Flesh in the Age of Reason (20 page)

The
Spectator
’s valetudinarian imprudently took up this ‘Mathematical Chair’, so as ‘to direct my self by a Scheme of Rules’:

I used to Study, Eat, Drink, and Sleep in it; insomuch that I may be said, for these three last Years, to have lived in a Pair of Scales. I compute my self, when I am in full Health, to be precisely Two hundred Weight, falling short of it about a Pound after a Day’s Fast, and exceeding it as much after a very full Meal; so that it is my continual Employment to trim the Ballance between these two Volatile Pounds in my Constitution. In my ordinary Meals I fetch my self up to Two hundred Weight and a half Pound; and if after having dined I find my self fall short of it, I drink just so much Small Beer, or eat such a quantity of Bread, as is sufficient to make my weight.

Eventually he reached the absurd point at which ‘I do not dine and sup by the Clock, but by my Chair’. And the result? – ‘notwithstanding this my great Care to ballast my self equally every Day, and to keep my Body in its proper Poise, so it is that I find my self in a sick and languishing Condition’. Hence he begged Mr Spectator ‘to consider me as your Patient, and to give me more certain Rules to walk by than those I have already observed’. Recourse to the balance had evidently made him even more unbalanced than before.

If the perils of poring over medical books was an old humanist conceit, the weight-watching hypochondriac who reduced life to the quantification of inputs and outputs was new and suggestive – Swift would have relished it – of the evil genius of mindless mechanical
materialism. How ominous that the Sanctorian slave wanted yet more rules! And how prophetic of future physical and dietary cultures in which all manner of artless attempts to monitor and manage in the name of health (or happiness, or beauty) ended up nightmarishly counter-productive and self-destructive.

People succumbed in myriad ways to the crotchets of the illmanaged mind. Visiting a friend, Mr Spectator noted, ‘I had the Misfortune to find his whole Family very much dejected’. Why so? His wife had ‘dreamt a very strange Dream the Night before, which they were afraid portended some Misfortune to themselves or to their Children’. And what further caused the ‘settled Melancholy’ disfiguring her face? ‘We were no sooner sate down, but, after having looked upon me a little while,
My Dear
, says she, turning to her Husband,
you may now see the Stranger that was in the Candle last Night
.’ Worse was to follow:

Soon after this, as they began to talk of Family Affairs, a little Boy at the lower end of the Table told her, that he was to go into Join-hand on
Thursday
. Thursday! says she,
No, Child, if it please God, you shall not begin upon
Childermas-day;
tell your Writing-Master that
Friday
will be soon enough
.

Ensnare yourself in such superstitions, Addison reflected, and you would end up making it a ‘Rule to lose a Day in every Week’.

Worse still were those religious enthusiasts, who saw not just silly strangers in the candle but demons and visions everywhere. Spirits as such were no problem at all to Addison – quite the reverse: ‘all the Regions of Nature swarm with Spirits,’ he assured, echoing More or Glanvill. Indeed, with a nice touch, Mr Spectator imagined such higher beings overseeing humanity as an etherealized version of himself: ‘we have Multitudes of Spectators on all our Actions, when we think our selves most alone.’ Such spiritual beings, however, should not be the occasion for gloom: ‘I am wonderfully pleased to think that I am always engaged with such an innumerable Society.’ The spiritual should thus exalt man’s sense of self-esteem.

Drawing on Locke’s account of the (mis-)association of ideas, Addison explained how false beliefs about demons and devils arose
out of the silly talk of vulgar nurses and servants. Errors took root which perverted true faith into superstition (indelibly associated with the papists), or that enthusiasm which was the mark of the Puritan. Committed as they were to the Anglican
via media
, Addison and Steele passionately condemned all that perverted faith.

