theorize: the mind is a repository, and thinking is the arrangement of ideas. And while Adam surely overlooked some important details, Paradise Lost nevertheless also offers us a museum of this second sort: the allusive compendium of a world of learning. It offers us both: Urania and the library. It aims at once to recover the vision of an untroubled paradise—an ecology in which “knowledge” is the only forbidden thing, in which angels descend to breathe visions into the minds of their recipients—while at the same time offering the digested collection of an impressive lifetime’s worth of learning. It is, at once, the song that Milton’s Muse sings through him, while at the same time the epitome of what its author could bring to bear on the subject. And so meeting here are, seemingly, two theories of poetics: poetry as the product of musing—of “inspiration”—and poetry as the condensation of a life of study. They are, however, stitched together by a system of metaphors, the most embracing of which is the metaphor of the museum, which is itself at once material and ideal, collection of things and site of the muses.

Exhibit 1. John Locke’s Commonplace Book

Angel etymologically means “messenger”; inspire means “breathe in.” The words are of course critical in Milton’s epic, but they also turn up, linked, in a more surprising place, a philosophical treatise begun just as Paradise Lost was seeing its way into print.² This is in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding—but to see what angels and inspiration are doing there requires a bit of groundwork. And just as Richardson sketches Milton in a compositional ecology, so too Locke’s Essay stages the author in a place of thinking. Locke is discussing the “steps by which the mind attains several truths” when he proposes that

the senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet: and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory, and names got to them. Afterwards the mind proceeding farther, abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names. In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with ideas and language, the materials about which to exercise its discursive faculty: and the use of reason becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment.³

1. An incomplete index from John Locke’s medical notebook for the years 1662–1667. Bodleian Shelfmark MS. Locke f.25. Courtesy Bodleian Library.

This is the core of Locke’s epistemology of “cognitive contact,” in which ideas rise directly out of encounters with material sensation;⁴ from the start, the mind is an empirical observer, receiving and storing experience in little nugget-like atoms called ideas.⁵ Knowledge by this account would not seem to be a repertoire for the body moving in space, or an available set of strategic interactions with tools, or even a set of habits of deportment; it doesn’t seem to be of much use for playing an instrument (though Locke meditates on this elsewhere) or for walking, breathing, or swinging a hammer. It doesn’t provide much room for poetry or inspiration. The mind by this account is what develops general concepts from particulars, which is in turn equivalent to the working up of language from the things experienced by the senses. Francis Bacon, more than a generation earlier, had kicked off the project of the new sciences by calling for a thorough remodeling of learning; he insisted that the task of philosophy should be to establish “in the human intellect … a true pattern of the world as we actually find it.”⁶ Locke offers an epistemological system that makes sense of this task; Locke’s “empty cabinet” makes it possible to think of mental activity as a pattern for natural philosophical practice. The link between practice and concept is in this regard quite explicit; stocking the mind is like stocking the cabinet, mental processes leaning on a distinct set of habits, which will turn out to be elaborated in haptic engagements with the world.

A strange habit has sprung up in our reading of Locke. We have learned to read him as an entry in a history of ideas, when his prose, especially when he touches nearest on the nature of the mind’s ideas themselves, embeds itself continually in a history of practice. Locke’s own remarks lead back toward embodiment, especially in spaces like his library; the pressure even of this passage is not toward abstraction, though this is the process it describes, but rather toward a set of learned movements. Locke insists that the acquisition of ideas, and even the development of reason, recalls and is formally equivalent to the material processes of sorting books in a library. Jules Law, elaborating Richard Rorty’s claims about the rhetoricality of metaphor (metaphor as one world-making choice among others) argues that the brilliance of Locke’s achievement is precisely the ambiguity of his figures; Locke, Law argues, deliberately leaves his metaphors unpacked.⁷ But Locke only appears to leave his metaphors unpacked while we confine ourselves to conceptual source domains; that is, his metaphors are only unpacked if we think that they refer us to an imagined set of relations. Locke’s own prose all along points us toward practical, embodied engagement with objects in space. This particular image works because the cabinet provides the working space where a relationship between the curator and a stable system of storage may become duplicated as a model for an internal relationship between the mind and its objects. Even while ideas rise from objects, Locke’s prose returns us to particulars. If you want to unpack his metaphors, you will have to unpack his library.

So, does Locke represent the genesis of the empiricist dualism, as it is commonly argued, or a more profound embeddedness in the materials of thinking, as his own language insists? The paradox, felt even here, is that Locke’s figure of the mind as collection develops a distinction between the mind and its materials, even while itself resting on a complex set of entanglements with the environment through which that mind moves.⁸ It is one thing to claim that the objects of the world are ontologically unlike but systemically identical to the objects of the mind. This is how Locke is read, as advancing a theory of mind distinct from, rather than “abstracted” from, or even “much the same” as, the daily practices upon which Locke’s thinking continually leans. Locke advances, in this sense, philosophy as the mirror of nature, reproducing nature while nevertheless fundamentally unlike it. It is something else altogether to create this systematic difference by tinkering with physical models. This would be to install an internal division in the mind that bottoms out upon an intimately experienced and always evolving relationship between a curator and his things.⁹ These often-remarked internal distinctions, differently articulated through abstract slashes like res cogitans/res extensa, soul/body, mind/brain, are established through shifting alliances between psychological theories and habits of work. Indeed, in his case, Locke builds this strange division with constant reference to curating a cabinet. And this is the beginning of a kind of entanglement.

Locke bases his model of an autonomous mind on a dialectical interchange between models and theories, cabinets and minds, collections and concepts.¹⁰ “Man’s power,” as Locke sums up, and his “ways of operation, [are] much the same in the material and intellectual world.”¹¹ Locke’s name therefore has come to stand for a concept of mind that would emerge as one of the chief legacies of Enlightenment empiricism, despite the fact that a return to his own habits tends to paint a much more complicated picture.¹² Undoubtedly, Locke’s argument and its legacy helped introduce a warpage into mainstream ways of viewing the world. This is the system of the understanding as an observer among its objects, the mind consisting of, on the one hand, a set of faculties like reason and judgment, and, on the other, the ideal objects with which it works. And it establishes this through a complex web of metaphors, each of which leans on the memory of haptic practice. But our readings of Locke in general expect us to perform a more complicated transformative trick: at once to remember what it feels like to stock a cabinet with its objects, and to accept an etiology of reason which, in the end, will insist that it has no place for feeling. Take, for instance, Paul de Man’s influential reading of the Essay. “When Locke,” de Man convincingly argues, “develops his own theory of words and language, what he constructs turns out to be in fact a theory of tropes.”¹³ This seems exactly right. Locke’s curatorial mind is not only modeled on the labors of a collector in his cabinet; it also works, fundamentally, by modeling ideas on patterns observed in the stuff of experience, de Man’s “theory of tropes.”¹⁴ “Of course,” de Man continues, “he would be the last man in the world to realize and to acknowledge this. One has to read him, to some extent, against or regardless of his own explicit statements.” We are asked, therefore, to accept Locke as a foundational figure in the modern mobilization of metaphor, while we are encouraged to overlook the (metaphorical) rudiments on which his most conceptual metaphors are built. We are encouraged to treat him as a theorist of pure reason, when all his remarks remind us of thinking as a practice. Even while Locke reminds us of the embeddedness of thought in the stuff of the senses, we are asked to forget.

The usual treatment of the history of the empiricist project, de Man’s remarks notwithstanding, is to note its general hostility to metaphor, especially when metaphor is imagined as a mere rhetorical choice among others.¹⁵ In this sense, metaphor is the stuff of poetry and stagecraft, what, in the conventional formulation offered by Thomas Tyers, “takes the hearer and reader by storm,” convincing “our passions … before our reason, which is too often made a dupe of.”¹⁶ But increasingly, recent work has drawn our attention to the ways in which thinkers were sensitive to metaphor as an important tool for organizing systems of ideas.¹⁷ This insight is in fact developed by Locke, though he avoids the word “metaphor” itself. “It may,” he remarks,

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; and how those which are made us of to stand for actions and notions quite removed from sense, have their rise from thence, and from obvious sensible ideas are transferred to more abstruse significations, and made to stand for ideas that come not under the cognizance of our senses; v.g. to imagine, apprehend, comprehend, adhere, conceive, instill, disgust, disturbance, tranquility, &c. are all words taken from the operations of sensible things, and applied to certain modes of thinking.¹⁸

The double consciousness of Locke’s treatment of metaphor is on full display here. On the one hand, Locke goes out of his way in this passage to avoid even the hint of a rhetorical flourish—while, on the other hand, he expects us continually to hear the origins of words as figures for sensible simples. It is not merely that sensible ideas are made twice “to stand,” or that ideas “rise” from the senses; these are of course things less proper to ideas than to the person having them, but this is merely the beginning of the ways in which ideas are, Locke insists, traceable to haptic or somatic dimensions of experience. Rather, he suspects that his whole vocabulary, and the conceptual field in which he thinks, might “depend” upon, that is, “hang from,” ideas first produced by the senses. “Apprehend” means “grasp,” “adhere” means “stick to”; “instill” means “put in by drops”; “disgust” means “averse taste”; and so on. And precisely here is the moment I mentioned before—where language more appropriate to Paradise Lost turns up in the Essay: “Spirit,” Locke continues, means “breath”; “angel” means “messenger.” Words penned in Locke’s cabinet would not be out of place in Milton’s bed.

