Part One
Theories of Mind and Body

One
Introduction:
Toward a Natural History of Mind and Body

G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter

I

The mind/body problem has long taxed Western thought. This book is not, however, another contribution to the philosophical argument about mind/body relations per se.^[1] Rather, the common endeavor uniting these essays amounts to something different, the desire to explore the problem of the mind/body problem. In their different ways, all the authors investigate why it has been the case (and still is) that conceptualizing consciousness, the human body, and the interactions between the two has proved so confusing, contentious, and inconclusive—or, as we might put it, has acted as the grit in the oyster that has produced pearls of thought. Furthermore, the volume as a whole has the wider purpose of taking that mind/body dichotomy which has been such a familiar feature of the great philosophies and locating it within its wider contexts—contexts of rhetoric, fiction, and ideology, of imagination and symbolism, science and religion, contexts of groups and gender, power and politics. To

[1] Rigorous study of the mind/body relationship construed in the philosophical sense begins as a subset of the philosophy of mind in the nineteenth century, and a case can be made that there are traces of it evident in eighteenth-century rational thought. By the time the journal Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy was launched in England in 1876, the mind/body relationship was a widely discussed philosophical topic and a valid field of serious inquiry, as is evident, for example, in books written by diverse types of authors. See, for example, the philosopher George Moore's The Use of the Body in Relation to the Mind (London: Longman, 1847), Benjamin Collins Brodie's Mind and Matter (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1857), and the famous British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley's medico-philosophical study of Body and Mind (London, 1873).
By the turn of the twentieth century, discussions of mind/body continued to flourish in the major European and American schools of philosophy, as can be seen in the tradition from Wittgenstein to Gilbert Ryle and A. J. Ayer, and in such works as the well-known philosopher C. D. Broad's The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1925). More recently, see R. W. Rieber, ed., Body and Mind: Past, Present and Future (New York: Academic Press, 1980); Nell Bruce Lubow, The Mind-Body Identity Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); Michael E. Levin, Metaphysics and the Mind-Body Problem (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Norman Malcolm, Problems of Mind: Descartes to Wittgenstein (New York: Harper and Row, 1971)—authors writing on the relationship from different perspectives and for different diachronic periods. The literature is vast and continues to produce scholarship, as can be surmised from the entry on "Mind and Body" in the recently published Oxford Companion to the Mind, ed. R. L. Gregory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 204.

speak of the mind/body problem as if it were a timeless abstraction, a topos for unlimited discussion by countless symposia down the ages, would be to perpetuate mystifications. It must itself be problematized—theorized—in relation to history, language, and culture. And here, the first thing to notice—a bizarre fact—is the paucity of synthetic historical writing upon this profound issue.^[2]

[2] The historiography of the mind/body relationship extends, of course, as far back as the Greeks and demonstrates a long tradition of speculation, so abundant that it would be foolish to attempt to provide any sense of its breadth in the space of a note. But we want to comment on the main curves of the heritage of mind and body, especially by noticing the supremacy of mind over body throughout the Christian tradition, and the reinforcement of this hierarchy in the aftermath of Cartesian dualism. Both mind and body received a great deal of attention in the Enlightenment, and it is one of the purposes of this book to annotate this relationship in a variety of discourses, more fully than the matter has been studied before. There is also a large literature, scientific and mystical, secular and religious, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that treats of the mind's control over the body or the converse: see, for instance, the Paracelsian physician F. M. van Helmont: The Spirit of Diseases; or, Diseases from the Spirit...wherein is shewed how much the Mind Influenceth the Body in Causing and Curing of Diseases (London, 1694). Other works attempted to demarcate the boundaries of mind and body, such as John Petvin's Letters concerning Mind (London: J. and J. Rivington, 1750); John Richardson's (of Newtent) Thoughts upon Thinking; or, A new theory of the human mind: wherein a physical rationale of the formation of our ideas, the passions, dreaming and every faculty of the soul is attempted upon principles entirely new (London: J. Dodsley, 1755); and John Rotherham's On the Distinction between the Soul and the Body (London: J. Robson, [1760]), a philosophical treatise aiming to differentiate the realm of mind from that of soul. Still other discourses, often medical dissertations written with an eye on Hobbes's De Corpore (1655), actually aimed to anatomize the soul as distinct from the brain in strictly mechanical terms; see, for example, Johann Ambrosius Hillig, Anatomie der Seelen (Leipzig, 1737). In all these diverse discourses, the dualism of mind and body was so firmly ingrained by the mid eighteenth century that compendiums such as the following continued to be issued: Anonymous, A View of Human Nature; or, Select Histories, Giving an account of persons who have been most eminently distinguish'd by their virtues or vices, their perfections or defects, either of body or mind...the whole collected from the best authors in various languages ...(London: S. Birt, 1750).

More recently, in the Romantic period, there was realignment of the dualism often in favor of the body, as J. H. Hagstrum has noted in The Romantic Body: Love and Sexuality in Keats, Wordsworth and Blake (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985). In our century, the discussion has proliferated in a number of directions. On the one hand, there is a vast psychoanalytic and psychohistorical literature that we do not specifically engage in this volume but whose tenets can be grasped, if controversially, in Norman O. Brown's Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), a classic expression of the Freudian viewpoint; and in Leo Bersani's The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). On the other, the philosophy of mind within the academic study of philosophy has continued to privilege mind over body. But there is now also a tradition of revaluation that (at least nominally) attempts to view the mind/body relationship neutrally, giving each component allegedly equal treatment no matter which diachronic period is being studied, and still other critiques that view body in relation to society, as, for instance, in A. W. H. Adkins, From the Many to the One: A Study of Personality and Views of Human Nature in the Context of Ancient Greek Society, Values and Beliefs (London: Constable, 1970), and in Bryan Turner's The Body and Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). Francis Barker's The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (New York: Methuen, 1984), represents the reconstruction of the body according to the lines of modern literary theory.

Other, more diverse, studies pursuing literary, artistic, political, and even semiotic relationships include: David Armstrong, Political Anatomy of the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Leonard Barkan, Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); Body, Mind and Death, readings selected, edited and furnished with an introductory essay by Anthony Flew (New York: Macmillan, 1964); J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Inquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (London: Cape, 1970); Robert E. French, The Geometry of Vision and the Mind-Body Problem (New York: P. Lang, 1972); Jonathan Miller, The Body in Question (London: Cape, 1978); Gabriel Josipovici, Writing and the Body (Brighton: Harvester, 1982); for a literary interpretation, see M. S. Kearns, Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987). Rebecca Goldstein, the British novelist, has written a novel about the dualism entitled The Mind-Body Problem (London, 1985).

During this decade there has been a proliferation of studies of the body in respect of gender, as in: Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); idem, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988); Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, eds., The Making of the Modern Body (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1986); Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). The full range of studies of the body in our time will become apparent when Dr. Ivan Illich's comprehensive bibliography of "The Body in the Twentieth Century" appears.

If we acknowledge a certain plausibility to Alfred North Whitehead's celebrated dictum that all subsequent philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, we might be especially disposed to the view that the mind/body

problem is amongst the most ancient and thorny—yet fundamental and inescapable—in the Western intellectual tradition. For the predication of such differences was one of Plato's prime strategies. In attempting to demonstrate against sophists and skeptics that humans could achieve a true understanding of the world, Plato developed rhetorical ploys that postulated dichotomies between (on the one hand) what are deemed merely fleeting appearances or shadows and (on the other) what are to be discovered as eternal, immutable realities. Such binary opposites are respectively construed in terms of the contrast between the merely mundane and the truly immaterial; and these in turn are shown to find their essential expressions on the one side in corporeality and on the other in consciousness. The construction of such a programmatically dualistic ontology provides the framework for epistemology, since for Plato, the only authentic knowledge—not to be confused with subjective "belief" or "opinion"/is that which transcends the senses, those deceptive windows to the world of appearances. But it is equally the basis for a moral theory, as dozens of philosophers have shown: knowing the good is the necessary and sufficient condition for choosing it, and right conduct constitutes the reign of reason over the tumult of blind bodily appetites.

The Homeric writings are innocent of any such clear-cut abstract division between a unitary incorporeal principle called mind or soul, and the body as such. So too the majority of the pre-Socratic philosophers. But "Enter Plato," as Gouldner put it, and the terms were set for philosophy.^[3] And, as Whitehead intimated, the formulations of post-Platonic philosophies can be represented as repeatedly ringing the changes upon such foundational propositions. Admittedly, as early as Aristotle, there was dissent from Plato's postulation of Ideas, or ideal forms, as the eternal verities indexed in the empyrean; yet in practice the Aristotelian corpus affirmed the equally comprehensive sovereignty of mind over matter in the natural order of things, which found expression—ethical, sexual, social, and political—in his images of the good man (the gender is significant) and his superior status within the hierarchies of the family, economy, polity, and cosmos. And in their varied ways, most other influential philosophies of antiquity corroborated the elemental Platonic interpretation of the order of existence as organized through hierarchi-

[3] Alvin Gouldner, Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory (New York: Basic Books, 1965) emphasizes how Plato makes a break with earlier thought traditions. A good introduction to Plato's strategies is offered by G. M. A. Grube, Plato's Thought (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980). Popper's attack upon Plato is worth remembering in this context: Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London, 1945). See also Bennett Simon, Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978).

cal dochotomies that dignified the immaterial over the physical, and, specifically, mind over the flesh that was so patently the seedbed of mutability and the harbinger of death. Through its aspirations to "apathy"—and, if necessary, in the final analysis, suicide—Stoicism aimed to reduce the body to its proper insignificance, thereby liberating the mind for its nobler offices. Neoplatonists in the Renaissance and later, with their doctrines of love for higher, celestial beings, likewise envisaged the soul soaring upward, in an affirmation of what we might almost call the incredible lightness of being.

Moreover, the rational expression of the Christian gospel, drawing freely upon Platonic formulas, was to recuperate the radical ontological duality between mind and gross matter in its assertion that "in the beginning was the Word." (Here, of course, are the origins of the logocentrism that proves so problematic to our contemporaries.) Various sects of early Christians, from Gnostics to Manichaeans, took the dualistic disposition to extremes, by mapping the categories of good and evil precisely onto mind and body respectively, and urging modes of living—for example, asceticism or antinomianism—designed to deny the demands of the body in ways yet more drastic than ever the Stoics credited.^[4]

II

There is no need in this Introduction to provide a detailed route-map through the history of Western thought, charting the course taken by such dualistic ontologies of mind over matter, mind over body, ever since antiquity gave it its philosophical, and Christianity its theological, expression, and Thomist Scholasticism synthesized the two. Nevertheless, something substantial must be said about the natural history of mind and body. Otherwise, the stunning essays in this volume will appear to be less integrated than they are, and the chapters by Foot and Popkin may appear to fall outside the book's stated scope. In fact, Foot's chapter demonstrates that the accounts of motivation in both Locke and Hume depend upon an antecedent theory of mind and body: as motives belong to the realm of the mind, the emphasis on pleasure and pain in the thought of Locke is not readily understood without taking account of his well-developed mind/body relation. Popkin's claim, in contrast, is

[4] F. Bottomley, Attitudes to the Body in Western Christendom (London: Lepus Books, 1979); Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

that racism always depends to a certain extent on the anthropological and biological assumptions of its proponents, and although he assumes rather than adumbrates the point, the biology of an era necessarily reflects a substratum of philosophical ideas concerning empiricism and magic, mechanism and vitalism, materialism and immaterialism, reason and unreason—in short, all those constellations that converged into "mind-body" during the Enlightenment. These ideas, sometimes coherent, sometimes not, fed into the ocean of Enlightenment thought we are calling "mind and body," and although The Languages of Psyche does not undertake to compile any proper history or route-map of the conjunction, we (the collective authors) believe that the mind/body relation possesses a rather intricate natural history that must be articulated here if the essays that follow are to be appreciated.

Influential Renaissance teachings on the nature of man and his place in nature—in particular, those of Ficino and Pico—articulated Christian versions of Neoplatonic idealism;^[5] Christian Stoicism was soon to have its day. And Descartes's celebrated "proof" of the mind/body polarity—under God, all creation was gross res extensa with the sole exception of the human cogito —confirmed the priority and superiority of mind with a logical éclat unmatched since Anselm, while providing a vindication of dualism both deriving from, and, simultaneously, legitimating, the "new science" of matter in motion governed by the laws of mechanics. Furthermore—and crucially for the future—Descartes contended that it was upon such championship of the autonomy, independence, immateriality, and freedom of res cogitans, the human consciousness, that all other tenets fundamental to the well-being of that thinking subject depended: man's guarantees of the existence and attributes of God, the reality of cosmic order and justice, the regularities and fitnesses of Creation.

Micro- and macrocosmic thinking, ingrained as part of the medieval habit of mind, found itself reinvigorated by the Cartesian dualism. Whether this was owing primarily to religious or secular developments, or again to the challenge given to the "old philosophy" by the "new science," continues to be the subject of fierce controversy among a wide variety of historians on many continents. But the progress of micro-macrocosmic analogies itself is unassailable. For the Malebranchians and Leibnizians, Wolffians and Scottish Common Sense philosophers who

[5] Valuable here are Paul Kristeller, Renaissance Thought (New York: Harper, 1961); Charles Schmitt and Quentin Skinner, eds., The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

manned the arts faculties of eighteenth-century universities, instructing youth in right thinking, the analogy of nature underlined the affinities between the divine mind and the human, each unthinkable except as reflecting the complementary Other. From the latter half of the seventeenth century, it is true, rationalist and positivist currents in the European temper grew increasingly skeptical as to the existence of an array of nonmaterial entities: fairies, goblins, and ghosts; devils and wood demons; the powers of astrology, witchcraft, and magic; the hermetic "world soul," and perhaps even Satan and Hell themselves—all as part of that demystifying tide which Max Weber felicitously dubbed the "disenchantment of the world."^[6] Yet subtle arguments were advanced to prove that such a salutary liquidation of false animism and anthropomorphism served but to corroborate nonmaterial reality where it truly existed: in the divine mind and the human. For many eighteenth-century natural philosophers and natural theologians, the more the physical universe was drained by the "mechanicization of the world picture" of any intrinsic will, activity, and teleology, the more patent were the proofs of a mind outside, which had created, sustained, and continued to see that all was good.^[7]

It would be a gross mistake, however, to imply that Christian casuistries alone perpetuated canonical restatements of the mastery of mind over body. The very soul of the epistemology and poetics of a Romanticism in revolt against the allegedly materialistic attitudes and aesthetics of the eighteenth century was the championship of mental powers, most commonly finding expression through the idea of the holiness of imagination and the transcendency of genius. Genius and imagination, no matter how designated, had been among the commonest themes of the rational Enlightenment: the basis of its developing discourse of aesthetics; the salt of its political theory, as Locke and Burke showed; even the ideological underpinning of its "scientific manifestoes."^[8] Later on,

[6] See the argument in R. D. Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

[7] For the relations of God and Nature see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

[8] Illuminating on the philosophy of imaginative genius are J. Engell, The Creative Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); P. A. Cantor, Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and, more generally, G. S. Rousseau, "Science and the Discovery of the Imagination in Enlightenment England," Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1969): 108-135, and E. Tuveson, The Imagination as a Means of Grace (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960).

contemporary philosophical Idealism in the form of Hegel-on-horse-back likewise interpreted the dynamics of world history as the process whereby Geist, or spirit, realized itself in the world, spiraling dialectically upward to achieve ever higher planes of self-consciousness. And we must never minimize the Idealist thrust of the developmental philosophies so popular in the nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle era—from Bosanquet and Balfour to Bergson, and influenced by Hegelianism no less than by the Origin of Species —which represented the destiny of the cosmos and of its noblest expression, man, as the progressive evolution of higher forms of being out of lower, and in particular the ascent of man from protoplasmic slime to the Victorian mind.^[9]

Given this philosophical paean down the millennia affirming the majesty of mind, it is little wonder that so many of the issues which modern philosophy inherited hinged upon mapping out the relationships between thinking and being, mind and brain, will and desire, or (on the one hand) inner motive, intention, and impulse, and (on the other) physical action. In one sense at least, Whitehead was a true child of his time. Twentieth-century philosophers such as G. E. Moore still puzzled over the same sorts of questions Socrates posed, wondering what the shadows flickering on the cave walls really represented, and pondering whether moral truths exist within the realm of the objectively knowable. Not only that, but the kinds of words, categories, and exempla in circulation to resolve such issues have continued—for better or worse—to be ones familiarized by Plato, Locke, or Dewey.^[10]

To its credit, recent philosophy—as Philippa Foot energetically argues below—has urged the folly of expecting to find solutions to these ancestral problems through honing yet more sophisticated variants upon the formulas traded by post-Cartesian rationalism or Anglo-Saxon empiricism. A few more refinements to utilitarianism or the latest model in associationism will not get us any further than will laboratory experiments in search of the true successor to the pineal gland. And when Richard Rorty pronounces the death of philosophy in his latest tour de force,^[11] one wonders to what degree the age-old dualism has conspired to cause it. Rorty, like Foot, suggests that philosophers had just as well throw up their hands—perhaps even do better by denying the dualism

[9] See Peter Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

[10] See J. Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (New York: Basic Books, 1966).

[11] Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

of mind and body altogether. It may be, as Rorty maintains, that, philosophically speaking, "there is no mind-body problem,"^[12] and that as a consequence Rorty is entitled, as a professional philosopher, to cast aspersions on, even to crack grammatical jokes about, all those who believe there is. For this reason, Rorty believes that "we are not entitled to begin talking about the mind and body problem, or about the possible identity or necessary non-identity of mental and physical states, without first asking what we mean by 'mental.'"^[13] And as a direct consequence of his aim to shatter Cartesian dualism and the philosophies that built on its further dualisms all the way up to Kant, Rorty can announce his own aim in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature as being "to undermine the reader's confidence in the 'mind' as something about which one should have a 'philosophical' view, in 'knowledge' as something about which there ought to be a 'theory' and which has 'foundations,' and in 'philosophy' as it has been conceived since Kant."^[14]

Above all, new bearings in philosophy—especially the way Wittgenstein proved a seminal impulse for many, phenomenology for others—have reoriented attention away from the traditional envisaging of emotions, desires, intentions, states of mind, acts of will, and so on, as "things," as inner natural objects with a place within some conceptual

[12] Ibid., 7. Rorty's fervor to smash dualism is everywhere apparent. For example, in this same introductory section entitled "Invention of the Mind," Rorty writes: "at this point we might want to say that we have dissolved the mind-body problem" (32), and a few sentences later, on the same page, "the mind-body problem, we can now say, was merely a result of Locke's unfortunate mistake about how words get meaning, combined with his and Plato's muddled attempt to talk about adjectives as if they were nouns."

[13] Ibid., 32. Rorty continues this passage by derogating the grand aims of contemporary professional philosophy: "I would hope further to have incited the suspicion that our so-called intuition about what is mental may be merely our readiness to fall in with a specifically philosophical language game." Here Rorty's polemical pronoun ("our") shrewdly hovers between professional philosophers on the one hand and interested amateurs who have thought about the dualism of mind/body on the other.

[14] Ibid., 7. The implication would seem to be equally true for the "body." But historically speaking, there have been three species of books about body, all of which have produced a large number of metacritiques in the last century: (1) those written by philosophers of mind with an interest in keeping the dualism (Rorty would say "philosophical language game") alive by diminishing the importance of body when considered in its physiological, or neurophysiological, state; (2) those by scientists (anatomists, physiologists, neurophysiologists, and other empirical laboratory experimenters) often concerned to demonstrate that the dilemmas called linguistic by the philosophers are actually as yet unexplored neurophysiological mysteries related to the workings of the central nervous system; and (3) those by a broad range of historians and other cultural commentators interested in the social dimensions of the mind/body problem when considered with respect to individuals or societies viewed collectively.

geography of the self, the causal connections between which it is our duty to discover by introspection and thought experiments. Such a reified view of being, thinking, and acting—a Marxist critic might say it is no more than is to be expected within commodity capitalism—has sustained devastating attack, and modern crosscurrents in philosophy have been claiming that we should rather attend to the meanings of our moral languages understood as systems of public utterance. Thereby we might escape from the sterilities of a figural mechanics of the mind which, as Alasdair MacIntyre has emphasized, and as Rorty has now demonstrated, threatened to drag moral philosophy down into a morass, and address ourselves afresh to more urgent questions of value and choice.^[15]

Comparable processes of revaluation have also transformed literary theory. In England, Victorian criticism (itself sometimes proudly hitched to the wagon of associationist psychophysiology) commonly believed its mission was to judge novelists and playwrights for psychological realism: were their dramatis personae credible doubles of real people? Somewhat later, various schools of criticism, enthused by Freudian dogmas, went one stage further, and took characters out of fiction and set them on the couch, attempting to probe into their psyches (how well was their unconscious motivation grasped?) and into the unconscious of their authors (how were their fictions projections of their neuroses?). Today's criticism has discredited such preoccupations with the physical presence and the psychic potential of characters as banal, as but another form of literal-minded reification. For many theorists today, especially the feminists, the task of dissecting the body of the text is coeval with that of the body of women, while the traditional notion of the authorial mind as creator—a notion reaching its apogee in Romanticism—has yielded to a fascination with genre, rhetoric, and langauge as the informing structures.^[16]

[15] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).

[16] In the process, the human body is abandoned, and discourses consulting the human form rather than "the body as text" or "the body as trope" become increasingly rare. Amongst them see John Blacking, The Anthropology of the Body (London: Academic Press, 1977); Julia L. Epstein, "Writing the Unspeakable: Fanny Burney's Mastectomy and the Fictive Body," Representations, Fall 1986, 131—166; Robert N. Essick, "How Blake's Body Means," in Unnam'd Forms: Blake and Textuality, ed. Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1986). The more usual approach applies the paradigm "read the body—read the text," as if to equate the two through a metonymy, and as discovered in so many (often excellent) works of contemporary feminism (see those mentioned in n. 2 above). But these trends appear to be absent, or at least minimal, in contemporary philosophy; see, for example, Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Further reasons for this recent development, viewed within the context of literary theory, are provided in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (London: Routledge, 1989).

We may applaud the transcendence—in philosophy, in criticism, and elsewhere—of crude mechanical models of the operations of thinking and feeling, willing and acting. This is not, however, to imply that the interplay of consciousness and society, of nerves and human nature, has somehow lost its meaning or relevance. Far from it, for it is important, now more than ever, to be able to think decisively about the ramifications of mind and body, their respective resonances, and their intersections, because the practical implications are so critical.

For ours is a material culture that is rapidly replacing the received metaphors that help us understand—or, arguably, mystify—the workings of minds and bodies. Deploying such models is nothing new. To conceptualize the mind, suggested Plato, think of the state; the understanding begins as a blank sheet of paper, argued Locke (for Tristram Shandy, by contrast, its objective correlative was a stick of sealing wax). Above all, during the last few centuries, the proliferation of machinery—watches, steam engines, and the like—has provided models for the functions of corporeal bodies and the processes of the understanding; the image of thinking as a mill, grinding out truths, was especially powerful.

Indeed, as Otto Mayr has remarked, particular forms of technology may even determine—or, at least, shape distinctive ways of viewing the mind itself.^[17] Clockwork mechanisms as found in watches yield images of man, individual and social, as uniformly and predictably obeying the pulse of centrally driven systems. Such a behaviorist image of man-the-machine, Mayr suggests, was particularly prominent in the propaganda of ancien régime absolutism (and we may add, in images of factory discipline in the philosophy of manufactures). In Britain, the more complex regulatory equipment of the steam engine, with its flywheels and contrapuntal rhythms, perhaps offered a rather different metaphor of man: that of checks and balances, counterpoised within a more decentralized and self-regulating whole, suggestive perhaps of a kind of individuality in tune with the English ideology. And, more recently, in the aftermath of late-nineteenth-century positivism, neurobiology and neurophysiology have become persuaded that mind is brain, and that

[17] O. Mayr, Authored, Liberty and Automatic Machines in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); L. Mumford, The Condition of Man (London, 1944); idem, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963).

the brain is an entirely mechanical, machine-like instrument whose operations are barely understood because of the vastness of its complexity.^[18] In this sense, the human brain is more complex than the largest computer.^[19] This radical mechanism, shunning any traces of vestigial vitalism (of the old Bergsonian or Drieschian varieties), forms the unarticulated basis of practically all laboratory biology and physiology today, yet its roots, vis-à-vis mind and body, extend at least as far back as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In a sense, then, mechanism, at least viewed within its mind/body context, has come full circle back to its Cartesian, and somewhat post-Cartesian, model.^[20]

Mechanical models—realized in Vaucansonian automata—were obviously integral to Cartesian formulations of man as an intricate piece of

[18] For the reciprocity of mind and brain, see Patricia S. Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986); John Eccles, The Neurophysiological Basis of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953); idem, Brain and Human Behavior (New York: Springer Verlag, 1972); idem, The Understanding of the Brain (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973); Marc Jeannerod, The Brain Machine: The Development of Neurophysiological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); Morton F. Reiser, Mind, Brain, Body: Toward a Convergence of Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Fred A. Wolf, The Body Quantum: The Physics of the Human Body (London: Heinemann, 1987). Arguing against the radical mechanism of these positions is Herbert Weiner, M.D., "Some Comments on the Transduction of Experience by the Brain: Implications for Our Understanding of the Relationship of Mind to Body," Psychiatric Medicine 34 (1972): 355-380. For the shrewd input of a Nobel laureate in physics on the question of material reciprocity, see E. P. Wigner, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Princeton University, "Remarks on the Mind-Body Question," in The Scientist Speculates: An Anthology of Partly Baked Ideas, ed. I. J. Good (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 284-302.

[19] Victor Weisskopf, Knowledge and Wonder: The Natural World as Man Knows It (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979), 244.