Against such ‘little horrors of imagination’, the
Spectator
offered correctives. Lifting a tale from the newly translated
Arabian Nights
, it told of a hypochondriacal ruler cured by a wise physician not through medications as such, but by the imaginative counter-suggestion which formed the medicine of the soul:

He took an Hollow Ball of Wood, and filled it with several Drugs, after which he clos’d it up so artificially that nothing appeared. He likewise took a Mall, and after having hollowed the Handle, and that Part which strikes the Ball, he enclosed in them several Drugs after the same manner as in the Ball it self. He then ordered the Sultan, who was his Patient, to exercise himself early in the Morning with these
rightly prepared
Instruments, ’till such time as he should Sweat. When, as the Story goes, the Virtue of the Medicaments perspiring through the Wood, had so good an Influence on the Sultan’s Constitution, that they cured him of an Indisposition which all the Compositions he had taken inwardly had not been able to remove.

Small surprise that one of the morals of the tale was ‘how beneficial Bodily Labour is to Health, and that Exercise is the most effectual Physick’.

The radical prophylactic against the waywardness of the mind lay in an energetic reform of education, presently marred by false theory and lack of balance: ‘The general Mistake among us in the Educating our Children, is, That in our Daughters we take Care of their Persons and neglect their Minds: in our Sons, we are so intent upon adorning their Minds, that we wholly neglect their Bodies.’ As always, such divisions were damaging. Taking their cue, yet again, from Locke, it was explained that since boys and girls began with similar mental equipment, the
tabula rasa
, education for both must be rational and geared to the symbiotic cultivation of mind and body.

Passionate popularizers of Locke’s philosophical and educational
ideas, Addison and Steele took the gamble of putting across his controversial views on personal identity. As we saw in the previous chapter, these were a red rag to conservative bulls who feared they undermined the permanence of the self in an objective moral order. These speculations seem to have caused no worry to Addison and Steele, who cheerfully dramatized Locke’s account of conscious selfhood by conscripting an episode from
The Persian Tales
(recently translated by Ambrose Philips), a tale of transmigrating spirits, re-animated bodies and mistaken identities.

Having learned from a dervish the trick of implanting his soul into a dead body, King Fadlallah enters the corpse of a deer. The cunning holy man then seizes the opportunity to occupy the king’s newly vacant body, preventing him from repossessing it. Only after migrating through a succession of corpses and mistaken identities is Fadlallah able to regain his own flesh. Was not Locke then right? Bodies were contingent and even interchangeable appendages, rather like suits of clothes or disguises.

Prompted by this fable to address head-on the question of ‘what it was that might be said to compose
personal Identity
’, the
Spectator
knew where to look for the answer:

Mr.
Lock
, after having premised that the Word
Person
properly signifies a thinking intelligent Being that has Reason and Reflection, and can consider itself as itself; concludes, That it is Consciousness alone, and not an Identity of Substance, which makes this personal Identity of Sameness.

It went on to cite the discussion (quoted in
Chapter 4
) in the
Essay concerning Human Understanding
of the man who remembered both Noah’s Ark and the recent flooding of the Thames, meant by Locke to show how, through the possession of memory, the self might transcend different embodiments and times.

Addison and Steele were thus the first champions of Locke’s beguiling idea that consciousness, not substance, was the location of the person. They must have judged that this would strike a chord with their readers. Not, it must be emphasized, because of any pessimistic, cynical or subversive connotations it carried. Mr Spectator
was not selling decadent rakery or Hobbesian libertinism, tempting readers to savour the bottomless depths of illicit fantasy; neither was he a Humean sceptic
avant la lettre
, casting aside the stable Christian absolutes with an ‘anything goes’ amoralism. Rather, exactly like Locke, Addison and Steele offered conscious selfhood as a more appealing and plausible rendering of identity. For them it was of a piece with Christian doctrine and Plato’s avowal of the soul’s supremacy over the passions.