Philosophical analysis in this account therefore begins to look like metaphor analysis, as metaphor emerges as the basic generative condition of intellectual life in the first place.¹⁹ While Locke has gone out of his way to avoid the word, what he is describing is the work of metaphor embedded in the intellect. Indeed, he offers us a definition without the proper name, going so far as to hide “metaphor” in its Latin equivalent, for what is “transfer” (“carry across”) but the Latin word for “metaphor,” Aristotle’s Greek word for the same sort of ferrying or “carrying across” of meaning from one realm to another?²⁰ And what is an angel doing here, except as a figure for the carrying of messages from one ineffable realm to another?

As Locke imagines it, the conceptual metaphor—the mind as cabinet—governs the coordination of source and target domains across a range of subordinate metaphors, including the ways in which reason does its workmanlike labor, the lodging of ideas like books in the memory, the ways in which the mind is furnished, the paperiness of its inscription surfaces, and so on.²¹ In this sense, metaphor does not merely describe a linguistic flourish.²² It captures a special category of brainwork. So when the recent cognitive turn in philosophy argues that conceptual work appropriates neural networks developed in bodily activity, that conceptual thought is overlaid on sensorimotor networks of neurons,²³ it pursues Locke’s suggestion to trace the “originals of all our notions and knowledge” to their roots in the senses. It is not just that something else is carried across from the source domain of the metaphor to the target domain, or even that those domains are thoroughly blended; it is that the neural networks for the literal and metaphorical senses of a word seem to be partly shared.²⁴ Metaphor, in this line of thought, emerges as the special, possibly unique condition in which the mind can hold two ideas superimposed at once. Metaphor causes sensory experience to overlap with conceptual relationships. It nevertheless, to a greater or lesser degree, appears to be the basic condition of language and knowledge acquisition, especially when that knowledge turns to thinking about the conditions of knowledge.²⁵ As Mark Johnson puts it, “In a very strong sense, philosophy is metaphor.”²⁶

One of Locke’s examples—“apprehend”—has recently received a great deal of attention in the laboratory, for the metaphor itself directly and dramatically relates embodiment to mentation.²⁷ The word understood in its conceptual sense, something like “hold something in the mind,” clearly leans on a bodily engagement with the world, the reaching out and grasping of something. Recent empirical research on brainwork suggests that such a word as “grasp,” meant in its metaphorical sense, activates parts of the same neural networks that light up when someone grasps something bodily and materially.²⁸ The implication is that overlapping sets of neurons fire whether the word is thought, written, spoken, or heard, but also when something is grasped, or even when someone else is seen to be grasping something—actually or conceptually.²⁹ The brain’s motor, visual, and proprioceptive circuits provide the ground of transfer where relations in space are bartered for relations between concepts. What is more, while it matters when a metaphor is mostly a dead one (as, for example, in the case of “apprehend”) many of the same general areas of the brain seem to be employed in conceptual as in related motor or proprioceptive processing.³⁰ Embedded in etymology, Locke suggests, are clues to atavistic acts of intellection, for the web-work of the symbolic catches up fragments of its aboriginal embodiment.³¹ Conceptual systems are overlaid on patterns that emerge in sensory experience, even when the words labeling those concepts do not always own those concepts’ metaphorical debts in an obvious way.³² As Locke puts it, “The dominion of man, in this little world of his own understanding,” is “much the same as it is in the great world of visible things,” his laborious intellect working on ideas much in the same way as a craftsman might work with his collection of materials.³³

The cognitive theory of metaphor has come under fire for underestimating the extent to which culture may come to shape metaphor—especially how context or situation may even map itself backwards into the understanding of and interaction with the material world.³⁴ It seems to offer, in other words, little room for “socio-cultural situatedness.” George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, for instance, argue that the fundamental experience of containment, childhood experiences with putting things in and out of boxes, and so on, shapes by the royal road of metaphor a host of conceptual structures—not least our metaphors for memory, which include “filling the mind” and “retrieving information.”³⁵ A number of studies on the embeddedness of exactly this metaphor, however, note that theorizations of containment tend to depend on inherited uses of containers, and that different cultures develop, therefore, strikingly different conceptual models.³⁶ What we clearly need, then, is not a simplistic theory of concepts located immediately in rudimentary facts about the body but a nuanced theory that locates the haptic ground of conceptual metaphor in the mind’s elaborated and entangled relationship with its working environments. Speaking more immediately, we need a theory that locates thinking in its embodiment, thought as a property of an ecology. Especially in the case of a metaphor that becomes important for the mind’s understanding of itself (“the mind is a container”), what we need is a theory that can do two things at once. It must account for the way that an ideal system may be modeled on a material context at the same time that that material context is, in turn, modified by the ideal system doing its work. And it must do all of this while remembering that it is the system itself, the dialectical to-and-fro of the theory and practice, that makes it possible to think the mind/body split in the first place.

This suggests, then, that we may usefully think of the two halves of Locke’s remarks as linked. On the one hand, Locke notes, concepts are borrowed from bodily experience; on the other, ideas are stored and coordinated in the mind similarly to how things would be stored and coordinated in the cabinet. It is worth remembering, at this point, Locke’s lifetime habit of collecting, organizing, and collating books. His working model of mind would refer us, in this sense, to shelving and sorting practices at work in the cabinet, a cabinet that he was quite possibly in when he penned the lines that now stand as some of the most famous in the Essay.³⁷ Locke began composing his library while studying at Christ Church, Oxford, with an eye toward a career in medicine, and his early acquisitions are, not surprisingly, books on topics of theology, medicine, and chemistry.³⁸ But he also invested heavily in books of natural philosophy and natural history, including what one scholar calls the single most complete private collection of the works of Robert Boyle.³⁹ Locke’s holdings throughout, therefore, were heavily weighted toward those thinkers who would pave the way for thinking of the mind as a library: Aristotle and Cicero among the ancients, but also Francis Bacon, Thomas Willis, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke among the moderns, with a selection of such Renaissance humanist thinkers as Milton, Spenser, and Thomas Browne.⁴⁰ Taken together, these volumes provide a compact history of the origin of Locke’s system of conceptual metaphorics (his theory of ideas as objects) from Renaissance contact with Greek and Latin originals. Indeed, Locke’s library contained the precise books, from Aristotle to Bacon, that would have allowed him to construct a reasonably exhaustive prehistory of the notion, expressed in the second book of Locke’s Essay, that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses.⁴¹ This is of course a container theory of mind, the master metaphor of Locke’s epistemology.

But this is library as content; we are interested in the library as metaphor, indeed, as ecology, as a place where Locke might elaborate the relationship between thinker and materials of thought. And this requires a more detailed return to the site of work, in order to establish one way that Locke’s philosophical system found its bedrock in a set of learned gestures and habits. Fragments of Locke’s library survive—enough to reconstruct the elaborate systems he developed to tackle exactly the related problems of storage and coordination not just of books but of ideas. The library was elaborated over three rough phases: an early phase of acquisition, which was interrupted by a pair of extended visits to the Low Countries; a second phase of coordination, in which the books he continued to acquire while abroad and the books being held for him in England were together entered in an interleaved copy of Thomas Hyde’s Catalogus impressorum Librorum Bibliothecae Bodleianae;⁴² and a final phase, beginning after his return in 1688, when he was reunited with his total collection of books and set to put them in a meaningful, indexed order.⁴³ These phases roughly accompany the years he began, worked up, and published the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which he started in 1671 but completed only in 1688. I mention this at length for two reasons. The first is that Locke strove to achieve continuity in his library despite his shifting circumstances; it is a curious detail of his life as a collector of books that he seems never to have purchased a duplicate.⁴⁴ This was made possible in part by the Catologus, which operated as a sort of epitome and vade mecum of the library itself. It is also partly because Locke continually had his library and its books in mind even during his separations from them.⁴⁵ The second is to note that Locke’s elaboration, on the one hand, of the mind as a cabinet, and his development, on the other, of his cabinet as an increasingly stable repository of ideas, together suggest the dialectical to-and-fro that characterizes a cognitive ecology, a working space of thinking that, in Locke’s case, also provides the model for thought.