[20] The endurance of these Cartesian models, from Descartes to the present, in regard to the mind/body dualism, as well as in such disparate academic territories as linguistics, medicine, and psychology, is discussed in William Barrett, Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer (New York: Doubleday, 1986); Richard B. Carter, Descartes' Medical Philosophy: The Organic Solution to the Mind-Body Problem (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Harry M. Bracken, ed., Mind and Language: Essays on Descartes and Chomsky (Dordrecht and Cinnaminson, N.J.: Foris Publications, 1984); Marjorie Grene, Interpretations of Life and Mind: Essays around the Problem of Reduction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971); idem, Descartes (Brighton: Harvester, 1985); Kenneth Dewhurst and Nigel Reeves, eds. Friedrich Schiller: Medicine, Psychology and Literature (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1978); E. H. Lenneberg, Biological Foundations of Language (New York: Wiley, 1967); Amélie Oksenburg Rorty, Essays on Descartes' Meditations (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1986); Margaret D. Wilson, Descartes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); Albert G. A. Balz, Descartes and the Modern Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952). Some of these topics are anticipated in René Descartes, Lettres de Mr Descartes, où sont traittés les plus belles questions de la morale, physique, médicine, & les mathématiques (Paris: C. Angot, 1666-1667).

mechanism yoked, however mysteriously, to an undetermined mind—the whole amounting to the notorious "ghost in the machine."^[21] Such Cartesian mechanical metaphors—widely condemned by Romantics old and new for their supposedly disembodying and alienating implications^[22] —were commonly drawn upon, with rather conservative intent, to reinforce the age-old belief that homo rationalis was destined, from above, to govern those below.

But there are also significant differences between these old Romantic views of our world of artificial intelligence and cognition theory. The material analogues in vogue today, by contrast, are arguably far more challenging and less flattering to entrenched human senses of self. Ever since Norbert Wiener and Alan Turing, cybernetics, systems analysis, and the computer revolution have been changing our understanding of the transformative potentialities of machines. If the Babbagian computer was merely a device to be intelligently programmed "from above," the computers of today and tomorrow have intelligence programmed into them, and they possess the capacity to learn, modify their behavior, and "think" creatively—in a sense, to evolve. The more the notion of "machines that think" becomes realized, the more urgent will be the task of clarifying in precisely which ways we believe their feedback circuits differ from ours; or perhaps we will have to say, the ways in which those alien, artificial intelligences believe our calculating operations differ from theirs ! Human/robot interactions, once the amusing speculations of science fiction, may ironically become the facet of the mind/body problem most critical to that twenty-first century which is but a decade away. What is it, if anything, that gives us a "self," a personality, entitling us to rights and duties in a society denying these to artificial intelligence? Today, as in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the philosophers, especially philosophers of mind, speak out on these vital subjects. John Searle and many others regard "free will"—the traditional predicate of autonomous mind—as an unsatisfactory and obsolete answer.^[23] And it is one of the strengths of Philippa Foot's chapter that she demonstrates the eighteenth-century legacy of this continuing problem.

[21] For this Cartesian legacy, see Aram Vartanian, Diderot and Descartes: A Study of Scientific Naturalism in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953); and see, of course, Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (London: Hutchinson, 1976).

[22] For modern critics of the supposedly dire consequences of Cartesian dualism, see F. Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture (New York, 1982); M. Berman, The Re-enchantment of the World (London, 1982).

[23] John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). Modem neurosurgeons have made useful contributions to this subject, especially within the contexts of the complex ways in which the brain processes language in relation to a perceived external reality and to the role of the will within this reality, a subject of immense concern to poststructuralist theory, especially Derridean and post-Derridean deconstructionism. Among these Fred Plum, M.D., has been especially eloquent; see, for example, F. Plum, ed., Language, Communication and the Brain (New York: Raven Press, 1988); G. Globus, ed., Consciousness and the Brain (New York: Plenum, 1976).

III

If airing such issues may still seem frivolous or futuristic, it can hardly be fanciful to focus attention upon the transformations that living bodies and personalities are nowadays undergoing. Spare-part surgery became a fait accompli long before philosophers had solved its moral and legal dilemmas. Surgeons have implanted the kidneys, hearts, lungs of other humans, and even other primates. Surely such developments (it might have been thought) must have caused intense anxiety for identity in a culture that still speaks—if metaphorically—of the heart as the hub of passion and integrity, and the brain as the seat of reason and control. But it hardly seems to have proved so. Should we conclude that we are all Cartesians or Platonists—or maybe even Christians—enough to regard the bits and pieces of the body as no more than necessary but contingent appendages to whatever we decide it is that does define our unique essence? One wonders (skeptically) whether we would feel as nonchalant about brain transplants. Are we sufficiently confident in our dualism to believe that acquiring another's brain would not make us another person, or, indeed, a centaur-like monster? Contemporary philosophers such as Thomas Nagel think not,^[24] and Professor Foot reminds us to what degree Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke and Hume pondered these matters, albeit in a different key.

And more perplexing perhaps, because more imminent, what of the implantation of fragments of brains, or elements of the central nervous system? Would these involve dislocations of identity?—the equivalent perhaps to the caricaturists' macabre vision of the Day of Judgment when the bodies of those dissected by anatomists and dismembered in war arise, yet with their parts grotesquely muddled and misassembled. Here we seem to be on terrain already laid bare by current practices within psychological medicine. In the psychiatric hospital, advances in neuropsychiatry enable us, through drugs and surgery alike, radically to transform the behavior and moods of the disturbed, so that we colloquially say that they have turned into "another"—indeed, a "new"—person. Can somatic interventions thus make a whole new self? Because the patients involved are "psychopathological" cases, to which regular

[24] Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); idem, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

public legal constraints may not apply—or because, to put it crudly, such developments have been largely pioneered in the back wards, out of sight and out of mind—the dystopian implications of such medically induced personality transformations do not always receive full attention.^[25]

Yet our dramatically increased capacity to wreak such changes, to make "new men" of old, is obviously a matter of great moment for the natural history of the somatic/psychic interface. The ethical and legal ramifications are obviously epochal—although law courts in their own fashion currently tend to handle such issues on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis, often hearing the authority of biology in the distant background. The widening horizons of genetic engineering, reproductive technology, and gender-change operations raise parallel issues as to wherein the unique—and permanent?—human personality should be deemed to reside: is it in genetic material that is essentially somatic, in particular organs, or in an experiential je ne sais quoi such as memory? (It may be one thing for the law, another for morality, and something different for the people themselves.)

Finally, though certainly not least, all these issues have been sharpened by our new technologies for managing death. Until quite recently, death was defined by some palpable and natural organic termination: the heart stopped beating, the breath of life expired. Even among the more superstitious and mystical, the "will to live" (Life Force?) was translated into organic dysfunction or disease. Medical technology, however, has marched on, from iron lungs to resuscitators and respirators. The implicit Cartesian in us can happily accept that a person remains alive even after the cessation of spontaneous body activity such as the heartbeat. But does that not leave us without a certain index of death at all?—or, indeed, signs of life? (Are some people simply more dead, or more alive, than others?) Medical attention has, of course, switched to the concept of "brain death"—which itself implicitly trades upon the humanist assumption that what finally defines mortal man is consciousness, while also embodying the more specifically modern faith that, while mind may still be more than brain, the needles registering presence of electrical impulses in the cortex betoken that the mind is still "alive." The paradoxical outcome of this eminently "humane" chain of reasoning is that we nowadays aggresively keep "alive" those in whom none of the indices of consciousness recognizable to the "naked eye" survive.^[26]

[25] For criticism of invasions of the rights of mental patients, see T. Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Paladin, 1961). See also idem, Pain and Pleasure: A Study of Bodily Feelings (London: Tavistock Publications, 1957).

[26] On the modern medicalization of death see R. Lamerton, The Care of the Dying (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980).

IV

The argument so far has accentuated two points (the second developed below). First, the question about how we envisage the two-way traffic between mind and body is of fundamental concern for us today as well as for diverse cultural historians concerned with the diachronic past. It determines matters of grave import—ethical, legal, social, political, personal, sexual. The intricacies of exchange between consciousness and its embodiments are not gymnastic exercises designed to tone up mental athletes for the philosophers' Olympics, but are integral to everyone's intimate sense of what being human is and ought to be. Mental and physical interaction is a subject extending far beyond the historian's workshop or the philosopher's purview.^[27] Idiomatic expressions—being somebody or nobody, or a nobody, being in or out of one's mind—prove the point beyond a shadow of doubt.

Thus our understanding, private and public, of mind and body has always been deeply important—for the law of slavery no less than for the salvation of souls. Yet it is crucial that we avoid the trap of hypostatizing "the mind/body problem" as if it were timeless and changeless, one of the "perennial questions" of the master philosophers—indeed, itself a veritable Platonic form, immemorially inscribed in the "aether." Toward this goal, amongst others, The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought is largely dedicated: especially to the contextual dimensions and social implications of the two-way traffic. The terrain is so vast that we (the collective authors) have been able to cover only a few facets of this broad contextualism and historicism, and many volumes would be required to fill in the canvas more adequately. Even in specific terrains, history—social and political, religious and economic—has taken its toll. For one thing, as already suggested, the dilemmas involving disputed readings of psyche/soma relations, and the terms in which discussion has been conducted, have been radically transformed over the centuries.^[28]

[27] Despite the unassailability of the crucial function they play there. For example, the late American philosopher Susanne Langer devoted her entire professional career to the interaction of mental and physical phenomena in an attempt to generate an aesthetics based on the link. See her Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scribner. 1953) and Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967-1982).

[28] Cf. W. I. Matson, "Why Isn't the Mind-Body Problem Ancient?" in Mind, Matter, and Method, ed. P. K. Feyerabend and G. Maxwell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966). This matter of origins viewed within the context of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century debates is discussed by Douglas Odegard in "Locke and Mind-Body Dualism," Philosophy 45 (1970): 87-105, and Hilary Putnam in "How Old la the Mind?" in Exploring the Concept of Mind, ed. Richard Caplan (Iowa City: Universky of Iowa Press, 1986).

At one time, to take an example, proof of the existence of a consciousness seemingly independent of this mortal coil counted because it seemed confirmation of a soul destined, as was hoped, for a glorious immortality; nowadays, by contrast, many defend autonomy of the mind against scientistic reductionisms predsely because no such heavenly bliss after death can be expected. Early-eighteenth-century thinkers were not confronted with organ transplants as problems for practical ethics. They did, however, puzzle themselves, at least mock-seriously, about the status of Siamese twins: one body, two heads—but how many souls did such creatures have?^[29] Other philosophers and projectors of the time asked what a "soul" was anyway? Did all moving creatures possess one? When was soul acquired? Did it make any sense to ponder a cat's soul or a cow's? Could a black African be said to have the same soul as a white? (Blake's "little black boy" in Innocence was born "in the southern wild" and is black: "but oh," he pleads, "my soul is white.") These and other similar questions were asked under as many agendas as there were philosophers. The notion of multiple "personality," of course, came much later, once the techniques of hypnotism and dynamic psychiatry had revealed the disturbing presence of a plurality of apparently hermetically-sealed chambers of the consciousness (cogito ergo sumus, as it were).^[30] In other words, concepts such as "soul" and "personality" must be handled with care, paying due respect to their resonances in context over time.

Second—and this is the key contention which forms the rationale for this volume—it would be a mistake to speak of the mind/body problem as if it were a conundrum that has always existed. Rather mind/body relations became pressing in the guise of the mind/body problem only rather recently, and in response to specific cultural configurations. Above all, it was the eighteenth century (to deploy that diachronic expression somewhat elastically) and the intellectual movement we term the Enlightenment, which problematized this feature of the human condition. How was this so? This is the question—construed in its broadest contexts—which we (the collective authors in this book) aim to address, fully aware that we want to continue dialogue about the matter, rather than to suggest any ultimate explanations or final words.

[29] See C. Kerby-Miller, ed., Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (New York, 1966), for the sad story of Indamira and Lindamora.

[30] See S. P. Fullinwider, Technologies of the Finite (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982).

As indicated above, mainline philosophical currents from the Greeks onward adumbrated a mythic conceptual geography which, in its value hierarchy, elevated the ideal above the material, the changeless over the mutable, the perfect over the processual, the mental over the physical, the free over the determined, and superimposed each pair upon the others. Demonstrating such an order of things could not, it is true, be achieved without some ingenuity and acumen. After all, the existence of the eternal form of a table and the survival of the soul beyond the body, are neither of them immediate objects of sense experience.

Nor could such a metaphysic be established without intellectual aplomb. Aristotle's polished conceptualization of nature, for instance, is a far cry from the messy chaos of contrary motions and kaleidoscopic multiplicity of shapes which greets the innocent eye.^[31] Christian apologetics in particular had to overcome what prima facie appear to be profound internal tensions, not to say contradictions, in its theology. The Christian faith, zealous in its denigration of the (original) sinfulness of the flesh, set particular value upon the immortal destiny of a unique, personal soul (an element absent, in different ways and for distinct reasons, from both Neoplatonism and Judaism). Yet at the same time, and no less uniquely, the Scriptures revealed that embodied man was made in God's image, that God's own Son was made flesh, and that His incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection were typologically prophetic of a universal resurrection of the flesh at the impending Last Judgment. Few creeds made too much of the otherworldly, but none so honored the flesh. This particular tension lay at the root of Augustine's ambivalence, forming the substratum of his ethics and epistemology, as well as his troubled view of mind in relation to body.^[32] And those Christian exegetes and scholiasts who followed in Augustine's steps commented upon the paradox of flesh and fleshless within a single credo.

Thus the articulation of orthodox Christian theology might well be read as a heroic holding operation, attempting to harmonize the most unlikely partners. Through the Middle Ages and into early modern times, churchmen battled against the flesh, extolling asceticism, mortification, and spirituality, while believers were almost ghoulishly fascinated by the seemingly incorruptible tissues, freshly spurting blood,

[31] Michael V. Wedlin, Mind and the Imagination in Aristotle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

[32] For Augustine on mind and body see F. Bottomley, Attitudes to the Body in Western Christendom (London: Lepus Books, 1979), and Jean H. Hagstrum, The Romantic Body (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), chap. 2.

and weeping tears of long-dead saints, yet simultaneously awaiting the resurrection of the body in expectation of a very palpable orgy of bliss in heaven.^[33] The endlessly controversial status of the Eucharist—did the sacrament truly mean consuming the blood and body of the Savior? or was it essentially an intellectual aide-mémoire of Christ's passion and atonement?—perfectly captures the essential tension between the spirit and incarnation within Christianity.

Nor was the triumph of the "mind over body" metaphysic achieved without opposition. After all, antiquity itself had its atomists and materialists—Democritus, Diogenes, Epicurus, Leucippus, Lucretius—who in their distinct ways discarded the radical dualism of matter and spirit, denied the primacy of spirit, and proposed versions of monistic materialism which reduced the so-called nobler attributes to particles in motion and to the promptings of the flesh under what Bentham much later called the "sovereign masters, of pleasure and pain." The history of orthodox theology from Aquinas onward amounted to a war of words: a logomachy waged on behalf of what Ralph Cudworth, the late-seventeenth-century Platonist, was tellingly to call the True Intellectual System of the Universe, against advancing armies of alleged atomists, eternalists, mortalists, materialists, naturalists, atheists, and all their tribe of Machiavellian, Hobbist, and Spinozist fellow travelers, who were all supposedly engaged in hierarchy-collapsing subversion, intellectual, religious, political, and moral.^[34]

Many have doubted whether these leveling metaphysical marauders were in fact real (or at least, numerous)—or were rather, as might be said, ideal, or ideal types—demonic bogeymen invented to shore up orthodoxy. They have doubted with good reason. Research is uncovering a larger presence of sturdy grass-roots materialism—as exemplified by Menocchio the Friulian Miller, with his cosmology of cheese and worms—than once was suspected.^[35]

[33] Such paradoxes are brilliantly illuminated in P. Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); see also idem, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); idem, The Body in the Cosmos: Natural Symbols in Medieval and Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).

[34] See Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

[35] E. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou (New York: Vintage, 1979); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (New York: Penguin, 1982). For the culture of "plebeian" materialism, see M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Polities and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986).

Yet, after every qualification, it is clear that the overarching hierarchical philosophy of the mind/body duo became definitive for official ideologies in a European sociopolitical order which was itself massively and systematically hierarchical.^[36] Often articulated through correspondences between the bodies terraqueous, politic, and natural, the mind/body pairing was congruent with, and supported by, comprehensive theories of cosmic order which attributed to every last entity of Creation its own unique niche on that scale of beings stretching from the lowest manifestation of inanimate nature up to nature's God. On this great chain, the material was set beneath the ideal, and man was "the great amphibian," pivotal between the two.^[37]

This bonding of mind and body was, moreover, all of a piece—as hinted above—with a divine universe presided over by a numinous celestial wisdom. Were mind not lord over matter—were the relations between man's soul, consciousness, and will on the one side, and his guts and tissues on the other truly baffling and ambiguous, would that not have been a scandal in a cosmos created and ruled by a Transcendent Mind, pure Being? As Simon Schaffer argues below in regard to Joseph Priestley, only what one might call perversely heterodox believers, with theologicopolitical fish of their own to fry, would contend that the doctrines of immaterial minds and souls so cardinal to Christian orthodoxy were downright heresies. Lies, moreover, even inimical to the gospel, and, by contrast, promoting a deterministic philosophical materialism as their pristine faith, were problematical in another way.

There was, of course, abundant scope within Christian belief for heresy, and much of that was radical. Yet most rebel creeds involved attacks upon the banausic "knife-and-fork" materialism of paunchy prelates and the espousal, from Luther through the New Light and the Church of Christ, Scientist, of more intensely spiritual outlooks that established churches with their feet on the ground of Rome or Canterbury allowed. Many of the most exciting, modernizing philosophical movements in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries aimed to slough off what were seen as the excessively materialist Aristotelian components of Scholasticism, replacing them with the more idealistic doctrinces of Neoplatonism and Neo-Pythagoreanism and dozens of grass-roots varieties of the two. Reijer Hooykaas, the contemporary Dutch historian of

[36] L. Barkan, Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the Worm (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

[37] A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936) remains the classic discussion of the meanings of hierarchical metaphysics.

science, has suggestively drawn attention to the congruence between the Protestant God and the transdendental voluntarism of the "new philosophy."^[38] It is a similitude—or at least a convergence—that needs to be weighted in all our discussion of the mind/body relationship in modern times.

Hence the first comprehensive and sustained questioning of mind/body dualism, and the wider cosmology of which it was emblem and authorization, came with the Enlightenment.^[39] The relationship was eventually analyzed, explored, questioned, contested, and radically re-formulated—a great intellectual wave sweeping over western Europe from the middle of the seventeenth century onward. The terms of the debate were fierce and the stakes (in the cases of scientists and divines) could be high. Indeed, some even rejected root-and-branch its very terms. There was no single line of attack, and certainly no uniform outcome. It was a dialogical undertaking—in Bakhtin's sense—whose grandness could only be gleaned in the architectural magnificence of its details; in the case at hand, in the ramifications and implications of the debate that seemed to touch on every single subject under the sun. But in a multitude of ways, as the contributions to this volume reveal, what hitherto had been taken as a fact of life—albeit not without its difficulties and unrelenting tensions—became deeply problematic to many and repugnant to some.

In certain respects the fabric came apart at the seams not because of ideological animus or ulterior political motives, but because inquiry inevitably uncovered loose threads begging to be pulled. Essentially internal investigations in science and scholarship, new discoveries and technical advances, all served inevitably—though not uncontroversially—to modify the mental map. As Robert Frank shows below, anatomy was one of these fields. Ever since the Renaissance endeavors of Vesalius, Fallopius and others, the forging of more sophisticated techniques of postmortem dissection as part of the rise of anatomy teaching stimulated

[38] R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1972). Illuminating also are I. Couliano, Eros et magic à la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1984), and W. Leiss, The Domination of Nature (New York, 1972); and, for the long-term retreat of the "animist" worldview, E. B. Tylor's anthropological classic, Primitive Culture (1871).

[39] Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon, 1964) remains the most penetrating account of the metaphysics of the Enlightenment. S. C. Brown, ed., Philosophers of the Enlightenment (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979) contains valuable discussions of philosophes from Locke to Kant.

intense curiosity about the relationship between structure and function, normalcy and pathology, the living body and the corpse on the slab.

As well as investigating muscles, bones, and, most celebratedly, the vascular system, seventeenth-century anatomy devoted fertile attention to the nerves. These nerves became the European sport of anatomists and physiologists, whose narrative discourses reveal to what degree the nerves also engaged the imagination, and often, the genius, of these scientists. The pathways between nerve endings, the central nervous system conducted along the spine, and the distinct chambers of the brain were finely traced, above all by the English physician and scientist Thomas Willis, with a precision vastly outstripping Galen's pioneering investigations. Such work invited inferences not merely about the role of the brain both as the receptor of nervous stimuli from the senses and the transmitter of motor signals, but about the localized functions of the distinct brain structures: cerebrum, cerebellum, and so forth. The logic of anatomical investigation was offering every encouragement, not merely to the general intuition that the brain was connected with thinking, but to the more radical prospect that specific pieces of gray matter governed identifiable facets of sensation, ideation, and behavior.^[40]

There was of course nothing new in a broad, essentially mechanistic, "medical materialism"—the perception of every doctor (indeed, every patient) that physical states affect consciousness; such views, as Carol Houlihan Flynn emphasizes below, were of a piece with the most orthodox humoralism. What was new and challenging about Willis's "neurologia" and "psyche-ologia" was that it pinned down the mind remarkably—even uncomfortably—close to the brain. In making these observations, Willis had no grander ax to grind. Blamelessly orthodox in his Anglicanism and a true-blue royalist in politics, he was no protophilosophe. Even his use of language—a prose style that was closer to Bacon than to the more baroque Sir Thomas Browne and Thomas Bur-net of his own time—was remarkably conventional and augured for scientific style the plain prose advocated by Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society.^[41] But his own work and later investigations by others

[40] For Willis see also Hansruedi Isler, Thomas Willis, 1621-1685, Doctor and Scientist (New York: Hafner, 1968); and on the nerves, J. Spillane, The Doctrine of the Nerves (London: Oxford University Press, 1981); G. S. Rousseau, "Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility," with a postscript, The Blue Guitar (Messina) 2 (1976): 125-153; idem, "Psychology," in The Ferment of Knowledge, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 143-210.

[41] There is no study of Thomas Willis's prose style, certainly no exploration approaching the work that has been completed for Sprat, Thomas Burnet, and other early prominent members of the Royal Society. For the debates over rhetoric and science within the Royal Society at this time see Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); idem, ed., Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); also useful for the linguistic milieu of all those post-Cartesian figures is Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, 8 March 1980, by Brian Vickers and Nancy S. Struever (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 1985); and Hans Arsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

such as Albrecht von Hailer (the Swiss Enlightenment physiologist) into the nervous system and its functions of irritation and excitability, were easily appropriated by those whose vision of a "science of man" (to complement and complete the "science of nature" which had been so successfully pursued in the seventeenth century) was intended as a weapon of war against the entrenched cosmology, theology, and politics.

V

This is no place to retell the tale of the Enlightenment, or even of the role of scientific materialism within it.^[42] As Peter Gay has emphasized, however, we must never forget that the sharpest intellects of the generations from the late seventeenth century forward were primed to be systematically critical of old orthodoxies, and eager to map out newfound worlds, cognitive as well as physical. The voyages of discovery, the philological criticism pioneered by Renaissance humanists, the dazzling techniques of historical inquiry, and the new science accelerating from Galileo to Newton all joined forces to question traditional authorities as graven in the authority of books, including the Book of God's Word and delivered in the ipse dixits of the ancients and the entrenched hand-me-down orthodoxies of metaphysics, Scholasticism, and custom. To set human understanding on a sure footing, searching inquiries had to be initiated into man's nature and his place within the entire living system, into his natural faculties, propensities, and endowments, his history, his social ties, his prospects. And if the proper study of mankind was man, as the great English poet had pronounced, such knowledge (it was claimed) patently could not be plucked down from abstract eternal witnesses or looked up in books, but had to be grounded upon firsthand facts, derived from observation and experiment, subject to the searing

[42] For admirable introductions, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Vintage, 1966-1969); Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968).

sunlight of criticism.^[43] Yet few pursuits in the history of science in the modern age invigorated empiricism more than the dilemma of mind and body. It was a dualism almost guaranteed to elicit the latest strain in every man and woman.

The mobilization of such programs—Hume spoke for his age in expressing his aspiration to become the Newton of the moral sciences—broke down, or at least left uncertain and indeterminate, that overarching structure of analogies and correlations between the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the universe which had been the guarantor of traditional epistemologies. This was the larger "breaking of the circle" about which the late Marjorie Hope Nicolson has written so eloquently,^[44] but the collapse was felt as much in the domain of mind and body as in the organic and inorganic sciences. Indeed, Hume's skeptical Dialogues of Natural Religion questioned the very possibility that man could attain to any determinate understanding of his (teleological) station within the cosmos, or any grasp of the meaning of the universe, just as his radical moral philosophy appeared to deny that the order of the natural world could provide the basis for an ethical code by which to live.^[45]

Hence in a multitude of ways, Enlightenment inquirers convinced themselves that the highest priority for a true understanding of man—to serve as the basis for the critique and reform of society—must be (to use Hume's terms) an Inquiry into Human Nature. This was an endeavor conducted in a variety of fields or disciplines—we may anachronistically call them politics, religion, aesthetics, psychology, anthropology, history, and so forth—by the distinguished succession of thinkers from Bayle and Locke, through Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, and La Mettrie, and on to Helvetius, Diderot, d'Holbach, Rousseau, Lessing, and Herder, to say nothing of innumerable lesser figures. Their outlooks were often remarkably diverse, as they debated and disagreed on levels extending beyond methodological and clerical ones. Also, their vantages differed in accordance with national and regional cultures and changed over

[43] Paul Hazard, The European Mind, 1680-1715 (Cleveland: Meridian, 1963), and idem, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century: From Montesquieu to Lessing (Cleveland: Meridian, 1963) capture, in vivid language, the effervescence of intellectual transformation produced by the new science, scholarship, and geographical discoveries. See also R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Background of the Battle of the Books (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1936).

[44] See M. H. Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the "New Science" upon Seventeenth-Century Poetry, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960).

