Flesh in the Age of Reason (52 page)

Stewart had a bone to pick with aspects of commonsense philosophy, especially as expressed by some of his Scottish contemporaries who (he believed) had sacrificed true analytic philosophy to support for social convention and Kirk orthodoxy, by simply using their philosophy to endorse commonplace beliefs. Instead of ‘the principles of common sense’, Stewart preferred to speak of ‘the fundamental laws of human belief’. Nevertheless, he broadly sided with commonsense philosophy against the subversives – the sceptical Hume and such materialists as Hartley and Priestley (see the following chapter), whose views he condemned as speculative, unsubstantiated by evidence and, therefore, the relics of a former, pre-inductive age of metaphysics.

Stewart was the philosophical champion of the soul. The soul is not something of which we are introspectively conscious: our knowledge of it is wholly ‘relative’, derived from the phenomena of consciousness at large. His polemics against materialism are couched in a form which is methodological rather than religious or moralistic; any proposal to substitute a physiological for an introspective psychology struck, he thought, at the philosophical integrity of the
science of mind. He did, however, maintain that the immateriality of the mind was important among the considerations leading us to expect life after death. It established a presumption of immortality, permitting the countering of objections to the possibility of an existence apart from the body. Other considerations turned on the principle that, as experience showed, our nature was adapted to the nature of things. Tendencies deeply rooted within our nature required a future life for their realization.

Stewart’s argument for the continuation of the soul after death seems to echo the thinking of Shaftesbury and the
Spectator
: an adequate sense of self as a human hinged upon the idea of prolongation and futurity, and would be frustrated and cheated by extinction. Would the psychological need for the soul to be immortal have been implanted by a benign Deity had it not corresponded with reality?

Stewart represents a principled critique of unreflective Christian faith recuperated onto a higher level, with expectations both of intellectual progress on this earth and of some consummation in a world to come. Overall, he was the culmination of Scottish academic attempts to discover in history the progressive manifestation of Mind. Central to enlightened thinking was the goal of extending scientific thinking to human nature and society. Living in a rapidly changing society with a strong academic tradition, Scots were prominent in that movement, contributing particularly coherent philosophies of progress.

These typically Scottish ideas filtered into the wider consciousness, partly through the
Edinburgh Review
, founded in 1802, which trumpeted the ‘march of mind’. In their vulgarized form they were later deliciously parodied in Thomas Love Peacock’s novel
Crotchet Castle
(1831):

‘God bless my soul, sir!’ exclaimed the Reverend Doctor Folliott, bursting one fine May morning, into the breakfast-room at Crotchet Castle, ‘I am out of all patience with this march of mind. Here has my house been nearly burned down, by my cook taking it into her head to study hydrostatics, in
a sixpenny tract, published by the Steam Intellect Society, and written by a learned friend who is for doing all the world’s business as well as his own, and is equally well qualified to handle every branch of human knowledge.’

Teachings about the soul long dominated the everyday faith preached on Sundays from Anglican pulpits. God had made a double creation, the immaterial and the material, the permanent and the passing. The body temporarily housed an immaterial spirit which was a unity, self-conscious and endowed with free will. The office of reason was to govern the flesh, which had no sway over a healthy mind – fury, madness and sickness were exceptions which proved the rule. A human was thus what Dr Johnson called an incorporated mind, defined by a soul accountable to its Maker. Deeds done during that soul’s earthly sojourn decided its fate beyond the grave. Altogether, it was a schedule of beliefs that was meant to provide moral and social glue: if, as that frantic Restoration libertine the Earl of Rochester declared, ‘After Death, nothing is’, what was to stop a wild plunge into vice and crime?

Pillars of the Church and of learning upheld such teachings. In discussing our ‘future state’, Joseph Butler, the much-respected Bishop of Durham, asserted that all the evidence pointed to ‘the simplicity and absolute Oneness of a living Agent’, that is, the accountable soul, and that ‘we may exist out of our Bodies’ as well as in them. Half a century later, Thomas Reid, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, echoed him: ‘A person is something indivisible.’ Such views were designed to scotch those who raised doubts about the traditional Christian ‘incorporated mind’.

