Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, spent a great deal of time wondering about the dramas transpiring within her own cranium. One of her “sociable letters,” written to an unnamed female interlocutor, exemplifies this tendency. Cavendish relates that, on a particularly cold winter day, encouraged or even commanded by her husband, she ventured out of her warm house to view ice skaters gliding upon the now-frozen river ringing a city’s walls. Although Cavendish “take[s] some Pleasure to see [these skaters] Slide upon the Ice” and eventually longs to join them so that she “might Slide as they did,” she lacks “the Agility, Art, Courage, [and] Liberty” to set foot on the solid river.1 As the skaters wheel out in the cold, Cavendish remains a stationary spectator secreted away, “Warm Inclosed in a Mantle, and Easily Seated in [a] Coach.”2 Once Cavendish leaves the river, however, the winter scene plays out again, not before her eyes but now upon the folds of her brain, a site usually taken to be even more close and solitary than the interiority of a carriage:
I returned Home very well Pleased with the Sight, and being alone to my self, I found I had a River, Lake, or Moat Frozen in my Brain, into a Smooth, Glassy Ice, whereupon divers of my Thoughts were Sliding, of which, some Slid Fearfully, others as if they had been Drunk, having much ado to keep on their Incorporeal Legs, . . . yet most of my Thoughts Slid with a good Grace and Agility, as with a Swift, and Flying Motion. But after I had sat by the Fire-side some time, the Imaginary Ice began to Melt, and my Thoughts Prudently Retired, or Removed, for fear of Drowning in the Imaginary River in my Brain.3
At this point in her letter, controlled confusion sets in: inside and outside, body and world, freedom and restraint, are all exchanged. The skaters coasting through Cavendish’s brain reflect their external counterparts—but with some key differences. If Cavendish herself felt coddled and commanded when visiting the real-world frozen river, her thoughts evince wholly different characteristics. Displaying an unruly freedom, they skate free of their human counterpart, playing out the desires that Cavendish herself could not enact. As a consequence, Cavendish’s cerebral skaters enjoy, in this internal world at least, the liberty she lacked in the external. But this moment of wish fulfillment, however pleasant, raises some troubling questions, every bit as slippery, teasing, and treacherous as the frozen river fixed in Cavendish’s psyche. For instance, although they inhabit her most intimate interiority, these thoughts open up a difference and opacity within the self, since Cavendish observes them with the same detachment as she did the original ice skaters. In other words, Cavendish’s thoughts are somehow hers but not her, an indication that her brain is populated by entities that think and behave differently from her self.
The ideas gliding through this brief passage—the insistence that the brain contains more thinking things than we often imagine, the corresponding implication that these same cerebral entities might be different from or at odds with an overarching consciousness—are continual preoccupations in Cavendish’s writing. Passages like this alert us to the coiled complexity of Cavendish’s images of the brain, not to mention her tendency to use figure and fiction as a means of staging usually abstract philosophical questions about the nature of mind and matter, persons and their thoughts. Indeed, the above-quoted passage represents only one of Cavendish’s many attempts to figure the brain (if anything, it is arguably one of her simpler images). Elsewhere we find her likening the brain to a forest, a swamp, an island, an ocean filled with ships, various states and commonwealths, a surface to be printed upon, various body parts (eyes but also the stomach, hand, and heel), a spyglass, a tennis player, a closet filled with sumptuous clothing, an oven, a feast, a barrel of wine, a garden, a beehive, a city, a university, a parliament, a cozy house with a fireplace, a cloud, the sun, the entire universe.4
In this light, Cavendish must appear as the inverse of Thomas Willis, whose writings on the brain, as we saw in the previous chapter, were deeply conflicted in their use of metaphor and figurative language. Although the two thinkers were near contemporaries, Royalist true believers who spent the revolution in various states of exile (Cavendish in Paris, Willis in Oxford), dedicated readers and critics of the same set of thinkers (e.g., Descartes, Helmont), and devotees of natural philosophy, the methods and aims of their respective work point in divergent directions. While there is no evidence that Cavendish read Willis’s work or vice versa, her writing often reads like a purposeful refutation of his.5 Where Willis understood his brain anatomies as efforts to push back against a benighted, “poetic” view of the mind, Cavendish took aim at a different target: thinkers invested in the mechanistic natural philosophy Willis himself advocated. Where Willis argued that his approach to studying the brain would put our understanding of the psyche on a firm foundation, Cavendish contended that our grasp of the brain and mind was always uncertain because unsettled by the effects of our language, senses, and cultural norms. Most importantly, Willis and Cavendish developed opposing views on the use and abuse of figurative language in neuroscientific research. Willis claimed that plain, literal language, ornamented with a few controlled analogies, served as an ideal medium for a perspicuous new science of mind—although, in practice, he indulged in a series of unacknowledged and wild metaphors to plug a gap in his system. Conversely, Cavendish knowingly and enthusiastically embraced metaphor in her natural philosophical endeavors. With figurative language, she set out to radically refigure her period’s customary understanding of thinking things. Moreover, Willis and Cavendish tend to employ entirely different figures in their writing. As we have seen, Willis is drawn toward personification: a figure that transforms elements within the nervous system into reflections of the whole person. Cavendish opts for a different approach. Although she sometimes casts the brain as a microcosm peopled with tiny homunculi—witness her ice-skating thoughts—at other moments she figures the organ as an appendage or tool. In her writing, the brain is likened to a hand or to an optical instrument: odd imagery that transforms the nervous system from a microcosm into a tool for thinking. As a result of their distinct metaphors, Willis and Cavendish not only represent the nervous system differently; they also advocate for disparate ways of studying mind and matter. Willis insisted that the brain contains a place for a single central sovereign soul, which commands animal spirit soldiers. By doing so, he makes it seem as if to understand the mind we must probe into the occluded organs where thought really happens. Conversely, Cavendish’s metaphors make us see things differently. Studying the mind means observing the actions of its organs rather than seeking to gain access to some hidden interior space.
Despite their prevalence and prominence, Cavendish’s nervous figures have been ignored by many contemporary critics, most of whom have focused instead on more general issues in her writing: her conception of a panpsychist universe, her critique of mainstream science, her attempts to depict various utopias.6 Lianne Habinek’s work represents an important exception to this rule. In the course of examining Cavendish’s continual characterization of her nervous system as a kind of “writing machine” pouring forth printed matter, Habinek shows how Cavendish transforms the brain from a “passive vessel” housing psyches and ideational impressions to “an active agent producing material thoughts.”7 This chapter extends Habinek’s insight in a number of ways. Cavendish’s turn to these more “active” nervous figures, I argue, represents a turn away from the neuroscientific metaphors and methods evident in the work of her close contemporaries and rivals. Moreover, Cavendish’s obsessive efforts to figure the brain, it will become evident, are at the heart of her thought. If Willis’s work demonstrates how metaphors like personification can slip into the gaps produced by attempts to rigorously mechanize the mind, Cavendish’s writing, with its more purposeful use of figurative language, makes possible her panpsychist system.
At the heart of Cavendish’s philosophical system stand these convictions: that everything within the natural world is entirely corporeal or material in nature, and, following from this first principle, that “All the Parts of Nature have Life and Knowledg.”8 Cavendish, in the technical terms of contemporary philosophy, is a panpsychist materialist, a position that commits her in kind to a thoroughgoing monism.9 In other words, Cavendish flatly rejects the bifurcations we often imagine dividing up the world into separate classes of thinking or senseless things, animate or inorganic entities. For her, trees can feel and think, stones are every bit as alive as animals or plants, and the human mind is made of the same sort of material substance as minerals or flowers. Especially important for our purposes, panpsychist materialism drives Cavendish to advocate for a vision of the brain and nerves almost wholly at odds with the mainstream views of her time. If, in Cavendish’s philosophical system, evidently “brainless” or inorganic things like stones can think, then one must think differently about what kinds of matter can make a brain—just as one must think differently about the workings of one’s own nervous matter. Because Cavendish’s vision of the brain is purposefully challenging and counterintuitive, I want to provide a brief account of her understanding of the nervous system’s dynamics. Having done so, I’ll then show how her aforementioned philosophical convictions give rise to this image of the psyche.
The easiest way to capture Cavendish’s vision of the nervous system is to show how it departs from the mainstream conception of the brain in the late seventeenth century—a conception advocated most famously by Descartes and, at times, by Willis. In this mainstream model, the nervous system, broadly speaking, can be described like so: the brain is conceived as the seat of thought, since it houses deep within its cerebral folds, at the center of its twin hemispheres, the incorporeal mind or soul, which observes and responds to the external world from its confines within a “Cartesian theater” or command center. The organs outside this bright center of consciousness are, depending on the particulars of the neurophysiological system in question, either entirely thoughtless machinery (Descartes) or essentially senseless chemically charged particles (Willis when he writes literally). In either case, the fluids flowing through the brain ferry sensory stimuli across the body or enact volitional commands sent from the sovereign soul. According to Descartes, in particular, it would be absurd to claim that the nerves or animal spirits in the little finger “know” or “understand” the sense impressions they send to the brain.10 On the contrary, stimuli simply pass through the nerves, like water through a pipe; only the mind, at the receiving end of this corporeal apparatus, can make sense of this information. In the mainstream view of the nervous system, then, the sovereign mind, secreted away in the brain, lords over the otherwise subservient mechanisms of the body. At its core, this conception of the nervous system emphasizes hierarchy. It maintains that thinking only truly takes place in a single, centralized part of the nervous system (usually the pineal gland) and that this special section of the brain is subsequently more important than the cerebral organs supporting it.
