Flesh in the Age of Reason (56 page)

This tradition amounted to the creation of a new body of thinking: the psychologization of identity. It is significant that Hartley specifically wrote of a ‘psychology, or theory of the human mind’, locating that endeavour as part of ‘natural philosophy’. In validating the experience of a thinking principle – the ego or self, understood independently of orthodox divinity – the intelligentsia was framing a new domain of knowledge, increasingly actually styled ‘psychology’. According to Chambers’
Cyclopaedia
(1728) – a work hugely influential, since it served as a template for Diderot and d’Alembert’s
Encyclopédie
– such ‘psychology’ – ‘a Discourse concerning the Soul’ – constituted a subdepartment
not
of ‘theology’ but rather of ‘anthropology’, that is, the study of man.

Chambers glossed soul and mind in terms of Lockean categories. By linking the soul with ‘physiology’ and ‘logic’, and by transferring study of the mind from the realm of pneumatology (that is, the traditional doctrine of ‘incorporeal’ substances, concerning God, angels, and so on) to ‘psychology’, his
Cyclopaedia
inscribed and relocated ‘psychology’ within science not divinity.

The endeavour to effect a scientific probing of consciousness subsequently threaded its way through Mesmerism to Victorian spiritualism and parapsychology. A different strand of the science of the soul led, on the other hand, towards modern reductionism, as exemplified by Francis Crick’s
The Astonishing Hypothesis
(1994),
subtitled
The Scientific Search for the Soul
, in which that old will-o’-thewisp is finally hunted down to some obscure chamber of the brain, a modern pineal gland. Berating human pride
à la
Voltaire, Crick there asserts that, once upon a time, the soul was a theological entity, the chattel of the Church. At a later stage, thanks to Descartes, Locke and the Enlightenment, it was translated into the self, and so sovereignty over it fell to philosophy. From now on, however, it will not be intellectuals but neuroscientists who will be authorized to pronounce upon mind and its meanings. ‘Many people used to believe that the “seat” of the soul was somewhere in the brain,’ the anti-psychiatrist R. D. Laing expressed the matter, rather brutally: ‘Since brains began to be opened up frequently, no one has seen “the soul”. As a result of this and like revelations, many people do not now believe in the soul.’

More poignantly, such conclusions can be inserted into an evolutionary anthropology of the soul construed as the decline and fall of animism or perhaps the changing mind of Hartley’s child as it grew up. Once upon a time, every atom of creation had a soul, observed the Victorian ethnologist Edward Tylor in a moving elegy; but this ghost-world was gradually whittled down:

Animism, indeed, seems to be drawing in its outposts, and concentrating itself on the first and main position, the doctrine of the human soul. This doctrine has undergone extreme modification in the course of culture. It has outlived the almost total loss of one great argument attached to it, – the objective reality of apparitional souls or ghosts seen in dreams and visions. The soul has given up its ethereal substance, and become an immaterial entity, ‘the shadow of a shade’.… There has arisen an intellectual product whose very existence is of the deepest significance, a ‘psychology’ which has no longer anything to do with ‘soul’. The soul’s place in modern thought is in the metaphysics of religion.

In such transformations, the eighteenth century was evidently a watershed. The Christian soul ceased to be a given. The workings of the soul, or mind, became the subjec- matter of psychological inquiry,
focused upon the learning habits of children and the instinctual wisdom of the body. What was next needed was an overarching theory of evolution. That came with Erasmus Darwin.

By firm immutable immortal laws
Impress’d on Nature by the Great First Cause.
Say, Muse! how rose from elemental strife
Organic forms, and kindled into life;
How Love and Sympathy with potent charm
Warm the cold heart, the lifted hand disarm;
Allure with pleasures, and alarm with pains,
And bind Society in golden chains.

ERASMUS DARWIN

Looking back, as he so often did, the dyspeptic Thomas Carlyle accused the Industrial Revolution of reducing men to machines. ‘Were we required’, he pronounced in ‘Signs of the Times’ (published in the
Edinburgh Review
in 1829),

to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age… which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends.… Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external Nature for us, and we think it will do all other things.

