Abstract
Associated ideas, complained Locke, follow one another “without any care or attention.” In a brilliant inversion of Locke’s nervous worries about the perils of misassociation, Hume resolved the sceptical despair brought on by philosophical reasoning only by returning to mindlessness: “carelessness and in-attention alone can afford us any remedy. For this reason I rely entirely on them” (Treatise, I.4.2). How did British natural and moral philosophers in the early eighteenth century think about what happens when the mind is elsewhere? How did they theorize the processes by which thoughts, fancies, memories, daydreams, and feelings come to mind without prompting either by reason or reality, by the will or by the world? Examining works by Mead, Harris, Gibbs, and Branch, I detail the role of bodily fluids and nervous spirits in “conveying the mischief” by which imagination tends to ruffle our calm. Minds are often surprised by their own habits, and various forms of regimen were recommended in these works of medical psychology and moral physiology to ‘pinion’ the imagination and still the roving thoughts. I anchor these local discussions within a broader enquiry into mind-wandering and ‘stimulus-independent thought’, and sketch a rich neurophilosophical background to Hume’s views on the bodily bases of custom and habit.
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Notes
- 1.
Hume 1739/1978, I.1.3, at p. 8.
- 2.
Hume 1739/1978, 624.
- 3.
See also Tierney-Hynes 2007 on the ‘castle-builder’.
- 4.
- 5.
/1978, 104; Traiger 1994.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
Klinger 2008.
- 10.
Dreyfus 2007, 353.
- 11.
Velleman 2007, 184.
- 12.
- 13.
Wegner 1997.
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
Smallwood and Schooler 2006, 946.
- 17.
- 18.
As we’ll see, early modern thinkers treated stimulus-independent forms of mind-wandering alongside the different cases in which attention is easily captured by current stimuli.
- 19.
English versions of iatromechanism are now often seen by revisionary historians as more flexible, biologically-oriented, and contextually anchored than on earlier interpretations (Ishizuka 2006). Yet the contrast is still often drawn with a rigid Cartesian model in which dynamics, sentience, and life had been evacuated from the body. For a different account of Descartes’ ideas about the complexity and flexibility of ‘automatic’ processes, and about our open organic interactions with the environment, see Sutton 1998, chapter 3; 2000.
- 20.
Ishizuka, 2006.
- 21.
- 22.
Locke 1690/1975, Essay 2.33.6.
- 23.
Locke 1690/1975, 2.33.5.
- 24.
Locke 1690/1975, 2.33.4.
- 25.
Locke 1690/1975, 2.33.9, 18.
- 26.
Locke 1690/1975, 2.33.3, 6.
- 27.
Locke 1690/1975, 2.19.1. The OED ambitiously characterizes this passage as the first instance of a distinct and metaphorical use of ‘attention’.
- 28.
- 29.
- 30.
Locke 1690/1975, 2.10.4–5.
- 31.
Locke 1690/1975, 2.10.4.
- 32.
- 33.
Hume 1739/1978, 1.4.2, 218.
- 34.
Hume 1739/1978, 1.4.7, 264.
- 35.
Hume 1734/1993, 349. This language is echoed in the Treatise: Hume complains that metaphysical reasonings have “heated my brain” (1.4.7, 266). I agree with Marina Frasca-Spada (2003) that much of the terminology which Hume applies to ideas in the Treatise has been transformed with little alteration from a standard physiological idiom: ideas “flow in upon the mind” in a forcible or lively manner, for example, while others are “faint and languid” (Hume 1739/1978, 9), while the vividness of certain conceptions “diffuses itself … and is convey’d, as by so many pipes or canals” (ibid., 122; Frasca-Spada 2003).
- 36.
Hume 1739/1978, 1.4.2, 218.
- 37.
Hume 1975, 55. For Bertrand Russell, Hume’s recommendation of carelessness and inattention was not only the ultimate in self-refutation for a philosopher in particular, but also quite generally “the complete bankruptcy of reason” (Russell 1997, 239). Our default interpretive stance now is more naturalistic and affective, and thus more sympathetic.
- 38.
So I agree with James A. Harris’s case, in an excellent recent paper, that the first two books of Hume’s Treatise in particular should be read against the background of many early eighteenth-century books “devoted to showing how philosophy could help with living a happier and more virtuous life, by showing the way to better regulation of the passions,” most of which books are “completely unread today” (Harris 2009). But Harris’s focus is on straightforward moral philosophy as the context, rather than on the medical-psychological and moral-physiological literature from which I sketch just a few themes in this paper. In these latter fields, there were signs prior to Hume of his idea, nicely described by Harris, that the old contest between reason and desire would be better seen as “the interaction of a panoply of feelings,” to be registered and explored in their mysterious workings by the analyst of human nature. Frasca-Spada (2003) rightly notes that Hume’s few references to common physiological theory are “impeccably well informed.”
- 39.
Antrobus et al, 1970.
- 40.
Sutton 2009.
- 41.
Hobson & Stickgold 1994, 10–11.
- 42.
- 43.
Branch also published a compendium of legal sayings in 1753, and may have been alive still in 1769. A second edition of Baxter’s Enquiry had appeared in 1737, the year before Branch’s book. For background on the Baxter-Branch debate see Dacome 2004. Dacome’s overarching case is that dreams were gradually medicalized and pathologized through the eighteenth century, as moral physiologists sought to establish “a new model of the credible mind, one in which the elimination of the vagaries of the mind was to be carried out by means of body policing,” Dacome 2004, 397. See Daston 1998 for a related broader narrative of the pathologizing of imagination in the Enlightenment. These early eighteenth-century texts also exemplify the spread of discussion about these further reaches of mental life well beyond philosophy, then as now. But further work is needed to piece together the impact and reception of works like these, and to understand how they related to moral, imaginative, cognitive, and social practices of the time.