Cavendish, who will insist that a body contains many intelligences without any permanent hierarchy among them, sets out to overturn this mainstream conception of the mind and brain—though not without some hesitation.11 For example, a short survey of Cavendish’s work shows her, at first, dramatizing the aforementioned Cartesian theories before eventually accepting, and advocating for, a more subversive view in her later writings.12 Cavendish concludes one of her earliest texts, the 1653 Poems, and Fancies—a purposeful hodgepodge of occasional verse and natural philosophical speculation—with a curious prose coda entitled “The Animall Parliament.” As its title implies, the coda imagines the “animall” brain as a court or parliament, where various allegorized representatives of the psyche meet to discuss the state of the body (e.g., one “lord” implores the body to eat less rich food so as not to damage the stomach): “The Soul called a Parliament in his Animal Kingdom, which Parliament consisteth of three parts, the Soul, the Body, and the Thoughts; which are Will, Imagination, and Passions. The Soul is the King, the Nobility are the Spirits, the Commonalty are the Humours and Appetites. The Head is the upper House of Parliament, where at the upper end of the said House sits the Soul King, in a Kernel of the Braine, like to a Chaire of State by himselfe alone, and his Nobility round about him.”13 The allegory here is largely conventional. Indeed, it doesn’t take much interpretative effort to look beneath its political trappings in order to uncover an account of the physiological process whereby the soul or mind, perched upon the pineal gland (here called the “kernel”), receives information from the animal spirits. Although the allegory, clearly enjoying some poetic license, departs from literal theory by personifying these nervous emissaries, thereby making them thinking things in their own right, it nevertheless reinforces a clear hierarchy in the nervous system by ensuring that the “Soul King” sits in the pineal gland alone, apart, and hence above the rest of his parliament. As in the mainstream model, Cavendish’s early allegory locates a qualitative distinction in the nervous system, since one organ (the pineal gland) is served by others.
But fifteen year later, in the Grounds of Natural Philosophy, arguably Cavendish’s most mature and complete account of her natural philosophical system, the structure and workings of the nervous system are reconceived radically. Having come close to the conclusion of her book, Cavendish reveals a scene unfolding in her brain: “The Parts of my Mind grew sad, to think of the dissolving of their Society: for, the Parts of my Mind are so friendly, that although they do often Dispute and Argue for Recreation and Delight-sake; yet, they were never so irregular, as to divide into Parties, like Factious Fellows, or Unnatural Brethren.”14 Immediately we notice a major shift in Cavendish’s allegory of body and mind. The psyche’s inhabitants enjoy equality, even friendship, with no one entity or group ruling over the rest (even, presumably, the presiding consciousness of Cavendish herself). The parts of Cavendish’s mind “dispute and argue,” to be sure, but only as sport and diversion. In the midst of their friendly debate, though, a different group of thoughts breaks in:
After the Wisest Parts of my Mind had ended their Arguments, there being some of the Dullest, and the most Unbelieving, or rather, Strange Parts of my Mind, that had retired into the Glandula of my Brain, which is a kind of a Kernel; which they made use of, instead of a Pulpit: out of which, they declared their Opinions, thus:
Dear Associates, We, that were not Parties of your Disputations, or Argumentations . . . being retired into the Glandula of the Brain, where we have been informed by the Nerves, and Sensitive Spirits, of your wise Opinions, and subtile Arguments. . . . We desire you . . . not to trouble the whole Society.15
In this later allegory, the pineal gland, or “kernel,” no longer serves as a throne for the sovereign soul (since there doesn’t seem to be one). Instead, the pineal stands as a literal bully pulpit for a group of troublesome, fractious thoughts. By the conclusion of her career, then, Cavendish’s vision of the nervous system and its workings has been refigured. What I have called the mainstream model of the brain—where sensory information is delivered to a central organ—is treated with disdain in this later allegory. It is the sort of system advocated only by “strange,” reclusive thoughts who, holed up in the “Glandula of the Brain,” must be “informed” of the debate unfolding around them through a series of intermediaries, “by the Nerves, and Sensitive Spirits.” In place of this mainstream model, the allegory itself treats the nervous system as the site of diverse and dispersed thinking things. Rather than posit a soul-king in the pineal gland, which would be functionally separate from and so more important than the surrounding matter serving it, Cavendish’s later allegory undermines such visions of cerebral sovereignty.16 Now the brain is populated by many intelligences, no one of which necessarily serves some preeminent organ.17
To appreciate why Cavendish came to advocate this striking vision of the nervous system, so outside the customary ways of understanding the brain, the nerves, and their functioning during her time, it’s necessary to say a few words about her materialist system more generally. Cavendish’s insistence that the nervous system possesses no single point of intelligence, or inherent hierarchy, follows from a few technical, but absolutely important, points concerning the makeup of matter. For Cavendish, although everything is alike—insofar as it is material and has thought and life—everything nevertheless thinks and lives in different ways. This careful interplay of similarity and difference is sustained by the nature of matter itself. Matter is ultimately only one sort of thing—extended, corporeal substance—but it can attain different states of relative density or purity (think of the way water can appear as a liquid, solid, or gas while still remaining H2O).18 Cavendish often refers to three states of matter: dull, sensitive, and rational. Essentially, these three words denominate matter’s varying capacity for “self-motion.” All matter must be capable of moving itself, since Cavendish’s system leaves no room for ghostly, incorporeal entities to direct and push around otherwise passive natural things. Dull matter has very little or almost no ability to move itself, sensitive matter can move itself but is still somewhat slow or hindered in its actions, and rational matter is the freest and most expatiating of all.19 When all three kinds of matter interact, the rational is like a “surveyor or architect,” the sensitive constitutes the “labouring or working part,” and dull matter comprises the materials that are worked upon.20
All this may sound, at first, like Cavendish has replaced the dualist’s hierarchy (i.e., the incorporeal moves the material) with a materialist counterpart (i.e., rational matter rules over sensitive and dull matter). But things are more complicated. While we can mark or differentiate these three states of matter in principle, it is impossible to isolate them in practice. Pick any object at random, and it will contain some mixture of dull, sensitive, and rational matter. As Cavendish explains, these “three degrees [are] so inseparably commixt in the body of nature, that none could be without the other in any part or creature of nature, could it be divided to an atom.”21 All creatures, no matter how impressively complex or trivially simple, are made of rational as well as sensitive and dull matter. It follows that while there may be a conceptual hierarchy inherent to matter, this dynamic does not create a corresponding hierarchy of creatures. There are not higher thinking things—nature’s “surveyors” and “architects” who have managed to hoard all the rational matter—and then, a few steps lower on the ladder of being, unthinking things, which are left only the dregs of dull matter. On the contrary, because all three degrees of matter are “commixt in the body of nature,” every creature contains aspects of the “surveyor,” “laborer,” and the brick. More simply: all creatures think (thanks to their store of rational matter), live and feel (because of sensitive matter), and possess inert, solid elements (dull matter). “There is not any Creature in Nature,” writes Cavendish, “that is not composed of Self-moving Parts (viz. both of Rational and Sensitive) as also of the Inanimate Parts, which are Self-knowing.”22 Hence, we find sensitive and rational matter at work within human bodies, which should be no surprise. But the same sensitive, rational matter that allows the human to raise a hand or meditate on existence is also present, in some measure, in rocks and trees, which means, in turn, that those nonhuman things also have “Self-moving Parts” and are “Self-knowing.”
At this point, though, an important caveat is in order. While Cavendish stresses that everything lives and thinks, she emphatically denies that humans, trees, and rocks have uniform thoughts or lives. Not every entity has the same capacity for self-motion; not all creatures manifest the same kinds of self-knowledge. Whenever Cavendish underlines similarity (everything senses, thinks, and thrives), she also marks a corresponding difference (everything senses, thinks, and thrives in disparate ways): “All Creatures, being composed of these sorts of Parts, must have a Sensitive, and Rational Knowledg and Perception, as Animals, Vegetables, Minerals, Elements, or what else there is in Nature: But several kinds, and several sorts in these kinds of Creatures, being composed after different manners, and ways, must needs have different Lives, Knowledges, and Perceptions.”23 Here, too, the degrees or gradations of matter explain the distinctions that cut through Cavendish’s monism. While every creature contains rational, sensitive, and dull (or inanimate) matter, not every creature contains the same mixture or amounts of such matter. This is how Cavendish can account for the evident variety of the natural world while still adhering to her materialist monism. Presumably a human being possesses more rational and sensitive matter than a rock—and so is capable of freer, more complex thoughts and actions than the stone. Although, significantly, even the rock must contain a pebble of rational matter that makes it capable of some form of “self-knowing.” That rocks can think and feel should come as a surprise to anyone who has kicked a stone without hearing a scream (from the rock). But Cavendish reminds us that rocks, being made of a different mixture of the three degrees of matter than humans, may feel and think in ways unfamiliar to us. They may not sense or react in precisely the ways we do when kicked.