Locke’s cabinet provided an apt metaphor for mind because the space was structured to match, in fact to materialize, the rudimentary and analytically prior metaphors underwriting Locke’s sense of how cognition works. These more rudimentary and hence capacious metaphors are different species of the same basic conceptual source domain: the mind is a container. In this analytically prior formulation, Locke imagines the mind as a sort of camera obscura—a “dark room” that allows images to enter and fall upon a suitable surface like a wall or a screen (see Exhibit 4).⁴⁶ The mind has the capacity, called “contemplation,” Locke writes, to hold a small set of such ideas “for some time actually in view.”⁴⁷ This would be to perceive something (etymologically, “to take” or “to capture” it), and to extend or to attenuate that perception across time. It is as though the understanding stood within a miniaturized chamber, viewing images cast upon a two-dimensional surface, contemplating them simply as they come and go. But contemplation on present sensory ideas is the exception rather than the norm; indeed, in his Essay Locke gives to “contemplation” the shortest space possible, offering little more than a barely ornamented definition. Indeed, he gives to “contemplation” a space appropriate to how long the mind is able actually to contemplate, without recourse to any supports. For, according to Locke’s system, we far more often “retrieve” ideas that are “laid up in store … when need and occasion calls for them.” It is for this reason that the dark room emerges as an important transitional metaphor. Locke almost instantly appends to the image of the dark room an extensive storage function: the mind, he notes, is just like such a closet with a small opening “would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there.”⁴⁸ The development of his argument begins, that is, to situate itself in a more elaborated and embracing metaphorical context. This context is of course the library or repository, in which mental states, refigured as “ideas,” may be “laid up” or stored like “dormant pictures,” where they may either be recalled at will or turn up according to their own associations and affordances. The library, that is, offers to Locke what has elsewhere been called a “regimen of the mind.”⁴⁹ It offers a way of visualizing, of making present to the mind as Locke understands it, a system of natural memory; it offers a solution to the problem posed by the theory of the mind as a chamber like his own, a solution to Locke’s concern that objects entering through that chamber’s small openings should, as he hoped, “stay there.”⁵⁰

Taken together, Locke, his cabinet, and the library it contained provide the ecology in which Locke’s remarks about the cabinet-like structure of the mind are immediately embedded. The network provides a way of speaking: the understanding with its ideas is like a curator in a cabinet. A second problem emerges, however, which Locke’s shelving system was not designed to handle. This is the problem of recollection—and it is his solution to this problem that cuts to the core of Locke’s metaphorical theory of metaphors. As Locke puts it, a man who seeks but is unable to find “those ideas that should serve his turn, is not much more happy in his knowledge than one that is perfectly ignorant.”⁵¹ For the “business … of the memory,” Locke remarks, is not merely to store up impressions but “to furnish to the mind those dormant ideas which it has present occasion for.”⁵² This problem for the active and goal-oriented mind, the one embedded in what he calls a “present occasion,” or, colloquially, a man’s “turn,” demands a system in which ideas are linked to the subject at hand. It requires, therefore, a related but distinct technology, for the ordering of knowledge as though it were a collection of things will involve more than the ability to store ideas in a stable, organized place. It also demands the organization and collation of ideas so that they can be integrated into present circumstances. What is wanted is a system where a context—a “present occasion”—might already suggest a shifting and adaptable constellation of related ideas or concepts, which nevertheless point back to the material and exemplary ground from which they emerged.

The creation of links between present occasion and ideas of use, Locke insists, is partly a power that memory already has. Among the natural work of memory is the retention of associations between ideas, as those ideas are patterned by experience. This is an old idea, that turns up, among other places, in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, who is in turn indebted to Aristotle’s De Memoria.⁵³ The mind of itself creates groupings among ideas of things it witnesses together. But the development of such associations is also a capacity that can be mastered and perfected, and it is in the working out of this problem in the library that Locke put a traditional form to new use. He was the inventor of a new system of collating and storing extracts, a system that was destined to become, in part for the fame of its author, the most popular method for note taking until the end of the eighteenth century.⁵⁴ This is Locke’s New Method of Common-placing. Locke’s copy of Hyde’s Catalogus was geared toward the regular filing away of the matter of knowledge, but his series of notebooks laid out by the New Method worked that knowledge up into patterns and systems for their instant, motivated use. It provided therefore a second set of metaphors, overlaid upon the first, which helps explain how things witnessed in the world are liquidated into the materials of thinking.⁵⁵

Like the library, the commonplace was an old technology when Locke encountered it. It emerged through Renaissance humanist practice, developed out of theories of poetics as they were understood to have been conceived by Cicero and Quintilian (see Exhibit 2).⁵⁶ The book of commonplaces (topos koinos in Aristotle’s Greek or locus communis in Cicero’s Latin commentary) provided the backbone to the Scholastic brand of philosophical inquiry and the classical style of rhetorical disputation alike.⁵⁷ Cicero, especially as he was received in Locke’s England, understood the development of oratory to hinge on what he called “inventio.” This category meant to include more than merely the discovery (invention in its etymological sense) of a happy order or the spontaneous development of an effective turn of phrase; it expanded over the Renaissance to include the gathering, storage, and recollection of examples with an eye to their use in narrative or argument.⁵⁸ All of this counted as “inventio.” The commonplace, as Locke encountered it, was a heuristic device dedicated to the kind of rhetorical making that inventio demanded;⁵⁹ the “declared purpose of … the serious commonplace book,” as it has recently been put, was “action,” specifically for “the better arming one’s arguments in speech or writing.” It was organized to store examples according to arguments already well known.⁶⁰ The humanist commonplace was based on inherited categories; largely because it was geared toward disputation in traditional questions of ethics and theology, the Renaissance commonplace began as a sort of grid of traditional topics, and it located examples to fit.⁶¹ Many of these commonplaces, indeed, were printed volumes already filled in, minor encyclopedias with prepared entries and suitable for a wide range of cultural work; numerous early modern and premodern writers—Montaigne, Shakespeare, even Milton⁶²—have been shown to have relied on such prepared commonplaces. Culling examples from a wide array of sources, traditional commonplaces were harnessed to a recognizable polemic end, gathering examples and rhetorical resting places as the mirror of a Renaissance cosmos, assembling in small the proof of the divine order of the world. They offered a relatively standardized way of dividing up the realms of knowledge.⁶³ As Ann Blair puts it, “Explananda … become ‘commonplaces’ in the technical as well as the colloquial sense: in being selected from their original source and entered into the commonplace book [extracts] become self-evident truths.”⁶⁴

Locke’s innovation was to convert the commonplace into a machine for developing abstract categories themselves.⁶⁵ He thereby turned a form dedicated to the repetition of the Renaissance worldview into a tool for the new philosophy and its inductive methods—or, in other words, “abstraction” as a natural process of intellection.⁶⁶ Locke at most titled commonplace volumes according to inherited categories—physica, theologica, medica—but his indices, where the real organizational work of recollection was prepared, were organized according to the present state of his learning, his interests, how he had already learned to understand the world, and, in general, what he observed as he read. The system begins with Locke reading; when he comes across a passage that seems important to him, he considers (in the words of an eighteenth-century editor) “to what head the thing [he] would enter is most naturally referred; and under which, [he] would be led to look for such a thing.”⁶⁷ Armed with a single word (“Epistle” is Locke’s apt example), Locke consults his index. Here, heads will be gathered according to their first letter and following vowel, so it is necessary to begin by seeing if there are other Epistolary notes already entered. Had there already been an entry in “Ei,” Locke would have found the page number in the index, and turned to that page. Finding “Ei” empty, however, he turns to the first blank page in the book and copies out the passage verbatim. When he is finished copying, he inserts the head in the margin, and turns back to the index, where he writes the number of the page in the commonplace book under “Ei.” Some of Locke’s many imitators developed ways of reintroducing categories back into the index itself; one user, for instance, inserted heads in superscript in the index: “Go—13Gold coin, 21Gold Mine,” and so on.⁶⁸ Locke simply wrote these categories in the margins of each page, whereby, in his words, “the Heads present themselves at First Sight.”⁶⁹ It is worth pausing to make the point explicitly. Locke’s index was by no means the only technology whereby mental models were realized in curatorial practices—and curatorial practices in the vocabularies of intellection. But between Locke’s space of work and his theory of the intellect we may witness a cognitive ecology at work, where the logics of abstraction are distributed between keeper and collection.

