VII

An ominous cloud hovered over the Enlightenment: the fear that, for all their faith in the progress of humanity, all their secular evangelizing,

[75] See K. V. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth; Penguin, 1973); and also H. Leventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1976).

[76] On mesmerism and similar sympathetic powers see W. Falconer, A Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions upon Disorders of the Body (London: C. Dilly, 1788); John Haygarth, Of the Imagination, as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body (Bath: Cadell and Davies, 1800); and, amongst modern scholarship, R. Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass., 1968); Jonathan Miller, "Mesmerism," The Listener, 22 Nov. 1973, 685-690; Roy Porter, "Under the Influence: Mesmerism in England," History Today, September 1985, 22-29.

all their optimistic demythologizing crusades, the human animal himself might not prove fit for the programs of education, organization, and consciousness-raising that the philosophes were mobilizing. Might there be some secret soul within? Some metaphysical je ne sais quoi no microscope could ever detect? For the Voltaire of Candide, as well as the Johnson of Rasselas, man seemed only to have the definitive capacity for making himself miserable. For the Diderot of Rameau's Nephew, man was all antitheses (perhaps like Pope's vile Sporus), a chameleon, a monster even. And the Shandy males (in what remains one of the most highly genderized "cock and bull" stories in any language) argued themselves into incapacity. The culture of sensibility thus seemed to entrap itself in a maze of contradictions, and not least, as that famous if corpulent "nerve doctor" George Cheyne contended long before Freud, the pursuit of civilization brought only the discontents of the "English Malady."^[77] All these ironies were encapsulated in that archetypal Enlightenment disorder variously called hypochondria,^[78] melancholy, hysteria, low spirits, depression. Call it by any other name, wax skeptical even, it remained psychological misery nonetheless.

Stated otherwise, the eighteenth century that aimed to erect a Newtonian moral science, discover the laws of thinking and action, and generate social technologies to pave the way for progress, increasingly stumbled upon hidden depths within the human animal that hindered organized improvement. The boundless and willful anarch, the imagination, was one such sphere. Enlightenment writers continually expressed their anxieties at what Samuel Johnson brilliantly called "the

[77] On sensibility see Erik Erametsa, A Study of the Word "Sentimental" and of Other Linguistic Characteristics of Eighteenth-Century Sentimentalism in England (Helsinki, 1951); Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986); L. Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility (Detroit, 1962); more broadly cultural are S. Moravia, "The Enlightenment and the Sciences of Man," History of Science 18 (1980): 247-268; idem, "From 'Homme machine' to 'Homme sensible': Changing Eighteenth-Century Models of Man's Image," Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 45-60; K. Figlio, "Theories of Perception and the Physiology of Mind in the Late Eighteenth Century," History of Science 13 (1975): 177-212; and on the positioning of the "English Malady," as Cheyne christened the peculiar nature of English melancholy within the wider history of mental illness, see Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression from Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).

[78] See E. Fischer-Homberger, "Hypochondriasis of the Eighteenth Century, Neurosis of the Present Century," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 46 (1972): 391-40l. For the politics of hypochondria in Britain see Roy Porter, "The Rage of Party: A Glorious Revolution in English Psychiatry?" Medical History 29 (1983): 35-50; and much other recent scholarship devoted to the medical career of Dr. George Cheyne.

hunger of imagination," that power of wishing or fantasizing which captivated the consciousness and paralyzed the will, driving individuals into dreamworlds of delusion and flights of phantasmagoria. Imaginaton—and worse still, fancy—had disturbingly ambiguous resonances.^[79]

Not least, growing fears were expressed that exercise of imagination entailed the direst practical consequences for both genders. A growing literature laid bare the dangers of fantasy-induced nymphomania in young women, and, above all, masturbation in both sexes.^[80] Earlier ages had construed masturbation as a relatively harmless physical abuse, in response to ordinary genital irritation. Enlightenment doctors such as Samuel Tissot, however, reconceptualized onanism not as physically stimulated but as the product of a warping of the mind, overheated by diseased imagination. As such, it was more perilous. Indeed, because imagination was so central, onanism was far more dangerous than mere fornication, more habit-forming, more corrupting of the fabric of character, and ultimately more deleterious in its long term effects.