This latter point cannot be stressed enough. Crucially, Cavendish’s philosophy denies not just a version of anthropocentrism (i.e., only human beings can think) but also anthropomorphism (i.e., the presumption that, if something thinks or feels, it must think or feel just like the human). Panpsychism makes the natural world, and our place within it, strange. (It also makes us uncanny to ourselves, as we will see.) For Cavendish, most thought is, by the standards of our familiarly human ways of thinking, radically alien. To stress this point, she emphatically differentiates her panpsychism from a variety that would make all thinking things diminished versions of the human being—or, for that matter, that would make all organs of thought another version of the human brain. Cavendish flatly rejects such homuncularism:
Wherefore, no body, I hope, will count me so senseless, that I believe sense and life to be after the like manner in every particular Creature or part of Nature; as for example, that a Stone or Tree has animal motions, and doth see, touch, taste, smell and hear by such sensitive organs as an Animal doth; but, my opinion is, that all Sense is not bound up to the sensitive organs of an Animal, nor Reason to the kernel of a man’s brain, or the orifice of the stomack, or the fourth ventricle of the brain, or onely to a mans body.24
It is not nonsense, then, to think that stones or trees might think (as we do, though not just as we do). To accept as much only necessitates that we think differently about what counts as thought and about the organs that might produce it. The truly senseless position is the one Cavendish rejects here: the belief that there is only one kind of cognition and, corresponding to it, only one set of organs that can produce it. As Jonathan Kramnick points out, Cavendish, throughout her work, “wants to show that the world abounds in points of view.”25 The human or animal nervous system is not the criterion against which all other sensoria must be compared: either to be found similar enough to merit the capacity for thought or so unlike the human brain as to be bereft of that ability. To believe as much is to succumb to a species of anthropomorphism.
And for Cavendish, we are bound to anthropomorphize the thinking things of an alien nature, so long as we maintain that sense and thought are bound only to particular organs in certain higher beings—like, for instance, the pineal gland or “kernel of a man’s brain.” Cavendish reminds her readers just how limited and constricting such views are given the infinite inventiveness of nature. If the rocks beneath our feet can feel and the trees towering above our heads can think, then they must do so with organs wholly different from those of the human nervous system. For Cavendish, it is within the bounds of possibility that even creatures without heads or evident sense organs can have thoughts and experiences, “for sense and reason, and consequently sensitive and rational knowledge, extends further then to be bound to the animal eye, ear, nose, tongue, head, or brain.”26 Moreover, it must be the case that there are ways of sensing and knowing that exceed the language and concepts humans have developed to describe their own mental worlds. Since there are other kinds of sense organs in nature, there are more than five senses—though humans clearly cannot experience or name those other ways of feeling: “Wherefore those, in my opinion, do grossly err, that bind up the sensitive matter onely to taste, touch, hearing, seeing, and smelling; as if the sensitive parts of Nature had not more variety of actions, then to make five senses.”27
In sum, accepting panpsychism means challenging our presumptions about what counts as a brain or nervous system; it also means expanding our ideas about what thought might look like. In fact, the conviction that everything thinks but thinks differently carries with it a significant corollary. Everything thinks differently—even within itself: “For we may well observe, in every Creature there is a difference of sense and reason according to the several modes of self-motion; For the Sun, Stars, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Plants, Animals, Minerals; although they have all sense and knowledge, yet they have not all sense and knowledg alike, because sense and knowledg moves not alike in every kind or sort of Creatures, nay many times very different in one and the same Creature.”28 To translate this somewhat thorny passage: Cavendish suggests that while there are differences between the nervous systems of various creatures, there are also differences within a single nervous system. A human is a thinking thing, but then, incredibly, so are the “Sun, Stars, Earth, Air,” etc. Given this, the sun must think and feel with organs that are wholly unlike those of the human organism. But even within the confines of the human body, there are disparate kinds of cognition and sensation taking place. Sense and knowledge are “very different in one and the same Creature,” after all. This claim follows from Cavendish’s contention that rational, sensitive, and dull matter is inherently mixed in every part of nature. Importantly, this conviction holds true not just for different bodies but also for body parts. That is, every inch of the body contains different mixtures of the three degrees of matter. As Cavendish notes, certain organs (such as the brain) contain more rational matter than others (say, the hand or foot).29 Nevertheless, it does not follow that these other organs are entirely bereft of rational or sensitive matter. Like the rock, the hand, too, must have some rational matter mixed within it, and so it too must be capable of both self-motion and thought. As a consequence, parts of the body can think and act independently of the controlling consciousness in the brain. Effectively Cavendish’s panpsychism populates the person with many intelligences, all of them “particular”: “As for Example, Each Sense hath a particular Knowledge, for the Eye knows not what the Ear hears, nor the Ear knoweth not what the Eye seeth, nor the Nose knows not of the Ear’s hearing or the Eye’s seeing, nor the Ears nor Eyes of the Noses smelling, nor all those Senses of the Tongue’s tasting, nor the Tongue knows nothing of the other Senses; and Touch, though it be a general Sense, yet every several Touch is a several Sensitive Knowledge.”30
As we saw, Cavendish’s representation of the dynamics unfolding within the nerves and brain differ considerably from that of the Cartesian or mainstream model. We now can appreciate how her materialist panpsychism points her in this direction. Because it confines thought to a single, central, unified place in the brain (usually the pineal gland), the mainstream model also strictly codifies what counts as authentic cognition. In this model, thinking and reasoning are delimited to a few activities. Images of the external world are projected into the Cartesian theater for the benefit of an inner eye seated there; these representations are duly examined, carefully considered, and then acted upon by this interior intelligence. To be sure, Cavendish grants that, at times, thought works in precisely this manner. A sovereign psyche, having deliberated upon an intended action, directs the corporeal machine accordingly: “’Tis true, the Mind Designs, and the Senses Execute; as for Example, A Man Designs in his Mind to go to such or such a place, the Senses Obey the Mind in the Execution, for the Eyes direct the Feet, and the Feet carry or bear the Body, and the whole Body gives strength to the Feet to bear or carry it.”31 But, at still other moments, mind and body can operate differently. Since even sensory organs and peripheral body parts possess a measure of their own intelligence and will, they, too, can direct and steer the organism: “And to prove the Senses have Knowledge, I say, the Eyes direct the whole Body, and the Feet, to go just to that Designed place, without the Minds further notice, for the Mind takes not notice of every step or tread of the Feet, or the Motion of the Body, and oft-times the Mind thinks not either of the Way, or designed Place the Body is going to, but is busied with other Thoughts, and yet the Senses carry the Body to the designed Place.”32 In other words, the eyes, having their own knowledge, can operate independently of the mind’s “designs.” While the mind muses away in the background of the brain, the eyes, commanding the feet, walk the body where they want. Once again, it’s important not to misunderstand Cavendish’s subtle point. In this passage, the “Knowledge” of the eyes is different than that of the “designing” mind in the brain; after all, “Each Sense hath a particular Knowledge.”33 Effectively, when the eyes move the body, it is not as if they become miniature versions of the brain. Their knowledge clearly does not involve the reception of sensory stimuli into an internal space, a moment of further reflection on these images, and then a purposeful action. Cavendish does not want to claim that the eyes have eyes of their own feeding them visual information. Her goal is not to populate every organ with a little intelligence seated in its own Cartesian theater, nor is to place pineal glands within every body part. Instead, she wants to emphasize the “particular Knowledge” of distinct organs.
What does this mean precisely? Cavendish’s vision of an organism directed by its eyes is less odd than it might at first appear. Sometimes we think deeply and then act in a deliberate manner. We see a cup of coffee across the room; we imagine how good it tastes; we determine to get it; we walk carefully to retrieve it. In this instance, “the Mind Designs, and the Senses Execute.” At other moments, though, we cross a room, grasp a cup, drink some coffee—all while thinking deeply about something else entirely (the nature of figurative language; a problem in philosophy of mind). Unknowing inheritors of the Cartesian vision of the psyche, we tend to characterize our grab at the coffee in this second episode as “mindless.” But Cavendish wants us to think otherwise. Her panpsychism would elevate these “mindless” acts into the realm of authentic thought. Since the eyes can “direct” the body through a complex choreography, all without the designing mind’s careful management, it follows that the “Senses have Knowledge.”34 This is an especially important point because it reorients how we might study the psyche. If it is not the case that every intelligent performance can be traced to some internal “design” in the brain or to some representation in the Cartesian theater, then it no longer follows that understanding every bit of complex behavior requires a delve into a microcosm where another inner intelligence manages the actions of some cerebral army. Because peripheral body parts like eyes or hands already possess their own “particular Knowledge,” we can appreciate their thoughtful activities by observing them at work rather than assuming they are playing out a script written within the pineal gland. However, reorienting our study of the psyche in this manner means recasting some of our assumptions about what counts as thought (a “mindless” walk across the room may be quite intelligent) and about what body parts count as thinking things (the eyes and not just the brain have knowledge).
Driven by the dictates of her materialist system, Cavendish forges a vision of the nervous system radically at odds with those of her contemporaries. In her work, the brain is no longer understood as an organ housing a single locus of coherent, unified intelligence, which is attached in turn to a servile sensory prosthesis. Instead, Cavendish populates the brain and body, as she does the external world more generally, with a multitude of thinking things, no one of which senses or knows in precisely the same manner, and no one of which necessarily commands and controls the rest. Cavendish frequently registers that her view of the psyche, as well as her panpsychism more generally, will not be accepted easily.35 As she suggests, both Cartesian and Royal Society accounts of the brain worked hard to institute ideas at odds with her position. They did so, according to Cavendish, by pointing to the scientific research bolstering their views (i.e., brain dissections and chemical analyses of nervous fluids) and by playing upon the human capacity for pride (i.e., if the only thinking thing is the ensouled pineal gland of the human brain, then human beings must stand apart and above the rest of nature).36 Given such efforts, it is no wonder that, to the late-seventeenth-century mind, the broadly Cartesian vision of the nervous system could appear not only intuitive but grounded in a rigorous scientific account of the body. Faced with a brick wall of blithe certainty built up by mainstream science of mind, Cavendish must supplement her constructive account of the nervous system with a critical subversion of her rivals’ systems. And for Cavendish, this means exposing the work of figurative language in writing on the nervous system.