[45] See David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, ed. N. Kemp Smith (New York: Social Science Publishers, 1948).

time^[46] Yet when viewed as a whole, the movement served to destroy the traditional notion—the creed of Milton, Pascal, Racine, and Bossuet—that man had been placed in a divinely ordered universe as a unique compound of immaterial and immortal soul and mundane, mortal body, as Sir Thomas Browne's "great amphibian":

to call ourselves a Microcosm, or little World, I thought it onely a pleasant trope of Rhetorick, till my nerr judgement and second thoughts told me there was a real truth therein. For first we are a rude mass, and in the rank of creatures which onely are, and have a dull kind of being, not yet priviledged with life, or preferred to sense or reason; next we live the life of Plants, the life of Animals, the life of Men, and at last the life of Spirits, running on in one mysterious nature those five kinds of existences, which comprehend the creatures, not onely of the World, but of the Universe. Thus is Man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is desposed to live, not onely like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds; for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason, the one visible, the other invisible.^[47]

Many philosophes, sketching in what was often called a "natural history" of man, believed it was imperative to treat man less as a fixed and final object of creation, an "Adam," than as the product of time, circumstances, and milieu—the creature of education (as Locke, Condillac, and Helvetius especially stressed),^[48] of climate and physical environment (Montesquieu), of physical evolution (Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck),^[49] or of history (Vico, Boulanger, Ferguson, Miller, Herder).^[50] Man's physique and consciousness were both the result of processes of

[46] A point argued in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

[47] The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 6 vols. (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928-1931), 1:47 (sec. 34). Browne, like Willis, conducted a thriving medical practice all his life, but the intersection of his literature and medicine, especially viewed within the medicolinguistic realm, or in relation to mind/body dualism, has not been explored. Such fine books as Thomas N. Corns's The Development of Milton's Prose Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) discuss baroque English style in the age of Browne but omit these seminal scientific figures.

[48] See, for instance, D. W. Smith, Helvetius: A Study in Persecution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), a fine account of the pioneering utilitarian.

[49] For the history of man set in the context of vibrant ideas of life see Jacques Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée française au XVIII siècle (Paris: Colin, 1963).

[50] For Enlightenment conjectural histories of man see Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945); J. H. Brumfitt, Voltaire, Historian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958); P. Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

natural and social advancement from savagery to civilization, from rudeness to refinement. Or, as some saw it—a point emphasized below in Richard Popkin's essay on the Jewish question—possibly the result of a deterioration from some pristine golden age through to latter-day decadence. In the process of such dynamic interaction with the environment, of learning and adaptation, body and awareness had endlessly, indefinitely interacted. Consciousness (both individual and collective) developed out of the senses, and the senses themselves—whether considered in terms of the individual adult maturing from infancy or in terms of the collective psychohistory of the species—had equally been the product of dynamic processes of refinement, atunement, or, possibly, enfeeblement.^[51]

Nevertheless, it would be grossly misleading to imply that Enlightenment thought was programmatically atheistic or revolutionary, or even optimistic about the prospects of radical praxis.^[52] Diderot's dialogues hardly share the practical confidence of Lenin's tone: What Is to Be Done?; the conclusions of Candide and Rasselas are conclusive within an intentional inconclusiveness; and so self-conscious a work of advanced thought as Tristram Shandy is ultimately an elegy—an English elegy—to inaction. Yet the Enlightenment advanced visions of man's life that saw his essence lying in change, process, transformation, becoming—any-thing but a fixed point on an inflexible scale. Man had less of a nature than of a history, or rather his history was his nature. He was made by the sum of all the determining forces; but out of the resources of his milieu man also made himself—and, through the dynamic dialectic of habit and education, constantly remade himself over and again. And this was a process, as Diderot emphasized so clearly, long before Marx, in which material circumstances shaped consciousness even as consciousness itself changed material circumstances. Thinking was thus an expression of being, and self was a creature of experience. A radical prospect—indeed, a daunting one, when a Laurence Sterne (whose hero tells us, deferring to Locke, that a man's mind is a veritable history book) goes on to have his hero asked "Who are you?," to which his only response is, "Don't puzzle me."^[53]

[51] For ideas about the malleability of man see J. Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (London: Duckworth, 1972).

[52] See Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958).

[53] Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, ed. C. Ricks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).

Man was thus a creature less of fixed being than of becoming. Lockeans denied he was born naturally endowed with a full complement of innate ideas and moral understanding. Experience was all, and experience was derived from the senses and was mediated by the highly somatic mechanisms of pleasure and pain. Thus, a tacit materialism was seeping in through the cracks, as is illustrated by Locke's canny acknowledgment that there was nothing incompatible with the divine creation in the possibility of "thinking matter"—though it was not a notion he expressly espoused.^[54] Yet the radical transformation of mind/body concepts had less to do with doctrinaire materialism than with the softening-up process whereby man's faculties, traditionally taken as "given," such as the will, or the understanding conceived as the "candle of the Lord,"^[55] as a divinely endowed "ratio recta," were subjected to intense scrutiny, one might almost say "deconstructed." It is as if their operations were itemized, part by part and one by one, and the contingencies and vagaries of consciousness thereby accentuated.

Thus, in moves whose inadequacy Philippa Foot criticizes below, the various forms of utilitarianism attempted, in the name of scientificity, to reduce the exercise of moral judgment to sets of component decisions taken in a lawlike way on the basis of the operation of the mechanisms of desire and aversion. Likewise, epistemological associationism pictorialized the processes whereby edifices of knowledge were built up out of the primitive building bricks of sense impressions.^[56] As Locke's revolutionary Essay concerning Human Understanding shows, associationism was not necessarily committed to a materialist physiology; yet, as in Hartley's subsequent system, it often was. As Foucault (in such well-known books as Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish ) and other scholars have noted, theory and practice in such eighteenth-century endeavors as child rearing, pedagogy—not least instruction for the deaf and blind—and penology was the radical new model of a will which was neither free nor instinctually wicked but malleable and available for conditioning in a controlling environment. These developments assumed an understanding for simpler concepts—attention, learning languages ver-

[54] John Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); idem, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); idem, Perceptual Acquaintanee from Descartes to Reid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

[55] The favorite Cambridge Platonist image; see Rosalie Colie, Light and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).

[56] Perhaps the finest discussion of the rise of such mechanistic imagery of thinking remains Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (London: Faber and Faber, 1928).

bal and symbolic, reading—which have yet to be fully studied.^[57] Even so, by the middle of the eighteenth century it was perfectly clear to those who entered into such physiological and psychological discussion that consciousness, like memory and desire, was not an activity that could profitably be discussed without full recourse to both mind and body.

Such developments had many faces. Reflecting widespread contemporary excitement, many of our historians have been enthusiastic about the Enlightenment "discovery" of man and its formulation of new, scientific, secular concepts of the personality and identity; about the birth of self-awareness and the exhilarating odyssey of individualism that occurred during that period; and about the growing importance of the notion of Bildung, with its proclamation, paralleling the Kantian sapere aude, dare to be wise, of esse aude, dare to be, or to become, asserting the true emancipation of mankind from ancient, self-imposed, fetters. At the end of this avenue lies the declaration of the rights of man: startlingly secular, individualist, utilitarian.^[58] And from these natural rights—natural because they derive from man's anatomy and physiology, his or her body as much as any other consideration—follows the modern state with its peculiar blend of democratic liberty and social control.

Or one could speak in more pessimistic tones of the dissolution of traditional stable senses of self, soul, and of social obligation in that welter of indulgent narcissism and moral solipsism encouraged by the fashion-

[57] Attention, learning to read, and language theory as it reflected the relation of words to things were subjects of supreme significance throughout the Enlightenment, and those who wrote on these subjects—from whatever vantage point—inevitably found themselves commenting upon mind and body. Among these, for example, were such diverse thinkers as the Swiss classicist Samuel Werenfels, the opponent of false sublimity and author of A Discourse of Logomachys, or controversys about words, so common among learned men. To which is added, A Dissertation concerning Meteors of Stile, or false sublimity (London: W. Taylor and E. Sanger, 1711); the English philologist James Harris, the author of the 1756 Hermes (reprint, Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1968), from whose work the passage in our epigraph is taken; the illustrious French philosopher-social commentator Condorcet, in his Progress of the Human Mind (see the edition by Stuart Hampshire et al. [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955]); and Charles Bonnet, the Swiss naturalist whose psychology of mind and body formed the basis of his very interesting theories of attention and learning. For Bonnet, see Consid é rations sur les corps organis é s, où l'on traite d leur origine, de leur dévelopment, de leur éproduction, &c. & où l'on a rassemblé en abrégé tout ce que l'histoire naturelle offre de plus certain & de plus intéressant sur ce sujet, 2d ed. (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1768); idem, Essai analytique sur les facult é s de I'âme (reprint, New York: Olms, 1973); idem, Essai de psychologic (reprint, New York: Olms, 1978); as well as Lorin Anderson, Charles Bonnet and the Order of the Known (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1982). G. Murphy, in Psychological Thought from Pythagoras to Freud (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968), does not identify "attention" as a valid category until the nineteenth century, but it was surely a crucial category in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

able new sensibility and the utilitarian hedonic calculus. The erosion of that value hierarchy which the mind/body template had inexorably underwritten was (in ths reading) that highroad to nihilism trodden (in the eyes of many scholars, as David Morris underlines below) by none other than that hero of the late Enlightenment, the Marquis de Sade.^[59]

Or, as a third possibility, one might eschew premature judgments be-teen optimistic and pessimistic readings, the visions of self-emancipation and self-imprisonment, and rather preserve a studied ambivalence, echoing the open question of Diderot's final drama, Est-il bon? Est-il mechant? Which ever line is taken, what seems beyond dispute is the Enlightenment conviction that to know the world it was vital first to know the knower; to look within man was to grasp his faculties, dispositions, and potentialities; but the latter could not be accomplished without first inquiring into the boundaries of the body, the status of consciousness, and the interplay between the two. Whether viewed dialectically, as Kant and Blake would, or more simply as contrary states of body and mind, interplay required consultation of both. One without the other—say mind without body, or body without consciousness—entailed an epistemological, even ontological, impossibility—a constituted anomaly whose just proportions could only be set straight by consultation of the Other. In this radical inclusiveness lay much of the elusive originality of Enlightenment thinking on mind and body, whether viewed along English, French, German, or any other national lines.^[60]

VI

Above all, the Enlightenment did actually generate, almost for the first time in Western culture, a thoroughgoing materialist strand, which was

[58] For the eighteenth century as an era of the achievement of self-identity see S. D. Cox, "The Stranger within Thee": Concepts of the Self in Late-Eighteenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh, 1980); J. O. Lyons, The Invention of the Self (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978); P. M. Spacks Imagining a Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); J. N. Morris, Versions of the Self (New York, 1966); for philosophical background see H. E. Allison, "Locke's Theory of Personal Identity: A Re-examination," in Locke on Human Understanding: Selected Essays, ed. I. C. Tifton (Oxford, 1977), 105-122.

[59] Lester G. Crocker, An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959); idem, Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963). Crocker highlights the dilemmas produced by Enlightenment naturalism, subjectivism, and relativism.

[60] See Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Vintage, 1966-1968); and Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

generally—though not necessarily, as the cases of Hartley and Priestley amply testify—associated with a strident religious freethinking verging on atheism: true materialism would expose theistic idealism as false consciousness. This was an agenda whose vitality remains to be explored and measured for the latter part of the eighteenth century. Taking up suggestions such as Locke's hints of the possibility of "thinking matter," the suggestion was widely investigated and disseminated—it is bandied about as a shocking commonplace by Diderot—that mind might be fully and entirely comprehended by the activities of the brain, nerves, and juices, and that thought was nothing but the secretion of the brain just as bile was the secretion of the stomach. From the middle of the eighteenth century, this materialist agenda became privileged. La Mettrie first comprehensively spelt out a materialism applied to man in L'homme machine, d'Holbach expounded a totally materialistic vision of the cosmos in his Système de la nature, and the Ideologues later systematized a functionalist philosophy of thinking, in which they emphasized that the phenomena of consciousness were purely the products of the fine-tuned organization of matter.^[61] It may appear an odd position—this radical materialist notion of consciousness and ideation. Yet it was widely explored and—what is more—continues to find staunch champions among the elite of our contemporary neurobiological and neurophysiological establishment who continue to insist that brain is matter, thought brain, and (as John Keats, the young doctor-poet, might have remarked) that this is all we need to know. To be sure, the sociobiologists and environmentalists have countered this extreme materialist position, but the results are still out, and it would be imprudent and premature to believe that one or another position lies close to any agreed-upon truth. This fierce ambiguity underlies some of (but not all) the eternal fascination of mind and body.

In the eighteenth century, materialist outlooks appeared in many other guises too, such as Erasmus Darwin's pioneering version of biolog-

[61] For Enlightenment historical and critical exposes of religion as false consciousness, see Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (New York: Atheneum, 1967); R. Knox, Enthusiasm (London, 1950); B. R. Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); G. Rosen, "Enthusiasm: 'A Dark Lanthorn of the Spirit,'" Bulletin of the History of Medicine 42 (1958): 393-421; H. Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, and That Subtile Effluvium: A Study of the Opposition to the French Prophets in England, 1706-1710 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978). For materialism, see in particular Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980; A. C. Kors, D'Holbach's Circle: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

ical evolutionism. This version envisaged the evolution of all forms of organic activity out of the first living filament, driven by an urge to aspire to higher levels of sensory enjoyment. The inherent drives of wriggling matter eventually blossomed forth in the human consciousness^[62] This Darwinian position greatly influenced early Romantic thinkers, in England and on the Continent, who derived much of their sense of mind and body form Darwin's materialist biology, perhaps even more so than from the great philosophical tradition extending from Hobbes and Locke to Kant and the Germans.

It is no accident that Darwin—like La Mettrie, Hartley, Cabanis, and literally dozens of others who would figure into a detailed study of mind and body—was a physician. For, as Dora Weiner emphasizes in her essay below, the most powerful, yet profoundly ambiguous, toehold for a mode of materialism within traditional European thought had been the discourse of medicine—a discourse as vast as it was diverse. Doctors had long enjoyed a notoriety for what we might call their professional materialism, alongside their proverbial (if probably unjustified) reputation for atheism. Traditional humoral medicine was materialist through and through, if we mean by that that it acknowledged—as must any medicine worth its salt—the central role of psychosomatic and somatopsychic activities in determing health and disease. No doctor or patient earnestly examining the parameters of sickness could question that physical disorders—or indeed medical drugs—affected mental states, or, vice versa, that physical health depended to no mean degree upon emotional disposition, states of mind, and so forth. The placebo effect was highly familiar to doctors attuned to the magic of sympathy and the strength of imagination in governing matters of health.^[63] Medicine was permitted this potentially threatening perspective, in part because the needs of practice required it, and, far more so, because, dealing definitionally with pathological states, with the diseased individual, the ground rules governing normal human values were obviously suspended. One

[62] Maureen MacNeil, Under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin and His Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); see D. King-Hele, Erasmus Danvin and the Romantic Poets (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), for this theory of consciousness amongst Romantic literati.

[63] For explication see L. S. King, "The Power of the Imagination," in The Philosophy of Medicine: The Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), chap. 7; Owsei Temkin, Galenisrn: The Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973); and more broadly, idem, "Health and Disease," in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. P. P. Wiener et al., vol. 2 (New York: Scribner's, 1973), 395-407.

might incidentally compare the license granted the satirist or caricaturist to imply that his target was none other than an insect, a wild beast, or a machine. Such "medicinal" satire did not derogate from the dignity of human nature precisely because it exposed the sickness of those who truly threatened it.^[64]

Furthermore, despite an older and erroneous historiography, Cartesian philosophy no more undermined the traditional psychosomatic medical perspective than the "scientific revolution" of the seventeenth century destroyed humoral medicine (although, as we have seen a new emphasis upon the key role played by the nervous system is everywhere evident).^[65] It is hardly surprising in such circumstances that medicine (broadly understood) proved one of the key sites for the further elucidation of the seemingly infinitely complex and shifting relations between consciousness and corporeality.

This development is highly evident in Antonie Luyendijk-Elshout's paper. It is widely argued these days, in part following Foucault, that the age of reason could not tolerate "unreason" and had to sequestrate and silence it in the "great confinement"; and that, by consequence, eighteenth-century therapeutics for the mad fell back more heavily

[64] But it did not call in question the semiology of disease and the role of imagination within this semiotic system of medical diagnosis. Also, satires on the imagination in the period reflected the intersection of these two realms: medical and literary—in such works, for example, as (in England) Dr. Malcolm Flemyng's Neuropathia (London, 1747) and (in Italy) the polymathic Lodovico Antonio Muratori's book on imagination, human health, and dreams (1747). For medical satire, see M. H. Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau, This Long Disease My Life: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), but there remains no in-depth study of the medicalization of the imagination in the Enlightenment, as G. S. Rousseau noted two decades ago in "Science and the Discovery of the Imagination in Enlightened England," Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1969): l08-135.

[65] Modern critiques of Cartesian dualism stress the continuing degree of psychosomatic interplay, even in the discussion of brutes, for the latter of which see L. Cohen Rosenfeld, From Beast-Machinc to Man-Machinc: The Theme of Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940). See also T. Brown, "Descartes, Dualism and Psychosomatic Medicine," in The Anatomy of Madness, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, 2 vols. (London, 1985), 2: 40-62; Sylvana Tomaselli, "Descartes, Locke and the Mind/Body Dualism," History of Science 22 (1984): 185-205; R. B. Carter, Descartes' Medical Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); L.J. Rather, Mind and Body in Eighteenth-Century Medicine (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965); idem, "Old and New Views of the Emotions and Bodily Changes," Clio Medics 1 (1965): 1-25. A contrary interpretation is to be found in P. Lain Entralgo, Mind and Body: Psychosomatic Pathology: A Short History of the Evolution of Medical Thought (London: Harvill, 1955).

upon mechanical and medical means to restrain the body.^[66] This marginalization of the Enlightenment doctors was almost unprecedented—it is said—in Western civilization. But Dr. Luyendijk-Elshout's paper shows that this interpretation is far too simplistic a reading, and demonstrates the point by using students' medical dissertations, which have rarely been consulted. The "mad-doctors' assessed by our Dutch historian of medicine fully understood the importance of mental and emotional precipitants of the sicknesses of their charges, just as they intertwined medical and moral treatments in their often highly original therapeutics. Medical concepts, centered upon the mediating role of the nerves, and psychophysiological categories, such as the idea of the passions of the soul and their pathology, effectively established the inter-linkage. The result was a more elaborate and psychopathological medical theory than we (collectively, that is) have recognized: one taking account of dreams and visions, nightmares and hallucinations, fantasies and phantasmagorias—an entire underworld of dark subconscious passions often sinking the patient in a sea of mental conflict. The nerves could not be forgotten, of course, prime movers that they were. Yet even they were only a part of the evidence heard by the Enlightenment physician, who also listened to the cries and whispers of the spectral, nighttime world of his patients.^[67]

A similar conclusion emerges from Carol Flynn's discussion of key concepts of health and disease as they figured in medical tracts, practical medical advice, therapeutics, and fiction in the eighteenth century. Doctors and laymen were equally aware that the organism possessed a rather mysterious and often mocking wisdom of its own. Both the clergymannovelist Laurence Sterne and the physician-novelist Tobias Smollett—each suffering from a consumption he clearly knew would prove fatal and cause early death—expressed in their writings the perception that states of health and disease were not gross matters of mechanism, nor entirely under the control of imperious reason. Each recognized that his

[66] See classically M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization. Similar views are to be found in the Frankfurt School interpretation of the Enlightenment, as in, for example, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).

[67] This spectral, nighttime world is just beginning to receive attention, although no one has written so lucidly about it as Luyendijk-Elshout below; see Terry Castle, "Phantasmagoria," Critical Inquiry 15 (1988): 32-49. N. Kiessling's valuable study The Incubus in English Literature: Provenance and Progeny ([Pullman]: Washington State University Press, 1977) treats the literary dimension without consulting its medical underbelly.

best hope for health depended deeply upon the animated expression of his own personality in action,^[68] in motion, in the velocity of change. Au fond, it was a recipe for health lying proximate to our twentieth-century holistic views that celebrate the unity of mind and body, the constant occupation of the imagination, and motion, or exercise, elevated to new degrees of sophistication.

Medicine, with, as we have seen, its materialist undertow, diagnoses sickness and proffers remedy. As Peter Gay has pointed out, the philosophes adored the picturing of themselves as physicians to a priest-ridden, poverty-stricken ancien régime they regarded as sick, materially, intellectually, and spiritually.^[69] Indeed, they diagnosed such traditional theological and metaphysical conceptions as the absolute mind/matter, or mind/body dualisms, or the disembodied soul, or the dogmatic espousal of free will, and its correlate, sinfulness, as themselves symptoms of mental folly or even derangement. Such "fictions" became the targets of those unmasking campaigns for disillusionment and demystification that animated much of the best Enlightenment criticism.

Thus philosophes made free with attacking forms of consciousness as diseased, as the expressions of psychopathology. Metaphysical dogmatizing, system-building, religious ravings, and speaking in tongues—these (critics argued) were not rational minds at work but the shriekings of the sick and suffering. "The corruption of the senses is the generation of the spirit," Swift sardonically remarked, in a materializing formulation that any competent philosophe might have appropriated.^[70] Likewise, Enlightenment pundits enjoyed representing supposed proofs of "free consciousness" as quintessential expresions of false consciousness, analogous to nightmares, ghosts, specters, incubi, and succubi; the entire range of somnambulism or mesmeric phenomena thus offered manna to satirists. "The sleep of reason produces monsters," judged Goya, for whom so much official culture betrayed an ingrained psychopathology.^[71]

[68] See D. Furst, "Sterne and Physick: Images of Health and Disease in Tristram Shandy " (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1974); J. Rodgers, "Ideas of Life in Tristram Shandy: Contemporary Medicine" (Ph.D. diss., University of East Anglia, 1978); A. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years (London: Methuen, 1975); and for Smollett, G. S. Rousseau, Tobias Smollett: Essays of Two Decades (Edinburgh, 1982).

[69] See P. Gay, "The Enlightenment as Medicine and as Cure," in The Age of the Enlightenment: Studies Presented to Theodore Besterman, ed. W. H. Barber (Edinburgh: St. Andrews University Publications, 1967), 375-386.

[70] J. Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Satires, ed. K. Williams (London: Everyman, 1975), 191-194.

[71] Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789-1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

It is one of the goals of this book that we should see to what degree this was a psychopathology widely disseminated throughout the various layers and segments of Enlightenment culture—medically generated, perhaps, but also widespread elsewhere, having filtered down to many parts of society through its popular theologies and mythologies of the flesh.

In Enlightenment knockabout histories, entire disciplines such as Scholastic metaphysics or dogmatic theology were relegated to the status of mere delusion, mental aberrations, or, at best, products of a species in its immaturity, a stage in the progress from mental infancy up to modern maturity. Thus Idealism was exposed to the whiplash of criticism as the archetype of false consciousness. As Simon Schaffer emphasizes below, formulating theories of "fictions" was integral to the endeavors of reformers such as Bentham. He represented the very idea of the immortal soul as the fabrication of vested interests, above all the clergy, eager to indoctrinate the masses with beliefs that magnified their own authority, and, more broadly, systematically promoting a self-serving "fiction" of the superiority of the spiritual over the physical, head over hand, priesthood over people. For radical philosophes, the very notions of God, Satan, and all other nonmaterial powers were phantoms of priestcraft, fabricated to keep the people in their place. Yet the line from Hartley (who was also a physician) to Priestley, and then Priestley to Bentham, has not been studied in this light: as a discourse of radical will, part mind, part body, and thoroughly soaked in the elaborate medico-philosophical labyrinth of the time. The Languages of Psyche aims to open up this avenue for further exploration.

More comprehensively, and even constructively, such diagnoses of the psychopathology of the ancien régime were incorporated into a systematic sociohistorical critique through the program of the Idéologues, notably Cabanis.^[72] For these intellectuals living in times of revolutionary social change, expressions of thought were to be treated as one of many products of the integrated, unified human organism. Such unity may have been more imagined than scientifically demonstrable, and it also happened to follow in the footsteps of the giant waves of vitalism sweeping over late Enlightenment thought.^[73] But the idea of a complex or-

[72] Sergio Moravia, Il pensiero degli Ideologies (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974); M. Staum, Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

[73] The classic statement is, of course, by Jacques Roger, Les sciences de la vie (Paris: Colin, 1963), but Bakhtin has added to the discussion in his 1926 statement about the "dialogism of vitalism" in which both Enlightenment mechanists and vitalists are seen as more entrenched in "the Other" than has been acknowledged; see Michael Bakhtin, "Sovremennyi Vitalizm" (Contemporary vitalism), Chelovek i Priroda 1 (1926) : 9-23, 33-42, and G. S. Rousseau's analysis of this work in relation to the traditions of Enlightenment vitalism: "Bakhtin and Enlightenment: An Essay on Vitalism for Our Times," in The Crisis of Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Tradition, ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For vitalism as it impinges on the mind/ body question, see the now classic early-twentieth-century statement by Hans Driesch, The History and Theory of Vitalism (London: Macmillan, 1914); and idem, Mind and Body, trans. Theodore Besterman (New York: L. MacVeagh, the Dial Press, 1927). The role of vitalism in relation to mind and body was widely studied in the eighteenth century in medical dissertations, especially in middle European universities, and in relation to Stahi's animism and Barthez's medical theory (discussed in Rousseau above). Vitalism in general was fully considered by the German psychologist Ferdinand Carus in his Geschichte der Psychologie (Halle, 1795).

ganic form as the basis of a unified human organism was so strong that it invigorated this research program continuously, especially in France and in centers of learning where French influence held sway. It was thus axiomatic for them—within the mind/body context—that consciousness could not be regarded on its own terms but had to be understood as complementing the thinker, whose ideas were to be read as functional to his interests. In thus developing the notion of "ideology" into an analytic weapon—the weapon that was eventually transformed through the breakdown of other vital connections into nineteenth-century sociology and twentieth-century sociology of knowledge—the Idéologues proved astute commentators upon their own times.

