Flesh in the Age of Reason (64 page)

In time, of course, certain acts (like walking) become mechanical habits or second nature, but that is not the point, for ‘a species of motion which began in express design may, though it ceases to be the subject of conscious attention, owe its continuance to a continued series of thoughts flowing in that direction’. The proof ? We get lost in thoughts: walking and talking, ‘we actually find that, when our thoughts in a train are more than commonly earnest, our pace slackens, and sometimes our going forward is wholly suspended, particularly in any less common species of walking, such as that of descending a flight of stairs’. In citing absent-mindedness as testimony of the superiority of the mind Godwin was arguing along similar lines (although within a secular frame) to those defenders of the Christian
soul – for example, Samuel Clarke – who had held that reverie and daydreaming attest the separate soul. What was at stake was not, of course, some separate soul but the possibility that mind could assert ever greater control over matter.

Godwin drove this line of speculation further, pondering whether thought plays a role in regulating blood circulation and heartbeat. ‘When thought begins, these motions also begin,’ he ventured, ‘and, when it ceases, they are at an end.’ Overall, ‘there are probably no motions of the animal economy which we do not find it in the power of volition, and still more of our involuntary sensations, to hasten or retard’, leading to the possibility: no thought, no motion. Mind is constantly and necessarily impinging upon operations that are apparently instinctual, physical and mechanical.

Following Hartley, and paralleling his older contemporary Erasmus Darwin, Godwin thus held that though initially conscious acts of will and attention (like learning to play the piano) turn into habits, they remain acts of mind. Darwin for his part studied habit for reasons of his own: by helping to bridge the apparent gap between man and beast (both were creatures of habit), habit lent support to his evolutionary theory (continuity). Godwin had very different fish to fry. He was interested in confirming the realm of reason, that is, the maintenance of perfect mental control over the flesh, including over what we would call ‘autonomic’ functions like breathing and digestion. He could rest content with nothing which imperilled mental autonomy.

The more reason extended its ascendancy over the flesh, the more it would be possible to prevent or overcome disease: through the adoption of rational diet, moderation, temperance and exercise, the body machine would be kept in perfect shape. Superficially, Godwin’s teachings did not differ greatly from the commonsense medical regimens advocated by popular health champions from Cornaro to Cheyne. But there was one key difference. For Godwin, rational living held out some semblance of this-worldly immortality: reason could conquer death. Whereas Christians looked forward to the ultimate resurrection of the body, the Promethean in Godwin
expected that reason could pre-empt decay of the flesh in the first place: ‘In a word,
why
may not man be one day immortal?’

Giving Swift’s Struldbrugs a wholly optimistic spin – he took much from Swift, if turning him upside down – Godwin positively looked forward to a future geriatric paradise. Such would be an extremely eligible state of affairs, because maturity brought wisdom, independence and hence happiness.

In pursuing such thoughts, Godwin drew upon the conjecture of the ‘celebrated’ Benjamin Franklin, that ‘mind would one day become omnipotent over matter’. Finding this idea beguiling, he elaborated upon it. Experience proved the psychosomatic: ‘Listlessness of thought is the brother of death. But cheerfulness gives new elasticity to our limbs, and circulation to our juices.’ Our bodies work well when reason is captain, but ‘when reason resigns the helm, and our ideas fluctuate without order or direction, we sleep. Delirium and insanity are of the same nature. Fainting appears principally to consist in a relaxation of intellect.’ In short, he concluded, ‘disease seems perhaps in all instances to be the concomitant of confusion’.

Godwin adduced further psychosomatic evidence. Did not unhappiness produce a ‘broken heart’ and trigger organic disease, while good news set physical complaints to rights? The energetic and busy had the power to resist setbacks sufficient to reduce the idle to illness. ‘I walk twenty miles, full of ardour, and with a motive that engrosses my soul,’ he declared:

and I arrive as fresh and alert as when I began my journey. Emotion, excited by some unexpected word, by a letter that is delivered to us, occasions the most extraordinary revolutions in our frame.… There is nothing of which the physician is more frequently aware, than of the power of the mind in assisting or retarding convalescence.