Pondering ‘the Immortality of the Soul’ – that ‘Subject upon which I always meditate with great Delight’ – Addison insisted, sounding more conventional than Locke, that such eternal existence ‘is the Basis of Morality, and the Source of all pleasing Hopes and secret Joys’. Were such hopes mere wish-fulfilment, or were there rational grounds for believing in that separate soul? One confirmation, he suggested, lay in dreaming. Some theories of dreams – the notion that they were ‘Revelations of what has already happened in distant Parts of the World, or… Presages of what is to happen in future Periods of Time’ – were extravagantly fanciful. But ‘dreams may give us some Idea of the great Excellency of an Human Soul, and some Intimation of its Independency on Matter’, for they attested an ‘Activity which is natural to the Humane Soul’, which ‘the Power of Sleep’ could not ‘deaden or abate’; though a person might be ‘tired and worn out with the Labours of this Day’, this ‘active Part in his Composition’ was ‘busie and unwearied’. Dreams might thus be deemed the ‘Relaxations and Amusements of the Soul, when she is disencumbered of her Machine’ or ‘disengaged from the Body’. By implication, such an exercise of imagination could persist once the body was not slumbering but dead. Claims such as these, as we have seen, were hotly contested between Collins and Clarke.

Addison adduced further plausible grounds for the separate soul, derived from the enigma of mundane existence. Life was so short, he reflected, that ‘a Man, considered in his present State, seems only sent into the World to propagate his Kind’. In other words, ‘he does not seem born to enjoy Life, but to deliver it down to others’ – almost a foretaste of the ‘selfish gene’. Such a fate was not surprising ‘in
Animals, which are formed for our use, and can finish their Business in a short Life’. But the brevity of man’s earthly sojourn seemed,
prima facie
, a blemish in the divine scheme, for ‘a Man can never have taken in his full measure of Knowledge, has not time to subdue his Passions, establish his Soul in virtue, and come up to the Perfection of his Nature, before he is hurried off the Stage’. Would the Divine Dramatist thus bring the human drama to such a botched and premature finale? Was it not far more likely that terrestrial life was just a prologue? Nearly a century later, Godwin came up with similar musings, but reached very different conclusions.

As will be evident from Addison’s slighting reference to the animal kingdom, on the soul the
Spectator
endorsed age-old ‘human exceptionalism’. This conviction was justified through an anthropological and historical tenet popular in the century to come: belief in the unique and separate human soul was embraced by modern, progressive, civilized minds. ‘T
HE
Americans
’ – that is, native American Indians –

believe that all Creatures have Souls, not only Men and Women, but Brutes, Vegetables, nay even the most inanimate things, as Stocks and Stones. They believe the same of all the Works of Art, as of Knives, Boats, Looking-glasses: And that as any of these Things perish, their Souls go into another World, which is inhabited by the Ghosts of Men and Women.

Such animistic opinions were, of course, ‘absurd’, insisted Addison, oozing a condescending cultural chauvinism. Yet, in a typical enlightened gesture, he also confessed that ‘our
European
Philosophers’ of former times had embraced ‘several Notions altogether as improbable’. Platonists – the master himself seemed exempt – ‘entertain us with Substances and Beings no less extravagant and chymerical’, while ‘many
Aristotelians
have likewise spoken as unintelligibly of their substantial Forms’ – that stock gibe against scholasticism. Wherever it was to be found, such animism was symptomatic of a primitive mentality. Modern reason knew better – that human beings, and they alone, possessed an immortal soul.

*

The
Spectator
created and publicized an eligible persona for the new, post-1688 public: man as a sociable being. This modern self rested upon a healthy and disciplined body. And that, in turn, would sustain a healthy mind, one which avoided ensnarement in phantasms and which, in the Lockean dispensation, would prove capable of continuous adaptation to the exigencies of a challenging but opportunity-rich environment. Man thus became not just a sociable animal but a progressive one, too. Spectatorial man, conditioned to play his part in the public sphere, became one of the preferred fashionings of the self. What made its stress on appearances, on the presentation of the self, so acceptable was Addison and Steele’s skill in convincing their readers that what lay beneath, to be presented, was a noble and estimable self.

The turmoil of the seventeenth century prompted the disturbing question: had Aristotle been mistaken to call man a social and political animal? If so, what then did human nature truly comprise?

One response, prompted by the Civil Wars, was that of Hobbes: man was inherently an aggressive loner,
homo lupo lupus
. Fear and the belligerence it bred made political society no better than a ceasefire, a defensive compact of atomized antagonists trying to make their lives somewhat less solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short than in that dire ‘war of all against all’ which was the state of nature.