For they—and others besides them—were perceiving that traditional doctrines of consciousness were obsolete; in this sense, traditional concepts of the old mind/body dualism being just as out of date. It was no longer plausible to maintain that the order of things, natural and social, was to correspond to Truths, revealed in Scripture, enshrined by the Church, and expounded by right reason. Such prescriptive visions had to yield to analytic accounts that acknowledged and explained the sociohistorical fact that information, ideas, images, public opinion, and propaganda—in short, ideology—were increasingly playing a crucial, indeed, a dominant, role in ordering and managing society.^[74] So magisterial was the authority of knowledge in the high Enlightenment. The very power of the philosophes, the spread of books and the press (the fourth estate), was making Swift's dictum that "the pen is mightier than the

[74] See Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961); Elizabeth Eisenstein, "On Revolution and the Printed Word," in Revolution in History, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 186-205; Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclophtie, 1775 -1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); idem, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

sword" prove prophetic, and confirming Hume's view that mankind is governed, au fond, by "opinion." Wishful thinking aside, it was hardly fortuitous that it was the philosophes who made such observations, because in their war to displace priests and official propagandists as the mouthpieces of society, they became masters of the media in an increasingly opinion-conscious society.

Yet here lies a profound paradox that may stand as the summation of that multitude of ironies that sprang out of the mind/body dialectic. Enlightenment thinking, as we have suggested, was profoundly critical of the theological-metaphysical myth of the autonomy of mind and its correlate, free will. Such fictions sanctioned priestcraft, superstition, and hellfire. Philosophes anatomized such absurdities and their wider practical manifestations—the irrationalities of credulity, faith, devotion, magic, spells, folklore, and faith healing.^[75] Yet the whole body of such beliefs and practices proved amazingly resilient. Explaining the acceptance and continuing purchase of such nonsense presented no small problem, especially for reformers desperately trying to convince themselves and the world that mankind was growing ever wiser in what Paine called the Age of Reason. Worse still, progressives had to face the embarrassing fact that many such absurd beliefs and practices appeared to be efficacious. Old charms and new mesmerism might be stuff and nonsense, silly mumbo jumbo from the viewpoint of Newtonian science; yet both seemed to possess curative properties and to exercise strange "occult" powers, if only because of the deviousness of the human imagination.^[76] Might not human nature and the human mind then also harbor dark mysteries? Mysteries impenetrable to any science, Newtonian or even more advanced? Impenetrable forever?

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.

Two
Barely Touching:
A Social Perspective on Mind and Body

Roy Porter

It is a mark of the perduring Idealism of our culture that the "body" side of the mind/body relationship has been neglected, or, to put the same point another way, that the major studies of the mind/body problem have been philosophical rather than material-social. Even the direct physical anguish of the flesh, as in the experience of disease, fails to challenge our preferences. The nineteenth-century tuberculosis victim, his or her body wasting away, was somehow "spiritualized" by the process, just as in an analogous way, twentieth-century Freudianism represents a final if backhanded vindication of the ultimate sovereignty of consciousness.

Perhaps this is changing. Perhaps today's newly heightened sense of the ultimate fragility of the body, seemingly threatened with extinction from one quarter by neutron bombs, from another by AIDS, will at last engender a fundamental cultural reversal. The odds are probably against it. History suggests rather the enormous capacity of Idealism in its various forms to rise above the threats. The history of the cursed body and of mind triumphant over matter is long and involved, but ultimately clearly defined.

Back in mid-eighteenth-century Yorkshire, Dr. Slop anathematizes Obadiah:

"May he... be damn'd," (for tying these knots). "May he be cursed in eating and drinking, in being hungry, in being thirsty, in fasting, in sleeping, in slumbering, in walking, in standing, in sitting, in lying, in working, in resting, in pissing, in shitting, and in bloodletting.

"May he (Obadiah) be cursed in all the faculties of his body.

"May he be cursed inwardly and outwardly.—May he be cursed in the hair of his head.—May he be cursed in his brains, and in the vertex," (that is a sad curse, quoth my father) "in his temples, in his forehead, in his ears, in his eye brows, in his cheeks, in his lips, in his throat, in his shoulders, in his wrists, in his arms, in his hands, in his fingers.

"May be damn'd in his mouth, in his breast, in his heart and purtenance down to the very stomach.... may there be no soundness in him.^[1]

Thus the fate of Obadiah, cursed in his body. Yet the same malediction seems to have hung over all the males in the Shandy household. Tistram's own complaint—the loss of his animal spirits, of his nose, of his name, of his foreskin, and almost of his life—

I can now scarce draw [breath] at all, for an asthma I got in skating against the wind in Flanders^[2]

merely echoes the evils heaped on the bodies of his father (a man "phthisical" and racked with a sciatica),^[3] his brother Bobby ("a lad of wonderful slow parts" who expired in his youth),^[4] his uncle Toby, wounded in the groin at the seige of Namur, alongside his faithful servant Trim (likewise "disabled for the service"),^[5] and not least Parson Yorick, victim like Sterne himself of consumption, whose death is commemorated by a double page of black humor ("Alas, poor Yorick!").^[6] It is in short a "dirty planet,"^[7] whose "strange fatalmes"^[8] curse Everyman

[1] L. Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, ed. C. Ricks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 185-187. For recent work on the body in Sterne see M. New, "At the Backside of the Door of Purgatory," in Laurence Sterne.' Riddles and Mysteries, ed. V. Grosvenor-Myer (London: Vision, 1984), 15-23; J. Berthoud, "Shandeism and Sexuality," ibid., 21-88; E. A. Bloom and L. D. Bloom, "'This Fragment of Life': From Process to Mortality," ibid., 57-74; Roy Porter, "Against the Spleen," ibid., 84-98; D. Furst, "Sterne and Physick: Images of Health and Disease in Tristram Shandy " (Ph.D. Diss., Columbia University, 1974); L. S. King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); J. Rodgers, "Ideas of Life in Tristram Shandy : Contemporary Medicine" (Ph.D. diss., University of East Anglia, 1978).

[2] Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 40.

[3] Ibid., 219

[4] Ibid., 67.

[5] Ibid., 114.

[6] Ibid., 233-234.

[7] Ibid., 40.

[8] Ibid., 136.

the homunculus—"skin, hair, fat, flesh, veins, arteries ligaments, nerves, cartilage, bones" and all^[9]

So the bodies of the Shandy family are cursed to a man. Yet a similar blight seems to infect the study of the history of the body.^[10] Of course, the mind/body problem as such has attracted great minds, historians of philosophy have minutely scrutinized theories of consciousness—John Yolton's brace of books, Thinking Matter and Perceptual Acquaintance, are admirable recent examples—and we have glorious studies of ideologies and mentalities from The Savage Mind and The Greek Mind to The Victorian Frame of Mind.^[11] Yet with a handful of honorable exceptions— Mikhail Bakhtin is one, Norbert Elias another—the body side of the mind/body relation remains curiously neglected, perhaps echoing that late-Victorian moment when the journals Mind and Brain were founded in quick succession, but no Body^[12] Even Marxism, heeding Marx's lofty contempt for vulgar biologism—man is what he eats—has failed to generate a historical materialism of the body.^[13]

In fact, for services rendered in concentrating our minds upon the body one scholar stands out head and shoulders above the rest, Michel Foucault, who but for his desperately premature death in 1985 would surely have contributed to this series.^[14] Foucault dislodged the Cartesian

[9] Ibid., 36.

[10] There is a lively discussion on the inadequacies of histories and sociologies of the body in B. S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1984). It is less dear whether Turner's own formulations offer a way forward. There is a stimulating discussion of the neglect of the body in literature in Virginia Woolf's essay, "On Being Ill," in Collected Essays, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), 193-203. For Woolf's own problems with "embodiment" see S. Trombley, "All That Summer She Was Mad": Virginia Woolf and Her Doctors (London: Junction Books, 1981). And more generally see the discussion in G. S. Rousseau, "Science and Literature: The State of the Field," Isis 69 (1978): 583-591; idem, "Literature and Medicine: The State of the Field," Isis 72 (1981): 406-424.

[11] J. Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); idem, Perceptual Acquaintace from Descartes to Reid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); C. Levi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage, trans, as The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965); W. E. Houghton, Jr., The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

[12] M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968); N. Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1983).

[13] See the discussion in Turner, The Body and Society, 5-6, 99-101.

[14] Foucault's main relevant works are Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Tavistock, 1967); The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970); The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972); The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London: Pantheon, 1973); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979); The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (London: Penguin, 1978). See also M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. C. Gordon (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), especially the essay "Body/Power," 55-62.

privileging of the subject, of the cogito, in arguing that the true object of the disciplines, of the exercise of savoir-pouvoir, has been the body, focal point of the clinic, asylum, school, reformatory, prison, parade ground, bed. Foucault exposed the folly of taking the bourgeois disparagement of the flesh at face value. Sexual repression was sexual expression; every technique for subduing the flesh was but another mode of empowering it.^[15]

The scale of our loss in Foucauh's death is only underlined by the crass extravagance of his epigoni. Take for example Francis Barker's The Tremulous Private Body, subtitled An Essay on Subjection, issued in 1985 Here is his verdict on Pepys, or rather, as he insists, "the Pepysian text":

the body in the Pepysian text is no more than a monstrous discourse at least in so far as the subject experiences itself as initiator of its own speech.... Disinherited and separate, the body is traduced as a rootless thing of madness and scandal and then finally, in its object-aspect, it is pressed into service.^[16]

Is this Pepys? The phrase "monstrous discourse" invites the riposte: if the cap fits. The willfulness of Barker's thesis that the triumph of the bourgeoisie involved the disappearance of the body and its replacement by the book simply brings home the need for investigation rather than sloganizing.

Indeed, study of the mind/body problem has been bedeviled all along by ax-grinders. How often have philosophers, insensitive to anachronism, invoked a Cartesian dualism—tailored after whatever mode of rationalism or dualism happened currently to be in vogue—to explain all manner of twists and turns of ideas, with scant regard for the historical Descartes or for his actual reception or reputation?^[17] But more distorting still are those moralists who would use the mind/body relation to redress the human condition or peddle new metaphysics.^[18] Writes Fritjof Capra in The Turning Point:

[15] See especially Foucault, History of Sexuality, 3-14.

[16] F. Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (London: Methuen, 1984).

[17] An instance of this can be found, for example, in M. D. Wilson, "Body and Mind from the Cartesian Point of View," in Body and Mind: Past, Present and Future, ed. R. W. Rieber (New York: Academic Press, 1980).

[18] E.g., M. Berman, The Re-enchantment of the World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982); F. Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture (New York: Wildwood, 1982).

The Cartesian division between mind and matter has had a profound effect on Western thought. It has enabled huge industries to sell products—especially to women that would make us owners of the "ideal body"; it has kept doctors from seriously considering the psychological dimensions of illness, and psychotherapists from dealing with their patients' bodies.^[19]

Yet this is, of course, baloney. Descartes himself never denied the utter interdependence of mind and body. As he put it:

The mind depends so much on the temperament and disposition of the bodily organs that, if it is possible to find a means of rendering men wiser and cleverer than they have hitherto been, I believe that it is in medicine that it must be sought.^[20]

Furthermore, as L. J. Rather's admirable study of Jerome Gaub has shown, post-Cartesian medicine indeed remained thoroughly psychosomatic and somato-psychic.^[21] To father Descartes with praise or blame for the "ghost in the machine" is no substitute for accurately probing what happened.

To be precise, we need thick-textured study of the body, unprejudiced by timeless philosophical dualisms or Lovejoyan unit-ideas—remember that Homer had no general term for "mind" or "body"—^[22] research which contextualizes the human frame within specific sociocultural frames of reference, sensitive to experience, representations and meaning. And in undertaking this, it will be as well to go back to banausics, and remember that in medieval and early modern Europe— that civilization of faith—the human body had a power and prominence

[19] Capra, Turning Point, 23, 44.

[20] Quoted in T. Brown, "Descartes, Dualism and Psychosomatic Medicine," in The Anatomy of Madness, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, 2 vols. (London: Tavistock, 1985), 2: 40-62. See also R. B. Carter, Descartes' Medical Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), who demonstrates the extent of Descartes's own explorations of psychosomatic interplay; see, e.g., pp. 113-114.

[21] L. J. Rather, Mind and Body in Eighteenth-Century Medicine (London: Wellcome, 1965). For discussions of medical continuity, the irrelevance of the "Cartesian" dualism, and the continuation of psychosomatic approaches to health and personality see W. F. Bynum, "Health, Disease and Medical Care," in The Ferment of Knowledge, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 211-255; G. S. Rousseau, "Psychology," ibid., 143-210; L. S. King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

[22] Bennett Simon, Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978); W. I. Matson, "Why Isn't the Mind-Body Problem Ancient?" in Mind, Matter, and Method, ed., P. K. Feyerabend and G. Maxwell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966).

never again to be matched: it was the measure of all things. It was muscle power that tamed the animals, tilled the fields, and made what were—literally—the manufactures. It was man power that built the cathedrals and won the battles—still, in the Renaissance, spectacles of hand-to-hand combat. In what Laslett has called the face-to-face society,^[23] it was the personal stature, strength, physique, and stamina of rulers that held the balance between government and anarchy. From trial by ordeal to judicial torture, courtroom procedures put the body to the test; and justice was meted out against the flesh from whippings to the faggot and the gallows.^[24] Even after death, the corpse was not spared, often being left to hang in chains as a lesson to the living (yet felons' corpses were touched for their supposed miraculous healing properties).^[25] The elementary functions of keeping body and soul together really mattered. Here is a late-seventeenth-century child, Mary Nelthorpe, writing to her mother about the state of her health:

This is to lett my Mother know
Her Worme is well from top to toe,
Except my Bumps, they so exceed
They make me scratch untill I Bleed;
But now 1 think ont, It is fitt,
To lett you know how oft I shitt,
Two stooles a day, but sometimes none
Take one time with another one;
And that I may not one thing miss;
Bout twice as oft I goe to piss.^[26]

Standard histories tell us that Christianity was a religion of the spirit, the soul's quest for Heaven. But, as Piero Camporesi has brilliantly demonstrated, for the common flock what commanded belief was Christ's body nailed to the Cross, the mortifications of holy men, the marvels of saints' corpses that gushed blood or remained incorruptible, healing miracles, the promise of the resurrection of the body.^[27]

Bodies were pregnant with meaning. There were the symbols of the Body Politic, of the King's Two Bodies, and of the Corpus Christi, that corpus mysticum which was the Church. The Royal Touch cured scrofula,

[23] P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1978).

[24] See Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

[25] P. Linebaugh, "The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons," in Albion's Fatal Tree, ed. D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, and E. P. Thompson (London: A. Lane, 1975), 65-118.

[26] Hertford Record Office. I owe this quotation to the kindness of Dr. Linda Pollock of Churchill College, Cambridge.

[27] P. Camporesi, La came impassibile (Milan: Saggiatore, 1983).

and aristocratic lineage spelt out the mystique of blood.^[28] And the ritual theater of the body was played out not least on the stage itself littered in Shakespeare's age with corpses, just as from Petrarch to Donne, poetry both sacred and profane pursued the paradoxes of the human clay.

Of course, to say the body was prominent is not to say it was held in good odor. In a biological ancien régime where life expectations were low and whose creed blamed original sin for bringing death and disease into the world, vile bodies drew deep disgust. "Inter urinas et faeces nascimur," pronounced St. Augustine, developing a dualism of the body seen as the prison house of the soul, echoed later by the Puritan Oliver Hayward's "Alas, the best man is two men."^[29] In his Second Anniversary, John Donne addressed his own soul:

Think further on thyself, my soul, and think
How thou at first wast made but in a sink
This curded milk, this poor unlittered whelp,
My body, could, beyond escape or help,
Infect thee with original sin and thou
Couldn't neither then refuse, nor leave it now.^[30]

Small wonder the term "body" itself became a synonym for corpse, that Swift might surmise "surely mortal man is a broomstick,"^[31] or that on his return to England, Lemuel Gulliver, his hero, "could not endure my wife or children in my presence, the very smell of them was intolerable";^[32] or, more generally, that when satirists wished to deflate the pretensions of poets, kings, or philosophers, they showed that their inflated status arose at bottom only from diseases of the guts.^[33] In Swift's classic

[28] M. Bloch, The Royal Touch (London: Routledge and Kegal Paul, 1978); R. Crawfurd, The King 's Evil (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911).

[29] The Diaries of Oliver Heywood, ed. J. H. Turner, vol. 3 (London, 1882), 304.

[30] See the discussion in J. Broadbent, "The Image of God, or Two Yards of Skin," in The Body as a Medium of Expression, ed. J. Benthall and T. Polhernus (London: A. Lane, 1975), 305-326; and J. Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), chap. 5, "Bodies."

[31] J. Swift, "A Meditation upon a Broomstick," in J. Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Satires, ed. K. Williams (London: Everyman, 1975), 191-194.

[32] See the illuminating discussion in N. O. Brown, Life against Death (London: Rout-ledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 171 f.

[33] See, for instance, C. Kerby-Miller, ed., Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), 107 ff.; and the descriptions in M. V. Deporte, "Digressions and Madness in A Tale of a Tub and Tristram Shandy," Huntington Library Quarterly 34 (1970): 43-57; R. Paulson, Theme and Structure in Swift's Tale of a Tub (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960); J. R. Clark, Form and Frenzy in Swift's Tale of a Tub (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970); D. B. Morris, "The Kinship of Madness in Pope's Dunciad," Philological Quarterly 51 (1972): 813-831; G. Rosen, "Form of Irrationality in the Eighteenth Century," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 2 (1972): 255-288.

formula, "the Corruption of the Senses is the generation of the Spirit"; "the same Spirits which in their superior Progress would conquer a Kingdom, descending upon the Anus, conclude in a Fistula."^[34]

Yet Christianity also held the body in an esteem other sects—for example, the Gnostics—or philosophies such as the Stoic found contemptible. After all, Scripture taught man was made in God's image, God's only son became flesh, and then rose from the dead, so presaging the general resurrection of the body at the Last Judgment.^[35] How could the body be more highly honored than by the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist, which brought Christ's very blood and body to the lips of the faithful?

If man were made in God's image, his body must be almost holy. A Puritan drew the natural inference:

Whereas our bodies are God's workmanship, we must glorify him in our bodies.... yea, we must not hurt or abuse our body, but present them as holy and loving sacrifices unto God.^[36]

In the Renaissance nude, the body became a veritable emblem of the soul, just as human anatomy became incorporated in a natural theology of design. Man's body was a microcosm epitomizing the order and meaning of the cosmos; and so, too, according to the physiognomy, the outer case itself was an index of the soul.

Bodies thus carried complex and contradictory messages, and minds felt confused about embodiment. Tristram Shandy expressed his admiration for

the Pythagoreans (much more than ever I dare tell my Jenny) for their "getting out of the body, in order to think well. " No man thinks right, whilst he is in it.^[37]

[34] J. Swift, "A Tale of a Tub," in A Tale of a Tub and Other Satires, K. Williams (London: Everyman, 1975), 1-136; "A Discourse concerning the Mechanical Operations of the Spirit," ibid., 167-190.

[35] A point justly emphasized in F. Bottomley, Attitudes to the Body in Western Christendom (London: Lepus, 1979).

[36] William Perkins, quoted in A. Wear, "Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth Century England," in Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 55-100, at 63.

[37] Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 472.

Events of course prove him right, no one does think right in his body (and yet they don't think right out of them either). But, as Tristram admits, mind cannot declare unilateral independence from the body, they are but two faces of the same coin; or rather

A man's body and his mind, with the utmost reference to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin's lining; rumple the one—you rumple the other.^[38]

So for man, Sir Thomas Browne's great "amphibian," the coexistence of body and soul was a fact of life; or rather its great mystery. For

How mind acts upon matter, will, in all probability, ever remain a secret [as Dr. William Buchan admitted]. It is sufficient for us to know that there is established a reciprocal influence betwixt the mental and corporeal parts, and that whatever disorders the one likewise hurts the other.^[39]

Theories proliferated through the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment unraveling the knot of mind and body, what Tristram Shandy termed this "junketting piece of work betwixt [our bodies] and our seven senses"—^[40] so many, in fact, that one of the choicer jokes of the Anti-Jacobin Review was to carry a mock advertisement of a forthcoming publication:

[38] Ibid., 174. Compare p. 356: "I said, 'we were not stocks and stones'—'tis very well. I should have added, nor are we angels, I wish we were,—but men cloathed with bodies, and governed by our imaginations."

[39] William Buchan, Domestic Medicine (London, 1776). CL this discussion in the correspondence of two young men in the eighteenth century:

In our conversations about matter and spirit, you expressed some doubts whether although matter operates on spirit, spirit can act upon matter, and asked whether a man had ever been known to think himself into a fit of the gout. It did not immediately strike me that there were cases where actual diseases of the body were evidently occasioned by perturbations of the mind. Instances of the force of imagination in pregnant women are notorious. Convulsions and fainting are common effects of fear, an extreme degree of which has been said to turn the hair white. And I have heard an odd story of a man at Edinburgh that was persuaded, by the stratagem of some physician, into a fever. But these kinds of cases, however authentic, are of no weight in the controversy concerning the nature of the soul, as they require that the soul should be previously shewn to be spirit.

J. James to J. Boucher, The Letters of Richard Radcliffe and John James, ed. M. Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 155. Or as a late-eighteenth-century madhouse-keeper put it, "The action of the mind on the body, and of the body on the mind, after all that has been written, is as little understood, as it is universally felt; and has given birth to endless con-lecture, and perpetual error" (B. Faulkner, Observations on the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Insanity [London, 1789]).

[40] Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 356.

The influence of Mind upon Matter, comprehending the whole question of the Existence of Mind as Independent of Matter, or as co-existent with it, and of Matter considered as an intelligent and self-dependent Essense, will make the subject of a larger poem in 127 Books, now preparing.^[41]

Such theories form the subject of John Yolton's recent Thinking Matter, and it would be illuminating to give Yolton's strictly history-of-ideas analysis an added dimension by exploring the possible social roots and ramifications of the various resolutions. Were materialists radicals? Did dualism support the social hierarchy?^[42] Yet my aim here is somewhat different. For I examine actual perceptions, experiences, and modes of mind and body, their bonds and boundaries in specific contexts of use, in order to sound their resonances—scientific, experiential, symbolic—and why these were to modulate.

I shall explore one instance in some detail, the problem of madness, melancholy, and similar forms of disturbance. Today's parlance—mental illness being wrong in the head, psychiatric disorder—instantly reveals our own cognitive map: madness is in the mind. But that was not the common perception three centuries ago. Then insanity was, or at least sprang from, a disease of the body. Insanity was not typically regarded as a condition of an "occult" faculty, such as the psyche, mind, soul, or personality, even though it was a distemper involving disordered thoughts and feelings.^[43] "Madness is as much a corporal distemper as the gout or asthma." Today we readily associate such sentiments with the aggressively "medically materialist" wing of the psychiatric profession. But these were actually the words of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, giving voice to a commonplace of Georgian culture.^[44]

Lady Mary's lay view was endorsed by physicians of every school. For their part, the medical old guard identified insanity as typically an imbalance of the humors produced in the digestive system, mania being

[41] Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin (London, 1851), 84.

[42] The anthropological speculations of Mary Douglas are intriguing here. See Natural Symbols (London: Pantheon, 1970).

[43] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965) has an important discussion: see chap. 3; and Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); M. G. Hay, "Understanding Madness: Some Approaches to Mental Illness" (Ph.D. thesis, University of York, 1979).

[44] Letters from Lady Mary Wortley Montage, ed. R. Brimley Johnson (London: Every-man edition, 1925), 465. G. S. Rousseau has drawn attention to this passage in "Psychology," in The Ferment of Knowledge, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 143-210, 206.

a superfluity of choler, melancholy too much black bile.^[45] Newer iatrochemists, by contrast, attributed craziness to acid and sour chemical ferments, whose sharp particles scoured and inflamed the fibers. Or, more fashionably still, as George Rousseau has emphasized, physicians built on Thomas Willis's pioneer neurology to contend that disturbance lay in defective nerves: their lack of tone or elasticity due to clogging checked the flow of animal spirits, thus depressing the mood.^[46]

Rivalries between particular schools of anatomy and physiology, however, were about details. All shared a common conviction that the source was organic. As the Newtonian physician, Dr. Nicholas Robinson, put it in the 1720s:

Every change of the Mind, therefore, indicates a Change in the Bodily Organs;^[47]

His contemporary, George Cheyne, the king of the "hyp doctors," concurred:

I never saw a person labour under severe obstinate, and strong nervous complaints, but I always found at last, the stomach, guts, liver, spleen, mesentery, or some of the great and necessary organs or glands of the belly were obstructed, knotted, schirrous, spoiled or perhaps all these together.^[48]

The etiology is particularly striking for those diseases, such as hysteria or hypochondria, which later generations would come to regard primarily as psychic, as functional disorders, whose physical symptoms were but secondary somatizations. Traditional medical theory, however, regarded these as regular somatic diseases. Of course, as Sydenham and Willis were at pains to prove, medicine no longer accepted antiquity's attribu-

[45] For explication of the complexities of black bile and choler see L. Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1640 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1951); idem, Sanity in Bedlam: A Study of Robert Button's Anatomy of Melancholy (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1955).

[46] Fundamental here is G. S. Rousseau, "Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility," with a postscript, The Blue Guitar (Messina) 2 (1976): 125-153; idem, "Psychology," in The Ferment of Knowledge, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

[47] N. Robinson, A New System of the Spleen (London: Bettesworth, 1729), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Fears of Psycbiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 344.

[48] George Cheyne, The English Malady; or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds (London: Strahan and Leake, 1733), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535 -1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 184.

tion of hysteria to the wandering womb.^[49] Yet that did not make it any the less organic, for (as Willis argued) hysteria was

chiefly and primarily convulsive, and chiefly depends on the brain, and the nervous stock being affected.^[50]

No wonder it struck women worse than men: their nervous systems were weaker.

Paralleling hysteria was hypochondria, which likewise was not classed as a disorder of the understanding (the morbid obsessions of mere malades imaginaires ) but rather as an organic distemper. There had of course been a traditional humoral etiology for it.