More than one of Locke’s contemporaries instantly recognized the metaphorical work of his commonplacing system; John LeClerc for instance begins his celebration of Locke’s commonplacing system with the advantages it has for the development of the mind. In his preface to the pamphlet containing Locke’s indexing system, LeClerc categorically confounds the commonplace with the “Treasury or Store-house” of the “Memory”; similarly, he programmatically confuses the index with the faculty of “Judgment.”⁷⁰ This is because the index provides a place for the dialectical elaboration and systematization of Locke’s epistemology, especially of the relationship between the faculty of the understanding and its mental materials. Each commonplace entry involves two separate acts of transfer. First, a quotation is selected as an epitome of a text, and then, as part of the process of putting it in the commonplace, a single word is developed to pose it as part of an abstract category. These two transfers anticipate Locke’s sense of the mind as a collection: the “senses at first let in particular ideas, to furnish the yet empty cabinet,” Locke remarks; thereafter, the mind, “by degrees growing familiar with some of them,” “abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names.”⁷¹ The first variety of transfer in the commonplace, from book to notebook, echoes the work of the senses, identifying ideas that can be stored as facts.⁷² The second, however, begins to capture the intellect as an emergent property, developing only when the store is full enough that reason may begin to arise alongside the categories of thought. This latter process is what is properly called “abstraction,” for it is the method “whereby ideas taken from particular beings become general representatives of all the same kind.” But it clearly leans against “abstraction” in its other meaning, the summarizing of the contents of a book. It may be, Locke elsewhere surmises, that there are “species” existing in the world prior to experience. But it is the mind, in its curatorial habits, that develops general names—“abstracts” them—from the materials of thinking. The commonplace is therefore itself a measure of “the use of reason,” which, Locke remarks, “becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment.”⁷³ Reason, writes Charles Taylor, is for Locke “above all a property of the process of thinking, not of the substantive content of thought”;⁷⁴ nor does reason stand somehow apart from its work. “Reason,” in Locke’s idiom, develops through the curatorial compilation and organization of “its materials.”

Locke’s headings are the trick whereby past contexts anticipate present occasion; the index is where Locke’s metaphors of abstraction bottom out, for it is the site where he might witness himself working out new abstract categories from the raw material of the old. There is, however, an important reverse movement, which finds these abstractions reinstalled at the site of the collecting activity in the first place. The tricky thing is how to identify passages ripe for abstraction, even while in the act of reading. As anyone who has compiled an index will know, the development of these general ideas or heads comes secretly to bear an important formative function, slipping back into the reading process. Just as the development of names for general heads in the commonplace will provide “general names, applicable to whatever exists conformable to such ideas” in the future, so too, Locke remarks, we “take for the perception of our sensation” that which is in fact “an idea formed by our judgment.”⁷⁵ So, for instance, our repeated exposure to convex shapes, Locke observes, teaches us that what appear in the eye to be certain flat disks of light will actually turn out to be spheres if handled and turned on all sides.⁷⁶ Prior work by the judgment to compile the mathematical notion “sphere,” abstracted from numerous past experiences of flat disks, sneaks so swiftly into experience that by the time fresh sensations reach what Locke calls the “presence chamber” of the mind, they are already altered by the organizing work of the judgment.⁷⁷ We do not see flat disks and then figure out that they are spheres; we simply see spheres. What appear to the intellect to be passively received sensory ideas are already shaped by the “workmanship of the understanding.”⁷⁸ Shaped by “conformity with our own experience,” the understanding participates in a secret way in constructing the world it beholds.⁷⁹ So, too, rather than arriving late to a field of examples already assembled, the index of Locke’s commonplace is already entangled in the project of compilation, for it is the categories emerging there that help Locke identify the abstracts to copy in the first place. The explosion of indices in printed books was a sign of the times, of the reorganization of knowledge as content.⁸⁰ But in Locke’s case, and in the cases of the thousands of people who adopted his method, we may say that their science produced the tail that it itself grasped—collected matter suggesting index headings that in turn suggest new matter to collect. The index is not merely a method of collation and organization; it is also a system of reading.⁸¹ What begins as a local conception of abstraction in the material habits of collection ends up getting smuggled into how Locke perceives the very activity of thought; what begins as the mere development of general names from observed particulars—abstraction, in other words, as itself an abstraction—ends up becoming, in the way of all abstractions, a judgment passing as a perception.

Locke’s indexing system is a system suited to the mind he understood himself to have: one that collects nuggets, files them away, and develops general names according to the ideas it possesses. Likewise, the theory of mind he develops is one suited to, and metaphorically founded on, the filing systems through which he did the work of thinking. He does not go quite so far as to suggest that reason itself is a mere offspring or epiphenomenon of the storage of ideas—that it rises autogenetically out of the mere accrual of facts. Nor does he suggest that we may choose freely the way that we divide up sensations into objects or abstracts. Though the “contents” of the mind “are derived from experience,” and therefore particular to the individual and his social context, “the psychological,” remarks Graham Richards, “stays formally fixed,” arriving in the end at seemingly essential and universal rules and methods, the very rules and methods it is the work of the Essay to discover.⁸² Indeed, Locke’s optimism is in the end anchored by the notion that collections of the same simple ideas will suggest the same abstract ones, providing, Locke hopes, a vocabulary for rational discourse.⁸³ In his intellectual practice, however, he discusses perfectible but ultimately idiosyncratic methods of storage, sorting, and recall as the routes to discoveries about the world. And in this system, the labor of abstraction, the work of commonplace linked to library, ends up providing the master metaphor governing his epistemology. The mind as cabinet and cabinet as mind end up unconsciously coordinating a host of subordinate operations about the workmanlike nature of the intellect. What starts out as a mere metaphor, a work of judgment, slips back in as a structuring condition, shaping not only how the mind witnesses itself but also the way that it organizes its environment. The final sign of this dialectical process is the Essay itself, which emerged, in the end, as what Locke called “a copy of my own mind, in its several ways of operation.”⁸⁴

Exhibit 2. John Milton’s Bed

The networks of metaphor elaborated in Locke’s cabinet provide a way of returning to the question of who visited Milton behind the curtains of his bed. Present there was his Muse, who “inspires / Easy” his “unpremeditated verse.” But also crowding Milton for his bedcovers were masses of poets, philosophers, writers, and thinkers who provided the grist of his deep reading. Like so many of his contemporaries, Milton was a keeper of commonplaces. Among the handful of his manuscripts that have survived the passage of time is a commonplace book owned, compiled, and consulted by Milton in his literary and poetic practice. Composed mostly of passages of political importance, the commonplace—now at the British Library—is a folio manuscript originally consisting of 126 leaves, of which more than half remain unused.⁸⁵ It contains entries ordered only by the order in which Milton encountered them in his reading and thought to copy them or have them copied for him. The surviving commonplace limits itself only to the three contemporary branches of moral philosophy—“Ethicus,” “Oeconomicus,” and “Politicus”—among which it is most heavily invested in the last. It contains, therefore, quotations from Machiavelli and John Speed, historical exempla and excerpts from church historians, and remarks on ethics and politics generally. There was nothing particularly revolutionary in the form of the commonplace; unlike Locke, Milton did not propose a flexible indexing system, working up “heads” as his thinking evolved. Milton’s choice of topoi, writes Ruth Mohl, is after traditional categories, dealing with political and moral questions.⁸⁶ It was accordingly useful to Milton in forming rhetorical answers to traditional political and religious questions, which is exactly how he seems to have used it.

2. Milton, poised between his amanuenses and his museum. Eugène Delacroix, Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to His Daughters. © 2014 Kunsthaus Zürich. All rights reserved.

Over the course of his lifetime, Milton would develop a profound sensitivity to the entanglement of minds with places—an embedded monism. But this is not what he inherited, or where his thinking started. Milton cut his teeth on the Aristotelianism of Christ’s College at Cambridge, where he began keeping his first set of commonplaces.⁸⁷ The Cambridge curriculum he experienced was generally Aristotelian in the late Continental and Scholastic tradition;⁸⁸ Aristotle’s De anima and Parva naturalia composed by far the greatest part of the proto-psychological theory Milton learned,⁸⁹ though he was exposed as well to later works in the classical and medieval line elaborating Aristotle’s epistemological insights: Cicero’s philosophical and rhetorical works, Hermogenes’s Ars Rhetorica, and so on.⁹⁰ Milton’s commonplace was one element of an inherited way of thinking, the Ciceronian, ultimately Aristotelian model of mind in which “invention” is the ranging of the mind over its stock of images.⁹¹ Milton himself remarks on the Ciceronian use of the commonplace in his essay The Art of Logic (1672); any rhetorical and logical inquiry begins, he insists, at the commonplace, gathering useful materials, and organizing them into an efficient design.⁹² The crucial point, the keynote equally for the influential strand of poetics passing through Milton and, in the event, to the empiricist project generally, is just that there is nothing in the mind but what is first in the senses. Although this would later be voiced by Locke and others, it finds its way into the British curriculum through medieval Scholasticism; as Thomas Aquinas phrased it in the Summa, nihil in intellectu est, non quod fuerit prius in sensu.⁹³ All mental work merely manipulates objects received through the wide portals of the eyes, ears, nose, and so on.