In this respect, Cavendish’s critique proceeds differently than we might expect. For instance, at no point does she find fault with her rivals’ particular claims about the brain or its mechanisms. Instead, Cavendish undermines competing views of the psyche by questioning the foundation of mainstream science of mind. To do so, she attacks not specific empirical findings but empiricism as such. In Cavendish’s estimation, the supposedly plain, objective facts revealed in the course of brain dissections are nothing of the sort. What the natural philosopher presents as purely discovered, Cavendish exposes as partly fabricated and fanciful. Despite assurances to the contrary, the neuroscientist, according to Cavendish, cannot witness directly the mechanisms of thought. And so when a natural philosopher claims to reveal precisely those mechanisms, his or her assertions must be taken as a hybrid form of writing that is half fiction, half plain description of the brain’s actual anatomy. Simply put, Cavendish believes that many of her contemporaries are writing what I have called nervous fictions: stories about brain, nerves, and mind that issue as much from fancy as they do from the natural world. Importantly, for Cavendish, the nature of these fictions and fantasies is indexed in the natural philosopher’s figurative language.
Before exploring Cavendish’s more general disagreements with mainstream science—and its figurative support—let me illustrate her mode of critique more particularly by considering her reading of a fellow natural philosopher, J. B. van Helmont. Author of a complex neurophysiological system that parallels, in certain details, Willis’s, Helmont maintains that the human body possesses not one but two souls or minds: a higher incorporeal/rational one, and a lower corporeal/sensitive counterpart (the latter maintains most physiological processes). The two souls, Helmont explains, are created by God and are married together (his imagery): “For truly, the [incorporeal] minde hath not a subject more near and like to it self, wherein it may be entertained, than that vital light which is called the sensitive soul, wherein indeed the [incorporeal] minde is involved, and tied by the bond of life, by the Command of God.”37 Despite his dual-soul system, Helmont is not a panpsychist like Cavendish. He does not believe, for example, that the body is bristling with multiple intelligences. In fact, he mocks the idea that a locus of mind or intelligence, like a soul, can “be so every where, and equally in the body [like] a wandering, roving inhabitant of an uncertain cottage.”38 Like most mainstream visions of the nervous system at the time, Helmont insists that, just as the two souls are bound together, they are also bound to a specific place in the body, “a Seat Royal,” a “proper and central mansion.”39 Although here, too, Helmont is a bit odd, since he locates this “Seat Royal” not in the brain (as so many of his contemporaries had) but in the stomach. The stomach, in Helmont’s language, is the “radical Inn” or “Bride-bed” that the lower, sensitive soul prepares for the higher, incorporeal one.40 From within this “Inn,” the rational soul can hold court, while the sensitive soul sends its messages across the body: “For the faculties and functions of the sensitive soul, are indeed distributed into a plurality of parts. In the mean time, the [incorporeal] soul it self, remains unshaken from its antient place, where it was first bound and tied.”41
Wild as it may appear, Helmont substantiates this system through a series of empirically observable facts. He argues, for example, that the souls must be stationed within a central space in the body, since more peripheral body parts can be injured without resulting physiological or psychic impairments (a claim he backs up with detailed case histories of those who have been maimed but have retained their cognitive and vital functions).42 He anatomizes the brain and heart—the other traditional “seats” of the soul—and argues that their mechanisms would preclude a place for the psyche (the brain is too preoccupied concretizing otherwise abstract thoughts in “animal Discourse,” and the heart is too “stirred with continual Pulses”).43 He also launches into a detailed chemical analysis of the stomach, showing how its particular constitution is ideally suited for the needs of the souls (it is the place, after all, where the “vital Spirits” are created, preserved, and then set to work as soldier-emissaries).44
Typically, Cavendish neither acknowledges nor takes direct issue with Helmont’s empirical and experimental evidence. Instead, her attack focuses on the conceptual and particularly linguistic aspects of his work. In this respect, she demonstrates how much of Helmont’s reasoning, presumably backed up by scientific fact—by medical case histories, anatomical knowledge, and chemical experiments—is actually generated from fancy, figure, and linguistic confusion. For instance, she points out that Helmont’s writing consistently blurs the concepts of corporeal and incorporeal. Moreover, from this first verbal ambiguity springs another: by treating immaterial entities as physical things, Helmont anthropomorphizes both the nonhuman world and the body’s internal microcosm, effectively transforming the supposedly transcendent incorporeal soul into a mere internal homunculus. Addressing an imagined fellow reader of Helmont’s work, Cavendish writes: “But your Author calls the Soul a Spiritual Substance, and yet he says, she has an homogeneal body, actively seeing and shining with a proper splendor of her own; which how it can agree, I leave to you to judg; for I thought, an Immaterial spirit and a body were too opposite things, and now I see, your Author makes Material and Immaterial, Spiritual and Corporeal, all one. But this is not enough, but he allows it a Figure too, and that of a humane shape.”45 Cavendish claims that still more elaborate figures flow from Helmont’s initial act of anthropomorphism. Having first imagined the souls as abstract “humane shapes” working within the body, Helmont then adds further features to this picture. He describes the souls’ dwelling, the circumstances of their relationship, and their gender. Cavendish zeros in especially on the latter detail, showing how it determines the work of the souls—to the sensitive soul’s disadvantage: “Concerning the Natural Soul, your Author speaks of her more to her disgrace then to her honor; for he scorns to call her a substance, neither doth he call her the Rational Soul, but he calls her the Sensitive Soul, and makes the Divine Soul to be the Rational Natural Soul, and the cause of all natural actions. . . . But of the Frail, Mortal, Sensitive Soul, as he names her . . . it has the honor to be the Inn or Lodging-place of the Immortal Soul or Mind.”46 Thanks to Helmont’s figures, the souls are domesticated. A first act of anthropomorphism transforms “spiritual substance” into a “humane shape.” And while this metamorphosis may appear innocent enough, in Cavendish’s recounting, it soon institutes a hierarchy within the body. Indeed, Helmont’s figures cast the souls in a domestic drama, one wherein absurd gender norms determine their roles and even places within the body. The sensitive soul becomes the housekeeper or homemaking wife of its incorporeal counterpart, and as a result it is confined to the body’s “kitchen” (the stomach) and barred from other organs and activities:
Wherefore, I will hasten, as much as I can, to the seat of the Soul, which, after relating several opinions, your Author concludes to be the orifice of the stomack, where the Immortal Soul is involved and entertained in the radical Inn or Bride-bed of the sensitive Soul or vital Light; which part of the body is surely more honoured than all the rest: But I, for my part, cannot conceive why the [Sensitive] Soul should not dwell in the parts of conception [i.e., the brain], as well, as in the parts of digestion, except it be to prove her a good Huswife.47
While Helmont provides some sound scientific reasons for placing the souls in the stomach, Cavendish dismisses those natural philosophical justifications as so much cover. Helmont’s figures, helped along by his beliefs about gender norms, determine the place and roles of the souls in the body. Hence, by drawing attention to Helmont’s figures—by making his rhetorical ornaments shine all the brighter—Cavendish uncovers in turn the underlying logic grounding this neuroscientific system. Because the sensitive soul takes on a “humane shape,” it must be outfitted with further anthropomorphic qualities, like gender; because the sensitive soul is figured as a woman, she must be a wife; because she is a wife, she must be a homemaker for her husband; and because she is a homemaker, she must spend all her time in the body’s kitchen rather than the brain or even some lower organ. Or so Helmont thinks. As Cavendish implies in this passage, Helmont’s arguments about maimed body parts and the chemical composition of the stomach can be understood as a rationalization of this predetermining logic. It is not science but a set of fixed beliefs about the nature of gender and hierarchy, captured in figurative language and projected onto the body, that drives Helmont’s system.
From Cavendish’s critique of Helmont, we can discern some important details of her more general attack on mainstream science. For one thing, we should note that Cavendish’s critique reverses what many have taken to be the normal hierarchy of figurative language. That is, it is often assumed that figurative language simply ornaments an otherwise freestanding truth. According to this view, all of Helmont’s talk of “Bride-beds” and “radical Inns” would serve as a vivid way of conveying otherwise difficult and abstract points about neurophysiology. One could strip away such language, and the underlying “truth” of Helmont’s system would remain—though in its naked and unadorned state it might be harder for the reader to countenance. For Cavendish, however, figurative language captures the inner truth of Helmont’s system, while the scientific work is, if anything, a way to justify and dress up a core fantasy. That is to say, Helmont’s physiology results from a groundless conviction, unacknowledged in his explicit statements but plainly evident in his metaphors, that the interior elements of the body behave as persons trapped in gendered and hierarchical relationships. In this respect, Helmont’s experimental and empirical proof for such structures simply serves as an effort to naturalize the fabricated nature of his system.
