In the previous section, we discussed the Burkean distinction between sublimity and beauty and the implied binary oppositions relating to them, including mind/body, man/woman, and gazing/gazed upon. These sets of distinction operate based on the prestige of the masculine sublime mind, and its domination over woman by the aestheticization of the beautiful female body. Sublimity and mind seemed male attributes, while beauty and body were ideal attributes of woman. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the new medical field of neuroscience challenged
31 Jaqueline M. Labbe explains Joseph Addison’s idea of the difference between observing the vast and the confined. Early in the century, Addison valorized a “wide and undetermined Prospect… [as]
pleasing to the Fancy, as the Speculation of Eternity or Infinitude are to the Understanding,” over
“Restraint,” elaborating that the “Mind of Man… is apt to fancy itself under a sort of Confinement, when the Sight is pent up in a narrow Compass, and shortened on every side by the Neighborhood of Walls or Mountains” (ix).
32 Kant’s aesthetic theory pushes the empirical sublime toward the extreme of the idealistic sublime.
In Kant’s philosophical system, the beautiful is based on the object apprehended by the imagination, while the sublime has its origin in the mind: “The sublime is [just] that, the mere capacity of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense” (98). This faculty is the reason. In viewing objects of overwhelming size, the imagination, with the presented sense-data accumulating to the infinite, finds itself incapable of apprehending under its category, while it is reason that demands “totality” for this formless and boundless object, in this way justifying the hypothesis of the illimitable capacity of the human mind. In other words, the very failure of the imagination paves the way to the success of the reason. It is the object of magnitude and infinity that testifies to, or guarantees, the mind’s capacity for the sublime. Kant’s emphasis on the power of the mind is quite similar to that of Longinus: both credit nature as the springboard testifying to the grandeur of the mind.
Nature is not sublime in itself; the sublime belongs to the subject. The Kantian sublime marks the boundary of scope in terms of object and subject. For English empiricists, who believe that
knowledge is based on the senses, the idea of the sublime has its foundation in the object, whether the object be a natural one, the “natural sublime” (mountain, ocean, sky) or a cultural one, the “rhetorical sublime” (the poetry of Homer, Virgil, Milton). The response from the subject has its basis in the object, and the object relies on the perceiver to reveal its sublimity. Kant changes this mutual relation:
the faculty of reason is itself sublime, and the object only functions as a reminder of its transcendental power. The Kantian sublime not only anticipates Wordsworth’s “egotistical sublime” but also provides a reading of the Romantic imagination.
the long-standing separation of mind and body. The religious/political distinctions that justified the dominance of the powerful and the male were threatened by the hypothesis that the mind, instead of carrying an immaterial essence, is part of our bodily organization.
A. Materiality and Vitality
In Descartes’ Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, the body and the mind are deployed as two discrete substances. The body, a channel between mind and the material world, is responsible for the transmission of information through the communication of sensory organs with the outer world, serving the function of extension. The immaterial mind, the function of which is thought, is independent of and isolated from the contagion of the material body.33 Capable of imagining and reasoning, the mind both interacts with the body and works on its own terms. In the performance of the imagination, the mind receives
unorganized sense data from the body and processes them into meaningful ideas through understanding; in the activity of reasoning, the intellectual mind operates to judge abstract ideas. “I think, therefore I am,” and it is the operation of the mind that identifies a single thinking subject that knows how to doubt and question, a unified self that tells the real from the illusory. Because of this, it is just the thinking self that justifies its own existence, and this thinking “I” is “a substance the whole essence or nature of which is simply to think, and which, in order to exist, has no need of any place nor depends on any material thing” (19). In Descartes’ dualist logic of
thinking, the body is “as a kind of mechanism” (100), operating according to the rules of the body;34 the mind, in contrast, is like a “ghost in the machine” (Hatfield 304),
33 In Descartes’ scheme of the body, the brain does not equal the mind. The brain is the name for the human organ, while the mind has an immaterial substance independent from the brain, though
Descartes once defined the place of the mind in the pineal gland.