In other fields too, as Roy Porter's chapter suggests, Enlightenment writers grew preoccupied with the evil consequences of vices which they saw as stemming from mental habits. Excessive drinking paradoxically ceased to be regarded as a vice of excess, with essentially physical sequelae, and increasingly was diagnosed as the expression of mental disorder. Narcotic-taking was also seen in a similar light to drunkenness. Coleridge presents the paradox of a thinker whose Romantic commitments made him unfold a heroic vision of the transcendental indepen-

[79] For the ambushes of imagination, see S. Cunningham, "Bedlam and Parnassus: Eighteenth-Century Reflections," Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (1971): 36-55; Roy Porter, "The Hunger of Imagination: Approaching Samuel Johnson's Melancholy," in The Anatomy of Madness, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd (London, 1985), 1:63-88.

[80] G. S. Rousseau, "Nymphomania, Bienville and the Rise of Erotic Sensibility," in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. P. -G. Boucé (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 95-120; Roy Porter, "Love, Sex and Madness in Eighteenth Century England," Social Restarch 53 (1986): 211-242' And for masturbation, see P. -G. Boucé, "Les jeux interdits de I'imaginaire: Onanism et culpabilisation sexuelle au XVIlle siècle," in La folie et le corps, ed. J. Ceard (Paris: Presses de I'Ecole Normale Supérieure, 1985), 223-243; E. H. Hare, "Masturbatory Insanity: The History of an Idea," Journal of Mental Science 108 (1962): 1-25; R. H. MacDonald, "The Frightful Consequences of Onanism," Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967): 323-341; J. Stengers and A. Van Neck, Histoire d'une grande peu. La masturbation (Brussels: University of Brussels Press, 1984); L. J. Jordanova, "The Popularisation of Medicine: Tissot on Onanism," Textual Practice 1 (1987): 68-80; and for a wider vision of bourgeois culture as leading to a masturbatory privatization of the body, F. Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (New York: Methuen, 1984).

dent mental faculties of reason and imagination, but whose everyday addition to opium—he called it a " free-agency-annihilating Poison"—illustrates both the practical reality of growing addiction to narcotics and its recognition as a disease of the mind. Yet Coleridge was the prophet of mental autonomy who enslaved himself. In his View of the Nervous Temperament, delivered almost at the graveside of the Enlightenment, the British physician Thomas Trotter exposed the modern philosophy of desire—classically expressed in the terms of utilitarianism—as the pathogenic agent perverting civilization into a drug culture, a mocking materialization of that scientific vision of mechanical man, subject to the laws of cause and effect, so dear to the Enlightenment.^[81]

Thus, in one of the great ironies of history, that "mind" which the Enlightenment set out to expose as a "fiction" fought back and reasserted itself, in surprising and troublesome fashions. For one thing, its pathological face was revealing itself. For late-eighteenth-century medicine was, as Dora Weiner demonstrates below, coming to recognize that lunacy was not just seated in the blood, nerves, or brain, but was an authentically mental disorder, requiring to be treated with "moral" means (the limitations of such methods would not become apparent until rather later),^[82] For another, mind went underground. As Ellenberger and Whyte have shown, the notion of the "unconscious" was taking on an at least inchoate existence in the age of sensibility, coming out in the culture of Romanticism. The Age of Reason closed, so to speak, with increasing, if grudging, homage to its opposite.^[83]

Profound currents of Enlightenment thought, we have argued, set about challenging the sovereignty of Mind, because it regarded that

[81] See Roy Porter, ed., Introduction to Thomas Trotter, An Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical, on Drunkenness (London: Routledge, 1988; 1st ed., 1804). See also idem, "The Drinking Man's Disease: The Prehistory of Alcoholism in Georgian Britain," British Journal of Addiction 80 (1985): 384-396. For other paradoxes arising out of the mind/body problem and the emergence of ideology, see idem, Mindforg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London: Athlone, 1987); idem, "Body Politics: Aproaches to the Cultural History of the Body," in Historiography Today, ed. P. Burke (London: Polity Press, forthcoming).