Clearly, for Cavendish, figurative language is no mere embellishment. In fact, we can discern in this critique of Helmont a hint that, in her philosophy, figurative language performs real cognitive work. Although she draws on this insight to fault Helmont for the use of particular kinds of figures (anthropomorphizations that naturalize gender norms), elsewhere her commitment to the cognitive work accomplished by metaphors will find her using such language for constructive purposes. Speaking more generally, Cavendish’s critique of empiricist science, like everything else in her work, flows out of her materialist panpsychism. Since panpsychism entails that the human mind is only one among a universe of thinking things, it follows that the human enjoys no particular cognitive privilege or preeminence in the natural world. As Cavendish explains, while “each particular creature or part of Nature may have some conceptions of the Infinite parts of Nature, yet it can not know the truth of those Infinite parts, being but a finite part it self.”48 This point undercuts one of natural philosophy’s grounding fantasies: that the scientist can stand, as it were, above or beyond nature, and from this vantage point, observe its workings fully, impartially, objectively. But for Cavendish, it is simply not the case that the natural philosopher is a god or king standing above or beyond the natural world.
Cavendish holds fast to this conviction. Even efforts to extend and empower the sensorium through technological prostheses, so as to grant the finite human mind a more complete and penetrating view of things, cannot overcome its necessarily limited nature. Cavendish’s critique of microscopy along these lines is well known.49 But, closer to our subject, she expresses a similar skepticism concerning the supposed epistemological advantages afforded by that other exemplary tool of scientific practice: the dissector’s scalpel. While an anatomist might maintain that cutting into a body, reconstructing the workings of the revealed organs, and analyzing the chemicals coursing through its confines make it possible for one to look within encasing flesh, Cavendish insists that such practices cannot uncover hidden secrets lurking beneath the superficies of skin.50 On the contrary, dissection reveals only another surface, one every bit as opaque and mysterious as those normally facing us:
I am not of the opinion of those who believe that anatomists could gain much more by dissecting of living, than of dead bodies, by reason the corporeal figurative motions that maintain life, and nourish every part of the body, are not at all perceptible by an exterior optic sense, unless it be more perceiving and subtler than the human optic sense is; for although the exterior grosser parts be visible, yet the interior corporeal motions in those parts, are not visible; wherefore the dissecting of a living creature can no more inform one of the natural motions of that figure, than one can by the observing of an egg, be it never so exact, perceive the corporeal figurative motions that produce or make the figure of a chicken.51
Cavendish’s chicken-and-egg example is astutely chosen, since it works to expose the aforementioned limitations of empiricist natural philosophy even as it reveals the strengths of a more conceptually oriented materialist alternative. From the perspective of the empiricist—even one armed with the sense-extending instruments of microscope and scalpel—the egg must appear always as a shell containing some unassuming opaque yolk: “unassuming,” since this substance seems to possess no visible parts or mechanisms responsible for its inevitable act of generation and “opaque,” since, by observation alone, it will be forever unclear how a living creature could arise from this cloudy fluid. It is only when one considers the egg as Cavendish does—as matter endowed with strictly invisible but nevertheless real motion and force—that one can begin to understand how it might metamorphosize into something more.52 The same arguments hold true not just for eggs but for brains. When the anatomist cuts into the nervous system in the hope of excavating the hidden mechanisms making it tick, they face, according to Cavendish, the same elusive substance as that of the egg. No matter how sharp the scalpel or keen one’s eyesight, we cannot witness the matter that makes the mind: “The Conceptions of the Brain, in my opinion, are not Immaterial, but Corporeal; for though the corporeal motions of the brain, or the matter of its conceptions, is invisible to humane Creatures, and that when the brain is dissected, there is no such matter found, yet that doth not prove, that there is no Matter, because it is not so gross a substance as to be perceptible by our exterior senses.”53
But Cavendish’s critique raises a question: if the substance revealed in the course of a brain dissection is not the matter in motion that makes thought possible, then how are we to understand those moments, inevitable in most neuroscientific writing, when the natural philosopher, having revealed some heretofore hidden organ in the brain, insists that the uncovered organ is, say, the seat of the incorporeal soul, the storehouse of memory, the site of common sense, etc.? Given Cavendish’s insistence that we have only a superficial and partial view of things, such claims must be understood, at least in part, as fantasies rather than as plainly objective descriptions of the brain and mind. For Cavendish, mainstream accounts of the brain and nervous system constitute “hermaphroditical” writing—a striking phrase indicating the merging, in scientific discourses, of the objects of nature (usually coded as feminine in Cavendish’s work) and the subjective artifice of empiricist observation (an activity Cavendish often genders as inherently male). Cavendish uses the phrase specifically in her critique of Hooke’s microscopic observations, but it can apply more generally as well. In the case of Hooke, the term is meant to emphasize that the natural philosopher, in seeking to describe the subvisible world revealed by his microscope, necessarily introduces a level of distortion and mediation into his observations.54 The images produced by mainstream, empiricist science, then, are “hermaphroditical” in the sense that they combine nature and human artifice. They are neither the merely mimetic but wholly adequate echoes of the natural world nor the groundless, and so frictionless, fancies of pure subjectivity. Instead, they must be seen as a combination of the two, or, to be more accurate still, as the projections of subjective fantasies onto the substance of nature or as a nature distorted by the work of human imagination.
Descriptions of the brain, in this respect, represent a peculiar sort of writing: half plain account of the organs evident within the nervous system and half fantasy about what those organs might mean and what sort of human subject they might create. Such fantasies, despite their groundlessness, have a curious predictability for Cavendish. “Hermaphroditical” accounts of the brain and nerves ground human pride, thereby making ourselves seem not a part of nature but the master of it. They achieve this by making the brain into a microcosmic reflection of humanity’s place in the wider world—or what one would like humanity’s place to be. Just as the human (supposedly) stands above and beyond the rest of unthinking nature, a single part of the human brain (the pineal) sits atop a senseless mass of matter. In both internal and external worlds, then, a part becomes more important—becomes more thoughtful, special, or commanding—than the whole. As a result, we get the systems of Descartes, Willis, and even Helmont: all thinkers who, one way or another, imagine the brain (or maybe the stomach) as a special place where a sovereign soul and mind can lord over the rest of the body. Cavendish traces both our unwillingness to accept her variety of materialism (which would knock the human down a peg on the great chain of being) and the insistence that the pineal gland is more important than the rest of the body to human pride:
But I perceive man has a great spleen against self-moving corporeal nature, although himself is part of her, and the reason is his ambition; for he would fain be supreme, and above all other creatures, as more towards a divine nature: he would be a God, if arguments could make him such, at least God-like, as is evident by his fall, which came merely from an ambitious mind of being like God. . . . In the same manner do the Epicurean, and some of our modern philosophers meet; for those endeavor to prove man to be something like God, at least that part of man which they say is immaterial.55
As should be clear “that part of man which they [the modern natural philosophers] say is immaterial” is the soul couched in the pineal gland or kernel of the brain. Here Cavendish contends that such claims are not grounded in actual discoveries or careful observations of the corporeal machine. Instead they arise from desire: specifically, from the human desire to be godlike. In this respect, a passion like pride refigures our accounts of the natural world and the body itself. Empiricist science is a cover. And partly what it seeks to cover up, through its pose of disinterest, is the very interest, or passion, of the scientist and human being.
The above points, taken together, help us understand Cavendish’s more particular and pointed attacks on rival neuroscientists. I noted above that what appears strangest about these attacks, at least at first glance, is that they do not take place on the battleground we might expect. Instead of quarreling with the specific details of empiricist neuroscience and arguing for a more accurate or refined description of the brain and nerves, Cavendish instead sidesteps such debates entirely. She focuses on the figurative accounts of the nervous system rather than literal descriptions of its organs. We now can understand why. For Cavendish, scientific claims about the organs of the mind are driven to a significant extent (though not entirely) by fantasy. Given this, if Cavendish were to engage directly with empiricist accounts of the brain, she would be legitimizing a mode of scientific inquiry she sees as baseless. Instead, she aims to expose the fantasies lurking beneath the mask of objectivity and plain description (and ultimately driving the entire scientific enterprise). And to do that she focuses on the figurative language that indexes such fantasies—fantasies that always work to elevate a certain part of the body above the whole.
The same strategy holds even when Cavendish takes aim not at a specific thinker but at dualism and its neuroscientific support more generally:
Wise and Learned men are of an Opinion, that there is no Rational Soul but in Mankind, at least in Animal Kind, and that the Soul of each Liveth and Dwells in a Little Kernel of the Brain, a Small Habitation for so Subtil and Dilating an Infusion, but surely the Soul is Wiser than to Choose so Close a Prison to Dwell in, and is more Active than to be Confined; neither can an Exterior motion on that Kernel, Inform the Soul of all the Actions of the Body, or Outward Objects, no more than when one Man Knocks at another Man’s Door, the Master of the House Knows why the other Knocks.56
Here Cavendish explicates—and mocks—the beliefs of the “Wise and Learned men” who have placed the rational soul in the pineal gland. If the soul were restricted to the pineal gland, then it would not be able to make sense of the stimuli it receives there, since such stimuli, ferried to it by senseless mechanisms, would be nothing but impulses and noise. Likewise, a master confined to a single room in his house might hear knocking at his door but not understand the purpose of his visitor. Thanks to Cavendish’s figures, what seems like a command center looks more like a place of confinement. On the one hand, Cavendish attacks this account of the mind and nerves by adding something to the plain, empirical accounts of her adversaries; by ornamenting their vision of the nervous system—by figuring the body as a house and the soul as a master—she brings out the absurdity of such views. On the other hand, Cavendish’s figures, in this instance, expose a figurative logic always lurking in such accounts. In other words, the figurative language in the above passage does not ornament or add to anything; it simply makes plain the fantasies fueling the science of the “Wise and Learned” in the first place. Why, Cavendish asks, do we presume that the rational soul sits like a master in a special, centrally located place in the brain that separates it from the rest of the body? Because, Cavendish implies, this is precisely how the natural philosopher imagines himself. This isn’t ornament but dissection.