34 The body, according to Descartes, can still “exhibit all the same motions” even if the mind does not exist in it.
with no corporeal existence in the body. This dichotomy presupposes the superiority of the mind over the body, and, through its guarantee as a concomitant of the divine, ensures the immortality of the self. Therefore, Descartes’ arguments reaffirm Scholasticism and consolidate the separation of the body and the mind in Western thought and culture. It is the immateriality of mind that religion and politics inscribe, explain, in order to set up the cornerstone for the integrity of the social order. In the discourse of the “body politic” popular in the Renaissance period, for instance, the power of the King derived from the immaterial aspect of a body (sic, the mind) ordained by God. It is this immateriality that guarantees the King’s governance.
In addition to the immateriality of the mind, Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity has another important effect on the eighteenth century’s configuration of the mind. In his picture of the world, the world is constituted by inept particles that require God’s initiative to move around. Universal gravitation, as well as the three laws of motion, according to Newton, is governed by the same set of natural laws that make possible the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies. Although gravity explains the motions of the planets, it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. Newton never identified the power behind motions, but since his tentative explanation was that God governs all things and knows their nature, the natural laws would inevitably be attributed to the creation of God. This religious explanation behind Newton’s view of physics and cosmology configures a passive/initiative model that consolidates the legitimacy of the governing and the established order.
Newton’s postulation of inept particles and such a world picture was soon applied to other areas of study, especially biological psychology. This passive view of the worldly object was exploited in David Hartley’s pattern of the body, in that he saw the body as a machine passively sending perceived representations to the mind.
Following empiricists such as John Locke, he believed that the human brain was a
blank sheet (tabula rasa), but further explained the motion of the body in nervous terms. Like Hobbes, Descartes, and others, Hartley had attempted to connect his system of mind to the system of human anatomy. He found the intellectual
mechanism existed chiefly in the so-called “white medullary substance” of the brain, and along the various nerve avenues. Sensations arrived in these workshop areas from all parts of the body, and were handled by these mechanisms according to the laws of association. Accepting Newton’s idea of a subtle elastic ether as the most minute particles, Hartley explained sensation as the result of a vibration of the minute particles of the medullary substance of the nerves. According to him, the elastic ether is rare in the interstices of solid bodies and in their close neighborhood, and denser as it recedes from them. This helps him to explain pleasure and pain in physiological terms: pleasure is the result of moderate vibrations, pain of vibrations so violent as to break the continuity of the nerves. These vibrations leave behind them in the brain a tendency to fainter vibrations or “vibratiuncles” of a similar kind, which correspond to “ideas of sensation.” This accounts for memory. This material process of “vibrations” in the brain and nerves undergirded the workings of
association and provided a physiological explanation for psychological phenomena.
“Motions” from the external environment bombard the senses in such a way as to cause vibrations, which run along the “medullary substance” of the nerves, solid but porous cords with “infinitesimally small particles” of Newtonian ether diffused throughout (qtd. in Richardson British Romanticism 10). Although Hartley’s theory of the mind is materialist through and through, his mechanical view of the mind/body follows the orthodoxy of a passive mind.35
35 As Roy Porter summaries Hartley’s rationalization and vindication of materialism: “Hartley piously framed his materialist physiological psychology in terms of the grand Christian narrative…. For it had been the Christian God who had endowed matter with all its active powers and potentialities in the first place. The necessarianism entailed by materialism was, indeed, the perfect guarantee of the universal operation of cause and effect, hence of the uniformity of nature, and so of the boundless
Immateriality of mind and passivity of body envisioned a relation of master/slave that rationalized governmental power, endowing with the powerful initiative and demanding a docile body of the powerless. In the process of the development of natural philosophy in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, natural philosophers were no longer satisfied with either the vacuity of the immaterial mind distanced from the material brain or the political undertone of the passive mind that relied on the vital power of God/King to make a move. This challenge to an orthodox science of mind was always accompanied with a challenge to authority, in that the right to interpret the mind was being kept in the hands of the English Church.
