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Eugène Delacroix, Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to His Daughters. © 2014 Kunsthaus Zürich. All rights reserved.

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

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

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

      Are many lesser Faculties that serve

      Reason as chief; among these Fansie next

      Her office holds; of all external things,

      Which the five watchful Senses represent,

      She forms Imaginations, Aerie shapes,

      Which Reason joyning or disjoyning, frames

      All what we affirm or what deny, and call

      Our knowledge or opinion; then retires

      Into her private Cell when Nature rests.

      Oft in her absence mimic Fansie wakes

      To imitate her; but misjoyning shapes,

      Wilde work produces oft, and most in dreams,

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

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

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

      Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve

      Assaying by his devilish art to reach

      The organs of her fancy, and with them forge

      Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams,

      Or, if, inspiring venom, he might taint

      The animal spirits that from pure blood arise

      Like gentle breaths from rivers pure, thence raise

      At least distempered, discontented thoughts,

      Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires

      Blown up with high conceits engendering pride.⁹⁷

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

      Woven throughout Milton’s alchemical trope of dream-making, governing the sublimation of words to ideas, is “spirit”—that tricky word Locke takes time from his remarks on metaphor briefly to unpack. It is possible, though by no means necessary, that Locke was thinking of Milton’s poem when he remarked on “angel” and “spirit” (“messenger” and “breath”) as examples of metaphor and its instruments; Locke after all had more than one copy of Paradise Lost in his library, and he was sympathetic to at least some of Milton’s politics. In any case,

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