As we have already seen, coffee-house wits and freethinkers like Anthony Collins had run with the notion, floated by Locke, of ‘thinking matter’, consciousness reduced to some bodily emission – inanities nervously mocked by Swift. Unlike in France, however, the majority of nay-sayers in Britain were not scoffing unbelievers but
heterodox Christians, earnestly pursuing what they saw as religious truth. Among those, the most penetrating and influential rethinker of the self, both temporal and celestial, was David Hartley.

This extraordinary psychologist (with him the term is barely an anachronism) has been neglected or misunderstood, largely because his writings defy modern academic categories. The title accorded him by some modern psychologists as ‘father of modern behaviourism’ offers praise at the cost of screening out the religious and eschatological dimensions of his thinking, elements which seem quaint and obsolete today but which were integral to his world view. Hartley the monist has been ironically split in two: he must be put back together again.

David Hartley was born in 1705, the son of a poor Anglican clergyman. Orphaned early, he attended Bradford Grammar School and went on to Jesus College, Cambridge, at precisely the moment when a synthesis of Newtonian natural philosophy and Lockean philosophy was modernizing the undergraduate curriculum. Graduating in 1726, he held a college fellowship until marriage four years later compelled him to quit it.

There had been an expectation that Hartley would be ordained into the Church of England and become a country clergyman, but he could not square it with his conscience to subscribe to all of the Thirty-Nine Articles (he did not believe in the eternity of hellfire torments). Such scruples were becoming more common among liberal-minded Cambridge graduates, leading to a bitter ‘subscription controversy’ some forty years later: should graduates be forced to swear to Articles which they regarded as muddled, unsound or obsolete? As later with his admirer Joseph Priestley (who edited his work), the idea that Christianity was riddled with mysteries to be accepted in blind faith was for Hartley a travesty of religion. Hence, though without any degree or licence, he started to practice medicine: if not in holy mysteries, truth evidently lay in the body. Thereafter Hartley devoted himself to showing how the flesh revealed God’s way with the soul.

After the death of his wife in childbirth, Hartley remarried in 1735,
and his second wife’s fortune enabled him to settle close by London’s fashionable Leicester Square, then the physicians’ quarter, before her ill-health induced them to move to Bath, where he built up a successful practice. He evidently impressed. He became a fellow of the Royal Society and moved in superior circles, his friends including the top physician Sir Hans Sloane, who became president of the Royal Society, the Revd Stephen Hales, famous for his pioneering physiological experiments, and Joseph Butler, whose doctrines of the soul buttressed orthodoxy. He also played his part in key philanthropic causes, championing smallpox inoculation and writing pamphlets to secure parliamentary aid for Mrs Joanna Stephens’s nostrum against kidney-and bladder- stones – he had personally suffered from that agonizing disorder while still a young man.

Hartley’s great work was his two-volume
Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations
, published in 1749, a book which further developed and systematized views earlier set out in his
The Progress of Happiness Deduced From Reason
(1734) and
Conjecturae Quaedam de Sensu, Motu, et Idearum Generatione
(Some Conjectures on Sense, Motion and the Generation of Ideas: 1746). The
Observations on Man
unfolded a comprehensive philosophy of man, considered both as an earthly being and in regard to a future state. It unreservedly embraced Locke’s empiricist theory of the mind, his ‘way of ideas’. Nothing was innate to the consciousness – that would have been yet another mystery, like the Trinity, and therefore incomprehensible – a card up the sleeve or a
deus ex machina
. All ideas and values within the mind derived from experience, from visible and tangible external reality: that was what made it intelligible and so allowed man to understand God’s ways, as surely He intended.