By seeking to uncover the workings of figures in scientific writing, Cavendish does not mean to reject literary language as such. Her attacks on the rhetoric of certain natural philosophical rivals should not be seen as an implicit endorsement of plain, unadorned writing—as anyone who has glanced at Cavendish’s own figuratively profuse texts can attest.57 Cavendish’s quarrel isn’t with figurative language, then, but with her rivals’ particular uses of it. More specifically, she faults these rivals on two counts. First, mainstream science implicitly presents its figures as ornaments pinned upon autonomous empirical discoveries. These figures seem to dress up truths already exposed by scalpel, microscope, and alembic. Helmont and Willis make it appear as if, having determined the workings of the body and brain’s machinery, they then reach for figures like personification to dramatize their findings. Cavendish rejects this dynamic. For her, empiricism covers up, by naturalizing, the partly imaginative nature of many scientific claims. Second, the figures her rivals choose to describe—or really forge—their systems are anthropomorphisms, and as anthropomorphisms they distort the nature of the disparate thinking things within the body even as they rehearse a fantasy pleasing to human pride. Such figures populate the nervous system with tiny reflections of the human self, thereby giving the impression that the same dramas at work in the wider world play out, again, upon the folds of the brain. As a result, microcosm is made to reflect macrocosm. A miniature king takes his seat in the pineal gland to order around a subservient mass of matter, just as, in parallel, human beings imagine themselves lording over the natural world. Moreover, these figures also subtly determine the direction of scientific research. By populating the body with thinking homunculi, such figures make it seem like our every thought and action can be traced to the work of an internal double. In this respect, understanding the mind means delving into the brain to uncover these mechanisms.
In her own writing, Cavendish seeks to overturn the two aforementioned uses of figurative language. Rather than treat metaphor as a mere ornament for an already discovered scientific truth, Cavendish uses figurative language itself as a cognitive tool for exploring new facts about the material world.58 Likewise, Cavendish employs figures that fundamentally resist the tendency to anthropomorphize parts of the nervous system. Rather than comparing parts of the nervous system to whole persons, she instead likens those parts to thinking tools or prostheses: elements that can break free of the synecdoches instituting hierarchies in the body. In this sense, Cavendish’s notoriously difficult metaphorical language makes a significant philosophical point about the nervous system and its relation to thought. We have seen that, for Cavendish, debates about the function of certain physiological mechanisms found in the nervous system—the pineal gland, the stretching network of nerves—rarely take place on the level we usually recognize in mainstream science: debates about, say, the nature of the fluid presumably running through the nerves or the purpose of the pineal gland. Because Cavendish doubts we can see into the internal mechanisms of bodily things, and because when we claim to do so we are almost always naturalizing otherwise invented or arbitrary images of the human, she rejects such methods. Instead, for her, debates about the workings of the nervous system are often debates about its proper figurative description.
Cavendish uses figurative language to typify her philosophical system and its assaults on anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. At times, that means her figures dispel a certain fantasy about the nature of human thought and its place in the brain. For instance, by portraying the brain as centerless and sovereignless, some of Cavendish’s figures undermine the conceited image of the psyche as a king seated upon a cerebral throne. As we have seen, Cavendish, in moments where she likens her own brain to a parliament filled with friendly thoughts, conveys a picture of the psyche more in accord with the leveling tendencies of her panpsychism. In these images, the brain becomes a space where a multitude of thinking things, no one of which is necessarily in charge, populate the psyche and nervous system. Cavendish clearly enjoyed such figures, since she draws on them repeatedly in her writing. Even when she compares the brain not to a state, court, or parliament—in short, to some human institution—but instead to a more far-flung entity, she often reaches for imagery that casts the organ as an enclosed space teeming with multiple agencies and intelligences. The brain then becomes an ocean filled with ships and sailors or a forest populated by travelers.59 As Lianne Habinek notes, these figures are “united . . . around the theme of a container housing jittery, chaotic, constantly moving things.”60 But Cavendish’s description of the brain as, essentially, a meeting place for a multitude of thoughts, while apt in certain respects, still traffics in the very anthropomorphism she seeks to overturn. After all, in these metaphors, Cavendish treats cerebral mechanisms as if they were tiny human persons or miniature reflections of the whole self. Moreover, such metaphors can still make it seem as if the person’s outward actions originate in an internal microcosm. Replacing the king with a parliament, then, does not ensure that one has overthrown the tendency to anthropomorphize parts of the body.
But Cavendish’s parliament metaphors are only one attempt to capture the nervous system in figurative language. Truer to the spirit of her philosophy are a series of figures where Cavendish likens the brain to another body part. “The Brain is like the Body,” Cavendish flatly states.61 It is also like the stomach, “for several Objects and Discourses . . . pass through the Eyes and Ears, into the Head, to feed the Brain . . . as several sorts of Meats put by the Hands into the Mouth, pass through the Throat into the Stomack, to feed the Body.”62 At the outset, it’s worth stressing how odd such metaphors are. Normally, when we figure the brain, we compare the organ to some entirely different (and usually nonbodily) entity in the hopes of making its mechanisms more intelligible as a result. When Cavendish herself likens the brain to a parliament, for example, the hope is that, since we understand how a parliament functions (i.e., people meet there to deliberate democratically), we will grasp in turn that the brain, otherwise mysterious, must work similarly (i.e., it is an organ where thoughts coalesce). To put this in the technical language of literary criticism: we gain a better understanding of a tenor (here the brain) by examining it in light of a vehicle (the parliament). In other words, a vehicle is like a tool that magnifies or exposes otherwise invisible or hidden aspects of the tenor. This instrumentalist theory of figurative language, it’s worth noting, was advocated by Cavendish’s Royal Society rivals. Consider, once more, Robert Boyle’s likening of a well-chosen “comparison” to a microscope: “Proper Comparisons do the Imagination almost as much Service, as Microscopes do the Eye . . . so a skillfully chosen, and well-applied, Comparison much helps the Imagination, by illustrating Things scarce discernible.”63 Cavendish’s tendency to compare one body part to another disrupts this logic. In this instance, both tenor and vehicle are drawn from the same source, from the same sort of thing. Comparing the brain to the stomach is like comparing a car’s steering wheel to its fuel pump. The metaphor threatens to become a list (of body parts or car parts) rather than a carefully calibrated balancing of similarity and difference. In this instance, tenor and vehicle are too close, and the result is a metaphor that appears opaquely involuted rather than one that opens outward to some other source of illumination.
Nevertheless, such figures are perfectly calculated to convey an especially tricky aspect of Cavendish’s philosophy: namely, her insistence that no single part of the body—even or especially the brain—can rule over the whole. Consider the following metaphor from The Worlds Olio: “Wit is like a Pencil that draws several Figures, which are the Fancies; and the Brain is the hand to guide that Pencil.”64 At first glance, this metaphor may seem less strange than I have made it out to be. For instance, we can translate it into somewhat simpler terms like so: the brain guides wit—here understood as the mind’s power to create “fancies,” “figures,” and other poetic, imaginative productions—like a hand guides a pencil. In this light, the figure appears not only anodyne but also illustrative of precisely the mainstream conception of the nervous system Cavendish seeks to subvert. After all, a single, commanding organ (the brain) pushes around a more peripheral faculty (wit) just as a hand pushes around a pencil.65 But read to the letter, the metaphor itself troubles such an interpretation. To cast the brain as the controlling or guiding force behind wit, Cavendish explicitly equates that most central of organs to a mere body part: “the Brain is the hand.” In other words, the brain is likened to an appendage or tool, just as the hand is likened in turn to a source of intelligence and agency. One implication of the figure—and one very much in accord with Cavendish’s thinking more generally—is that, within the body and nervous system, center and periphery, commanding consciousness and subservient tool can switch places. While the strict logic or content of the figure says one thing (body and brain instantiate a hierarchy), the figure itself conveys something quite different: the brain itself is nothing but an instrument or prosthesis; even appendages like the hand have “brains” and can operate of their own accord.