The primitive Doctors [Richard Blackmore stated] imagined that all Hypochondriacal Symptoms were derived from a Collection of black Dregs and Lees separated from the Blood and lodged in the Spleen, whence, as they supposed, noxious Reeks and cloudy Evaporations were always ascending to the superior Regions (the Chest, the Heart, and Head).^[51]

Yet this was ignorance, concluded Blackmore; the new anatomy could account for it much better as a defect of nervous organization.

Or take the vapors, that complaint involving fainting and fits traditionally blamed on the fumes given off by a distempered womb, rising up through the internal organs.^[52] But falsely, argued Dr. John Purcell. For in reality vapors were an organic obstruction located

[49] 1. Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); J. Boss, "The Seventeenth-Century Transformation of the Hysteric Affection," Psychological Medicine 9 (1979): 221-234.

[50] Quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535 -1800 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 190. See Jeffrey M. N. Boss, "The Seventeenth-Century Transformation of the Hysteric Affection," Psychological Medicine 9 (1979): 221-234. See also Hansruedi Isler, Thomas Willis, 1621 -1685, Doctor and Scientist (New York: Hafner, 1968); J. Spillane, The Doctrine of the Nerves (London: Oxford University Press, 1981). For important background see J. Wright, "Hysteria and Mechanical Man," Journal of the History of Ideas 41 (1980): 233-247.

[51] Sir R. Biackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours (London, 1725), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macaipine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535 -1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 320.

[52] For the spleen—both an abdominal organ and a fashionable term for melancholy—see C. Moore, Baekgrounds of English Literature 1700-1760 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963); O. Doughty, "The English Malady of the Eighteenth Century," Review of English Studies 2 (1926): 257-269; E. Fischer-Homberger, "Hypochondriasis of the Eighteenth Century—Neurosis of the Present Century," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 46 (1972): 391-401; Roy Porter, "The Rage of Party: A Glorious Revolution in English Psychiatry?" Medical History 27 (1983): 35-50.

in the Stomach and Guts; whereof the Grumbling of the one and the Heaviness and uneasiness of the other generally preceding the Paroxysm, are no small Proofs.^[53]

Noting that one of Hippocrates' greatest contributions to medicine was his recognition that epilepsy was not a divine affliction ("the sacred disease") but natural, Purcell insisted the vapors were akin to epilepsy, indeed that "an epilepsie, is Vapours arriv'd to a more violent degree,"^[54]

And—the exemplary case—melancholy too was similarly located on the etiological map. The waning of humoralism left early Georgian physicians disinclined to see it literally as the product of black bile.^[55] Rather, Willis had insisted, "Melancholy... is a complicated Distemper of the Brain and Heart."^[56]

Yet, in discarding humoralism, such physicians had no intention of setting mentalist theories in their place. Far from it. Humoralism had proved merely semantic, a will-o'-the-wisp. It was to make way for explanations grounded securely in mechanical operations. For, Dr. Nicholas Robinson insisted, insanity was not a mere matter of "imaginary Whims and Fancies, but real Affections of the Mind, arising from the real, mechanical Affections of Matter and Motion."^[57] If craziness was

[53] John Purcell, A Treatise of Vapours, or, Hysterick Fits (London: E. Place, 1707), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535 -1860 (London: Oxford University Press: 1963), 291; O. Temkin, The Falling Sickness (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

[54] Purcell, Treatise of Vapours, quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 291. See also E. Fischer-Homberger, "Hypochondriasis of the Eighteenth Century—Neurosis of the Present Century," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 46 (1972): 391-401.

[55] R. Klibansky, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964); Stanley W. Jackson, "Melancholia and the Waning of the Humoral Theory," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 33 (1978): 367-376; T. H. Jobe, "Medical Theories of Melancholia in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries," Clio Medics 19 (1976): 217-231.

[56] T. Willis, quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1863), 190. See also E. S. Clarke and C. D. O'Malley, The Human Brain and Spinal Cord (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968); E. S. Clarke and Kenneth Dewhurst, An Illustrated History of Brain Function (Oxford: Sandford Publications, 1972).

[57] N. Robinson, A New System of the Spleen (London, 1729), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psyehiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1983), 344. Robinson continued (345):

Upon these Grounds, then it clearly appears, that neither the Fancy, nor Imagination, nor even Reason itself, the highest Faculty of the Understanding, can feign a perception, or a Disease that has no Foundation in Nature; cannot conceive the Idea of an Indisposition, that has no Existence in the Body; cannot feel pain or Uneasiness in any part, unless there be pain or Uneasiness in that part; The affected Nerves of that Part must strike the Imagination with the Sense of Pain, before the Mind can conceive the Idea of Pain in that part; and therefore, it is in vain to go about to persuade any Man, that he is perfectly at Ease, while he, at the same Time, perceives himself in great pain and Anguish from divers Affections of the Body.... While the Nerves, therefore, are in good plight, the Ideas they convey through any of the Senses will be regular, just, and clear; upon which the Understanding will judge and determine of Objects, as they are, by the Laws of Nature, made to exist to a Mind fitly dispos'd, with proper Organs to receive their Impression: But if the Structure or Mechanism of these Organs happen to be disorder'd, and the Springs of the Machine out of Tune; no Wonder the Mind perceives the Alteration, and is affected with the Change.

More generally see, for this mechanical "physiological psychology," M. V. Deporte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1974), 125 f.; L. J. Rather, "Old and New Views of the Emotions and Bodily Changes," Clio Medica 1 (1965): 1-25; T. H. Jobe, "Medical Theories of Melancholia in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries," Clio Medica 11 (1976): 217-231; Esther Fischer-Homberger, Hypochondrie, Melancholie bis Neurose: Krankheiten und Zustandbilden (Bern: Huber, 1970).

thus fundamentally organic,^[58] physical remedies were clearly called for. That is what we find. Thomas Willis himself advocated a regime of close confinement and whippings, which probably reflected contemporary practice at Bethlehem (Bedlam), and drugs formed the staple of medication for the mad in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on old humoral medicine, Robert Burton had listed hundreds of purges, vomits, and simples for melancholy, including laurel, white hellebore, and tobacco ("divine, rare, super-excellent tobacco... a sovereign remedy to all disease")^[59] and some more exotic drug cocktails as well. Suffering from "head melancholy"?

[58] And physical causes were often held responsible. See The Private Letters of Dorothea Lieven ed. P. Quennell (London: J. Murray, 1937), 86:

The 27^th

I was upset yesterday at the death of a man whom I knew very well, for he was attached to the Court of the late Princess Charlotte of Wales, a man called Hardenbrot, remarkable for his enormous nose. It is less than three weeks since he came to call on me. I was alone with him. He told me that he was sometimes seized by fits of madness, during which he was not responsible for his actions. At this alarming information, I went up to the bell-cord and stood sentinel until the Duke of York came in and rescued me from our tête-à-tête. Afterwards, I told my husband that I thought Hardenbrot was talking very incoherently. He made enquiries and was told that he was in excellent health and had never shown any sign of madness. Two days later, he went off his head. He was put in charge of two doctors from Bedlam and died yesterday in a violent fit of madness. Don't ever think of eating lobster after dinner: that is what the poor lunatic used to do.

[59] Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), ed. A. R. Shilleto (London: George Bell and Sons, 1898). Second partition, "The Cure of Melancholy."

Take a Ram's head that never meddled with an Ewe, cut off at a blow, and, the horns Only taken away, boil it well skin and wool together, after it is well sod, take out the brains, and put these spices to it, Cinnamon, Ginger, Nutmeg, Mace, Cloves, in equal parts of half an ounce, mingle the powder of these spices with it, and heat them in a platter upon a chafing-dish of coals together, stirring them well, that they do not burn; take heed it be not overmuch dried, or dryer than a Calves brains ready to be eaten. Keep it so prepared, and for three days give it the patient fasting, so that he fast two hours after it. It may be eaten with bread in an egg, or broth, or any way, so it be taken.^[60]

The coming of the new mechanical philosophy changed the drugs but not the drugging.

No Man can have a tenderer, or more compassionate Concern for the Misery of Mankind than myself [argued Dr. Robinson]: yet it is Cruelty in the highest degree, not to be bold in the Administration of Medicines….. It is owing to these safe Men, that do but little good, and a great deal of real Mischief, that chronick Diseases are so rife now-a-days, and so generally incurable.... In this Case, therefore, the most violent Vomits, the strongest purging Medicines, and large Bleedings, are to be often repeated.^[61]

Nor was faith in organic remedies just a quirk of the doctors, for laymen and patients had equal faith in medicine. The nonconformist divine, Richard Baxter, advised: "neglect not physick."^[62] Despairing patients might bewail

that physick cannot Cure Souls, yet they must be perswaded or forced to it. I have known a Lady deep in Melancholy, who a long time would neither speak, nor take Physick; nor endure her Husband to go out of the Room, and with the Restraint and Grief he died, and she was cured by Physick put down her Throat, with a Pipe by Force.^[63]

Even John Wesley—a man who often challenged the organic diagnoses of madness, regarding many cases as instances of demoniacal possession—was free in recommending medical cures:

[60] Ibid.

[61] N. Robinson, A New System of the Spleen (London, 1729), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Mac. alpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1800 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 340.

[62] R. Baxter, The Signs and Causes of Melancholy, quoted in Robert Hunter and Ida Mac. alpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 340.

[63] Ibid.

Boil the Juice of ground ivy with sweet oil and white wine into an ointment. Shave the head, anoint it therewith, and chafe it every other day for three weeks. Bruise also the leaves and bind them on the head and give three spoonsful of the juice, warm, every morning. Or, be electrified. (tried). Or, set the patient with his head under a great water-fall as long as his strength will bear, or pour cold water on his head out of a tea-kettle. Or, let him eat nothing but apples for a month.^[64]

So the spectrum of troubles ranging from raving insanity to what we should today label neurosis was typically regarded as seated in the body. Indeed, the very term "neurosis"—a coining of the great Edinburgh professor William Cullen—was originally used not, as today, to signal the perplexing no-man's-land of functional disorders, but neuropathologically, to classify physical lesions. As Cullen put it, the neuroses were

all those preternatural affections of sense and motion, which are without pyrexia as a part of the primary disease, and all those which do not depend upon a topical affection of the organs, but more upon general effection of the nervous system, and of those powers of the system upon which sense and motion more especially depend.^[65]

The conceptual geography I have been mapping may seem strange to our psychiatrically primed minds. We are familiar of course with the kind of medical imperialism today found particularly amongst neurophysiologists, which aims to incorporate all personality disturbance within somatic medicine—for how else can research and therapy be scientific? And Lain Entralgo has demonstrated how rigid was the or-ganicism that became the trademark of regular medicine from Galen onward^[66] —witness Coleridge's caustic verdict on the physicians:

They are shallow animals; having always employed their minds about Body and Gut, they imagine that in the whole system of things there is nothing but Gut and Body.^[67]

[64] J. Wesley, Primitive Physick (reprint, Santa Barbara, Calif., n.d.), 87; G. S. Rousseau, "John Wesley's Primitive Physick (1747)," Harvard Library Bulletin 16 (1968): 242-256; A. W. Hill, John Wesley among the Physicians (London: Epworth, 1958).

[65] W. Cullen, First Lines in the Practice of Physic (Edinburgh, 1784), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 473. See J. M. López Piñero, Historical Origins of the Concept of Neurosis, trans. D. Berrios (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

[66] P. Lain Entralgo, Mind and Body (London: Harvill, 1955).

[67] Coleridge to Charles Lloyd, Sr., 14 Nov. 1796, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge ed. E. L. Griggs, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 256.

And yet it would be a great mistake to interpret the prevalent somaticism as a sort of doctors' conspiracy. Nicholas Jewson has suggested how far the traditional physician had to defer to patients' expectations—the clinical encounter was a delicate process of negotiation;^[68] and in what we would call psychiatric disorders abundant evidence suggests it was sufferers at least as much as physicians who opted for organic interpretations. As George Cheyne explained, he was often put on the spot when confronted with cases of depression because such conditions were easily jeered at by the vulgar as marks of "peevishness," "whim," "ill humour," or, amongst women, of "fantasticalness" or "coquetry."^[69] Or, more seriously, troubled spirits were all too readily taken as but a hairsbreadth away from outright insanity. Hence care was needed before advancing terms like "nervous" in consultations, and patients would expect a real disease diagnosis. Indeed, the dictates of humanity required it. For though the herd might suppose that these maladies were "nothing but the effect of Fancy, and a delusive Imagination, yet... the consequent Sufferings are without doubt real and unfeigned."^[70] Cheyne's solution was to emphasize organic origins:

Often when I have been consulted in a Case... and found it to be what is commonly call'd Nervous, I have been in the utmost Difficulty, when desir'd to define or name the Distemper, for fear of affronting them or fixing a Reproach on a Family or Person. If I call'd the Case Glandular with nervous Symptoms, they concluded I thought them pox'd, or had the King's Evil. If I said it was Vapours, Hysterick or Hypochondriacal Disorders, they thought I call'd them Mad or Fantastical.^[71]

Dr. Richard Blackmore faced the same doctor's dilemma:

This Disease, called Vapours in Women, and the Spleen in Men, is what neither Sex are pleased to own. A Man cannot ordinarily make his Court worse, than by suggesting to such patients the true Nature and Name of

[68] N. Jewson, "The Disappearance of the Sick Man from Medical Cosmology 1770-1870," Sociology 10 (1976): 225-244; idem, "Medical Knowledge and the Patronage System in Eighteenth-Century England," Sociology 8 (1974): 369-385; Roy Porter, ed., Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

[69] G. Cheyne, quoted in L. Feder, Madness in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 170

[70] Ibid.

[71] George Cheyne, The English Malady; or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of AU Kinds (London: Strahan and Leake, 1733), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 353.

their Distemper....One great Reason why these patients are unwilling their Disease should go by its right Name, is, I imagine, this, that the Spleen and Vapours are, by those that never felt their Symptoms, looked upon as an imaginary and fantastick Sickness of the Brain, filled with odd and irregular Ideas…. This Distemper, by a great Mistake, becoming thus an Object of Derision and Contempt: the persons who feel it are unwilling to own a Disease that will expose them to Dishonour and Reproach.^[72]

In other words it reassured patients to root their troubles in the body, for that made them real while reducing responsibility. Take for example the case of the nonconformist minister Richard Baxter.^[73] Baxter experienced a Pandora's box of internal maladies, occasioning excruciating pain and still greater fears, associated with what he intuited to be large kidney stones. He tried many remedies, some from the doctors, some home brews; and consulted up to thirty-six physicians all at once, without relief or remedy. The real blow came when "divers eminent physicians agreed that my disease was the hypochondriack melancholy." What exactly the doctors meant by that we cannot be sure. For Baxter, however, the term carried unwelcome overtones of malingering, delusion, and real madness. His amour-propre had to deny it.

My distemper never went to so far as to possess me with any inordinate fancies, or damp me with sinking sadness, although the physicians call'd it the hypochondriack melancholy.

Feeling threatened by the doctors, Baxter needed to legitimate his disease and his sick role—by tracing its true body site:

I thought myself, that my disease was almost all from debility of the stomach, and extream acrimony of blood by some fault of the liver.

Baxter's autobiography makes it quite clear that the mere malade imaginaire could expect no pity from ordinary people—any more than did Molière's hero. Indeed, he would be a figure of fun. On being rumored to be hypochondriacal, Baxter reports, "I became the common talk of the city, especially the women."

[72] Sir R. Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours (London, 1725), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1555-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 320.

[73] For my discussion of Baxter, I rely on Andrew Wear, "Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England," in Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-lndustrial Society, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 55-99. The extracts that Wear cites are from Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae (London: Parkhurst, 1898), 9-10, 173.

Hence sympathetic doctors and their patients would collude in diagnoses that realized such conditions by rooting them in the body. As even Bishop John Moore in a sermon in 1692 on Religious Melancholy stated, such troubles were truly "Distempers of the Body, rather than Faults of the Mind."^[74] Still, however, the ambiguities ran deep. When Dr. John Radcliffe told Queen Anne she was suffering from the vapors, she sacked him; it was too ambivalent a term to be applied to royalty.^[75]

There was another, even stronger reason why sufferers did not want depression to be judged "in the mind" rather than "in the body": the imputation of serious disturbance of the Reason or imagination. Renaissance minds were in no doubt as to the extraordinary cosmic powers exercised by imagination: it was the sustaining force of sympathy, astrology, magic; it engendered fascination.^[76] Physicians were of course rather ambivalently aware that imagination had great powers for curing diseases, as the successes of "faith" healers and quacks from Valentine Greatrakes through to Mesmer testified, though the faculty considered it scandalous that maladies unresponsive to the best medicines proved susceptible to mumbo jumbo and suggestion. But doctors chiefly warned of the power of imagination to do harm^[77] ." As Nehemiah Grew put it:

Phancy... also operates... in the production of Diseases. Consumptions often come with Grief. From Venereal Love, Madness, and Hysterick Fits.^[78]

Typical was the reputed capacity of the imagination in women, at conception or during pregnancy, to impress whatever preoccupied their imaginations upon their unborn child. A woman whose imagination was seized by a strange sight would indeed give birth to a monster.^[79]

[74] J. Moore, "Of Religious Melancholy," quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macal-pine, Three Hundred Years of Prychiatry, 1555-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 252.

[75] J. B. Nias, Dr. John Radcliffe: A Sketch of His Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918), 16, 18.

[76] See D. F. Bond, "'Distrust' of Imagination in English Neoclassicism," Philological Quarterly 14 (1937): 54-69, and idem, "The Neoclassical Psychology of the Imagination," ELH 1 (1937): 245-264; C. E. McMahon, "The Role of Imagination in the Disease Process: Pre-Cartesian History," Psychological Medicine 6 (1976): 179-184; I. Couliano, Eros et magie à la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1984).

[77] John Haygarth, Of the Imagination, as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body (Bath: Cadell and Davies, 1800).

[78] Nehemiah Grew, Cosmologia Sacra (London: Rogers et al., 1701), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 285.

[79] It was still part of popular medicine to believe that the mother had the power to imprint onto her conceptus whatever was in her imagination at the moment of conception. For this vision of the malign power of the imagination, see Bond, "'Distrust' of Imagination" idem, "Neoclassical Psychology"; S. Cunningham, "Bedlam and Parnassus: Eighteenth-Century Reflections," Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (1971): 35-55; and G. S. Rousseau, "Smollett, Wit and Tradition of Learning in Medicine," in Tobias Smollett: Essays of Two Decades (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 198 2), 160-183.

Within classical humanism, imagination was thus a very mixed blessing. Slipping the reins of reason, it ran riot and became dangerous, as appears in the distrust of dreaming so frequently expressed in the Stuart and Georgian ages. If (as Goya was later to put it) the sleep of reason produces monsters, there was every reason for medical theorists to promote bodily explanations for dreams and nightmares, commonly regarded as a form of demonical possession. Nightmare, physicians typically argued, was not literally a matter of being hagridden but was due to heavy suppers or bad sleeping posture.^[80]

Thus one popular association was the slippery slope from the anarchy of imagination to out-and-out insanity. "Madness," Samuel Johnson told Fanny Burney, "is occasioned by too much indulgence of imagination." No wonder the idea that pains, perturbations, and quirks of behavior stemmed from rebellious imagination was so distressing. When Johnson confessed that his fidgets, tics, and convulsions were not organic but bad habits, or admitted he was in the grip of religious scruples, it was with the direct awareness of "the dangerous prevalence of imagination." Samuel Johnson dreaded encroaching insanity.^[81]

[80] M. Weidhorn, Dreams in Seventeenth-Century English Literaturem (The Hague: Mouton, 1970); John Bond, An Essay on the Incubus, or Night-Mare (London: Wilson and Durham, 1753); Thomas Tryon, A Treatise of Dreams and Visions (London, 1689), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 233.

[81] 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, 2 vols. (London: Tavistock, 1985), 1:63-88. For Johnson's mental maladies see R. Macdonald Ladell, "The Neurosis of Dr. Samuel Johnson," The British Journal of Medical Psychology 9 (1929): 314-323; R. Brain, "The Great Convulsionary" and "A Post Mortem on Dr. Johnson," in Some Reflections on Genius and Other Essays (London: Pitman Medical, 1960), 92-100; K. Grange, "Dr. Samuel Johnson's Account of a Schizophrenic Illness in Rasselas (1759)." Medical History 6 (1962): 160-169; R. B. Hovey, "Dr. Samuel Johnson, Psychiatrist," Modern Language Quarterly 15 (1954): 321-355; K. T. Read, "This Tasteless Tranquillity: A Freudian Note on Johnson's Rasselas, " Literature and Psychology 19 (1969): 61-62; K. Baiderston, "Johnson's Vile Melancholy," in The Age of Johnson, ed. F. W. Hilles and W. S. Lewis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 3-14. For the wider context of Johnson's view of the interconnectedness of idleness, imagination, and madness see R. Voitle, Samuel Johnson the Moralist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961); W. B. C. Watkins, Perilous Balance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939); A. Sachs, Passionate Intelligence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); P. K. Alkon, Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967).

Even worse, however, might be the prospect of being "possessed" not by one's own imagination but by forces from Beyond, unearthly powers. Scriptural Protestantism envisaged the drama of salvation as a literal psychomachy. If God and the Devil battled for every soul, the likelihood of being personally invaded by Satan, perhaps in disguise, may never have seemed very remote to the pious. Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century spiritual autobiographies—by definition, of course, the memoirs of survivors—commonly tell of infiltration by emissaries of the Devil, invasion being particularly dangerous at times of physical weakness, anxiety, and sickness, when resistance would be low (illness was the Devil's bath, commented Burton).^[82] Such struggles were every Christian's cross. And yet the prospects of sin, damnation, and hell must have loomed terrifyingly. Wasn't there every reason then for sufferers to blot out the fear that such were the symptoms of diabolical invasion, taking refuge instead in a comforting physical explanation, located in the diaphragm not in devils, in the spleen not in Satan?

Of course, there was also a tradition of divine madness—hearing voices, seeing visions, receiving prophecy, speaking in tongues. Once part of the Christian mainstream, by the second half of the seventeenth century it had shrunk to being the shibboleth of the sectaries.^[83] Yet their claims to be in possession of higher truth and under the direction of higher powers threatened ecclesiastical authority and scandalized Enlightenment reasonableness. Enthusiasm's sting could however be drawn by "medicalization." "Divine madness" did indeed exist, but it was not, after all, a matter of literal inspiration by otherworldly powers, higher or lower, but a species of organic madness,^[84] As Nicholas Robinson in-

[82] D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic frorn Ficino to Carnpanella (London: War-burg Institute, 1958); idem, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (London: Scolar Press, 1981); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973); Don Cameron Allen, "The Degeneration of Man and Renaissance Pessimism," Studies in Philology 35 (1938).

[83] M. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

[84] R. A. Knox, Enthusiasm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950); B. R. Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); G. Rosen, "Enthusiasm: 'A Dark Lanthorn of the Spirit,'" Bulletin of the History of Medicine 42 (1958): 393-421; G. Williamson, "The Restoration Revolt against Enthusiasm," Studies in Philology 30 (1933): 571-603; S. I. Tucker, Enthusiasm: A Stndy in Semantic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); H. Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, and That Subtile Effluvium: A Study of the Opposition to the French Prophets in England, 1706-1710 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978).

sisted, the transports of a George Fox or of the French Prophets were nothing more than "mere madness" arising from "the stronger impulses of a warm brain."^[85]

Overall then, attributing disordered spirits to the body proved highly serviceable. It protected the sufferer from ridicule. It convinced him that his reason or soul wasn't at risk from rampant imagination or Satanic possession—but that low sectaries' religious inspirations were nothing more than hot air. Of course, the lowly origin of such disorders, seated in the bowels, might be shameful, but that was increasingly remedied by the new anatomy that rerouted the site of the lesion away from the guts and up toward the head, through those superfine, light, delicate fibers, the nerves.

Moreover, identifying melancholy as a disease of the body opened the way to a sociology of illness highly attractive to the polished elite of Georgian England. For, under George Cheyne's designation of "the English malady," depression became a life-style disorder.^[86] The pressures of hard, high, and fast living, the demands of the ton or the town, the constraints of fashion, hot rooms, rich food, fine wines, late nights, excitement, etiquette—all subjected the physical constitution to intense strain. Becoming low-spirited under such pressures was the cross of High Society, the distinguishing stigmata of those fine spirits, those sensitive souls singled out for excellence. Above all, such low-spirited ladies and gentlemen were patently not fundamentally warped in the will but deserved sympathy. As Cheyne said flatteringly:

[the English Malady] is as much a bodily Distemper as the Small-Pox or a Fever; and the Truth is, it seldom, and I think never happens or can happen, to any but those of the liveliest and quickest natural parts, whose Faculties are the brightest and most spiritual, and whose Genius is most keen and penetrating, and particularly where there is the most delicate Sensation and Taste, both of Pleasure and pain. So equally are the good and bad Things of this mortal State distributed! For I seldom ever observ'd a heavy, dull, earthy, clod-pated Clown, much troubled with nervous Disorders.^[87]

[85] N. Robinson, A New System of the Spleen (London, 1729).

[86] Roy Porter, "The Rage of Party: A Glorious Revolution in English Psychiatry?" Medical History 27 (1983): 35-50; O. Doughty, "The English Malady of the Eighteenth Century," The Review of English Studies 2 (1926): 257-269.

[87] G. Cheyne, The English Malady (London, 1733), ii. Similar characterizations of the English malady continue throughout the century. Compare T. Beddoes, Hygeia, 3 vols. (Bristol, 1802-1803), 3:4.