Hartley had also absorbed the novel utilitarianism of the Revd John Gay’s
Preliminary Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality
(1731), which made pleasure and pain psychology the key to moral development and hence to ethics. Together with Locke and Gay, Hartley dismissed all innatist theories of cognition and morality as arbitrary and anti-scientific – mere mystifying hocuspocus. Complex ideas and attitudes could best be explained by
showing how they were built up, by association, in a regular, gradual (hence
understandable
) manner, from simple inputs through repeated combinations of ‘sensations of the soul’. The mind was thus not some impenetrable enigma, but was open to inquiry.

Going beyond his mentors, however, Hartley sought to ground these epistemological and psychological operations in solid corporeal foundations: the anatomy of the nervous system and the physiology of ‘motions excited in the brain’. For this he drew upon the theory of sensation broached in the ‘Queries’ to Isaac Newton’s
Opticks
. Newton had shown how light vibrated in a medium, and how such vibrations impacted upon the retina. Having struck the eye, these corpuscular motions (according to Hartley’s reading of Newton) activated further vibrating waves which passed along the nerves to the brain. Associations of ideas were thus visualized and materialized by Hartley in terms of repeated vibrations in the white medullary matter of the spinal cord and brain, which were productive of the lasting traces which he styled ‘vibratiuncles’ (little vibrations). These vestiges served as the physical substrate of complex ideas, memory and attitudes. The mechanisms of the nerves and brain generated consciousness: in these ‘good vibrations’ lay Locke’s ‘thinking matter’ incarnate.

Unlike such atheist
philosophes
as La Mettrie, the author of the scandalous
L’Homme machine
(1748), Hartley piously framed his materialist physiological psychology in terms of the grand Christian narrative. How could materialism be the slippery slope to atheism? 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 power and wisdom of the Creator. Arguments about the law-governed workings of the natural world, familiar since Newton and blessed by natural theology, Hartley applied to the moral order.

As befitted a medical man, the first volume of
Observations on Man
thus addressed neuro-physiology, discussing the senses, sensations
and thought in terms of the consolidation of complex ideas and habits out of elementary, organically grounded impressions. In so arguing, Hartley had to take a stand on the quarrels over nerves and fibres raging since Descartes, and engage with the popular theories of the Leiden medical professor Hermann Boerhaave, who regarded the nerves as hollow tubes. This was the crux of the issue in the dispute between mechanists and animists over the soul’s relation to the body. As we saw in
Chapter 3
, Thomas Willis had held that the theatre of the soul was limited to the brain. It could experience sensations from, and initiate actions in, the rest of the body, through the nerves; these, he believed, were hollow conduits for the animal spirits produced by the brain to flow along. Following Willis, mechanists, Boerhaave included, also maintained that the nerves were hollow ducts. Their vitalist opponents, by contrast, most notably the German Georg Ernst Stahl, argued for the existence of ‘a rational agent presiding over the fabric of the body, and producing effects that are not subject to the laws of mechanism’ – a pervading
anima
or soul. They sought to vindicate their position by demonstrating that nerves were solid fibres – hence no such channel, as needed by the mechanists, existed to explain the brain’s command over the body.

Hartley esteemed the Dutch professor’s thinking concerning the structure and functions of the brain, yet he insisted,
pace
Boerhaave, that the brain was not a gland, neither were the nerves hollow. Boerhaave’s ‘tubular’ hypothesis had been disproved experimentally: attempts to inject fluids into the nerves or brain had failed. Clearly no fluid or animal spirits flowed through the nerves: rather they were made up of tiny particles, which Hartley termed ‘the component molecules of the brain’. Thus, it was Newton to the rescue! For Hartley, it was the vibrations of solid nerves which provided the physiological confirmation of Locke’s sensationalist epistemology and association of ideas.

Hartley set a learning model at the very heart of his psychology of human nature: all was to be explained by development. His theory of how sensations become ideas is made clear in his paradigmatic account of the development of habits, so essential in the forming of
the personality. Take, for instance, the motions of the hands in learning a musical instrument. First of all they pass ‘through the several degrees of voluntariness’, but in time and with practice their action becomes on many occasions automatic, though still perfectly voluntary on others, namely, ‘whensoever an express act of the will is exerted’.