This is clearly not a theory of poetic creation from inspiration; it is the theory of poetic creation as the just rearrangement of things already collected and available to the intellect. “There is no proceeding in invention of knowledge,” as Cambridge-trained Francis Bacon puts it, “but by similitude”; invention is entirely limited to the right ordering of things in the mind resembling things in the world.⁹⁴ At least, this is how Milton’s poetics were experienced in the eighteenth century. The workmanlike poetics implied by the Aristotelian cognitive model were admired by more than one of Milton’s eighteenth-century critics. Samuel Johnson, for example, remarked that Paradise Lost displayed “the united force of study and genius; of a great accumulation of materials, with judgment to digest, and fancy to combine them: Milton was able to select from nature, or from story, from ancient fable, or from modern science, whatever could illustrate or adorn his thoughts.” In reading Paradise Lost, Johnson concludes, “we read a book of universal knowledge.”⁹⁵

Where, then, is the room for inspiration? What use could a Muse possibly be to a mind like this, except as a shallow figure for the mind’s rote work of selection?⁹⁶ This is precisely the question motivating a crucial moment in Paradise Lost—in which the ultimate action of the poem depends upon a scene of instruction. Words in Adam’s mouth could almost be in Francis Bacon’s, John Locke’s, or a tutor at Milton’s Christ’s College in Cambridge, for it is here that Milton offers the clearest statement of this standard version of the mind’s work. Eve has just awoken, troubled and half-seduced in a dream, the blush of her excitement still on her cheeks; Adam offers her his understanding of the mind’s structure, organizing it into reason and its lesser faculties. “In the Soule,” Adam reports,

Are many lesser Faculties that serve

Reason as chief; among these Fansie next

Her office holds; of all external things,

Which the five watchful Senses represent,

She forms Imaginations, Aerie shapes,

Which Reason joyning or disjoyning, frames

All what we affirm or what deny, and call

Our knowledge or opinion; then retires

Into her private Cell when Nature rests.

Oft in her absence mimic Fansie wakes

To imitate her; but misjoyning shapes,

Wilde work produces oft, and most in dreams,

Ill matching words and deeds long past or late. (5.100–113)

Milton offers a relatively straight version of the faculty psychology that traces its origins to Aristotle; the conceptual work of Reason hangs on the imaginations summoned by Fancy because thought is conducted entirely through the manipulation of mental materials. Adam assumes that Eve’s fancy is operating autotelically, spinning “Wilde work” out of “words and deeds” summoned up from her (still very new) memory. He asserts a theory of the mind’s faculties as though they were discrete from the materials upon which they work; what is more, it is a fantasy of control—of the clear possession of ideas—which is only complicated when Reason retires. An Aristotelian before the fact, Adam has in other words summarized what someone might have learned at Cambridge in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Over the course of his life, however, Milton adopted a nuanced monism—a development that became important to how he understood the mind’s work. The depth of his commitment has been the subject of debate, but the outlines of this more sophisticated sense of the mind’s debts to the body (and vice versa) are suggested by the very fact that Eve rises from bed with a blush; the intellect is entangled in bodily experience, motions in the mind finding their way even to the surface of the skin. Adam perhaps silently assumes that a bed, in a grotto, is a retreat from the world, where reason and fancy can work uninterrupted. As Milton well knew, however, a bed does not offer a retreat from the world; it offers a different form of engagement. As Milton has his Muse, so Eve has a visitor; and as Milton, inspired, would wake in the morning, calling his daughter to report what he has heard, so Eve calls Adam to relay what she has witnessed. The first Muse was not Urania; it was Satan, who was during the night discovered by Ithuriel and Zephon,

Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve

Assaying by his devilish art to reach

The organs of her fancy, and with them forge

Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams,

Or, if, inspiring venom, he might taint

The animal spirits that from pure blood arise

Like gentle breaths from rivers pure, thence raise

At least distempered, discontented thoughts,

Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires

Blown up with high conceits engendering pride.⁹⁷

Two theories of dream-work are offered, here; Satan indifferently puts each to the test, intent only on subverting what he takes to be the even tenor of Eve’s untroubled sleep. In the first version, Satan is attempting directly to access Eve’s imagination, bypassing the wide way of the senses directly to implant ideas there. This presents the imagination as a laboratory—what Robert Hooke in virtually the same year compared to a “suppelex” or workshop (Exhibit 11); in this account, Satan is a dualist, for the mind is its own place, functionally isomorphic with a laboratory, even if ontologically unlike. In the other, however, Satan is a monist, attempting to work directly through what appears to be a distributed soul. Here, it is not particular “organs of her fancy” that count but Eve’s blood, breath, hopes, aims, and desires. It is a question of “taint[ing]” her blood as a way of altering her “spirits.”

Woven throughout Milton’s alchemical trope of dream-making, governing the sublimation of words to ideas, is “spirit”—that tricky word Locke takes time from his remarks on metaphor briefly to unpack. It is possible, though by no means necessary, that Locke was thinking of Milton’s poem when he remarked on “angel” and “spirit” (“messenger” and “breath”) as examples of metaphor and its instruments; Locke after all had more than one copy of Paradise Lost in his library, and he was sympathetic to at least some of Milton’s politics. In any case, the circumstances of Eve’s dream display a similar set of metaphorical crossings. Satan “inspires venom”; Eve’s “animal spirits” are raised “like gentle breaths”; her desires are “blown up”; and so on. Satan appears in Milton’s account not just a bit like a minor poet, or like a poet who is like an alchemist; “spirit” leans on an etymological borrowing widely employed in imagining the poet’s breath as the motive force for returning life to formless matter. Or, to put a finer point on it, Satan appears formally like Eve’s Muse, “breathing” into her ear in the same way that Urania might inspire a poet to write. The paradox is that if there is any figure who insists on his own disembedded intellect, it is the very agent working so assiduously upon Eve’s; Satan’s first sin is to misrecognize and to disavow his relationships with and among the other angels, and his continued pride all along hovers around his own compact faith that his “mind is its own place.”⁹⁸ Satan’s first sin was his experiment in philosophical dualism.

What at first looks like a straight version of the Scholastic dualism Milton inherited gives way to a more complexly entangled ecology; a simple theory of the mind as a container gives way to a more nuanced sense of thinking as an ecologically embedded activity. This shift, in the course of the poem, parallels Milton’s own intellectual development, over the course of his life. Milton arrived at an integrated sense of the intellect as an emergent entity, what Stephen M. Fallon calls his “ontological integrity.”⁹⁹ The critical passage in defense of this mature monism also appears in Paradise Lost; unlike the dualist system put in the mouth of Adam, this passage has also become an important one in establishing a prehistory of ecological writing, the so-called greening of Milton.¹⁰⁰ It is Raphael speaking, offering a metaphysical system. The world is:

… one first matter all,

Indued with various forms, various degrees

Of substance, and in things that live, of life;

But more refined, more spirituous, and pure,

As nearer to Him placed or nearer tending

Each in their several active spheres assigned,

Till body up to spirit work, in bounds

Proportioned to each kind. So from the root

Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves

More airy, last the bright consummate flower

Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit

Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed

To vital spirits aspire, to animal,

To intellectual, give both life and sense,

Fancy and understanding, whence the soul

Reason receives, and reason is her being.…¹⁰¹

The image Milton settles upon is appropriate to Adam’s garden, but this is not, in itself, what marks this as an ecological thought. The path that Milton traces here, from substance to spirit, is the clearest articulation of Milton’s monism; Adam and Raphael are bound to one another by their shared substance, differently “refined” according to the different “spheres” to which they have been “assigned.” No matter, no spirit: only the complex mutual dependencies of “one first matter” differently “indued.” As Milton puts it, in his De Doctrina, “Man is a living being, intrinsically and properly one and individual. He is not … produced from and composed of two distinct and different elements.” This is a rejection of the classical dualism of the Schools, the commonsense position he is at pains to complicate. “On the contrary,” Milton concludes, “the whole man is soul, and the soul man: a body, in other words, or individual substance: animated, sensitive, and rational.”¹⁰²