I have so far been exploring a pseudoparadox, the diagnostic prominence given to the body in what we now call "mental disorder." Within the larger priorities of the mind/body hierarchy, it is, of course, no paradox at all, in that the body could be safely blamed for such distempers precisely because it was so gross. But that does require us next to face a more taxing question: how, when, and why did mental disorder itself emerge? To explain this, a changing set of strategies will need to be scrutinized. But first the shift itself must be pinned down. If we examine English writings on madness after about the mid-eighteenth century, very different messages ring out. Now it is claimed that insanity and its brood are indeed of the psyche. Take in 1789 the view of Andrew Harper (who, as a surgeon, was hardly likely to be biased against somatic views):

[insanity] must depend upon some specific alteration in the essential operations and movements of the mind, independent and exclusive of every corporal, sympathetic, direct, or indirect excitement, or irritation whatever.^[88]

A few years later, William Halloran, the Irish mad-doctor, took a similar line. There was indeed a delirium that was organic; but there was also a madness genuinely seated in the mind, manifest in delusion. It was vital to attend to that distinction, since quite separate therapies were indicated. Above all, as he put it, "the malady of the mind... is, for the most part, to be treated on moral principles."^[89]

[88] Andrew Harper, A Treatise on the Real Cause and Cure of Insanity (London: Stalker and Waltes, 1789), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 522.

[89] W. S. Hallaran, An Enquiry into the Causes Producing the Extraordinary Addition to the Number of Insane (Cork: Edwards and Savage, 1810), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Mac. alpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1585-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 653. Hallaran argued:

To illustrate this seemingly paradoxical position, I would advert to the many well authenticated instances of insanity, as they have occurred within the Init twenty five years especially, and are noted on the records of our Lunatic Asylum. Amongst those are several which have owed their origin to mental causes, strictly speaking: such as dread of punishment, loss of friends, shame, sudden terror, remorse, etc. Having marked their progress, it was not difficult to contrast them with others of an opposite class, which had been occasioned by violent excesses of various kinds, and by which, the free action of the brain in particular, and of the lungs, together with the abdominal viscera in general, had been principally and individually engaged.... Here I am aware of exposing myself to animadversion, by seeming to admit the existence of insanity, independently of that intimate connexion which has been so generally supposed to prevail between it and the brain.

Indeed, this new perception of the autonomy of mental disorder spurred an epochal transformation in therapy. Back in the 1720s, Nicholas Robinson had concluded that druggings were the only answer:

It is not long ago since a very learned and ingenious Gentleman, so far started from his Reason, as to believe, that his Body was metamorphos'd into a Hobby-Horse, and nothing would serve his Turn, but that his Friend, who came to see him, must mount his Back and ride. I must confess, that all the philosophy I was Master of, could not dispossess him of this Conceit: till, by the Application of generous Medicines, I restor'd the disconcerted Nerves to their regular Motions, and, by that Means, gave him a Sight of his Error.^[90]

But by the 1750s, William Battie, who adopted a highly Lockean theory of madness viewed as deluded imagination stemming from misassociation of ideas, publicly scorned the time-honored Bethlem ancien régime of vomits and venesection, pronouncing that management could do far more than medicine.^[91]

Indeed, "management" became the therapeutic watchword of the last decades of the century. What was meant was a new intensity of person-to-person contact between physician and patient.^[92] The precise inflections of the disposition and behavior of the lunatic had to be grasped, addressed, and attacked. Deploying a rich array of tactics, the physician had to take charge, substituting his command for that of the delusional system. At its most theatrical, this might mean fixing the patient with the eye, a technique perfected by the Rev. Dr. Francis Willis, the mad-doctor brought in to treat George III.^[93] Questioned by Members of Parliament about what John Haslam was later to call "this fascinating power,"^[94] Willis offered a demonstration:

"Place the candles between us, Mr. Burke," replied the Doctor, in an equally authoritative tone—" and I'll give you an answer. There, sir! by the EYE! I should have looked at him thus, Sir— thus !" Burke instantaneously averted his head, and, making no reply, evidently acknowledged this basiliskan authority.^[95]

[90] N. Robinson, A New System of the Spleen (London, 1729).

[91] W. Battie, A Treatise on Madness (London: Brunner/Mazel, 1958), 59-81.

[92] R. Porter, "Was There a Moral Therapy in Eighteenth-Century Psychiatry?" Lychnos, 1981/2: 12-16.

[93] See I. Macalpine and R. Hunter, George III and the Mad Business (London: Allen Lane, 1969).

[94] John Haslam, Observations on Madness and Melancholy, 2d ed. (London, 1809), 271.

[95] Quoted in Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad Business (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 271-272.

Paralleling Willis in management by spectacle was William Pargeter. Case histories show how crucial for him was the idea of gaining mental superiority over his patient:

When I was a pupil at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, as my attention was much employed on the subject of insanity, I was requested.., to visit a poor man... disordered in his mind. I went immediately to the house, and found the neighbourhood in an uproar. The maniac was locked in a room, raving and exceedingly turbulent. I took two men with me, and learning that he had no offensive weapons, I planted them at the door, with directions to be silent, and to keep out of sight, unless I should want their assistance. I then suddenly unlocked the door—rushed into the room and caught his eye in an instant. The business was then done—he became peaceable in a moment—trembled with fear, and was as governable as it was possible for a furious madman to be.^[96]

One facet of this move from medicines to management was the expectation of greater therapeutic humanity. As Dr. John Ferriar put it:

It was formerly supposed that lunatics could only be worked upon by terror. Shackles and whips, therefore, became part of the medical apparatus. A system of mildness and conciliation is now generally adopted, which, if it does not always facilitate the cure, at least tends to soften the destiny of the sufferer.^[97]

Yet management therapy certainly never advocated kindness for kindness' sake. Far from it, for the model of madness infecting the mind and not the body involved the assumption that the madman's mind was peculiarly devious, warped, intractable. Hence, William Pargeter stressed,

The government of maniacs is an art, not to be acquired without long experience, and frequent and attentive observation. As maniacs are extremely subdoious, the physician's first visit should be by surprize. He must employ every moment of his time by mildness or menaces, as circumstances direct, to gain an ascendancy over them, and to obtain their favour and prepossession. If this opportunity be lost, it will be difficult, if not impossible to effect it afterwards; and more especially, if he should betray any signs of timidity. He may be obliged at one moment, according

[96] W. Pargeter, Observations on Maniacal Disorders (Reading: for the author, 1972), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1810 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 510.

[97] John Ferriar, Medical Histories and Reflections, 3 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1795), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Mac. alpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 545.

to the exigency of the case, to be placid and accommodating in his manners, and the next, angry and absolute.^[98]

Joseph Mason Cox, proprietor of the famous Fishponds Asylum, agreed:^[99]

The essence of management results from experience, address, and the natural endowments of the practitioners, and turns principally on making impressions on the senses. Since lunatics are artful, and their minds intensely fixed on the accomplishments of any wild purpose conjured up by the disease, physicians should be constantly on their guard: their grand object is to procure the confidence of the patient or to excite fear.... Whatever methods are adopted in order to secure either fear or confidence, deception is seldom admissible, no promise should remain unfulfilled, nor threat unexecuted.^[100]

This was because the madman's will had to be won over. Public opinion was scandalized that Francis Willis allowed George III a razor to shave himself with. Willis was firm in his own defense before the Parliamentary Committee:

It is necessary for a physician... to be able to judge, at the Moment, whether he can confide in the Professions of his Patient, and I never was disappointed in my Opinion.^[101]

Transferred to a more institutional setting, moral management mutated into moral therapy, most notably at the York Retreat, opened in 1796, run by the Quaker Tuke family.^[102] The Tukes likewise elevated mind above body, stating,

[98] W. Pargeter, Observations on Maniacal Disorders (Reading: for the author, 1792), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 539.

[99] J. M. Cox, Practical Observations on Insanity (London, 1806), 42-43. See also M. Donnelly, Managing the Mind (London: Tavistock, 1983).

[100] J. M. Cox, Practical Observations on Insanity (London, 1806), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535- 1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 596.

[101] Quoted in Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George Ill and the Mad Business (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 275.

[102] A. Digby, Madness, Morality and Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); "Moral Treatment at the York Retreat," in The Anatomy of Madness, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, 2 vols. (London: Tavistock, 1985), 2: 52-72; F. Godlee, "The Retreat and Quakerism," ibid. 2: 73-85; A. Scull, Museums of Madness (London: Allen Lane, 1979), 68; W. F. Bynum, "Rationales for Therapy in British Psychiatry 1780-1825," Medical History 18 (1974): 817-834.

The physician plainly perceived how much was to be done by moral and how little by medical means.^[103]

But management had special connotations at the Retreat. For little value was placed on the virtuosity of the doctor. Instead the emphasis was on community. Its atmosphere was that of the family, its aim through example and the distribution of praise and disapproval to rekindle healthy rational and moral responses in the insane. As Charles Gaspard de La Rive rightly perceived:

You see, that in the moral treatment, they do not consider the patients as absolutely deprived of reason, that is to say, as inaccessible to the emotions of fear, hope, sentiment and honour. They consider them... as children who have a superfluity of strength, and who would make a dangerous use of it; their punishment and rewards must be immediate, because anything at a distance has no effect upon them. A new system of education must be adopted.^[104]

Foucault interpreted moral therapy as the imposition of radical chains. The Retreat could dispense with manacles of iron, because it caged the patients in manacles of mind; psychiatric control was so much more thorough, silent, and less scandalous.^[105] Yet Foucault's seems a peculiarly paranoid judgment, given that the Retreat did indeed succeed in restoring such a high percentage of its patients to the outside world, and (as Ann Digby's new study has shown) so many ex-patients were deeply grateful for the care they received.^[106] Yet Foucault's comment rightly draws attention to one point: the concern of the Retreat with the reform of mind. The Retreat formed part of the new psychiatric space.^[107]

It made sense to early Georgian minds to treat behavioral disorders as a matter of the body. By 1800, they had largely become affairs of the mind.

[103] S. Tuke, A Description of the Retreat at York (York, 1813), 151.

[104] Quoted in Alexander Walk, "Some Aspects of the 'Moral Treatment' of the Insane up to 1845," Journal of Mental Science 100 (1954): 817.

[105] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965).

[106] A. Digby, Madness, Morality and Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); "Moral Treatment at the York Retreat," in The Anatomy of Madness, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, 2 vols. (London: Tavistock, 1985), 2: 52-72.

[107] M. Fears, "Therapeutic Optimism and the Treatment of the Insane," in Health Care and Health Knowledge, ed. R. Dingwall (London: Croom Helm, 1977), 66-81; "The 'Moral Treatment' of Insanity: A Study in the Social Construction of Human Nature" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1978).

Why? How did the idea of mental disorder become acceptable? How did terms like "hysteria," "hypochondria," and "neurosis" mutate into having the psychiatric meanings with which we are familiar? Indeed, how did the disciplines now known as psychiatry and psychology acquire independent existence from the early nineteenth century (the term "psychiatry" was an import from Feuchtersleben's German)?^[108] I shall hint at some developments which worked together in this direction.

For one thing, treating the mad was developing into a more specialist occupation. Mad-doctors wanted to distinguish themselves over and against general medicine. To be able to claim an expertise of the mind was a mark of independence.

Moreover, mad-doctors were increasingly operating in their own distinctive site, the asylum. From Battle through to the Tukes and Edward Long Fox, many headed small private asylums for respectable clients.^[109] The physician was entrepreneur, and personal contact was maximized. Treating the mad face-to-face, in the quasi-domestic intimacy of the small asylum, the energetic and human physician developed an unprecedented familiarity with the complex, ambivalent, defensive, self-protective preoccupations of the lunatic confined within the hothouse environment of the madhouse. They could see method in madness, and gain experience of behavior patterns that demanded explanation in terms more individual than the categories of gross pathological anatomy. The mentalization of lunacy was in large part a consequence of the institutionalization of the mad and their protracted clinical observation.

Yet it was not only the proto-psychiatrists who came to formulate the idea of mental disorder. Thus Coleridge was to insist:

Madness is not simply a bodily disease. It is the sleep of the spirit with certain conditions of wakefulness; that is to say, lucid intervals.^[110]

And this layman's opinion indicates we need to cast our explanatory net wider, exploring shifts in general social perceptions of self and society, danger and prestige, personality and propriety. So great had been the disorder of the Stuart century—that century of revolution—that the risk

[108] For some of these mutations see Roy Porter, "The Doctor and the Word," Medical Sociology News 9 (1983): 21-28; see also G. S. Rousseau, "Psychology," in The Ferment of Knowledge, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 143-210.

[109] W. Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 74 f.; Andrew Scull, "From Madness to Mental Illness: Medical Men as Moral Entrepreneurs," European Journal of Sociology 16 (1975): 219-261.

[110] Quoted in V. Skultans, Madness and Morals (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 16.

of disorder to the soul or self was intolerable, and deviations from Right Reason were abominated as culpable lunacy. By contrast, the peace, prosperity, and civility of Georgian society relaxed the old stringent social and self controls. Waning religious zeal, secularization even, meant that for polite society the threat of diabolical possession was reduced to a ghost from the past, a gothic survival. In the consumer society—whose atmosphere was one of increasing cultural pluralism and artistic tolerance—self-expression and the cultivation of sensibilities by people of feeling found new acceptance.

Rationalized by the Lockean philosophy of liberty, individuality, and the subjective understanding, the inner world of feelings could count for more.^[111] Suspicions about imagination were disarmed, and the search for self-identity could become an engrossing activity, the avocation of the finer, nobler soul. Such quests for New Found Lands of inner space—what Thomas Gray called "the stranger within thee"—are perhaps signaled by a remark of Boswell's in his Hypochondriack column: "There is too general a propensity to consider Hypochondria as altogether a bodily disorder: mens sana —a healthful mind—quite distinct from corpore sano —a sound body."^[112]

In Boswell, whom Johnson rebuked for flirting with melancholy,^[113] and many of his refined contemporaries we detect a willingness to risk the equivocations of a free-floating mental and imaginative condition, paving the way for the Romantic credo that if Consciousness or Imagination were the supreme faculty, it must be sovereign in Madness no less than in Reason, or, more scurrilously, in Byron's vignette of Keats at work on his poetry, "f—gg—g his imagination."^[114]

Attributing madness to the body had been a resource for coping with

[111] For the eighteenth-century quest for self-identity see P. M. Spacks, Imagining a Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), especially chap. 5; J. N. Morris, Versions of the Self (New York: Basic Books, 1966); for the Lockean philosophical background to this see H. E. Allison, "Locke's Theory of Personal Identity: A Reexamination," in Locke on Human Understanding: Selected Essays, ed. 1. C. Tipton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 105-122; S. D. Cox, "The Stranger within Thee": Concepts of the Self in Late-Eighteenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980); J. O. Lyons, The Invention of the Self (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).

[112] James Boswell, Boswell's Column, introduction and notes by Margery Bailey (London: Kimber, 1951), 319.

[113] A. Ingram, Boswell's Creative Gloom (London: Macmillan, 1982).

[114] Thus Byron:

Mr. Keats, whose poetry you enquire after, appears to me that l have already said: such writing is a sort of mental masturbation f—gg—g his Imagination. I don't mean he is indecent, but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state, which is neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium. In Byron: Selected Prose, ed. P. Gunn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 357. More generally see G. S. Rousseau, "Science and the Discovery of the Imagination in Enlightenment England," Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1969-70): 108-135; E. Tuveson, "Locke and Sterne," in Reason and Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas 1600-1800 ed. J. A. Mazzeo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962); idem, The Imagination as a Means of Grace (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960); idem, "Locke and the Dissolution of the Ego," Modern Philology 52 (1955): 159-174; K. MacLean, John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936).

chaos. After all, through the claims of the sectaries to direction by powers from Beyond, the real threats to order had come not from the body but from the spirit.^[115] But by the close of the eighteenth century all had changed. Enlightenment materialism had become incorporated in the French Revolution and in radical materialist sciences such as phrenology. Now it was medical materialism that jeopardized hierarchy. The mind that would now accept mental illness was the one that identified civilization's future with the supremacy of mind, indeed with the march of mind.^[116]

I have concentrated upon lunacy. Given time, intriguing parallels and contrasts could be traced in other areas of the mind/body interface. Here I can do no more than hint at a few. Take sex. The sex advice books of the late seventeenth century such as Nicolas Venette's Tableau de l'amour conjugal and Aristotle's Masterpiece present an extremely organic view of sex: it is essentially seen as a body urge, indeed a body purge, a physiological mechanism for discharging surplus passion or fluid, Nature's provision for the preservation of the race. Failures such as impotence or sterility are put down to organic causes to be set to rights by organic remedies—drugs, diet, surgery, and so forth.^[117]

Sexual discourse had changed quite remarkably however by the end of the eighteenth century.^[118] By then the dominant assumption was that

[115] See P. Fussell, The Rhetorical Worm of Augustan Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).

[116] J. Engell, The Creative Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).

[117] Roy Porter, "Spreading Carnal Knowledge or Selling Dirt Cheap? Nicolas Venette's Tableau de L'amour conjugal in Eighteenth-Century England," Journal of European Studies 14 (1984): 235-255.

[118] For the shifts see Roy Porter, "The Sexual Politics of James Graham," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 5 (1982): 109-206; P. Wagner, Eros Revived (London: Secker and Warburg, 1988); idem, "Research the Taboo: Sexuality and Eighteenth-Century English Erotica," Eighteenth-Century Life 3 (1983): 108-115; P. -G. Boucé, "Aspects of Sexual Tolerance and Intolerance in Eighteenth-Century England," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1980): 180; Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Alex Comfort, The Anxiety Makers (London: Nelson, 1967).

sex was all in the head. On the one hand, writers on what were becoming singled out as sexual diseases, soon to be the perversions—Tissot on masturbation, Bienville on nymphomania—were increasingly arguing that the blame for sexual vices lay not with some organic lesion but in the diseased mind.^[119] For Bienville, "the imagination is the sole contriver" of self-abuse.^[120] On the other hand, a noted physician such as John Hunter had demonstrated in a famous case-study how impotence could be overcome by acknowledging that the defect lay in the mind, and so proceeding psychologically rather than physiologically.^[121] Not least, James Graham, in his notorious Lecture on Generation, urged that the key to sexual performance lay in stimulating the imagination:

How astonishing is the force of the imagination of the bodily faculties! Some of you, gentlemen, may perhaps have experienced that the imagination being intensely rivited, at certain times, on a very beautiful or much loved woman, it will make a man enjoy a plain one with almost equal ardour.^[122]

How do we explain the shifts in this field? The forces are complex and confused. As part of the movement toward heightened sensibility, sex itself was being elevated, sublimated into the ideal realm of the mental pleasures.^[123] But at the same time, as sexual abuses such as masturbation became recognized as resistant to eradication, that sad conclusion suggested that their source must be deeply hidden, in the convoluted, deviant labyrinth of the imagination.

[119] See Foucault, The History of Sexuality; F. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).

[120] See Peter Wagner, "The Veil of Science and Morality: Some Pornographic Aspects of the ONANIA," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 4 (1983): 179-184; 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.

[121] Quoted in R. Hunter and I, Mac. alpine, Three Hundred Years of Pschiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 494.

[122] J. Graham, A Lecture on the Generation, Increase, and Improvement of the Human Species (London, 1780?), 50.

[123] For the Enlightenment's libido-liberating claim that the erotic is the healthy see J. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Erotic Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Roy Porter, "Mixed Feelings: The Enlightenment and Sexuality in Britain," in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. P. -G. Boucé (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 1-27; idem, "The Sexual Politics of James Graham," British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 5 (1982): 199-205; P. -G. Boucé, "Some Sexual Beliefs and Myths in Eighteenth-Century Britain," in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 28-47.

A parallel story can surely be told of drunkenness.^[124] Doctors traditionally deplored drunkenness as a constitutional malaise. Within humoral medicine, the drunken fever was a mark of a lack of moderation; the consequence of habitual intoxication was the ruin of the stomach and the inflammation of the brain, even to insanity. But in the Gin Age, as a succession of physicians gave more critical attention to hard drinking—Cheyne and Lettsom stand out—attention switched to the disposition to drunkenness—they sometimes spoke of "addiction"—taken as a malady of the will, culminating in Thomas Trotter's express statement of 1804 that habitual drunkenness was not just a disease but "a disease of the mind" (the concept of alcoholism was to follow a generation later).^[125] Here, I suggest, as in the case of sexual perversions, a growing recognition of the intractability of the habit, and its unresponsiveness to medication, helped direct the medical gaze within, into the inner space of the delinquent, recalcitrant will.

Mesmerism offers a parallel change and a similar challenge. As is well known, Franz Anton Mesmer himself was adamant that he performed his cures through the agency of a natural superfine medium, the animal magnetic fluid. That guaranteed that his technique was truly scientific. By contrast, it was his critics, especially the devastating French Commission of 1784, who insisted that Mesmer's cures were mere suggestion, were all due to transference from mind to mind. Mesmer could never come to terms with the idea of purely psychic efficacy, yet his follower Puysegur happily discarded the animal magnetic fluid and accepted a psychological explanation. He thus paved the way for hypnotism, Victorian spiritualism, and dynamic psychiatry, anticipating the course taken by the young Freud in shifting away from neurophysiology toward therapies that steadily grew less somatic: from cocaine, to hypnosis by pressure, to free associations and the talking cure.^[126]

[124] For a recent discussion of this issue see Roy Porter, "The Drinking Man's Disease: The Prehistory of Alcoholism in Georgian Britain," British Journal of Addiction 80 (1984).

[125] T. Trotter, An Essay, Medical, Philosophical and Chemical, on Drunkenness (London, 1804).

[126] For mesmerism in France see R. Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlighten-merit in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); G. Sutton, "Electric Medicine and Mesmerism," Isis 72 (1981): 375-392; V. Buranelli, The Wizard from Vienna: Franz Mesmer and the Origins of Hypnotism (London: P. Owen, 1976); F. A. Mesmer, Mesmerism: A Translation of the Original Scientific and Medical Writings of F. A. Mesmer, M.D., trans. George Bloch (Los Altos, Calif.: Kaufman, 1980); F. Rausky, Mesmer, ou la révolution thérapeutique (Paris: Payot, 1977). The early history of English mesmerism awaits its author. For contemporary accounts and attacks see J. Martin, Animal Magnetism Examined (London, 1790), and [anon.], The Wonders and Mysteries of Animal Magnetism Displayed (London, 1791). See also Jonathan Miller, "Mesmerism," The Listener, 22Nov. 1973, 685-690; Roy Porter, "Under the Influence: Mesmerism in England," History Today, September 1985, 22-29. For the hater legacy, see H. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, 1971).

Physiognomy underwent a similar psychological sublimation. Traditional physiognomy had been somatic through and through, postulating that character embossed itself directly upon the face or body. This came to seem hideously crude to eighteenth-century savants aware of hypocrisy and the mask, and subscribing to the New Philosophy's view that Nature's essence lay not in surface qualities but underneath. But Lavater was to develop a new physiognomical gaze—using what he called "an additional eye," his mind's eye, to peer behind transient, fleeting expressions and catch the hidden, secret soul.^[127]

Foucault's work is highly suggestive for grasping the meaning of shifts from attention to the body to attention to the mind. In Discipline and Punish, for example, he showed how physical torture and corporal punishment gave way to the systematic penalization of the mind ("punishment should strike the soul rather than the body," wrote Mably)—and, more importantly, in the new penology, to the goal of the reform of the criminal mind.^[128] Foucault's signal contribution was to deny that this switch should automatically be seen as liberal and humane. The emergence of disciplines such as psychiatry did not constitute "progress" but simply registered new configurations of savoir-pouvoir, inscribed in particular institutional structures—the asylum, the prison. But Foucault never ventured a more comprehensive social viewpoint, presumably fearing that the rigor of textual analysis would be sapped by the reentry of flabby social history, with all its people.

Yet surely we need that wider framework—of people, not just prison manuals and penitentials—as if we are to avoid the impression Foucault's books all too readily give that history has been one relentless encroachment of disciplines, controls, and their accompanying discourses. Indeed, his unfinished history of sexuality seems to hint that he himself was willing to broaden his approach. For there he hypothesizes in the first volume how growing bourgeois attention to health in the eighteenth

[127] See G. Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); M. Shortland, "Barthes, Lavater and the Visible Body," Economy and Society 14 (1985): 273-312; M. Shortland, "The Body in Question: Some Perceptions, Problems and Perspectives of the Body in Relation to Character, c. 1750—1850" (Ph.D. thesis, Leeds University, 1985); Roy Porter, "Making Faces: Physiognomy and Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England," Etudes anglaises 38 (1985): 385-396.

[128] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 95.

century might be seen as a counterweight to the aristocratic concentration on blood.^[129] But he did not proceed to examine the wider class dynamics of such developments, did not explore how the growing bourgeois stress upon the mind, upon body purification, delicacy, and social distance, formed tactics for dematerialization, designed to segregate the propertied and the polite from the hoi polloi, as part of that separation of high and low life which formed such a key feature of the eighteenth century.^[130]

Mind was to be cordoned off from body, just as the polite were not to be touched by the great unwashed. As that quintessential bourgeois, Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, was to put it:

every class of society has its own glory. The poor, his physical strength; the middle, the power of mental research; the elevated, the charm of manner, the amalgam which fits them as keystones to solidify the arch of society. Then let us each rejoice in our own, and rejoice in our neighbours' gifts, but not expect to find all united in one.^[131]

Let us nudge these speculations about mind, muscles, and manners one stage further. For in other important ways, broad social changes were to bring mind to the fore. The century from the Scientific Revolution to the Industrial Revolution saw a staggering expansion of human productive powers for the mastery of Nature and the management of matter. The consequence of these scientific and material transformations had been to empty Nature of mind—what Weber called the disenchantment of the world, or Couliano has more recently termed the de-eroticization of Nature.^[132]

[129] Foucault, The History of Sexuality.

[130] For the rise of sensibility see Erik Erametsa, "A Study of the Word 'Sentimental' and of Other Linguistic Characteristics of Eighteenth-Century Sentimentalism in England" (Thesis, Helsinki, 1951); R. S. Crane, "Suggestions towards a Genealogy of the Man of Feeling," ELH 1 (1934): 205-230; G. S. Rousseau, "Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility," with a postscript, The Blue Guitar (Messina) 2 (1976): 125-153; L. Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962); S. Moravia, "The Enlightenment and the Sciences of Man," History of Science 18 (1980): 247-268; K. Figlio, "Theories of Perception and the Physiology of Mind in the Late Eighteenth Century," History of Science 13 (1975): 177-212. For the opening up of cultural divides see P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978); for the changing role of the public see R. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

[131] C. C. Hankin, ed., Life of Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, 2 vols. (London, 1858), 2:127.

