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      The Mind Is a Collection

      MATERIAL TEXTS

       Series Editors

Roger ChartierJoseph FarrellAnthony Grafton Leah PricePeter StallybrassMichael F. Suarez, S.J.

      A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

      THE MIND

      IS A COLLECTION

      CASE STUDIES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY THOUGHT

      SEAN SILVER

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      UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

      PHILADELPHIA

      Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

       www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Silver, Sean, author.

      The mind is a collection : case studies in eighteenth-century thought / Sean Silver.

      pages cm — (Material texts)

      Coordinates with an online site.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-8122-4726-8 (alk. paper)

      1. Collectors and collecting—History—17th century—Case studies. 2. Collectors and collecting—History—18th century—Case studies. 3. Museums—Curatorship—England—London—History—17th century—Case studies. 4. Museums—Curatorship—England—London—History—18th century—Case studies. 5. England—Intellectual life—17th century. 6. England—Intellectual life—18th century. 7. Imagination (Philosophy) I. Title. II. Series: Material texts.

      AM344.S58 2015

      001.0942’09032—dc23

      2015013299

      CONTENTS

       PREFACE: WELCOME TO THE MUSEUM

       INTRODUCTION

       CASE 1. METAPHOR

      1. John Locke’s Commonplace Book2. John Milton’s Bed 3. Mark Akenside’s Museum

       CASE 2. DESIGN

      4. Robert Hooke’s Camera Obscura5. Raphael’s Judgment of Paris 6. A Gritty Pebble7. An Oval Portrait of John Woodward 8. A Stone from the Grotto of Egeria — 9. Venus at Her Toilet

       CASE 3. DIGRESSION

      10. The Iliad in a Nutshell — 11. A Full Stop 12. A Conical Roman Tumulus — 13. The Reception of Claudius 14. Addison’s Walk

       CASE 4. INWARDNESS

      15. William Hay’s Stone — 16. Two Calculi Cut and Mounted in a Small Showcase 17. An Ampulla of the Blood of Thomas Becket — 18. A Blue-Bound Copy of The Mysterious Mother

       CASE 5. CONCEPTION

      19. A Blank Sheet of Paper (1) — 20. A Folio Sheet with Two Sketches of a Single Conception — 21. A Triumph of Galatea — 22. Joshua Reynolds, William Hunter

       CASE 6. DISPOSSESSION

      23. A Shilling — 24. A Book of Accounts — 25. A Blank Sheet of Paper (2) 26. A Ring Containing a Lock of Hair — 27. The Lost Property Office 28. The Skeleton of Jonathan Wild

       CONCLUSION

       NOTES

       INDEX

       ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      PREFACE: WELCOME TO THE MUSEUM

      Welcome to The Mind Is a Collection. Gathered here are twenty-eight exhibits from seventeenth-and eighteenth-century London. Taken together, they tell a story about the development of modern theories of mind. Each of these exhibits is posed as a case study of a certain way of thinking—objects assembled as the vehicle and proof for theories of cognitive work. The era spanning roughly 1660 to 1800 was a special period in philosophy and the arts; it witnessed the widespread development of what has come to be called philosophical dualism, the strange split between mind and body that now seems to most of us to be intuitive. The general account, as it was worked up by authors, philosophers, painters, and poets, runs like this: the mind is a disembodied entity absolutely and fundamentally unlike the messy physical world in which it finds itself. It observes the world from a distance; it takes in a batch of simple sensations; it reviews them—comparing, arranging, combining, dividing; it husbands them up; it stores them for later recall. It tells the body what to do—especially by way of gathering more sensations, for, in this scheme, the body’s purpose is to be a vehicle for the mind. This is not therefore just one dualism; it is a system of dualisms, whereby one thing is split into two: subject is parted from object and “me” from “mine,” but also conscious awareness is parted from the mind’s contents, the power of thinking from thoughts, ourselves from our memories. It is not just that the mind is understood to be separate from the body, or even that the body (in much the same way) is understood to be separate from its environment. It is also that the working parts of the mind (its “faculties”) are understood to be separate from the materials upon which they work (its ideas). These are the basic outlines of philosophical dualism, which, I am suggesting, is in effect several dualisms. We are the inheritors of this peculiar seventeenth-century innovation.

      The problem with the dualist account of mind emerges when we realize that this rarified substance, this mind-stuff, is so absolutely unlike the coarse world in which we move and breathe that it offers no way of speaking about itself. There is a primal paradox here, a remnant of the violence of the dualist split. The mind comes with no instruction manual, nor any ready-made vocabulary. The only way

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