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.