Cavendish’s metaphors—read with an eye toward their precise imagery and not in an effort to translate them into more literal or logical statements—convey aspects of her philosophy that would otherwise be hard to capture in simple propositional statements: that the nervous system and body possess many intelligences, that at any moment the relationships structuring these intelligences can reverse and rearrange themselves. In such metaphors, Cavendish appears especially interested in troubling one bodily hierarchy in particular. That certain peripheral organs (like the hand or eye) behave as tools or prostheses for the brain becomes a particular point of concern for Cavendish. Consider another metaphor from The Worlds Olio: “The Brain is like a Perspective-glass, and the Understanding is the Eye to discover the Truth, Follies, and Falshood in the World.”66 Here Cavendish likens the brain to a “perspective-glass,” a device which might be either a common telescope or a more specialized optical tool held over a book or map to magnify and make sense of the underlying image. In parallel, the understanding—presumably the mental faculty coextensive with the mind or psyche itself (as in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding)—is compared to the eye. The allegory can be “translated” like so: the brain and understanding are tools that help us see the world, or even see the world better. But once again the strict translation misses the metaphor’s more significant point. Because they serve as the traditional seats of consciousness, the brain and understanding would usually have information delivered to them from some other source (like a perspective glass or eye). In this instance, however, both brain and understanding are likened to those peripheral tools or organs. The metaphor presents a vision of the body that seems to have no center. We have knowledge-delivering tools but nowhere to deliver that knowledge. Even stranger: the brain is compared to a device that extends eyesight (a perspective glass)—an odd claim that, if we follow its logic through, would imply that the brain somehow magnifies the eye. With a single, condensed metaphor, Cavendish manages to subvert nearly every relation we imagine holding in the body: centers become peripheries, the seat of consciousness becomes a tool, the brain serves and extends the eyes.
By likening the brain to body parts and appendages to centers of intelligence, Cavendish populates the person with thinking things without resorting to anthropomorphism. That is, if the organs of thought can be characterized as tools or prostheses, then it doesn’t make sense to treat them as microcosms housing tiny reflections of the self. However odd and extravagant the resulting metaphors may seem, they resolutely avoid the impasses evident in Willis’s or Helmont’s anthropomorphic nervous fictions. For one thing, Cavendish’s metaphors do not give rise to the circularities or regresses always implicit in the nervous figures of her contemporaries. As a hand or perspective glass, the organs of thought simply sense and see the world; there is no need to trace their thoughtful activities to the work of yet another mind (or minds) operating behind them. Likewise, Cavendish’s metaphors reorient how we might study these thoughtful organs. Because thinking things are more like tools than places inhabited by still smaller versions of the self, there is no need to look at an occluded inner realm to discover the real source of thought. Instead, we must pay attention to how thinking organs act and behave in the wider world.
But as we have seen, some of Cavendish’s contemporaries argued that a similar hierarchy was apparent even in figurative language itself, with one element in a metaphor (the vehicle) serving as a tool that magnifies or casts light on another (the tenor). It should be unsurprising, then, that in one of her most audacious figures, Cavendish disrupts the hierarchy not only of the body but of figurative language itself:
The Brain of a Man is the Globe of the Earth, and Knowledge is the Sun that gives it light: Understanding is the Moon, that changeth according as it receives light from the Sun of Knowledg: Ignorance is the Shadow that causeth an Eclipse. . . .
Or, Knowledg is the Brain, and Understanding the Eyes of the Brain: which do not all see clearly; some are purblind, those can only perceive, but not with perfect distinctions: some squint, and to those all Objects seem double, like a Janus-face.67
Despite its initial appearance of complexity, this metaphor works, at least in the first paragraph, in a more familiar manner than the ones I’ve surveyed so far. Rather than compare the brain to another body part—and hence raise a series of questions about centers and peripheries, about the hierarchies inherent to the body—the figure instead likens the brain, and implicitly the mental faculties it embodies, to an entirely different subject: the movement of stars, planets, and their satellites. In this case, the brain is the tenor, and the planets and sun are the vehicle. We seem to be on more solid ground here. Since we understand how the sun casts light on the earth and moon, we can understand in turn how knowledge brings light, or ideas, to the brain and the understanding. In other words, the metaphor illustrates an empiricist precept—light/knowledge enters the brain from the external world—and it thereby sets up a traditional view of the psyche.
But then Cavendish’s second paragraph flips this model and the very logic of figurative language on its head: “Or, Knowledg is the Brain, and Understanding the Eyes of the Brain.” How are we to understand this shift? In Cavendish’s first paragraph, knowledge, like the sun, delivered light to the brain and to the understanding. If that logic still holds here, then the brain, now the place of knowledge, must deliver light to the eyes. This is an extraordinarily odd image, but it is less odd in the context of Cavendish’s more general rethinking of the body’s hierarchies. Stranger still, though, is that, from one paragraph to the next, vehicle and tenor switch. In the first, the brain served as the tenor; it was the mysterious or unknown thing that needed to be compared to something else (namely, the earth) in order to be understood. In the second, the brain has become the vehicle; it is now the tool or instrument that casts light on another element (mental faculties like knowledge or understanding). Just as Cavendish’s other figures turned the brain from center to tool by likening it to a hand or eye, this one performs a similar feat by switching it from tenor to vehicle. Subverting the “hierarchy” inherent to figurative language runs parallel to a similar subversion of the hierarchies supposed to be in place within the nervous system.
Cavendish’s experiments with tenor and vehicle were clearly important to her, as they convey not simply her thoughts about the human nervous system but also her vision of a panpsychist universe.68 So far I’ve shown how Cavendish’s figures disrupt our normal way of envisioning the human nervous system: rather than a single point lording over a mass of matter, Cavendish insists that everything in the body must, by necessity, think. And yet, Cavendish’s refiguring of the nervous system runs in parallel to a more general claim about the natural world: namely, that everything can think, and that it thinks with organs different from those of the human. In a sequence from Philosophicall Fancies—one of her first attempts to systematize her thought—Cavendish underlines this important point through the aforementioned experiments with tenor and vehicle. The sequence begins by reminding us what is at stake in Cavendish’s panpsychism. She insists, for instance, that vegetables might think because the sap flowing through them is not unlike our own nervous organs: “Why may not Vegetables have Light, Sound, Taste, Touch, as well as Animals, if the same kind of motion moves the same kind of matter in them? For who knowes, but the Sappe in Vegetables may be of the same substance, and degree of the Braine.”69 Having established this point, though, Philosophicall Fancies suddenly veers away from the thinking natural world and back to the human brain. In order to explain the brain, Cavendish compares the organ to the workings of clouds and other aerial phenomena: “The Braine in Animals is like Clouds, which are sometimes swell’d full with Vapour, and sometimes rarified with Heat, and mov’d by the Sensitive Spirits [or “sensitive matter”] to severall Objects, as the Cloudes are mov’d by the Wind to severall places.”70 This figure works as we would expect: to understand the brain (tenor), we liken it to other phenomena, clouds (vehicle), which are presumably better known. More specifically, Cavendish explains that the same sort of chemical reactions happening in the air around us (the swelling of vapors, the heating of the atmosphere) also take place in the organs within us. Indeed, the figure isn’t far off from something we might find in Willis, a thinker who was happy to compare the brain to an alembic or other chemical device. In both instances, the main point is the same: the metaphor helps us discern the chemical reactions powering the brain.
But Cavendish, of course, adds an extra step to the metaphor, and, in doing so, she moves beyond mere mechanism in order to embrace vitalist panpsychism. On the next page of Philosophicall Fancies, Cavendish turns from the human brain to the nervous systems of nonhuman things. She wonders, for instance, whether or not the sun itself is a thinking thing: “If so, sure it hath a great Knowledge; for the Sun seemes to be composed of purer Spirits [or simply: purer matter], without the mixture of dull Matter; for the Motion is quick, and subtle, as wee may finde by the effect of the light, and heat.”71 She then goes on to wonder about the nature of the “thinking matter” in clouds themselves. After all, clouds, too, possess a mixture of sensitive, rational, and inanimate matter and are therefore capable of sentience and sapience of a sort. To emphasize this point, Cavendish compares the matter of clouds to the matter of the human brain: “The Cloudes seem to be of such spungy, and porous Matter, as the Raine, and Aire, like the Sensitive [matter] that form, and move it, and the Sun the Rationall [matter] to give them Knowledge: And as moist Vapours from the Stomack rise, and gathering in the Braine, flow through the Eyes; so do the Clouds send forth, as from the Braine, the Vapours which do rise in showres.”72 In other words, Cavendish began this sequence by using clouds as a tool to understand the hidden chemical reactions happening within the brain. But she concludes it by using the brain itself as a tool to help us see that clouds can undergo the same chemical reactions as those within the nervous system. Clouds, too, are capable of a kind of thought. Whereas a mechanistic philosopher might compare the brain to some celestial phenomena in order to illustrate its workings, he would never take the following step and insist on likening clouds to the brain. Such mechanistic metaphors, then, must point in only one direction—all sorts of natural, nonhuman phenomena can help us understand the brain, and so the brain is like the world in certain respects. But it would be a mistake, for more traditional philosophers, to imagine that the world is like the brain—that things like clouds could be likened to the seat of cognition. After all, if that were the case, then the human psyche would not stand apart or above other natural things.
Cavendish’s system is derived from a number of philosophical maxims, and it’s certainly possible to explain and defend this system in plain, unadorned English. Nevertheless, the spirit of this system—with its insistence that things think differently than we imagine and that all the parts of nature are forever shifting, changing, and mutating—can more properly be captured in the complicated figurative expressions I’ve surveyed above. These figures work by setting up a hierarchy only to overturn it. The result is a system that keeps us purposefully off balance, that makes it nearly impossible to orient ourselves toward a height or a center. And this holds true not simply for the body parts being described but for the metaphors themselves. If the traditional understanding of metaphor, in most scientific discourse, is that figure is simply an extra supplement that helps us swallow an otherwise difficult truth—if metaphor, in other words, is just another tool or prosthesis that magnifies or brightens a preexisting observation—then Cavendish’s tropes must trouble even this hierarchy by putting the parts of a metaphor, its vehicle and tenor, into play.