Having shown that ‘our involuntary motions’ are ‘gradually to become subject to the power of volition’, what were the limits? ‘Is it not then highly probable, in the process of human improvement, that we may finally obtain an empire over every articulation of our frame?’ These were astonishing speculations indeed. The progressive
power of human reason would overcome the doom of death. But first, Godwin noted, sleep, death’s image, must be banished, for ‘sleep is one of the most conspicuous infirmities of the human frame’.

If sceptics and reactionaries baulked at these vainglorious thoughts, and declared such rational control ‘beyond the limits of the human mind’, Godwin countered that it was ‘our vanity’ which prompted us ‘to suppose that we have reached the goal of human capacity’ – they it was, not he, who were being presumptuous.

In short, Godwin the visionary predicted that ‘the term of human life may be prolonged, and that by the immediate operation of intellect, beyond any limits which we are able to assign’. If, admittedly, ‘it would be idle to talk of the absolute immortality of man’, that was only because ‘eternity and immortality are phrases to which it is impossible for us to annex any distinct ideas’.

But would not such prolongevism bring catastrophic overpopulation? No, because once reason triumphed over the flesh, people would cease to reproduce, since their sexual cravings would dissolve away. Libido –
pace
Mandeville – was no biological constant but all in the mind, and so capable of control. Anyway, what pleasure there was in the sexual act hardly derived from physical drives – it was largely a product of fantasies attending our current, unreconstructed condition. Even nowadays, ‘strip the commerce of the sexes of all its attendant circumstances’ and desire would droop. ‘Tell a man that all women, so far as sense is concerned, are nearly alike,’ suggested Godwin in a thought-experiment,

Bid him therefore take a partner without any attention to the symmetry of her person, her vivacity, the voluptuous softness of her temper, the affectionate kindness of her feelings, her imagination or her wit. You would probably instantly convince him that the commerce itself, which by superficial observers is put for the whole, is the least important branch of the complicated consideration to which it belongs.

Copulation
per se
was hardly worth the candle – its pleasures largely came from fantasies and these in truth were pretty small beer. Everyone knew how arousal was prey to suggestion:

Let us suppose a man to be engaged in the progressive voluptuousness of the most sensual scene.… he resigns himself, without power of resistance, to his predominant idea. Alas, in this situation, nothing is so easy as to extinguish his sensuality! Tell him at this moment that his father is dead, that he has lost or gained a considerable sum of money, or even that his favourite horse is stolen from the meadow, and his whole passion shall be instantly annihilated.

Perfect proof, concluded Godwin, of the ‘precariousness of the fascination of the senses’! And if stray thoughts induced impotence in this manner, all the more should
noble ideals
subdue, and, he hoped supersede, the lusts of the flesh. Reason should thus mastermind the future: ‘if the power of intellect can be established over all other matter, are we not inevitably led to ask, why not over the matter of our own bodies?’

Godwin’s Prometheanism was mocked as visionary, and this victim of his own fantasies became a prime butt of satire: ‘Come kick me – is his eternal language,’ guffawed Southey. In ‘The Loves of the Triangles’ – chiefly a skit on Erasmus Darwin’s
The Loves of the Plants
– the
Anti-Jacobin Review
parodied Godwinian perfectibilism, especially the notion that reason could assume command of creation. ‘We contend’, its Godwin puppet insisted, that man could be raised ‘to a rank more worthy of his endowments and aspirations; to a rank in which he would be, as it were,
all
M
IND
… and never die, but
by his own consent
’.