[82] On moral therapy see A. Digby, Madness, Morality and Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); idem, "Moral Treatment at the York Retreat," in The Anatomy of Madness, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, 2 vols. (London, 1985), 2: 52-72; W. F. Bynum, "Rationales for Therapy in British Psychiatry 1780-1835," Medical History 18 (1974): 817-834.

[83] L. L. Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud (New York: Doubleday, 1962); H. P. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York, 1971).

sovereignty, in its traditional hierarchico-theological forms, as objectively reactionary and ideologically subservient to tyrannies, personal, social, and political. Mind/body dualism was an instrument of power. Progressives such as Condorcet aimed to undermine such traditions by insisting that consciousness was merely an expression of body-based impressions and sensations.^[84] Yet across the spectrum of experience the result was not as expected. For one thing, Romanticism emerged—eventually throughout Europe—as a triumphant vindication of mental individuality, an irreducible integrity, a celebration of uniqueness. And at the same time a mocking deviousness of the will asserted its resistance, manifest in its extreme form as mental morbidity, or what Freud honored as the psychoneuroses. These twin developments might respectively be represented as, on the one hand, the naturalization of theism, and, on the other, the survival of satanic possession.

Together they paradoxically combined to ensure the endurance of the age-old dualism. Throughout the nineteenth century—long after one can validly conjure up Enlightenment debates of any type—fierce challenges to mind were made. These came not only from expected quarters—in the name of credos and cults, the church at large, all the arts—but also from such newly developing academic subjects as anthropology, sociology, psychology, and, in some ways most crucially, from the newly privileged discourse of psychiatry. Body and consciousness played elusive roles in this nineteenth-century evolution of an old relationship: by now a worn-out dialectic, even a reciprocity. Too amorphous to be pinned down or pegged to anything concrete in an age of incremental positivism, consciousness was still viewed either in its mental or physical states, but rarely as the expression of a holistic unit called man or woman. Those who persistently pleaded for body tended to enforce the dualism, in its rhetorical antithesis more forcefully than anywhere else.

Thus minds and bodies were assured a legacy as individual entities, even by those whose unequivocal aim in the nineteenth century, and afterward, was to quash its durability. As the nineteenth century wore on, ever persuaded that its scientific discoveries were new and complacent in the belief that its predecessor (the century of Enlightenment)

[84] K. M. Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975) is a fine study of the late Enlightenment's most important social scientist-cum-prophet. Also relevant are R. V. Sampson, Progress in the Age of Reason (London: Heinemann, 1956), and C. Vereker, Eighteenth-Century Optimism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1967).

had uncovered nothing worthy of preservation, its discourses of mind and body became politically more explosive than they had been. Pardoxically again, the dialogue acquired a type of collective authority that enfranchised, even guaranteed, the survival of the already age-old dualism.

Looking back from the vantage point of our century, one can predict that such a sensitized view of mind and body will result in impasse. Indeed, as the nineteenth century wore out, it became practically impossible to become dialogical about mind and body in any open-ended sense (here Bakhtin was the great exception). If mind was construed as Self, and body as Other—a fair construction considering the degree to which man's rationality was celebrated in the long nineteenth century—one sees why neutral debates could not be held about the mind/body relationship which were incorporative, recuperative, or homogenizing of the Other. By the turn of the twentieth century, the desire to understand otherness—whether mind or body—was no longer ideologically or even politically acceptable, except as small waves and insignificant currents in an ocean of selfhood. The mainstream remained divided, as laboratory dualists and philosophical monists, for example, worked independently of the Other. Our dominant late-twentieth-century attitude to mind and body, in contrast, has entailed something of a denouement: less polarized, less dialogical, a topic less urgent among those who plead for integration, as entire segments of civilized society concede that they are entrapped in the dualism while hoping to escape from it, or dismiss its existence, altogether.