Though Thomas Willis’s ideas of the nervous system strongly suggested the identification of the mind with the brain, most followers of natural philosophers from John Locke to David Hartley overlooked it as another bit of convenient reasoning like Descartes’s statement that the mind is situated in the pineal gland. In Thomas Willis’
medical configuration, the traditional “animal spirit” is still preserved, and relegated to serving as the agent of the animal soul, which inhabits both the blood and nerves to channel biological energy. Though Willis’ neurology reshapes Galenic humoral models and, in its combination with Harvey’s discovery of blood, maps out an interior dimension of the body, he nevertheless postulated the existence of two souls: the animal soul and intellectual soul, and therefore lapses into the dualistic dichotomy of body/mind, materiality/immateriality. That the animal soul functions as a center for the sensory organs and the intellectual soul as a presiding agent once again replicates Descartes. The development from Willis to Hartley in neuroscience to some extent shaped the embodiment of mind and included the operation of mind in the realm of material configurations.36
power and wisdom of the Creator” (350).
36 Commenting on the impact of contemporary neuroscience, Roy Porter notes that: “Reason and intelligibility--- in other words, the Hartleyan anti-mystification test--- required that one should believe
A systematic challenge to the orthodox idea of mind started with Joseph Priestley’s interpretation of David Hartley in the mid-eighteenth century. Early in 1775 in his expositions of Hartley’s thought, he believed thought to be a “property of the nervous system, or rather of the brain” (qtd. in Richardson British Romanticism 10). This totally rejects the immaterial quality of the intellectual mind of Descartes.
This thought was commonly shared by dissenters/physicians in the late eighteenth century, as attested by John Thelwall’s lecture on “The Origin of Sensation” in 1793, which purports that the “phenomena of mind” is based “upon principles purely
physical” (ibid, 10). Underlying this seemingly scientific statement is a challenge to the institutions of orthodox natural philosophy, represented by the Royal Society, and the political institutions that relied on religious and philosophical support. Joseph Priestley believed his experiment with electricity following Benjamin Franklin would help discover the real face of nature that was now hidden from English superstition:
“the English hierarchy (if there is anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble even at an air pump, or an electrical machine” (qtd. in Schaffer
“States of Mind” 243). The chemical and electrical experiments Joseph conducted not only presupposed Hartley’s materialism but tried to solve the problem left by Hartley: if the mind is corporeal and identified with the brain, the problem that the mind now needed to practice both the functions of the animal soul and the intellectual soul was left unsolved. For the dualist figuration of the passive body and active mind, when adapted into this material scheme, invited an agent to run the body. If matter is totally passive, this monistic body would be a Cartesian machine.
Therefore, Priestley postulated that matter was active as well as passive, it could
that God had created only one substance, which was matter or body. Corporeal matter was clear tangible, concrete; why postulate two sorts of created stuff when one would do perfectly well? By contrast, traditional Platonic-cum-Cartesian dualism… created no end of philosophical confusion, not least the conundrum as to how those two poles would ever meet (the pineal gland problem)” (365).
expand and contract, and human consciousness was generated from these qualities of matter when they were properly organized. The materialist version of mind, in Priestley’s interpretation, is one that wills and judges, replacing the immaterial mind and practicing the same functions. This materialist doctrine of mind was “a view regarded by his many orthodox foes as dangerously radical, subversive and flatly anti-Christian” (Porter 366).37
Another famous figure that proposed both a corporeal mind and vitality in the revolutionary period was John Thelwall. An activist like Joseph Priestley, Thelwall was a leader in the London Corresponding Group. From 1792 to 1793 he attended the anatomical and medical lectures given at the Physical Society at Guy’s Hospital and he gave a series of lectures on “animal vitality.” The focus of the “animal vitality” advocates was to find the active power in the purely physiological nervous system so as to argue the materialist essence of the mind. These lectures questioned whether life is to be identified with the soul or is just the result of material
organization responding to the stimuli from the outside world in order to keep up the production and sustainment of life. In a word, the principle of vitality tried to find the initiative in the bodily mind itself:
But what is this something--- this vivifying principle?--- Is it atmospheric air itself?--- Certainly not. The coats of the arteries, and the membranous lining of the cells of the lungs, forbid the access of such an element; besides, it has been proved by experiment, that in the arteries of the living body there is no air. Something, however, it must be that is contained in the atmosphere, and something of a powerful and exquisitely subtile nature. (qtd. in Nicholas Roe
37 John Robinson argued in 1796 that a real danger lurked behind this “silent” campaign. In his Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religious and Governments of Europe, he believes that, as Schaffer paraphrases, “materialism bred arrogance among the intellectuals and abasement among their followers” (“States of Mind” 244).