The debates of the century after Milton – about the future of the soul, the autonomy of the mind, the power of environment and circumstances over the self, indeed the question of the actual constitution of identity – had been settled, concluded the gloomy Romantic Carlyle, less by argument than by accommodation: living in a world in which wealth and power were increasingly measured by machines,
it was natural that humans, too, should be so defined. Man the machine had ceased to be a controversial claim and had been reduced to a fact of life in the emergent world of manufactures.

That society brought together intellectuals and artists in centres such as Manchester, Newcastle and Bristol whose outlooks were shaped by the presence of industry. One of those leading groupings was the Birmingham-based Lunar Society. From the late 1760s a group of friends – Matthew Boulton, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Small, Josiah Wedgwood, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, James Watt and James Keir, joined by others later, notably Joseph Priestley, would occasionally meet up. The gatherings grew more regular, being held monthly at full moon, to help light their way home. A mix of entrepreneurs, engineers, men of science, technologists, doctors, educators, Dissenting ministers and gentlemen-intellectuals, the ‘Lunatics’ would discuss topics of common interest, generally relating to the development of the industrial society they were themselves forging.

It should be no surprise that the Lunar circle adopted a broadly materialist slant to its thinking – industry, after all, is concerned with making things out of matter. Matthew Boulton was minting coins of the realm, the potter Josiah Wedgwood was turning clay – that Old Testament symbol for the human – into wealth. His aim in running his works, he declared, was to ‘make such
machines
of
Men
as cannot err’. The workforce clocked on in the morning: man was driven by mechanical time.

The old fantasy – or for others, nightmare – of making a fully fledged social person from mere raw materials or the logical consequence of the Lockean vision of the human being as a
tabula rasa
, capable of unlimited programming, was taken up by one of the Society’s more idealistic intellectuals, Thomas Day, a follower of Rousseau who tried out the latter’s educational project as outlined in
Émile
. Indeed, following the Pygmalion myth, Day specifically aimed to sculpt a female as a wife for himself. Declaring that ‘he that undertakes the education of a child undertakes the most important duty of society’, he put theory into practice by acquiring a living doll
to transform into an angel schooled to despise fashion, live in domestic retirement and devote herself to her husband and offspring. Day selected for his experiment a blond girl of 12 from the Shrewsbury orphanage, whom he named Sabrina Sidney. He then went to the London Foundling Hospital where he chose her an 11-year-old brunette companion, Lucretia. To avoid scandal, he took his protégées to France, where he endeavoured to fire them with true Rousseauvian contempt for luxury, dress, title and frivolity. They quarrelled, however, irked him, and finally caught smallpox. After a year, Day returned to England, apprenticed the ‘invincibly stupid’ Lucretia to a milliner, and set Sabrina up in Lichfield. His experiments in training his intended’s temper proved, however, deeply disillusioning. When he dropped melted sealing wax on Sabrina’s arm to inure her to pain – a good Rousseauvian experiment – she actually flinched; worse, when he fired blanks at her skirts, she shrieked. Concluding she was a poor subject, he packed her off to boarding-school, decided she also had a weak mind, and abandoned her.

Day was regarded as quixotic even by his cronies. Indeed he died, a true enlightened martyr, in pursuit of another of his educational fads – breaking in a horse without cruelty: it threw him and he died. How that would have tickled Swift!

Day was an idealist. The Lunar Society boasted two thinkers, however, who were wedded to systematic materialism. We have already encountered Joseph Priestley’s Christian materialism, with its conviction that reason and the Bible together advanced a vision of man comprised of homogeneous matter, endowed with the capacity for thinking and action. Materialism squared with his scientific findings in experimental physics and met the principles of simplicity (Ockham’s razor) and intelligibility.