The pressure of Raphael’s speech to Adam, the sense it produces, is multiply upward, and looks in this sense to be a different route to the upward pressure Locke calls “abstraction”; it borrows from an embodied vocabulary to describe the passage from cruder forms of matter “up” to spirit in its greater refinement. And it repeats this pressure in an image, a stalk bursting upward into fruit, from earth to matter and qualities more rare. Like the “spirits … breathe[d]” by the flower, so the things of the world give gradual way to things intellectual. This is what Milton calls “aspiration,” the relentless drive of things more grossly material toward more “vital spirits.” The sublimation of thing to thing, root to stalk to flower to spirit, may in fact be more subtle than even the simile suggests; it seems that precisely the spirit expressed by the flower, though naturally “indued” with different form, becomes “spirits … intellectual,” the stuff of reason and the soul. Adam and Eve tend the garden; it repays them with the substance of mind. Here, then, lies the kernel of something formally like the system Locke worked up out of the stuff of his library; “reason,” he reminds us, “becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment.” The difference is that Raphael has no particular interest in developing a dualist system out of his embeddedness in his ecology. Reason, the stuff and substance of the soul, is in this sense linked immediately through sublimation to the (flower) bed in which it finds itself.

But if the pressure of the passage is upward, drawing in the end from the observed tendency of spirits and steams to rise, the movement of the passage is nevertheless equally, reciprocally downward, not only because the eye follows it down the page. Milton begins with an idea—or, let’s say, an inspiration; this idea is a monistic system linking flower and beast to angel and God, drawn upward by the aspirational love of Christian piety. But the passage does its work twice, once tracing out the system of things, and again putting it in a complex image. Raphael puts it this way: when it comes to matters of universal law, of truths that “surmount … the reach / Of human sense,” Raphael’s linguistic resources are the same as the resources available to the Muse who visits Milton in his bed. Such matters, which after all evade the immediate evidence of the eye, must be “delineate[d] … / By likening spiritual to corporal forms, / As may express them best.” Milton captures here the basic Renaissance faith in the equivalence between the visible and invisible worlds, the way in which, as one scholar puts it, “every kind of representation … has a twofold semantic status, a literal and a transcending, tropical one.”¹⁰³ The earth is “the shadow of heav’n,” and “things therein / Each to other like” (5.571–76). But he has bent this Renaissance theory of correspondence towards his own sense of a monistic plenitude. As Lana Cable puts it, speaking of Milton’s “paradoxical … commitment” at once to the affective content of sensory materials and the rhetorical exploration of concepts, “even apparently nonsensory language depends on a linguistic construct of ‘dead’ metaphor”; it is the work of Milton’s poetry and prose tracts, what Cable calls his “carnal rhetoric,” continually to rediscover and to revivify the dead metaphors that turn up, revenant-like, everywhere in Milton’s verse. Milton has, in the words of Phillip Donnely, “present[ed] his monism within the poem so that a dualist orthodox reading of the epic is still possible.”¹⁰⁴

But this is an incomplete account of Milton’s commitment to a fully articulated monism, in much the same way that we have already seen dualist accounts fail to capture their more profound entanglements with their material models. For Milton, concepts emerge not as the abstractions of sensory impressions but as the linguistic aspirations of sensual experience; “inspiration” is the name for the spiritual fullness that kicks the process back along its reverse vector. Poetry, like Creation, runs metaphor in reverse, downward from idea to image, returning “spiritual” to “corporal.”¹⁰⁵ This is why Milton sees fit to put his poetic system, this monism stretching from root to fragrance, matter to spirit, in the mouth of an angel. “Angel,” Locke remembers, means “messenger,” and it is Raphael that can carry inspiration back to its figures, putting the idea in words. Like Aristotle or Locke after him, Raphael turns to a more embracing metaphor to provide the explanatory framework of language itself—that is, “expression”—for what is “corporal … expression” but a bodily breathing out, a turn to carnal shapes to bear or to imply spirit? When Raphael insists that he must “liken spiritual to corporal forms, / As may express them best,” what is he doing but breathing out (“expressing”) what he has already breathed in (“inspired” or “aspired … spirit”)? We may better, therefore, say that Milton provides here one sense of poetry as the native articulation of a complex ecological entanglement, thinking as thinking through things, rising up from brute matter to spirit, and back from spirit back to matter via the metaphors that can best bear their angelic burden. Milton, like Raphael, transfers a series of ideas to metaphors, which repay him by being reliberated as ideas. This creative dwelling in and through a world of available images is the essential work of poetry in a cognitive ecology; inspiration is the name of its emergent apotheosis, the dazzling moment where the fullness of spirit is put back into expression. From ideas to things to ideas, inspiration to expression and back again: Milton provides a sketch of the poet at home in his poetic resources. Milton in his bed has in other words thought himself into Adam in his Eden. And “Urania,” the Muse of astronomy, is Milton’s name for spirit’s special emergent property; inspiration is the condition of the mind dwelling richly in its cognitive bed.

Exhibit 3. Mark Akenside’s Museum

We will have further opportunities to reflect on Milton’s importance to eighteenth-century theorizations of embedded cognition (see, for instance, Exhibit 14). For now, I want to remain quite local—tracing embeddedness in the word’s most mundane sense. Milton’s bed makes one more appearance in the historical register, before finally sinking from view. This is in the collection of Mark Akenside (1721–1770), a Newcastle-born physician with aspirations as a poet, who by dint of learning and hard work installed himself at the center of mid-century belles lettres.¹⁰⁶ Collecting came naturally to Akenside. He had studied in Leiden in the high period of that city’s market for technical and scholarly books; it was possibly there that he began building his library in earnest.¹⁰⁷ When he returned to London, he established himself as an important member of a circle of virtuosi and antiquaries who met at Tom’s coffeehouse in the Strand. He became well known to booksellers, by whom his “comments” were enough “cherished” that he was granted the privilege of reading “gratis all the modern books of any character”—and was given, according to this contemporary source, any book that “struck him with a powerful impression.”¹⁰⁸ Partly through such gifts, Akenside became widely recognized as an important collector of antiquities and the typical objects of one sort of virtuoso collection.¹⁰⁹ He was noted, for instance, for being a “curious collector” of prints, which he left, upon his death, to his “very intimate friend” Jeremiah Dyson.¹¹⁰ No catalogue of Akenside’s collection survives—it died with Dyson—so it is impossible to know how extensive his holdings might have been; he seems, however, freely to have shared it with acquaintances, one of whom remarked that it contained “capital prints from the most eminent Painters of Italy and Holland, which he illustrated [that is, described] with admirable taste.”¹¹¹

Though little is known of Akenside’s sizable private museum, the interests and idiosyncrasy of his collection are suggested by a gift he received mid-career. Sometime in 1760, Thomas Hollis gave to Akenside the bed reputed formerly to have belonged to Milton, in which, if the account can be believed, Milton was visited by his Muse.¹¹² Hollis admired Milton for his politics; he explicitly hoped that Akenside would pen a poem in the Miltonian tradition as compensation for the gift. It was a question of inspiration—and the bed was the critical mechanism. Hollis hoped that Akenside, “believing himself obliged, and having slept in that bed,” would be “inspired to compose a poem in Milton’s honor.” Unfortunately for Hollis, Akenside himself was just at that moment switching allegiances, blown by the winds of political change to the politics of the new ministry. Akenside, who reports say “seemed wonderfully delighted with the bed, and had it put up in his house,” seems therefore likely to have appreciated the bed as a legacy of a different sort.¹¹³ Certainly, speaking in a general way, the gift flattered Akenside into thinking of himself as a poet of the stature of Milton. But it also came to stand as a reminder of the formal similarities between poetry and dreaming. The terms of Hollis’s bequest make this much clear. It was a question not of politics but of poetics; Akenside dreamed of himself as the proper inheritor to Milton for sympathies between their practices as poets, not least because Akenside was working in a similar tradition of the imagination as an entangled form of memory work.

3. Title page of The Museum, ed. Mark Akenside (London: Robert Dodsley, 1746). Apollo, as a figure of poetry, is seated between his inspiration and his messenger. Courtesy University of Michigan Special Collections.