“Atmospheric Air Itself” 187)
After the discovery of electricity by Benjamin Franklin, natural philosophers (Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin) tended to postulate what was “contained in the
atmosphere” was a kind of electrical fluid. This vivifying principle rejected Thomas Willis’ postulation of a sulphurous and a nitrous substance as well as the residue of the immateriality of the intellectual mind in Willis’ system. Mind is material for Thelwall, and the substance he sought to replace the immaterial with is material through and through. Thelwall’s principle of “vitality” broke down the dualism of mind and body, intellectual soul and animal soul, reducing them to a material monism.
Erasmus Darwin had the last word in the early nineteenth century in the journey of the materialism of neuroscience. In his Zoonomia, Erasmus Darwin sees the mind as fundamentally embodied, a “sensorium” denoting “not only the medullary part of the brain, spinal marrow, nerves, organs of sense, and the muscles; but also at the same time that living principle, or spirit of animation, which resides throughout the body, without being cognizable to our sense, except by its effects” (Zoonomia 110).
This “spirit of animation” is made not of transcendental mind-stuff but of “matter of a finer kind” that we “possess in common with brutes” (ibid, 109). Indivisible from the sensorium through which it flows, the spirit of animation is a bodily energy expressed in the four primary “sensorial powers” of irritation, sensation, volition, and association” (qtd. in Richardson British Romanticism 13).
Priestley’s position as a religious dissenter, political activist (a close friend of Richard Price), and an enlightened natural philosopher became suspicious after the French Revolution. In the Church and King riots of 1791, part of a “loyalist” mob invaded Priestley’s home and destroyed his scientific equipment. This event demonstrated “a connection even in the popular mind between political radicalism and unorthodox science at the very beginning of the period of anti-jacobin reaction”
(Richardson British Romanticism 15). New discoveries and experiments that were not made or recognized by the Royal Society were not just an attempt to rewrite the history of science; they threatened the authority shared and consolidated by
science/religion/politics. After Priestley, in 1794 Thelwall was sent to prison on the charge of treason. It was not only because both Joseph Priestley and John Thelwall were involved with pro-revolutionary activities that they incurred danger; the
academic activities they participated in were sufficient reason to charge them with treason. As Christopher Lawrence explains this connection:
During the first two decades of the new century any account of life or mind which so much as hinted that they were merely the products of corporeal organization was condemned as atheistical and politically subversive, which usually meant French-inspired. (223)
The implication of materialism and atheism in the French anti-dualist tradition exemplified by Diderot, La Mettrie, and the Montparnasse physicians was seen as affecting the English physicists and dissenters. Anti-dualist thinking in France rejected the separation of mind from body, therefore posing a threat to the political power that relied on traditional interpretations of the origin of power. Schaffer summarizes the stereotypical attitudes the anti-Jacobins held on the relation between
The implication of materialism and atheism in the French anti-dualist tradition exemplified by Diderot, La Mettrie, and the Montparnasse physicians was seen as affecting the English physicists and dissenters. Anti-dualist thinking in France rejected the separation of mind from body, therefore posing a threat to the political power that relied on traditional interpretations of the origin of power. Schaffer summarizes the stereotypical attitudes the anti-Jacobins held on the relation between