It is no accident that Godwin fell into conflict with Thomas Robert Malthus, the population theorist. Malthus’s father, Daniel, a personal friend of Rousseau, had been a torchbearer of the Enlightenment and had his son educated by the most advanced teachers. Schooled in Locke and Hartley, the young Malthus had been groomed to become a philosophical radical – before he exploded into what must be called his Oedipal revolt.

The champagne fizz of revolution had naturally created noble expectations of improvement, but were they rationally justified? asked Malthus in his
Essay on the Principle of Population
(1798). Was
mankind truly about to realize such Promethean dreams? Malthus concluded that the radical programme of boundless progress was intrinsically self-defeating – knowledge would produce economic growth, this would increase wealth, wealth would then fire a population explosion. He had thus, he believed, exposed the visionaries’ Achilles heel. The implications of such an increase had never been evaluated by such prophets of progress as Godwin and Condorcet in France. Fantasy had outrun thought: ‘I have certainly no right to say that they purposely shut their eyes,’ Malthus commented ironically, yet ‘we are all of us too prone to err’.

Countering the day-dreamers, Malthus posed as the sober realist, scorning rhetoric and ‘mere conjectures’ in favour of facts. Radical plans were ravishing – Godwin’s philosophy was ‘by far the most beautiful and engaging of any that has yet appeared’ – but utopian bubbles were pricked by hard facts. Zealots ascribed all evils to the
ancien régime
; abolish the old order and, hey presto, everything was possible. But ‘the great error under which Mr. Godwin labours throughout his whole work, is, the attributing almost all the vices and misery that are seen in civil society to human institutions’. The real stumbling block was not the vices of the politicians but the nature of things.

How then did nature balance production and reproduction? ‘I think’, Malthus proposed, ‘I may fairly make two postulata’, namely that ‘food is necessary to the existence of man’, and that ‘the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state’ (‘These two laws… appear to have been fixed laws of our nature’). Population would thus inevitably tend to outrun resources and precipitate crisis: famine, epidemics and war. That was the great problem the radicals had never squarely faced – they had merely come up with frivolities, notably Godwin’s silly suggestions ‘that the passion between the sexes may in time be extinguished’. Nature herself, in other words, foiled dreams of social equality.

Godwin, as just shown, boldly held that such ‘progress’ would not, in actuality, be harmful, because of the future waning of sexual urges. Malthus, demographer, scientist, statistician, political economist and
Church of England divine, plumped for what to high-minded radicals like Godwin and William Hazlitt was the grossest of sexual materialisms, in which human propensities were unreformable, by inference because of Original Sin: man could not be trusted to curb his urges.

The godless Godwin countered Malthus by advancing a much more elevated view of mankind, one aspiring to transcend base urges in pursuit of the life of the mind. ‘One tendency of a cultivated and virtuous mind is to diminish our eagerness for the gratification of the senses,’ he declared:

They please at present by their novelty, that is, because we know not how to estimate them.… The gratifications of sense please at present by their imposture. We soon learn to despise the mere animal function, which, apart from the delusions of intellect, would be nearly the same in all cases; and to value it only as it happens to be relieved by personal charms of mental excellence.

The men therefore whom we are supposing to exist, when the earth shall refuse itself to a more extended population, will probably cease to propagate. The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have, in a certain degree, to recommence her career every thirty years.

Nor was that all, predicted Godwin, warming to his vision of heaven on earth:

There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice, as it is called, and no government. Beside this, there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment. Every man will seek, with ineffable ardour, the good of all. Mind will be active and eager, yet never disappointed.

*

The Godwin–Malthus conflict highlights with great clarity the perhaps surprising alliance which has surfaced at various points in this book between Christian doctrine and a materialist view of human nature that accentuated the body. Contrariwise, it reveals the commitment of the liberal and progressive intelligentsia to a new view of mankind, elevated above the gross and fallen Christian flesh in pursuit of a millennium in which what counted was the march of
mind, sanctity of intellect, freedom of the spirit, commitment to enquiry and the adventure of the life critically examined.