Akenside got his break in the world of literature roughly a decade before Hollis’s gift. This was when he was named editor of Robert Dodsley’s The Museum: Or, the Literary and Historical Register. Dodsley was a friend to the circles of collectors and writers that included Akenside; his own literary tastes likewise leaned toward descriptions of collections. As one of his first literary works, Dodsley penned a one-act farce on the contents of a toyshop; as one of his last, he compiled the first published set of remarks on the holdings of the British Museum.¹¹⁴ The Museum in many ways extended these tastes—which is why Akenside was such a natural editor for the project. Published from early 1746 to late 1747, the Museum was intended as a literary magazine, a “museum” as site of the muses. It generally declined simply to list rare things or curiosities, strange sights, and local exhibitions. There were other magazines that offered descriptions of strange and rare things in London, such as the long-running Gentleman’s Magazine.¹¹⁵ But the Museum was, right from the start, designed as an anthology of poetry, histories, literary reviews, and moral essays, intended from its inception as a compendium of concurrent tastes and a mirror of its age.¹¹⁶ It evinced a mainstream aesthetic, in which Dodsley’s implicit convictions about the parallel pursuits of poetry and collecting were repeatedly put on display. This is why it is called a “museum”—a collection that privileges literature and the arts. And, as the engraving on the title page suggests, it understands literature as the fruitful junction of inspiration and a messenger: Apollo, in his bower, is poised between Clio, the Muse of history, who will breathe her spirit into his ear, and the angel-like Hermes, ready to relay the poet’s song to Akenside’s list of subscribers.

After accepting Dodsley’s offer to manage the Museum, Akenside began calling himself its “Keeper,” modeling his task as specifically curatorial, perhaps even modeling himself after the Keepers of institutions like the Repository of the Royal Society. His own contributions to the magazine were addressed to a circle of like-minded collectors, not least in his numerous reviews of foreign and English books. He was, according to James Tierney, “consciously attempting to aid English collectors in the purchase of significant works for their libraries.”¹¹⁷ But editing a journal almost certainly suggested curating a collection because Akenside already thought of literary production and critical judgment as activities of his own deeply curatorial intellect. Akenside was in many ways defined by the powers of his memory. He was well known for “a memory of extraordinary power, and perfect readiness in the application of its stores.”¹¹⁸ Indeed, writes his first biographer, his memory “was at once discriminative and comprehensive.” He was said to have “retained all the riches of art, science, and history, legislation, poetry, and philosophy; and those he would draw out and embody to suit the occasion.”¹¹⁹ In this vein, Akenside was admired as a poet for his ability to return ideas to sense—drawing them out and “embodying” them; his memory was the source of his chief effects as a poet. Samuel Johnson, for instance, insisted that if “Akenside was a superiour poet both to Gray and Mason,” it is because of his “uncommon amplitude of acquisitions, [his] young mind stored with images, and much exercised in combining and comparing them.”¹²⁰ Thomas Campbell admired Akenside’s “skill” in “delineating the processes of memory and association,” and the “animated view” he gives of “Genius collecting her stores for works of excellence.”¹²¹ “If little invention is exhibited,” Alexander Dyce would later aver of Akenside’s poetry, “the taste and skill with which the author has selected and combined his materials are everywhere conspicuous.”¹²² Akenside was less admired, in other words, as a poet of inspiration, though this has often been claimed by succeeding generations, than he was admitted to be an able conservator of his imaginative resources, effective at fleshing concepts out, “embodying” them in images.

Among Locke’s list of the metaphors which remind us that abstracts may be traced to embodied experiences (“imagine, apprehend, comprehend, conceive …”), “imagine” emerges as a special category. The organization or manipulation of images is in Locke’s system the basic instrument of the intellect. The imagination is the stage where sensible ideas are liberated, by way of the word, into concepts. It is where the “transfer” occurs, for it is where sensory perceptions of material things are handed over to the work of the understanding. It is the stage where metaphor is made possible, where sensory rudiments are witnessed by the mind and sublimated into ideas.¹²³ But there is another way, in poetic practice, in which imagination emerges as the antonym for metaphor understood as abstraction, for “imagination” is more generally understood as the faculty that summons up images in service of the concepts they are made to represent. This is what Akenside and his contemporaries called “embodiment”: the idea is “embodied” in an image. Imagination in this sense denotes the reverse work of metaphor, providing a return road to sensory experience; it for this very reason suggests a set of rules and practices for poetry and the arts, a way of imagining expression as the distribution of images in service of a pattern or design. It is this reverse vector that made Locke, despite his distrust of fancy, an important figure to poets and painters of the Augustan mode. Locke’s Essay links a wide range of practicing poets, painters, authors, and artists of all sorts, each of whom differently agreed that the materials of sense are, in the end, the stuff of creative expression.

Akenside’s longest poems, what he called his epics, draw directly from the empiricist tradition elaborated by Milton, Locke, Pope, and, most important, Joseph Addison (Exhibits 12 and 13). Aside from standing next to Addison on the library shelf, Akenside’s inheritance is signaled by the titles of his two longest, best-known compositions: The Pleasures of Imagination (1745) and its recast version with the slightly altered title, The Pleasures of the Imagination (1772). Each differently owes intellectual debts to Addison’s 1712 Spectator essays of the same name—so much so that Akenside, despite explicit homage, was more than once accused of plagiarizing details from Addison’s essay.¹²⁴ But it would be hard to know how else Akenside might proceed—for Akenside was all along a poet who thought of himself as an able curator of images, who worked by fleshing out ideas. The nineteenth-century critic John Aikin remarks that, if Akenside was “an original writer,” he “merit[s]” that title “by the expansion of the plan” of Addison’s “Pleasures of the Imagination,” “and by enriching its illustrations from the stores of philosophy and poetry.”¹²⁵ Indeed, in this sense, Akenside extends a principle of borrowing that, we will see, was a keynote of Addison’s poetics; as Addison remarked, and as Akenside exemplified, “Wit and fine Writing doth not consist so much in advancing things that are new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable Turn.”¹²⁶ Akenside was working with and through a theory of imagination as a curatorial function—the imagination as collecting in order to recollect objects of sense.¹²⁷ Take, for instance, the clearest exposition of what, exactly, the imagination is, from his Pleasures of the Imagination:

For to the brutes

Perception and the transient boons of sense

Hath fate imparted: but to man alone

Of sublunary beings was it given

Each fleeting impulse on the sensual powers

At leisure to review; with equal eye

To scan the passion of the stricken nerve

Or the vague object striking: to conduct

From sense, the portal turbulent and loud,

Into the mind’s wide palace one by one

The frequent, pressing, fluctuating forms,

And question and compare them.¹²⁸

At the moment that he theorizes the imagination as a storehouse of ideas, and the human act of aesthetic appreciation (and judgment) as an imaginative act of “review,” Akenside recalls from his resources a material metaphor to realize it. This is the basic pattern of his poem. His basic move is to “imagine” abstracts, a habit that at times develops a metronomic regularity. It is perhaps fair to say that his thoughts on the imagination remain hopelessly abstract until he lights upon the “palace” as a visual or spatial metaphor to recollect his argument, returning the abstract idea to its material rudiments.¹²⁹ The form Akenside chooses—the mind as palace—is a conventional one, husbanded perhaps from Locke’s “presence room” (see Exhibit 1), the three-turreted palace of Spenser’s Temperance, Addison’s “Pleasures of the Imagination” (Exhibit 14), Adam’s remarks on fancy in Paradise Lost (Exhibit 2), or any number of treatises on the operation of the soul (see, for example, Exhibits 4 and 11). The palace, presence chamber, throne room, and so on, have multiply stood for the relationship between reason and the fancy—so much so that the image becomes by Akenside’s moment a commonplace, indeed a commonplace that Akenside expected his readers to visualize while reading. Perhaps Akenside is repeating a poetic technique he learned from Raphael, “delineating” his “spiritual to corporal forms, / As may express them best.” This pattern in any case emerges for Akenside as a consistent conceptual trope, a coordinating condition governing the operations of imagination; the imagination under its curatorial aspect is marked by its return to a collection of ideal objects—as they rise or are arranged under the poet’s review.