Priestley’s almost exact contemporary, Erasmus Darwin, for his part came to materialism from similar scientific sources – but minus the eccentric Christianity. Born near Nottingham in 1731, young Erasmus went up to St John’s College, Cambridge, subsequently, like so many others, crossing the Tweed to complete his medical training in Edinburgh. He then set up in medical practice in Lichfield, which
remained his home for twenty-five years. He there conducted at least one dissection as part of a public lecture series – not, one imagines, an altogether uncontroversial undertaking:

October 23rd, 1762 – The body of the Malefactor, who is order’d to be executed at Lichfield on Monday the 25th instant, will be afterward conveyed to the House of Dr Darwin, who will begin a Course of Anatomical Lectures, at Four o’clock on Tuesday evening, and continue them every Day as long as the Body can be preserved, and shall be glad to be favoured with the Company of any who profess Medicine or Surgery, or whom the Love of Science may induce.

A physician first and foremost, Darwin practised for some forty years, and his
magnum opus
,
Zoonomia
(1794–6) was a work of medical theory, heavily influenced by Hartleyan materialist neuro-physiology. Despite his busy practice, however, Darwin poured his ample energies into a multiplicity of projects. In 1771 he was dabbling with a mechanical voicebox. Symptomatic of his taste for sailing close to the wind of blasphemy, the speaking-machine was meant to recite ‘the Lord’s prayer, the creed, and ten Commandments in the vulgar tongue’. Religion was thus reduced to blasts of air, calling to mind Swift’s satires against the ‘Aeolists’ in
A Tale of a Tub
: what had been objects of fanciful ridicule for Swift were now being realized in the Midlands.

Many of Darwin’s ventures were more grounded. With Wedgwood and the engineer James Brindley, he was involved in extending the Grand Trunk Canal; aided by his friend Brooke Boothby, he founded the Lichfield Botanic Society, which brought out translations of Linnaeus. On a site west of Lichfield he established a botanic garden, the inspiration for his later poem of that name. Uniting arts and sciences, medicine, physics and technology, Darwin was not only a man of the broadest interests but the very embodiment of enlightened values. Not least, he was an unabashed materialist.

Darwin had abandoned the Christian faith quite early. ‘That there exists a superior
ENS ENTIUM
, which formed these wonderful creatures, is a mathematical demonstration,’ he proclaimed while
still a teenager, but reason gave him no warrant for believing that the First Cause was a Jehovah or the Christian loving father: ‘That he influences things by a particular providence, is not so evident.… The light of Nature affords us not a single argument for a future state.’ Indeed, the doctor in Darwin found the Christian Almighty quite repellent: how could a loving patriarch visit such terrible diseases upon innocent children? And the notion of a jealous Lord was quite perverse. Darwin detested the Churches’ fixation upon guilt, punishment and suffering; and his
Zoonomia
pathologized religious enthusiasm and superstition, diagnosing such religiosity as symptomatic of mental imbalance.

Although they were both materialists, Darwin thus differed fundamentally from Priestley in respect of Christianity and materialism. For Priestley, these were mutually reinforcing: God had created a universe of matter, the chain of material events led up to God. For Darwin, materialism sabotaged that faith. Yet their materialism shared common roots. Both were passionate supporters and developers of David Hartley’s progressive psycho-physiological materialism. ‘Give to my ear the progress of Mind,’ Darwin expressed it in
The Temple of Nature
:

How loves, and tastes, and sympathies commence
From evanescent notices of sense?
How from the yielding touch and rolling eyes
The piles immense of human science rise?

For both thinkers, the brain was the organ of mind, and hence mind – the product of education and experience – was progressive, programmed to learn and develop. As with Hartley but unlike Priestley, Darwin’s materialism derived from strong biomedical interests.

Indeed, medically trained in Cambridge and Edinburgh when its medical school was at its peak, Darwin’s whole bent was shaped by medical theories, including that of John Brown, the maverick but highly influential follower of the great Edinburgh professor William Cullen. Brunonianism (as his system came to be called) held that illness was a consequence of excessive, or deficient, excitation, and
was hence to be treated, respectively, by the application of lesser or greater stimulus: it was a medical analogue of the Lockean
tabula rasa
. The living being needed continual external stimulus (for instance, from heat and food) in order to survive and thrive. Questions of health and disease were thus reduced to variations of ‘excitability’. Life was hence to be understood not as a spontaneous state but as a ‘forced condition’, the product of the action of external stimuli.