[132] I. Couliano, Eros et magie à la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1984); W. Leiss, The Domination of Nature (New York: Brazillier, 1972).

The world soul vanished, Nature was reduced to matter, or what natural philosophers commonly called body. But while consciousness and sympathy were thus being drained from Nature, they were being concentrated in man's mind. As E. B. Tylor was later to argue:

Animism, indeed, seems to be drawing in its outposts, and concentrating itself on the first and main position, the doctrine of the human soul.^[133]

Crucially, this rise of dominion in science, discovery, and industry afforded man new experience of Mind over Matter, reinforcing that sense of the human mind as the source of power and creation so prominent in late-eighteenth-century sources from German Idealism to English Romanticism.^[134] It was but a short step to the Victorian identification of destiny with the March of Mind.

If one embodiment of this new sense of will was the entrepreneur, he was closely paralleled by the emergent intellectual. When the history of the intelligentsia is properly written, we will at last have a better appreciation of that astonishing growth in voice and authority of the thinker toward the close of the eighteenth century, of which Romanticism is one facet. The rise of the intellectuals' fourth estate went pari passu with a new magic of the mind. We all too readily regard the claims of poet-artists like Blake (who dissolved body into imagination or soul)^[135] as being at cross-purposes with those thinkers, such as Priestley, he parodied in The Philosopher in the Moon. Yet in fact they are all of a piece, as Peacock's satires show.^[136] "When I was young," wrote Théophile

[133] E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871), quoted in H. Jennings, Pandaemonium (London: A. Deutsch, 1985), 325.

[134] For different dimensions see J. Benthall, The Body Electric (London, 1976); P. A. Cantor, Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1084).

[135] Man has no Body distinct from his soul;

for that call'd Body is a portion of
the Soul discerned by the five Senses,
the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

Energy is the only life, and is from
the Body; and Reason is the bound or
outward circumference of Energy.
Energy is External Delight.

Quoted in J. Lindsay, William Blake: His Work and Life (London: Constable, 1978), 100. For Blake on the body see F. Frosch, The Awakening of Albion (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974).

[136] Cf. Mr. Flosky on "the morbid anatomy of black bile" in Nightmare Abbey, in The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. D. Garnett (London: R. Hart-Davies, 1948), 376.

Gautier, "I could not have accepted as a lyrical poet anyone weighing more than ninety-nine pounds."^[137] Yet this romanticization of consumption as the dematerializing disease only echoes Sydney Smith's complaint that a certain man "had not body enough to cover his mind decently with, his intellect is improperly exposed."^[138]

Improperly exposed intellects may come a bit near the bone. My coverage here is somewhat skimpy. I haven't touched on the countless layers of ambivalence and contradiction in representations of mind/body relations—for example, to note just one instance, the fact that the pre-Victorian rise of delicacy, when servants were being permitted less and less direct contact with their betters, occurred at precisely the time when man-midwives were being let into women's bedrooms for the first time, to touch the most private, the most delicate parts of all.^[139]

Yet what I have attempted is to suggest that in our understanding of the mind/body relation, the view from the body has been neglected. There is far more in the relationship than regular histories of faculty psychology, the philosophy of mind, or of psychiatry allow. In particular, mind/body relations must be understood within specific contexts of use determined by particular problems and cultural configurations. The detailed histories remain to be told.^[140]

[137] Quoted in S. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (London: Allen Lane, 1979); cf. S. Mcleod, The Art of Starvation (London, 1981).

[138] A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith ed. Lady Holland (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855), l: 258.

[139] John O'Neill, Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 23.

[140] See L. Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977); E. Shorter, A History of Women's Bodies (London: Allen Lane, 1983). For proto-Victorianism see P. Fryer, Mrs. Grundy: Studies in English Prudery (London: Dobson, 1963); M. Jaeger, Before Victoria (London: Chatto and Windus, 1956); E. J. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1979); M. Quinlan, Victorian Prelude (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941); E. Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens (London: Heinemann, 1966). For the midwife as sexual threat see Roy Porter, "A Touch of Danger: The Man-Midwife as Sexual Predator," in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).

Three
Locke, Hume, and Modern Moral Theory:
A Legacy of Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Philosophies of Mind

Philippa Foot

'Tis one thing to know virtue, and another to conform the will to it. In order, therefore, to prove, that the measures of right and wrong are eternal laws, obligatory on every rational mind,... [w]e must also point out the connexion betwixt the relation and the will...
—DAVID HUME, Treatise of Human Nature^[1]

Most philosophers writing today would be surprised to be told that their own philosophical psychology had anything much to do with that of late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century philosophers. No one indeed denies that interest in the philosophy of this period is still very great and not at all declining, if only because in metaphysics Locke's theory of primary and secondary qualities, and his theory of real essences, are widely discussed; and in moral philosophy Hume is a commanding, even dominating, figure, whose arguments we can never quite satisfactorily refute. The philosophies of mind of these two great empiricists has, however, come to seem more than a little quaint. We are no longer interested in the attempt to show the origin of psychological concepts in simple ideas or impressions presented in experience; and Wittgenstein has taught us to regard with suspicion the belief, firmly held by both Locke and Hume, that each person knows only from his own introspection what it is to think, to feel, or to desire.^[2]

[1] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2d ed., ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), book III, part i, section 1, p. 465. All subsequent references to Hume's Treatise are to this edition.

Where there are problems about the availability of works quoted in this paper, I have occasionally given alternative references, enclosed in square brackets.

[2] See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968), passim, but especially sections 243 ff., and, e.g., 316, 412, 551, 580, 587. Also part II, xiii.

In writing of modern philosophy I confine myself throughout to philosophy of the modern analytic school. It is absolutely necessary to deal with this separately from, e.g., phenomenology.

In this paper I will argue that although we have, it is true, rejected a great deal of the philosophical psychology of Locke and Hume, there is a part of it which we still more or less take for granted. If the debt is little acknowledged, this may be because it has come to appear to many simply as incontrovertible, uncontentious truth. I am thinking here of a part of the philosophy of mind which belongs to the theory of volition and thus to the theory of action; and not surprisingly it is in the related field of moral theory that its influence appears. I will describe the views of Locke and Hume on the subject of the determination of action, showing how these theories affected their own (very different) moralities. I will point out an underlying similarity in their philosophies of action which made it impossible for either of them to give a proper account of moral motivation, and will suggest that our own thinking on the subject of moral judgment would be improved if we made a more radical break with Locke and Hume.

To begin, then, with this part of the philosophical psychology of John Locke. What is interesting in this connection is his account of the determination of action by desire; there are several other parts of the Lockean philosophy of mind and self which are relevant to modern theories of ethics, as for instance his doctrine of self-identity, or again his theory of free will; but these I will set aside. Naturally, however, Locke's theory of the determination of the will to action must be seen in the context of his general empiricist epistemology. What Locke is out to do, in the theory of action as elsewhere, is to measure the reach of the understanding and to show that we can account for all our knowledge in terms of experience and the combination of ideas in the mind. He insists that all our concepts can be seen as combinations of simple ideas given to us by sense and by reflection, "sense" being the operation of our sense organs, and "reflection" the reflexive movement that we make in order to observe the operations of our minds.

Where, we may ask, do mental elements such as desires and emotions belong in this scheme of things? To Hume they would be impressions of reflection; but the structure of Locke's theory of mind is rather different. Desires and emotions are, he says, modifications of the simple ideas of pleasure and pain; and he classifies these as being not only ideas of reflection but also ideas of sense. What Locke means by this is that pleasure and pain can arise either from the senses (as when fire warms

or burns us) or alternatively from thoughts that bring joy or grief. He makes his position quite clear in a sentence from Book II of the Essay concerning Human Understanding:

By Pleasure and Pain, I must be understood to mean of Body or Mind, as they are commonly distinguished; though in truth, they be only different Constitutions of the Mind, sometimes occasioned by disorder in the Body, sometimes by Thoughts of the Mind.^[3]

And again, writing of "Delight and Joy on the one side; and Torment and Sorrow on the other," he says that "to speak truly, they are all of the Mind; though some have their rise in the Mind from Thought, others in the Body from certain modifications of Motion."^[4]

Such is the framework into which Locke's account of the antecedents of volition has to fit. He believes that this is how we obtain the simple ideas of pain and pleasure; and it is around pleasure and pain (which he identifies with happiness and unhappiness) that his theory of action revolves.

Turning now to the considerable complexities of this theory we may be glad to find one proposition which he unambiguously and consistently endorsed. Locke held the belief that later came to be known as "psychological hedonism," according to which all action is in some way directed toward pleasure or the avoidance of pain. For all his scorn for Hobbes and his tendency to play down any Hobbesian influence in his own work, he had in fact taken over Hobbes's belief that human nature is under the governance of two masters, pleasure and pain. It is true that Locke had freed himself entirely from Hobbes's materialist account of the origin of these elements of our experience, giving thoughts and bodily states an equal power to produce them. It is also true that Locke was much more liberal than Hobbes in his recognition of the diversity of objects in which men might take pleasure.^[5] Nevertheless he says

[3] John Locke, An Essay coneerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), book II, chapter xx, section 2, p. 229. All subsequent references to Locke's Essay are to this edition. Since Nidditch retains the original spelling, capitalization, and italics of the fourth edition of 1700, quotations from the Essay in the present paper are not uniform in appearance with the extracts from other writings available only in modernized form. I have chosen to use Nidditch's edition in spite of this, because it is widely available, and very much the best.

[4] Locke, Essay, II xxi 41, p. 258.

[5] In a short undated paper "Thus I Think" Locke had given, in a catalogue of lasting pleasures: health, reputation, knowledge, and "doing good." Lord King, The Life and Letters of John Locke (1829), 2d ed. (London, 1830), 2:120 [3d ed. (London: Bohn's Standard Library, 1858), 306-307].

explicitly, and repeatedly, in the Essay both that uneasiness and satisfaction determine the will and that good and evil "are nothing but Pleasure or Pain, or that which occasions, or procures Pleasure or Pain to us."^[6] In the Journal for 1676 he writes

The Mind finding in itself the ideas of several objects which, if enjoyed, would produce pleasure, i.e. the ideas of the several things it loves, contemplating the satisfaction which would arise to itself in the actual enjoyment or application of some one of those things it loves and the possibility or feasibleness of the present enjoyment, or doing something toward the procuring the enjoyment, of that good, observes in itself some uneasiness or trouble or displeasure till it be done, and this is what we call desire.^[7]

Psychological hedonism as such gives a certain general characterization of the objects of desire; but it leaves a good deal undetermined. For in itself it says nothing about whether or not an agent always seeks the greatest possible balance of pleasure over pain, taking future as well as present experiences into account. This was something about which Locke changed his mind between the first edition of the Essay, published in 1690, and the second edition of 1694, the latter being echoed by the third and fourth. Between the first and second editions he abandoned the doctrine that the will was always determined by "the greater good in view."

To return then to the Enquiry, what is it that determines the Will in regard to our Actions? And that upon second thoughts I am apt to imagine is not, as is generally supposed, the greater good in view: But some (and for the most part the most pressing) uneasiness a Man is at present under. This is that which successively determines the Will, and set us upon those Actions, we perform. This Uneasiness we may call, as it is, Desire; which is an uneasiness of the Mind for want of some absent good.^[8]

And again:

It seems so establish'd and settled a maxim by the general consent of all Mankind, That good, the greater good, determines the will, that I do not at all wonder, that when I first publish'd my thoughts on this Subject, I took it for granted; and I imagine, that by a great many I shall be thought more excusable, for having then done so, than that now I have ventur'd to recede from so received an Opinion. But yet upon a stricter enquiry, I

[6] Locke, Essay, II xxviii 5, p. 351.

[7] W. yon Leyden, John Locke: Essays on the Law of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 265-272. For the importance of this long journal entry, see ibid., 264.

[8] Locke, Essay, II xxi 31, pp. 250-251.

am forced to conclude, that good, the greater good, though apprehended and acknowledged to be so, does not determine the will, until our desire, raised proportionably to it, makes us uneasy in the want of it.^[9]

These two quotations come from the considerable material added by Locke in the second edition of the Essay and repeated with minor changes in all subsequent editions. In this emendation, sections 28 to 60 of book II, chapter xxi, replace sections 28-38 of the first edition, and although much of the text of the first edition appears in the later editions, it appears in a subsidiary role. Philosophically speaking, the change is significant. For Locke now introduces and discusses at length the subject of desire, which had been barely mentioned in the first edition.^[10] Moreover he now gives to desire the principal role in the determination of the will. Not that he goes back on his psychological hedonism: what happens is rather that desire is introduced as a piece of intermediary mechanism, operated on by present pleasures and pains and by the thought of future pleasure and pain, and itself having the power to produce volition or will.

By this means Locke hopes to solve the problem known since Antiquity as the problem of akrasia or incontinence. In the first edition he had tried to explain the problem away in terms of mistakes about the good, saying in words reminiscent of Plato's Protagoras that present pleasures and pains appear larger than those of the future on account of their proximity.^[11] But in later editions he admits that men may indeed know the better and choose the worse:^[12]

Let a Man be never so well perswaded of the advantages of virtue... yet till he hungers and thirsts after righteousness; till he feels an uneasiness in the want of it, his will will not be determin'd to any action in pursuit of this confessed greater good; but any other uneasiness he feels in himself, shall take place, and carry his will to other actions.^[13]

[9] Locke, Essay, II xxi 35, pp. 252-253.

[10] See Locke, Essay, Nidditch's note to p. 248, line 8.

[11] Plato, Protagoras 356c4-8, 357a5-b3.

[12] Locke, Essay, II xxi 35, p. 254.

[13] Locke, Essay, II xxi 35, p. 253. There is, however, a different view, or at least a different use of the term "desire," to be found in Some Thoughts concerning Eduation, a work which Locke put together, from notes written nearly a decade before, at the time when he was revising the Essay for the second edition. There Locke opposes desire to reason, apparently identifying desire with immediate inclination or appetite. See Some Thoughts concerning Education, sections 33 and 38; James L. Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 138 and 143.

Desire, Locke tells us, is uneasiness: the idea of desire is a modification of the simple idea of pain: a modification because the idea of desire implies a sufficient degree of pain to determine the will to action.

The first thing we must ask about this newly stressed mechanism is whether Locke thought it the universal determinant of the will. He explicitly says in several places that without uneasiness there is no volition, as in the passage last quoted. And although there is a sentence in which he says that "the will seldom [my italics] orders any action, nor is there any voluntary action performed, without some desire accompanying it," the context suggests that he is here contrasting the operation of "uneasiness" alone with "uneasiness" forming part of passions such as anger or jealousy.^[14] There is, however, a stronger reason for saying that Locke does not consistently affirm that volition is always caused by desire. For in book II, chapter ii, section 30, where he wants to distinguish desire and will, he actually gives examples in which he says "the Will and Desire run counter."

A Man, whom I cannot deny, may oblige me to use persuasions to another, which at the same time I am speaking, I may wish may not prevail on him. In this case, 'tis plain the Will and Desire run counter. I will the Action, that tends one way, whilst my desire tends another, and that the direct contrary. A Man, who by a violent Fit of the Gout in his limbs, finds a doziness in his Head, or a want of appetite in his Stomach removed, desires to be eased too of the pain of his Feet or Hands (for where-ever there is pain there is a desire to be rid of it) though yet, whilst he apprehends, that the removal of the pain may translate the noxious humour to a more vital part, his will is never determin'd to any one Action, that may serve to remove this pain.^[15]

In consistency Locke should not have suggested that desire can tend in one direction and will in another, but rather that there may be two desires, of which one determines the will to a movement which the other opposes. What he needs to show, in order to prove that will and desire are distinct, is that there can be a desire without a corresponding action, which does not of course imply that there can be actions without a corresponding desire.

Locke's usual line from the second edition forward is that volition and hence action are universally determined by uneasiness, that is, by desire. The only important rider that he adds is that when several desires have arisen, "the greatest and most pressing" does not always determine the

[14] Locke, Essay, II xxi 39, pp. 256-257.

[15] Locke, Essay, II xxi 39, p. 250.

will. For the mind has the power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires, giving us "opportunity to examine, view, and judge, of the good or evil [i.e., the effect on our happiness] of what we are going to do."^[16]

To support his account of the antecedents of action Locke has to try to show that whenever we act, or want to act, the volition is triggered by "uneasiness." In book II of the Essay, chapter xxi, from section 31 onward, this is just what he sets out to do. I think we can disentangle his arguments more or less as follows.

Locke wants to show that the object of desire is always pleasure, either positive enjoyment or else the negative pleasure of "indolency" or relief from pain. He also wants to show, however, that it is only when we are uneasy at the absence of pleasure that we have a desire and are thereby moved to action. So he has to explain how uneasiness comes into the picture in every instance in which we try to gain pleasure or avoid pain. He must consider the cases in which we wish to continue present pleasure or get rid of present pain, and also the determination of the will by the ideas of future pleasures and pains.

Where present pain is concerned he seems to see no difficulty, clearly believing that this pain, being itself an uneasiness, itself represents desire. And he also insists that the removal of a present pain is necessarily a condition of our happiness.^[17] What is more difficult for him is to say where uneasiness comes in when we want a present pleasure to continue, and Locke is here driven to the expedient of saying that we are anxious at the thought that the pleasure will end.

So that even in joy it self, that which keeps up the action, whereon the enjoyment depends, is the desire to continue it, and fear to lose it...^[18]

Future pleasures and pains he deals with in the first place by simply asserting (as in the passage about thirsting after righteousness which was quoted earlier) that until we feel uneasy at the prospect of pleasure sacrificed or penalty incurred, we shall not be turned away from present enjoyments and ease. But he also relies heavily on examples that seem to bear out his point.

[L]et a Drunkard see, that his health decays, his Estate wastes; Discredit and Diseases, and the want of all things, even of his beloved Drink, at-

[16] Locke, Essay, II xxi 47, p. 263.

[17] John Colman, John Locke's Moral Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), 217 stresses this point.

[18] Locke, Essay, II xxi 39, p. 257.

tends him in the course he follows: yet the returns of uneasiness to miss his Companions; the habitual thirst after his Cups, at the usual time, drives him to the Tavern 'Tis not for want of viewing the greater good... but when the uneasiness to miss his accustomed delight returns, the greater acknowledged good loses its hold, and the present uneasiness determines the will to the accustomed action...^[19]

Such examples cannot really show the nature of desire to be uneasiness, and one has to admit that Locke's theory is confusing and confused. Nevertheless Locke shows his genius in fastening on a connection that is deep, and hard to understand. For who can deny that there is some very interesting conceptual connection between pain, uneasiness, and desire? What Locke says cannot be right; but one may doubt whether anyone else has yet been able to give the true account of this fascinating subject.

The important question from our present point of view is how Locke's theory of action is related to his moral theory, and it is to this that I now turn. As a moral philosopher he has had very little lasting influence; and this is perhaps not surprising. His moral theory is a very curious blend of hedonism and rationalism, held together only by an explicit and often repeated appeal to the existence of God. As we shall see, his account of the determination of action seemed to force him toward something of this kind.^[20]

In the Essay concerning Human Understanding Locke claims that moral propositions can be known with certainty. He is emboldened to claim the status of a science for morality largely by the similar way in which his theory of knowledge treated moral and mathematical ideas. Unlike the ideas of material substances such as gold, these ideas are "adequate." There is, in such cases, no reference to unknowable "real essences" independent of the mind, and so we can have demonstrative knowledge in morals as we can in mathematics. In the fourth book of the Essay Locke gives several examples of moral propositions which can be known with certainty (by intuition and demonstration), as for instance that

[19] Locke, Essay, II xxi 35, pp. 253-254.

[20] Von Leyden wrote that "Locke's hedonism and certain other views held by him in his later years made it difficult for him to adhere wholeheartedly to his doctrine of natural law" (Essays on the Law of Nature, 14). John Colman, however, sees no inconsistency here, and in my opinion he is right. There is no reason why one should not be a rationalist about moral knowledge and a hedonist about the motive to moral action, so long as one is ready to rely on God to annex pleasure to the right actions either in this world or the next. See Colman, John Locke's Moral Philosophy, 235.

“Where there is no Property, there is no Injustice,"^[21] or "Murther deserves Death. "^[22] Complex ideas such as that of property or murder could be analyzed like those of mathematics. Since such ideas were "their own archetypes," we could know the real and nominal essences of property or murder at the same time.^[23] Locke denies, moreover, that these moral propositions are merely verbal, since the same ideas with a different name annexed to them would still carry the same implications.^[24] Never- theless, he believed that the examples which he gave of demonstrable moral propositions were of very little use without a further demonstration which would show why anyone had an obligation to act in one way rather than another; and this, he thought, required a knowledge of the laws which God had given to men. In the short piece called "Of Ethics in General" published by Lord King in his Life and Letters of John Locke, Locke had said that all the knowledge of virtue and vice which man had attained by the analysis of the complex ideas of morality found in different societies would amount to little unless we could "show the inferments that may draw us to virtue and deter us from vice."^[25]

Those who only give definitions

whilst they discourse ever so acutely of temperance or justice, but show no law of a superior that prescribes temperance, to the observation or breach of which law there are rewards and punishments annexed, the force of morality is lost, and evaporates only into words, disputes, and niceties.... Without showing a law that commands or forbids them, moral goodness will be but an empty sound, and those actions which the schools here call virtue or vice, may by the same authority be called contrary names in another country; and if there be nothing more than their decisions and determinations in the case, they will be still nevertheless indifferent as to any man's practice, which will by such kind of determinations be under no obligation to observe them.^[26]

Looking for the source of obligation Locke finds it in laws of various kinds, which he classifies under the headings of Divine law, the civil law,

[21] Locke, Essay, IV iii 18, p. 549.

[22] Locke, Essay, IV iv 8 p. 566.

[23] See, e.g., Locke, Essay, IV xii 7 and 8, pp. 643-644.

[24] Locke, Essay, IV v 9, pp. 566-567.

[25] "Of Ethics in General," section 6, in King, Life and Letters, 2d ed., 2:127 [3d ed. (1858), 310]. Von Leyden dates this paper to the late 1680s when Locke was organizing chapters for the first edition of the Essay.

[26] "Of Ethics in General," section 9, in King, Life and Letters, 2d ed., 2:129-130 [3d ed. (1858), 311-312].

and "the Law of Opinion or Reputation. "^[27] The sanctions of each kind of law can provide motives to good behavior, and in the Essay he calls them all "Moral Rules, or Laws."^[28]

Good and Evil, as hath been shewn... are nothing but Pleasure or Pain, or that which occasions, or procures Pleasure or Pain to us. Morally Good and Evil then, is only the Conformity or Disagreement of our voluntary Actions to some Law, whereby Good or Evil is drawn on us, from the Will and Power of the Law-Maker; which Good and Evil, Pleasure or Pain, attending our observance, or breach of the Law, by the Decree of the Lawmaker, is that we call Reward and Punishment.^[29]

The terms "virtue" and "vice" are, he observes, applied to actions merely to mark their conformity with a particular set of mores. Nevertheless the law which God has given to man "whether promulgated to them by the light of Nature, or the Voice of Revelation" is

the only true touchstone of moral Rectitude; and by comparing them to this Law, it is, that Men judge of the most considerable Moral Good or Evil of their Actions; that is, whether, as Duties, or Sins, they are like to procure them happiness, or misery, from the hands of the ALMIGHTY.^[30]

And earlier he had distinguished natural and moral good, saying that "moral good... is that which produces pleasure of a particular kind, namely the pleasure with which God rewards certain acts which he considers desirable."^[31]

To discover our moral obligations we must, therefore, discover the will of God, and as the words quoted above suggest, Locke is uncertain in his mind as to whether we can know our obligations by the light of reason or not.^[32] Yet in the Essay, book IV, he insists on placing morality

amongst the Sciences capable of Demonstration : wherein I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematicks, the measures of right and wrong might be made out, to any one that will apply himself with the same Indifferency and Attention to the one, as he does to the other of these Sciences.^[33]

[27] Locke, Essay, II xxviii 7, p. 352.

[28] Locke, Essay, II xxviii 6, p. 351.

[29] Locke, Essay, II xxviii 5, p. 351.

[30] Locke, Essay, II xxviii 8, p. 352.

[31] "Of Ethics in General," section 8, in King, Life and Letters, 2d ed., 2:128 [3d ed. (1858), 311].

[32] For discussion of this question see yon Leyden, Essays on the Law of Nature, 51-58, and P. J. Abrams, John Locke: Two Tracts on Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 85-86.

[33] Locke, Essay, IV iii 18, p. 549.

Immediately before this passage Locke had written of "the Idea of a supreme Being, infinite in Power, Goodness, and Wisdom, whose Workmanship we are, and on whom we depend; and the Idea of our selves, as understanding, rational Beings"^[34] as the elements from which this demonstration might proceed. And the same kind of suggestion is made, in an amplified form, in a passage from the Essays on the Law of Nature, written some thirty years before the Essay concerning Human Understanding, and first printed in W. von Leyden's translation from the Latin, in 1954^[35]

It seems that Locke continued to believe that it would be possible to produce a demonstrative science of morality, and that he even hoped to derive moral laws such as "Love thy neighbour as thyself" from the existence of God and from human nature. But although he was asked to do so by Molyneux and others, he never did produce anything of the kind.

Molyneux wrote:

One thing I must needs insist on to you, which is, that you would think of Obleidging the World with a Treatise of Morals, drawn up according to the Hints you frequently give in Your Essay, Of their Being Demonstrable according to the Mathematical Method.^[36]

And Locke replied:

Though by the view I had of moral ideas, whilst I was considering that subject, I thought I saw that morality might be demonstratively made out, yet whether I am able so to make it out, is another question. Everyone could not have demonstrated what Mr. Newton's book hath shewn to be demonstrable: but to shew my readiness to obey your commands, I shall not decline the first leisure I can get to employ some thoughts that way unless I find what I have said in my essay shall have stir'd up some abler man to prevent me, and effectually do that service to the world.^[37]

[34] Ibid.