For Locke, metaphor governs the progress of sensations to abstracts; for Akenside, it governs the movement whereby abstracts are returned to sensation. The “complicated resemblance existing between … the material and immaterial worlds,” as Akenside elsewhere avers, “is the foundation of metaphor,” and in his poetics metaphor itself is repeatedly put to the task of imagining this resemblance.¹³⁰ The most embracing of these images is, for Akenside, the “palace” with its ideal objects on review. Naturally, then, when Akenside encounters an epistemological crux, he follows the path worn by Raphael; he follows the route of metaphor back to the ground of intellection, tracing his way from difficult questions of process back to images drawn from the material world. He returns concepts, via the return-route of metaphor, to their material affordances. This is the great power of his poetry, which seeks sensory, bodily marked experience as the proper site for intellectual work. He therefore rediscovers the subterranean tendency of Locke’s epistemology to insist on the material origins of intellect, indeed on mind and reason rising into being simply from the hoarding up of material impressions. So, for instance, when Akenside offers a portrait of a young poet, we receive a virtual summary of Locke’s theory of the mind as the entelechy of its material impressions, his story of how the powers of the intellect and its self-awareness emerge out of the accrual of ideas. The young poet gathers and retains images no less accurately than “th’ expanse / of living lakes” reflects “the bord’ring shade and sun-bright heav’ns” or than “the sculptur’d gold … keeps the graver’s lively trace.”¹³¹ These are clearly unequal examples, held together only by Akenside’s syntax—but taken together they offer images of the mind’s image-making and -storing capacities; combined, they offer a description of the “mixt treasures” over which the “child of fancy oft in silence bends,” and the very working of the mind as an organ of storage and manipulation. With the collection of such images, “the mind / Feels her young nerves dilate: the plastic pow’rs / Labour for action,” rising to self-awareness of its autotelic capacities in an obvious rehearsal of Locke’s remarks on judgment as an emergent property of the mind’s collection of ideas.

Like Locke’s ideal man, Akenside’s poet is limited to the sorting and variation of the “diff’rent forms” summoned up from memory—or, Akenside suggests, spontaneously offered up by memory itself. It is in this sense that “imagine” provides abstraction’s opposite. As a poet, Akenside suggests, reposes in the company of the images internal to his mind, a “design / Emerges” from the hurry of phantasms, and he “breathes / The fair conception … / Into its proper vehicle.” This provides a new, fully realized world of sensory rudiments, remediated in paper, paint, or clay, becoming “to eyes or ears / An object ascertained,” once again to be witnessed by a new observer. As readers, we arrive late. “Line by line, / And feature after feature,” Akenside insists, “we refer / To that sublime exemplar whence [poetry] stole / Those animating charms,” the “conception” or “abstraction” that the poet has “breathed” back into material being. The active work of imagination reverses the Lockean vector of intellect, for what Locke understands as the “abstraction” of “concepts” from images assembled in the imagination to words, names, species, and general ideas is returned by Akenside to the “picturing” of “conceptions” or “abstractions.” While Locke expects the mind to coordinate a kind of “transfer” or “metaphor” from image to idea, Akenside expects the imagination to articulate a “reference,” a “ferrying back” to the original experiences of the senses. From Locke’s “transfer” we have arrived at Akenside’s “refer.”¹³²

Aside from the poetic epistle, there is no single conceit in the Museum more common than the dream. As a site of the Muses, the Museum is a collection of dream work. The dream, under the system elaborated by Akenside, offers a formal justification for the organization of images; dreams relay a sponsoring idea or conception through sensory materials. Moreover, it offers the promise of an arrangement seemingly in the absence of intention, the pure shifting of a moral truth or concept back into the material figures that might be thought to have produced it in the first place. Inspiration for poems like these emerges from outside the poet. Addison, for instance, falls asleep musing on a coin; he dreams the coin’s adventures (see Exhibits 12 and 21). Elsewhere, he falls asleep after reading a collection of letters about people deserving of fame; this offers the justification for his allegorical dream of the “Table of Fame” (Tatler 81), a vision of Fame’s allegorical high table of worthies. Akenside reads Addison’s “Table of Fame” just before drifting off to sleep—or so he says; his essay in the Museum is the record of the dream that followed. Each of these records a certain kind of inspiration—of the sort Hollis no doubt expected Akenside to experience in Milton’s bed. The notion is that a conception or extended idea gathered from an arrangement of objects in waking may, autotelically, generate a corresponding arrangement of objects for the delectation of the intellectual eye. This is creativity as a sort of borrowing, inspiration as abstraction from objects of the senses. The dream record, in the curatorial aesthetic of the eighteenth century, is the opposite of what we might expect; unencumbered by the demands of discourse or the requirements of polite form, it emerges as more methodical, more austerely systematic than the highly rhetorical performances of forms like the poetic epistle.¹³³

Akenside’s dream begins with Akenside dozing over Addison’s essay; he has been “amused” with the “pleasing Manner in which” Addison has “introduced” fame and its subjects, dwelling in Addison’s vision until he “formed [his] own Mind” to “composure and stillness.” This composure is refigured in his dream as an “immense Plain,” where Akenside “walks” until he meets an allegorically overdetermined “Figure of great Dignity.” Thomas Campbell, writing in 1820, remarked on what he called the artificiality of Akenside’s “figures”; he insisted that Akenside’s “illustrations for the most part only consist in general ideas fleetingly personified.”¹³⁴ This is certainly what is going on in Akenside’s dream essay; figures emerge as a function of the idea they are made to reproduce. This “Figure of great Dignity” is Akenside’s Muse, the figure of his inspiration; it leads him “immediately” to a “very spacious Building,” where a review of similar figures will be assembled. Here, the poet arrives to a sort of palace where will be put on review what he would later, in his Pleasures of Imagination, call the “frequent, pressing, fluctuating forms” of imagination work.¹³⁵ Striking about the dream is the way that it strives to create order from disorder, proceeding from an odd mixture of ornaments and “innumerable Crowd[s] of People,” a confused and uncertain “Crowd of Figures,” to a severely ordered and numbered arrangement of historical persons seated in order around a table.¹³⁶ The dream, once its sponsoring figure is introduced, does not vary from the single effort to arrange particular, historically real people around a single table, according to their varying celebrity. The dream in fact becomes more rather than less systematic as it wears on, perfecting the allegory as it assembles its figures. This is how Akenside’s imagination works; it arranges figures according to the design of an idea, or, put differently, a museum according to his Muse.

The full contours of the poetic process are on display in Akenside’s dream essays. “The Table of Modern Fame” is a straight form of the genre, taking its rise out of, and offering as though in epitome, the materials immediately at Akenside’s hand. Akenside had for several months been occupied compiling reviews of histories and biographies for the Museum;¹³⁷ his learning and mental development during this intense period of composition is registered in the many reviews of historical and natural philosophical treatises he had been reading. But it is also to be registered in dream essays like this one, which repeat that reading in small. Akenside’s dream vision is overrepresented by people who would have been called the “moderns,” including several members of the New Philosophy. Bacon takes his place near Fame, displacing Columbus. The dreamer insists that the “Discovery of a new World” was “but a slender Acquisition of crude Materials” that are “improv’d and perfected in that immense World of Human Knowledge and Human Power … discover’d” by the natural philosopher. Galileo, Harvey, Newton, and Locke are also seated there, with Milton and Pope. Except for a brief scuffle among comic authors, ending the dream by waking the dreamer, the essay concludes with the relatively elaborated entrance of Milton, the “blind, old Man,” who enters with the “Air of an ancient Prophet,” supported (and emblematically represented) by the “Genius of England.” Milton is the last to enter, and hence is seated at the end of the table. But in the way that the essay strives to order its materials, in fact to put disordered public materials into the greater order of the dream space, the mutability of Milton’s position, and indeed of fame generally, is corrected in the discourse which accompanies his entrance; the dreamer’s “Conductor” insists that Milton will “continually ascend … in the Goddess’s Favour,” in order “at last [to] obtain the highest, or at least the second Place in these her Solemnities.” Joseph Warton celebrated the essay as among the Akenside’s chief accomplishments, a signal example of his particularly curatorial mind. “The guests,” he notes, “are introduced and ranged with that taste and judgment which is peculiar to the author.”¹³⁸ Like the “throne of the goddess” of Modern Fame itself, which is “composed of different Materials, laid up in a beautiful Architectonick Manner,” the dream means elegantly to order mental materials according to a single, attenuated idea. And these guests, in the style of a battle of the books, are personifications of the biographies and histories Akenside had been reading.

This dream, and Milton’s place in it, help signal what made Hollis’s gift so welcome. Dry as this dream is, it offers a full portrait of Akenside in his cognitive bed. Eve’s bed is haunted by Satan, but Milton’s bed (like Akenside’s, which it was to become) is inhabited by crowds of poets, authors, thinkers, and statesmen. It is the place where collections of things, whether by reading or the wide way of the senses, are posed in meaningful arrangements and returned to language. Wordsworth is unfair in claiming that because the scholar in his cabinet “drinks the spirit breathed / From dead men” that the scholar must therefore be of “their kind”; it is through conference with the dead that poets like Akenside found themselves most fully inspired. What Akenside inherited from Locke and Milton was in the end a set of convictions about language as metaphor, sustaining distinctions between body and mind, even while guaranteeing the embeddeness of ideas in haptic experience. This is what caused it to resonate for Akenside, for the bed was the very site where Milton was reputed to have done his most exacting cognitive work.