- 44.
In responding to Baxter on dreaming, Branch also offers full-scale theories of perception and memory, in seeking to demonstrate just how much the soul can do without external guidance, to prove that “our Dreams may be our own” rather than implants from spiritual beings. He also offers a rich phenomenology of dreaming, raising and effectively answering sixteen objections to his core idea that dreams are just thoughts during sleep: just as he denies their supernatural origin, so he denies that they are brute biological givens, for they take considerable psychological sophistication. For this reason Branch at least does not neatly fit Dacome’s account of the Enlightenment pathologizing of dreams, which I would argue also neglects the developmental-cognitive-affective accounts of memory and dreams in David Hartley’s Observations on Man 1749: compare Sutton 1998, chapter 13. Theories of dreams were no more homogeneous and unified (from either conceptual or applied points of view) than they are now.
- 45.
Branch 1738, 45–46. The idea that external artifacts play key roles in distributed cognitive systems, transforming the demands on individual psychological resources, has been widely revived recently (Hutchins 1995; Clark 1997; Sutton 2002), but of course has itself a long history (Donald 1991; Tribble 2005; Sutton 2007a). Branch links his sense that the mind is fluid, and prone to rove, to the fact that we rely on more stable external cognitive artifacts (compare Sutton 2008). His more original point is that the residual differences between waking and dreaming mental life are due not to intrinsic physiological differences, but to the absence of social and material supports in sleep. The sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1925/1992) likewise ran an extended analogy between dreaming, with its fragmentary, torn, confused raw materials, and the mental life of a non-social individual, to demonstrate that our waking mental life is permeated by and thoroughly sculpted by our social frameworks. Branch perhaps has less faith than Halbwachs in the coherence and stability provided in waking thought by social networks.
- 46.
Branch 1738, 66. Dreaming is thus, for Branch, closer in character to imagining than to hallucinating. Compare Foulkes 1999, against Hobson’s account of dreams as delusions.
- 47.
Branch 1738, 26.
- 48.
On Mead and Gibbs see also Roos 2000. For Harris’s Lexicon Technicum: or, an universal English dictionary of arts and sciences (1704) I’ve used the 2nd edition (2 volumes, 1708 & 1710). Harris, who had been Boyle Lecturer in 1698, and was Secretary of the Royal Society for a year in 1709–1710, wrote an array of hack works: the DNB (IX, 13–14) says that “Harris was culpably improvident, and was generally in distress,” noting sadly that his 1719 history of Kent is “extremely inaccurate.” Thanks to Richard Yeo for advice on Harris.
- 49.
Mead 1702, 20–21.
- 50.
Morgan 1735, 152–4. For the earlier history of debates about animal spirits, and more detailed accounts of eighteenth-century controversies about their existence, see Jacyna 1995; Clower 1998; Sutton 1998, chapters 2, 8, 10; Rousseau 2004. Among our other current writers, Gibbs nicely compares the deniers of animal spirits to atheists. Observability is entirely irrelevant: although we can’t see God, we know he exists, so the fact that no cavity can be discovered in tubes of nervous fibre doesn’t matter, because “if the Hole was discernable, by which the Spirits pass thro’ a Fibre, it might be unfit for the Passage of so fine and rarify’d a Fluid, as the Spirits are.” Gibbs 1712, 27.
- 51.
Arguing in favour of the solids, David Baynes/Kinneir explicitly recommends metaphorising the spirits, so to talk of someone being in good spirits would mean they are in health (1738, 11–12). In fact the incorporation of the language of animal spirits into economics had already begun, foreshadowing their post-Keynesian career as markers of consumer confidence (Winslow 1986, Akerlof and Shiller 2009).
- 52.
- 53.
Mead 1702, 19.
- 54.
Mead 1702, 13.
- 55.
Mead 1702, 19.
- 56.
Mead 1702, 17.
- 57.
Gibbs 1712, 10.
- 58.
Gibbs 1712, 8–12, 38–39.
- 59.
Mead 1702, 14–15.
- 60.
See also Roos 2000.
- 61.
Gibbs 1712, 54–64.
- 62.
Harris 1710, vol II, s.v. ‘spirits’.
- 63.
- 64.
Descartes 1972, 96.
- 65.
Mead 1702, 61.
- 66.
Mead 1702, 61–62.
- 67.
Mead 1702, 62.
- 68.
Mead 1702, 65–67. Mead also offers a geo-sexual climatology: sometimes spirits will “without any manifest Cause at all, be hurried towards those Organs, to which at other Times they have been most frequently determined; and every one knows which they are in hot Countries and Constitutions”, 67. See Floyd-Wilson 2003 on related earlier geohumoralist assumptions.
- 69.
Quoted in Barker-Benfield 1996, 9–11.
- 70.
Ishizuka 2006, 452–3.
- 71.
Locke 1690/1975, 2.33.16.
- 72.
Sutton 2000.
- 73.
Mead 1702, 70.
- 74.
Locke 1690/1975, 2.33.6.
- 75.
Rousseau 2008.
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Sutton, J. (2010). Carelessness and Inattention: Mind-Wandering and the Physiology of Fantasy from Locke to Hume. In: Wolfe, C.T., Gal, O. (eds) The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3686-5_12
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