[35] "But what it is that is to be done by us can be partly gathered from the end in view for all things. For since these derive their origin from a gracious divine purpose and are the work of a most perfect and wise maker, they appear to be intended by Him for no other end than His own glory, and to this all things must be related. Pardy also we can infer the principle and a definite rule of our duty from man's own constitution and the faculties with which he is equipped. For since man is neither made without design nor endowed to no purpose with these faculties which both can and must be employed, his function appears to be that which nature has prepared him to perform" (yon Leyden, Essays on the Law of Nature, 157).

[36] Letter of 27 Aug. 1692, The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), vol. 4, letter 1530.

[37] Letter of 26 Sept. 1692, ibid., vol. 4, Letter 1538.

Locke's moral theory was flawed by this failure to do what he claimed could be done, and even more by his need to appeal to theology to explain moral obligation and the motivation to act morally. He himself said:

That Men should keep their Compacts, is certainly a great and undeniable Rule in Morality: But yet, if a Christian, who has the view of Happiness and Misery in another Life, be asked why a Man must keep his Word, he will give this as a Reason: Because God, who has the Power of eternal Life and Death, requires it of us. But if an Hobbist be asked why; he will answer: Because the Publick requires it, and the Leviathan will punish you, if you do not. And if one of the old Heathen Philosophers had been asked, he would have answer'd: Because it was dishonest, below the Dignity of a Man, and opposite to Vertue, the highest Perfection of humane Nature, to do otherwise.^[38]

Locke is, therefore, vulnerable to the criticism brought against him, or at least against doctrines such as his, by Richard Price in A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals first published in 1758.

Price there wrote:

Those who say, nothing can oblige but the will of God, generally resolve the power of this to oblige to the annexed rewards and punishments. And thus, in reality, they subvert entirely the independent natures of moral good and evil; and are forced to maintain, that nothing can oblige, but the prospect of pleasure to be obtained, or pain to be avoided. If this be true, it follows that vice is, properly, no more than imprudence; that nothing is right or wrong, just or unjust, any farther than it affects self-interest; and that a being, independently and completely happy, cannot have any moral perceptions....
But to pursue this point farther; let me ask, would a person who either believes there is no God, or that he does not concern himself with human affairs, feel no moral obligation, and therefore not be at all accountable? Would one, who should happen not to be convinced, that virtue tends to his happiness here or hereafter, be released from every bond of duty and morality? Or would he, if he believed no future state, and that, in any instance, virtue was against his present interest, be truly obliged in these instances, to be wicked?—These consequences must follow, if obligation depends entirely on the knowledge of the will of a superior, or in the connection between actions and private interest.^[39]

[38] Locke, Essay, I iii 5, p. 68.

[39] Richard Price, A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, ed. D. D. Raphael (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) [printed also in D. D. Raphael, British Moralists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 2:162-163].

In spite of criticisms such as this, Locke's idea of a demonstration of morality received some favorable notice in the eighteenth century.^[40] Nowadays, however, it seems to be generally agreed that Locke's moral theory is not of the same great interest as his political theory, or his views on such topics as substance, personal identity, and the perception of the external world. Hence, no doubt, the fact that in spite of the interest and vast influence of his political philosophy, Locke's moral philosophy is now rather little read.

By contrast, modern readers are as much concerned with Hume's moral writings as with his epistemology. His moral theory is extensively and intensively studied, and if one had to cite the foremost influence on contemporary ethics one might reasonably name David Hume. Hume's position is therefore quite different from Locke's so far as influence is concerned. Moreover they have sharply contrasting moral theories. In ethics Locke was a rationalist, claiming as we have seen that morality could be a demonstrative science on a par with mathematics. Hume stood on the other side of the great divide that came to separate moral philosophers in the eighteenth century into two schools: the adherents of reason in ethics and of moral sense.^[41] He derided Wollaston's attempts to show immorality as a kind of falsehood, and argued against those who like Samuel Clarke saw moral judgment as the perception of eternal and immutable relations of fitness which the intellect could grasp.^[42] In his own moral epistemology Hume insisted that morality was "more properly felt than judg'd of,"^[43] and said that we could never understand the practical nature of morality until we saw that virtue aroused a feeling of pleasure in our minds. In his theory of the "artificial virtues" Hume developed a far more sophisticated system than did eighteenth-century "sentimentalists" such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, who had been content to give the sentiment of benevolence as the mainspring of moral

[40] See Kenneth MacLean, John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936), 162 ff.

[41] Bishop Butler's attempt to compromise is expressed in the sentence from his Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue (1726) in which he refers to "a moral faculty: whether called conscience, moral reason, moral sense, or divine reason; whether considered as a sentiment of the understanding, or a perception of the heart, or, which seems the truth, as including both." The Works of Joseph Butler, ed. W. E. Gladstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), 1:399 [Butler's Fifteen Sermons and A Dissertation, ed. T. A. Roberts (London: S.P.C.K., 1970)].

[42] William Wollaston, 1660-1724. Samuel Clarke, 1675-1729. For criticism of Wollaston, see Hume, Treatise, III i 1, p. 461. For his opposition to theories such as Clarke's see, especially, Treatise, III i 1, pp. 463-470.

[43] Hume, Treatise, III i 2, p. 470.

action; and he insisted that the peculiarly moral sentiments arose only on an objective and disinterested view of "qualities useful or agreeable to ourselves or others."^[44] Nevertheless, in the end, it was by feeling not thinking that we distinguished virtue and vice.^[45]

Given this sharp contrast between the moral philosophies of Locke and Hume, it may seem strange to link their names as legators to modern theories of ethics. Nevertheless this is just what I meant to do.

Like his predecessor, Hume had a philosophical theory of the antecedents of action. Like Locke, he put out a general deterministic thesis, saying that men's actions were invariably caused by "their motives, temper and situation."^[46] But he too went beyond such indefinite statements of determinism, which left the causes of action more or less open, and told a tale about the specific and universal antecedents of voluntary action. For Locke this invariable antecedent had been "an uneasiness." Hume rejected this idea and put forward a suggestion that gave him more room to maneuver; he said that the active element in our psychological makeup, ultimately responsible for all our intentional actions, was "passion," and this was a more compendious term than Locke's "desire."

Hume's theory of reason and the passions, with reason "perfectly inert" and the passions active, with reason the slave and passion the master, is too well known to need description here.^[47] It was of course a pillar of his antirationalist, sentimentalist morality; for how, he asked, could anything as cool and detached as reason have the active tendency that so clearly belonged to morality? How could reasoning, whether about ideas or about matters of fact, give that impetus toward one end rather than another on which all human action must be based? The import of this theory and the connection between Hume's psychology and his ethics is easy to see, because Hume put the link between moral judgment and action at the center of his moral philosophy and made it one of his grounds for the rejection of rationalism in ethics.

According to the principles of those who maintain an abstract rational difference betwixt moral good and evil, and a natural fitness and unfitness of things, 'tis not only suppos'd, that these relations, being eternal and

[44] Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671-1713. Francis Hutcheson, 1694-1746.

[45] See Hume, Treatise, iii i 2, passim, and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, 1751, Appendix I, "Concerning Moral Sentiment."

[46] Hume, Treatise, II iii 1, p. 404.

[47] See, especially, Hume, Treatise, II iii 3, pp. 413-418; and III i 1, pp. 457-459.

immutable, are the same, when consider'd by every rational creature, but their effects are also suppos'd to be necessarily the same; and 'tis concluded they have no less, or rather a greater, influence in directing the will of the deity, than in governing the rational and virtuous of our own species. These two particulars are evidently distinct. 'Tis one thing to know virtue, and another to conform the will to it. In order, therefore, to prove, that the measures of right and wrong are eternal laws, obligatory on every rational mind, 'tis not sufficient to shew the relations upon which they are founded: We must also point out the connexion betwixt the relation and the will; and must prove that this connexion is so necessary, that in every well-disposed mind, it must take place and have its influence; tho' the difference betwixt these minds be in other respects immense and infinite.^[48]

Hume's theory of action itself is, however, complex and in places even its outline is blurred. What did he mean by a "passion"? What was the relation between passion and desire? What part, if any, did pleasure and pain play in the determination of volition? Was Hume, like Locke, a psychological hedonist? How did he think that men were motivated when they acted morally?

Some of these questions can be answered with confidence. For Hume a passion may either be an "aversion or propensity," in which case it is itself a desire, and a motive to action, or it may be some other "sentiment" or "emotion" or "feeling" such as love or hatred or pride. The second kind of passion can cause action, by a process which Hume describes at great length; but as critics have noted Hume does not think that particular desires are involved in the idea of, for instance, love and hate.^[49] Moreover there are some passions, such as hope, that have no special connection with action. It is the two passions of aversion and propensity that are the universal determinants of action.

Beyond characterizing desire in terms of propensity and aversion, Hume does not tell us what kind of experience desiring is, and it would of course have been against his principles to attempt to convey by description the content of the simple impression we receive by introspection and can know only through this experience. But it is clear that all connotation of tempestuousness has gone from the word "passion" as Hume uses it, particularly when he is thinking about desire. As is well known, he even goes so far as to speak of "certain calm desires and tendencies, which, tho' they be real passions, produce little emotion in the

[48] Hume, Treatise, III i 1, p. 465.

[49] See Patrick Gardiner, "Hume's Theory of the Passions," in David Hume, ed. David Pears (London: Macmillan, 1963), and Pall S. Ardal, Passion and Value in Hume's Treatise (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), chap. 3.

mind," and are "more known by their effects than by the immediate feeling or sensation," giving as examples "benevolence and resentment, the love of life, and kindness to children."^[50] The idea that some desires may be known by their effects rather than by a state of mind revealed to introspection is, clearly, a point on which Hume differs from Locke, and we shall have occasion to say more about this later on.

So far Hume's doctrine is fairly clear; but interpretation is more difficult when we try to say how he conceived the connection between propensity and aversion on the one hand and pleasure and pain on the other.^[51] It is a much-debated question whether Hume was some kind of psychological hedonist or not.^[52] What is certain is that he did not think that all action was self-interested. He disapproved of Hobbes and Locke for their "selfish system of morals,"^[53] and he asks in the final paragraph of the essay on self-love which forms Appendix II to the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals why there should be difficulty in conceiving that

from the original frame of our temper, we may feel a desire of another's happiness or good, which, by means of that affection, becomes our own good, and is afterwards pursued, from the combined motives of benevolence and self-enjoyment.^[54]

Thus Hume denies that everything we do is actuated by self-interest. But nor did Locke think that—if self-interest is to mean the pursuit of perceived maximum advantage to oneself. We earlier described Locke as a psychological hedonist because he thought that every agent sought some pleasure for himself, or to avoid some pain, in whatever he did. And Hume certainly speaks at times as if he believed this too. Nevertheless there is a passage in the Treatise in which Hume explicitly disavows any form of psychological hedonism, saying that

[b]eside good and evil, or in other words, pain and pleasure, the direct passions frequently arise from a natural impulse or instinct, which is perfectly unaccountable.^[55]

[50] Hume, Treatise, II iii 3, p. 417. As Árdal points out (Passion and Value, 94), a calm passion is one so experienced on most, not necessarily all, occasions.

[51] Hume talks more about pleasure, whereas Locke is driven by his theory of the nature of desire to place the emphasis on pain.

[52] See Árdal, Passion and Value, 69-79.

[53] Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Appendix II, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 296.

[54] Ibid., 302.

[55] Hume, Treatise, II iii 9, p. 439.

Moreover, as Páll Árdal has stressed, even when pleasure or pain is thought by Hume to be involved in the causal explanation of a desire, pleasure or pain need not be the end the agent wants to attain.^[56]

Hume was not, we should conclude, a psychological hedonist. Nevertheless pleasure and pain come in at a critical point in his moral philosophy. For it is clear that he believed himself to have solved the problem of linking moral judgment to the will, by insisting that the perception of virtue consisted of a pleasant sentiment or feeling.

Nothing can be more real, or concern us more, than our own sentiments of pleasure and uneasiness; and if these be favourable to virtue, and unfavourable to vice, no more can be requisite to the regulation of our conduct and behaviour.^[57]

Even here, however, it seems most unlikely that what Hume meant was that we are motivated to act virtuously by the wish to obtain pleasure from the contemplation of our own virtuous acts. Hutcheson, who was one of the chief influences on Hume's moral thinking, had argued against philosophers who tried to reduce morality to self-interest by supposing that we have "a secret sense of pleasure arising from reflection upon such of our own actions as we call virtuous, even when we expect no other advantage from them" and that we are motivated to act virtuously "to obtain this pleasure which arises from reflection upon the action."^[58]

The question of how Hume did understand the role of pleasure and pain in moral motivation has not so far as I know been satisfactorily answered, and commentators seem oddly incurious about the matter. Hume seemed to assume that what was thought of with pleasure tended to be pursued, and perhaps this is a correct idea. It has appeared, though in a curious form, in our own century in the philosophy of G. E. Moore, but has not to my knowledge lately received the attention it deserves.^[59]

I hope that I have by now said enough to show in outline what Locke believed, and what Hume believed, about the antecedents of voluntary

[56] Árdal, Passion and Value, chap. 3, and especially p. 73.

[57] Hume, Treatise, II i 1, p. 469.

[58] Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), 4th ed. (Glasgow, 1738; new printing, 1772), 96. Printed also in D. D. Raphael, British Moralists, vol. 2, sec. 305.

[59] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), chap. 2, sec. 27, p. 42. We should, perhaps, think again, in the light of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, about expressions such as "How good it would be to do such and such."

action. I have tried to show how they differed both in these theories of action and in their moral philosophy; and it is now time to change to the other tack. For the thesis of this paper is that there is a common mistake in their philosophies of action. I want to show that neither of them could give a proper account, within their own theories, of the part which reason plays in determining human choice.

The subject of reason and action, which I have just introduced into this discussion, is nothing grand or recondite. I am simply referring to the familiar fact that human beings often do do what they do because it seems the reasonable thing to do. Sometimes a process of reasoning is involved, as when we decide "I should do such and such," or say "So I'll do such and such" as the conclusion of one of these bits of practical reasoning. Like speculative reasoning (ordinary nonpractical reasoning by deduction or induction) this kind of practical reasoning has premises and conclusions. In other cases, however, we act on a reason or for a reason, without having been through any reasoning. Practical reasoning is then in the background, in that it may be appealed to if an argument is required.

My charge against Locke, and against Hume, is that the type of explanation of action which is their stock-in-trade cannot accommodate actions done for a reason. I want to say that they cannot give a true account of prudential action, when we act in a certain way for reasons connected with our own future happiness. Nor can they correctly describe even the most common cause of doing something because it is thought that that will be the cause or enabling condition of our getting something that we already want.

Let us first consider prudential action, and think again about Locke's account of the case where someone renounces present pleasure to avoid later distress. What Locke says, and must in consistency say, is that we will act prudently only if an "uneasiness" arises at the thought of the future evil or loss which present indulgence will bring. Thus we act as reason bids us only if we find ourselves with the relevant desire. We have as it were to wait and see whether the thought of the future does or does not have the effect of arousing the uneasiness in us. And even though Locke thinks that we have the power to suspend action and again contemplate the future, this is only to say that we can if we like give the desire more time to appear.

To see how little this kind of theory can accommodate reason-based action, and how strange it really is, we have only to observe that it must allow as a possibility that someone who is told that he should do something, like giving up drinking, on prudential grounds, might reply that

he felt no uneasiness at the thought of his future suffering and therefore could not be expected to do what we advised; as if the necessary mental mechanism was not in place. And if this does not seem strange enough, it should be remarked that the same response would be possible in the other case originally mentioned as one in which reason determines action. For why should it not be given where the reason for action is of the means-end or instrumental kind, related to a present felt desire? For example, suppose that someone had a headache (and so far as that goes, an uneasiness and a Lockean desire to get rid of it) but when told that an aspirin would relieve his condition he waited to see whether he wanted an aspirin. "You should take an aspirin," we say to him, but although he does believe that that would cure the headache he says that unfortunately he finds in himself no desire to do the thing.^[60] What really happens is just that he says to himself something like "My headache is awful. An aspirin would do the trick. So I need to go upstairs to get one," and goes. In other words, a piece of practical reasoning leads to action. Or perhaps he just goes upstairs without reasoning, but could give the desire to get rid of the headache as the reason why he went. In neither case do we think of inventing a special desire directed toward going upstairs as an antecedent of the journey. It is enough that reason tells the agent to go. And the question is why in the other type of case we are inclined, with Locke, to invoke a desire for our future good when we obey the dictate of reason which tells us not to drink.

What is at issue here is the supposed requirement for a certain kind of story about how all action comes about. And it is easy to see that on this point Hume and Locke are in agreement, in spite of the differences in the exact story that they tell. Where Locke puts in uneasiness, Hume puts in "passion" as the necessary antecedent of action, so that it is in terms of passions that he will have to explain how men act (as we say) for a reason in curbing their immediate impulses on prudential grounds. Notoriously, Hume himself even denies that prudential action has any special connection with rationality. "'Tis not contrary to reason," he says, "to prefer even my own acknowledg'd lesser good to my greater."^[61] The desire for our own good is just one "passion" among others, and its operation is mistaken for the working of reason only because, like reason, it is "calm" and makes very little disturbance in the mind. So much for

[60] It would, of course, be quite wrong to say that if the desire did not materialize, the agent would conclude that he did not want to get rid of the headache after all. It is not a question of desires materializing, but of acting on reasons.

[61] Hume, Treatise, II iii 3, p. 416.

Hume's account of the first "prudential" example, described above (and rightly described) as one case of the determination of action by reason.

Turning now to the other example, where the practical reasoning or the reason for acting was of the instrumental or means-end kind, one finds Hume much more aware of the problem of fitting this into the general theory than Locke had been.

'Tis obvious, that when we have the prospect of pain or pleasure from any object, we feel a consequent emotion of aversion or propensity, and are carry'd to avoid or embrace what will give us this uneasiness or satisfaction. 'Tis also obvious, that this emotion rests not here, but making us cast our view on every side, comprehends whatever objects are connected with its original one by the relation of cause and effect. Here then reasoning takes place to discover this relation; and according as our reasoning varies, our actions receive a subsequent variation. But 'tis evident in this case, that the impulse arises not from reason, but is only directed by it.^[62]

Hume sees that he needs something to be the dynamic antecedent of the action (in our example, the action of going upstairs) and says that it is the original passion which is at work, having spread itself, by an association of ideas traveling along the relation of cause and effect, to the thing that is to be done. And his use of the word "directed" suggests the image of a force, like a spring of water, or the movement of a body, which is guided in a particular direction.

Now there is something right in this case about his insistence on the relevance of the "original emotion," to the action taken, because in this kind of case what we are talking about is the rationality of taking means to something desired. But I suggest that he is wrong in thinking that a story was needed about how the desire for the end energizes the agent to adopt the means. Instrumental reasoning to the fulfillment of a desire is one of the forms of practical reasoning; and that is all that needs to be said about how the action comes about. If physiologists or psychologists have some story to tell about causality on experimental grounds that is, of course, a different matter. But it is not because we know anything of this kind that we are tempted by the kind of theory of action given by Locke and Hume.

That we are tempted by this kind of theory—that modern philosophers often make the same mistake that I have tried to identify in Locke and Hume—is a main thesis of this paper. But at this point I can imagine that protests will go up. Surely, it will be said, we are not nowadays in-

[62] Hume, Treatise, II iii 3, P. 414.

clined to accept that part of the philosophical psychology of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries which has to do with the determination of action by desire. Indeed, it may be thought that we accept very little of it, particularly now that Wittgenstein has taught us to see as problematic the idea of contents of the mind known to each person only by his own introspection.^[63] It is true that contemporary philosophy of mind is radically different from that of Locke and Hume.^[63] Nevertheless, with a few notable exceptions, contemporary philosophers share the assumption which I have pointed out as being common to Locke and Hume. To be sure, it is usual now to think of desires as dispositions rather than as introspectible contents in the mind, and they are therefore treated as underlying conditions rather than things that occur in the mind immediately before volition. But as we noticed earlier, Hume thought that some of his calm passions might be "more known by their effects than by the immediate feeling or sensation." The point to be stressed is that even if Hume had thought of desires as underlying dispositions, this would not have saved him from the mistake which I am claiming to find in Locke, Hume, and most present-day philosophers. For an account of how reason affects action which is in terms of underlying dispositions is still a causal account. Given a dispositional theory of desire, someone who was told to stop drinking for the sake of his health could still say that he did not find in himself the desire for health, now conceived as an underlying condition, a disposition to seek his own good.^[64]

My point is that where practical reason is concerned no such causal story is needed to show how action comes about. Practical reasoning, with its counterpart in the giving of reasons for choosing one course of action rather than another, is a kind of operation on a par with speculative reasoning. And it is as odd to ask for a causal account of one as of the other. When someone says that Socrates is mortal on the ground that all men are mortal and Socrates a man, philosophers do not invent a causal story about how his belief comes about. Few would suppose, in the case of speculative reasoning (whether deductive or inductive), that after asserting the premises the reasoner finds himself with a belief in the

[63] See n. 2 above. As far as I know, Wittgenstein never refers to Locke, but in his later philosophy he often attacks a theory of language, as well as certain propositions in the theory of mind, which are almost exactly those which Locke, in particular, put forward.

[64] Barry Stroud and others seem to me to be mistaken in thinking that Hume's account of desire can be radically improved by replacing it with a dispositional theory. See Barry Stroud, Hume (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 167-169.

conclusion, as if by a causal mechanism which he might always discover not to have worked. What I am pointing out is that it would be just as strange, in the case where action is in question, for someone to say that unfortunately he did not have the desire which would lead him to act in accordance with reason. One may of course bemoan the fact that what reason tells us to do (like morning exercises) has so little appeal on its own, and one might try to increase its appeal by some means or other. But this is not the ordinary way that practical reasoning works; on the contrary, it is an expedient adopted as a substitute for practical reason.

What the foregoing pages have shown is that Locke and Hume, however much they differed in detail, both gave an account of the genesis of voluntary action which is questionable. For both of them tried to find a type of antecedent which invariably preceded volition; and the argument of the last few paragraphs has suggested that this was a mistake that made it impossible for either of them to take proper account of one most important type of human activity, namely acting on a reason. Looked at from this point of view the differences between the two philosophers' theories of action seem slight, while their common presupposition leaps to the eye. Moreover, the implications of this seventeenth- and eighteenth-century empiricist philosophy are very important indeed. It is no exaggeration to see here one of the chief influences on the subjectivist, emotivist, and prescriptivist moral philosophies of our own time, and one of the long-term aims of the present inquiry is to oppose such theories by striking at their roots.^[65]

To try to give some idea of the shift of perspective that would be involved in giving up the Lockean and Humean point of view, one should remark first of all that what is at issue is the possibility of a certain kind of explanation of human action. If Locke and Hume were right, the explanation of every action would involve an antecedent event or

[65] C. L. Stevenson's Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944) is the book that most explicitly expresses this kind of ethical system; but it is arguable that most moral philosophers in the analytic school are still deeply influenced by such ideas. G. E. M. Anscombe is a notable exception, as well as Paul Grice and John McDowell. See G. E. M. Anscombe, Ethics, Religion and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981); idem, Intention (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1957; 2d ed., Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963); P. H. Grice, "Reply to Richards," in Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends, ed. R. Grandy and R. Warner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); J. McDowell, "Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?" Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 52 (1978): 13-30; J. McDowell, "Virtue and Reason," The Monist 62 (1979): 331-350. There is also some pioneering work on the subject of action and desire in Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), chap. 5.

condition such as Locke's uneasiness or Hume's aversion or propensity. If they are wrong, there is no need to search for any such feature of every situation in which voluntary action takes place; though of course such things can be taken into account wherever they really are found. Someone may do something because he is hungry, because he finds a certain course of action attractive, or because he simply wants to do that thing. He may, however, do it because he has some reason to do it: it is a necessary step to something that he now desires; he realizes that he will be in for trouble later if he does not do it; someone has given him an order; the action falls under a rule. These are explanations of his action, and in spite of the possibility of rationalization (in the everyday sense of unconsciously inventing reasons) we should say that what he gives is normally the correct explanation of why he does what he does. That is to say that the explanation is in terms of reasons, and any suggestion that a different account must be given is a philosopher's prejudice. People operate with practical reason as they operate with speculative reason. It is as wrong to invent a parallel process involving psychological causes in one case as in the other.

It is easy to see how moral theory is affected by these considerations about the explanation of action by reasons. For Hume's challenge, which dominated his account of the perception of virtue and vice, has come also to dominate our own thoughts about moral judgment. Hume had insisted, as in the famous passage placed as the motto at the head of this paper, that morality was practical, serving to produce action, and must be shown as such. Modern theories of moral judgment tend to take this challenge very seriously, and to meet it by fixing on some determinant of action, such as feeling or attitude, whose presence is taken to be a condition of the correct use of moral language; thus introducing a subjective element into the account. On the principles suggested in the present paper there is, by contrast, no need to look for any such thing. No such element need come into the explanation of action as motivated by the thought of reasons. And the way is open for a simpler account of the necessarily practical character of morals. For undoubtedly those who have successfully been taught morality see moral considerations as reasons for action. We do not have to look for something special in the way of "moral motivation" to see how it can be that they do things, on many occasions, because morality so dictates.

Nor is it hard to see on these principles that morality is necessarily practical; which is to say not that people always act morally (which of course they do not) but rather that there is a conceptual link between morality and action. To show just how this is true is a more complex matter, and

it is no doubt hard to get it quite right. Perhaps it is enough here to suggest that a moral system necessarily involves some kind of rules, and to point out that a rule belongs to our armory of practical linguistic devices. If someone should insist that it is not necessarily rational to obey any and every rule, this observation should be welcomed and not taken as any objection to what has been said. For what I have been trying to do is not to produce some kind of justification of morality—of the making and keeping of moral rules—as a rational human enterprise, in contradistinction to the invention of duelling rules or the more byzantine varieties of etiquette. Nor have I tried to show that someone who acts for a moral reason acts for a good reason. What has been in question is rather a clear view of the way in which morality motivates action, and above all a rejection of the kind of story which, in consistency with their own philosophy of mind, Locke and Hume had to tell.