I’ve spent much of this chapter detailing the ways in which Cavendish’s work knowingly departs from the mainstream science of her time. Not only is Cavendish’s explicit embrace of figurative language as a cognitive tool out of step with the methods of her fellow natural philosophers, her conception of the brain and nervous system radically departs from the more commonly accepted theories of Descartes or Willis. Having stressed the oddity of these views for the late seventeenth century, it’s nevertheless worth remarking that visions of the nervous system more in accord with Cavendish’s own began to gain real acceptance in the scientific mainstream by the mid-eighteenth century. Thanks to thinkers like George Cheyne, David Hartley, Robert Whytt, and others, it was not uncommon, decades after Cavendish’s death, to find natural philosophers rejecting the “mechanistic” animal-spirits physiology of a previous generation and advocating, in its place, a more “vitalist” system.
The transition to this new nervous paradigm will be the subject of my fifth chapter. For the moment, though, it is important to trace out its prehistory in the immediate wake of Cavendish’s work. Curiously, Cavendish herself seems not to have been a direct influence on these mid-century vitalist systems—or, at least, no natural philosopher of the time confesses to having read or reproduced her theories. Instead, many of these later thinkers trace their physiological insights to the various hints provided by Isaac Newton’s occasional speculations on the substance of the brain. It should be unsurprising that Newton, the exemplar of mainstream natural philosophy, rather than Cavendish, the perennial outsider, became the rallying point for this later work. More surprising, however, is how close Newton’s views of the brain and nerves came to Cavendish’s at times. For one thing, Newton, like Cavendish, argued against the prevailing understanding of the nervous system and of mind-matter interaction.73 He maintained, for instance, that the nerves were not hollow tubes carrying animal spirits from the brain to bodily peripheries and back again; instead, they were “solid and uniform.”74 To account for their ability to convey information, Newton pointed to the work of a subtle, invisible “aether” suffusing all things. According to Newton, the “vibrating Motion of the Aethereal Medium may be propagated along [the nerves] from one end to the other uniformly, and without interruption,” which meant that signals could cross the body—though no physical particles traveled through the nervous fibers.75 As later thinkers would emphasize, for Newton, sending stimuli through the nervous system was more like plucking a tensed musical string than forcing fluid through a hose. Newton’s seemingly minor adjustment to the basic mechanics of the nervous system will reverberate throughout the eighteenth century, as a new generation of natural philosophers, having accepted this new concept of nervous energy, begin to overturn not only animal-spirits physiology but also the visions of mind and brain that such physiology sustained.
Newton’s writings on the nervous system also followed Cavendish’s work in another respect. As we have seen, for Cavendish, one of the wilder implications of panpsychism is not just that everything thinks (the sun, stones, humans, etc.) but that everything belongs to an all-encompassing nervous system, with particular thinking things behaving as organs therein. According to Cavendish, “If all the heads of Mankind were put into one, and sufficient quantity of Rational Matter therein, that Creature would not only have the knowledge of every particular, but that Understanding and Knowledge would increase like Use-money.”76 Newton, incredibly and controversially, comes close to Cavendish’s vision when he wonders whether the space surrounding us might not behave as God’s “sensory” or “sensorium”:
Is not the Sensory of Animals that place to which the sensitive Substance is present, and into which the sensible Species of Things are carried through the Nerves and Brains, that there they may be perceived by their immediate presence to that Substance? And these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from Phaenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite Space, as it were in his Sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself: Of which things the Images only carried through the Organs of Sense into our little Sensoriums, are there seen and beheld by that which in us perceives and thinks.77
Here Newton draws a parallel between the human brain and “infinite Space”—God’s brain, as it were. In the human brain, sensations (or “the sensible Species of Things”) are “carried through the Nerves” to a more interior space (the “Sensory” or Cartesian theater) where they are then “seen and beheld by that which in us perceives and thinks.” Something similar happens in space—though in this case the perceiving, thinking thing is God rather than the finite human mind. That is, just as the mechanisms of the nervous system convey stimuli to “our little Sensoriums,” space itself—understood as an immense sensory prosthesis—presents “things themselves” to the divine mind.
Odd as it may seem, Newton’s query also proved to be influential throughout the eighteenth century. We find it amplified in the pages of the Spectator and also—as I will discuss at greater length in a subsequent chapter—in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, where it is recast as the “great Sensorium of the World.”78 For our purposes, one of the most immediate reactions to Newton’s idea is also the most important, since it demonstrates how questions of mind and matter frequently turn into debates about language and tropes. In a series of letters, Gottfried Leibniz and Samuel Clarke battled over the implications of Newton’s idea. Leibniz worried that Newton’s odd claim was a sign of a wider, and more worrying, heterodoxy evident everywhere in English thought. “Many will have human souls to be material,” he writes, “others make God himself a corporeal being. . . . Sir Isaac Newton says, that space is an organ, which God makes use of to perceive things by. But if God stands in need of any organ . . . it will follow, that they [these organs] do not depend altogether upon him, nor were produced by him.”79 Samuel Clarke, eager to defend Newton on this matter, insists that Leibniz has misread the query. He flatly denies Newton’s apparent heterodoxy: “Sir Isaac Newton doth not say, that space is the organ which God makes use of to perceive things by; nor that He has need of any medium at all, whereby to perceive things.”80 According to Clarke, Newton is not making a literal claim (“space is God’s brain”) but speaking in metaphor (“God sees things in space like we see ideas in our brain”).
Not only Newton’s orthodoxy but also his conception of mind and brain hang on a question of figurative language. Clarke maintains that Newton, like so many other early natural philosophers, uses an analogy to illustrate a difficult concept. We can better appreciate God’s ability to perceive the world in space by comparing that action with our own ability to perceive ideas in the brain. As Clarke explains,
Being omnipresent, [God] perceives all things by his immediate presence to them, in all space wherever they are. . . . In order to make this more intelligible, [Newton] illustrates it by a similitude: that as the mind of man, by its immediate presence to the pictures or images of things, form’d in the brain by the means of the organs of sensation, sees those pictures as if they were the things themselves; so God sees all things, by his immediate presence to them; he being actually present to the things themselves, to all things in the universe; as the mind of man is present to all the pictures of things formed in his brain. . . . And this similitude is all that he means, when he supposes infinite space to be (as it were) the sensorium of the Omnipresent Being.81
In other words, like all metaphors or similitudes, Newton’s has a tenor, an element in need of illumination, and a vehicle, an image providing some clarity. In this instance, God’s vast perceptual powers serve as the tenor, while the human brain acts as the vehicle. As Clarke notes, since God’s “immediate presence” to “all things in the universe” is so hard for us to grasp, Newton compares God’s powers to the processes that take place in our most intimate organs. Hence, the human psyche sees the images of external things with the “sensorium” in the brain just as God sees all things with space.
By drawing attention to Newton’s similitude—to the “as it were” nature of his query—Clarke’s argument points to still deeper mysteries. After their first exchange of letters, Leibniz and Clarke find themselves quarreling over ever more sweeping metaphysical questions and controversies. But whenever the meaning of Newton’s original claim is questioned, their debate implicitly returns to the logic of this similitude and to the workings of figurative language. In this light, much of the Clarke-Leibniz correspondence concerns the implications of treating the brain as a metaphor’s vehicle: that is, as the concrete or known entity supposed to cast light on a mysterious tenor. Clarke claims (that Newton claims) that we can learn something about God’s mysterious “sensorium” by likening it to our own. But as his debate with Leibniz demonstrates, “our little Sensoriums” contain their own mysteries—a point perfectly captured in a series of letters that find the combatants, armed with medical dictionaries, trying to pinpoint the precise meaning of the word “Sensory.” (Clarke: “The word sensory does not properly signify the organ, but the place of sensation. The eye, the ear, etc., are organs, but not sensoria.” Leibniz: “It will be difficult to make me believe, that sensorium does not, in its usual meaning, signify an organ of sensation. See the words of Rudolphis Goclenius, in his Dictionarium Philosophicum.”)82 In other words, likening God’s enigmatic perceptive faculties to those within the brain falters when we realize that the brain’s ability to make mental pictures is itself up for debate. By making the brain the similitude’s vehicle, Clarke and Newton appear to explain one mysterious thing with another.
For my purposes, what’s most important about Newton’s query, and the resulting debate between Clarke and Leibniz, is what it tells about the working of nervous figures and fictions. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when we encounter a metaphor concerning the nervous system, we usually face a figure that sets out to explain how the brain works by likening it to something else. To understand the machinery of the nervous system, natural philosophers compare that organ to an alembic; or, because such a comparison exposes an explanatory gap, the elements within the thinking brain are compared to persons. But Newton’s odd image of the great sensorium of the world, like Cavendish’s metaphors before it, remind us that this figurative logic can be flipped on its head: the brain can behave as vehicle for another tenor. The nervous system can be used to explain the mechanisms of clouds or even perhaps God’s manner of thinking. In doing so, however, early natural philosophy risks deepening various mysteries, as the Clarke-Leibniz debate readily demonstrates. Looking ahead, the brain’s shift from tenor to vehicle will become particularly important once the aforementioned vitalist views of the nervous system begin to take hold in the second half of the eighteenth century. As we will see, in those systems, while the brain’s representation as an organ populated by tiny persons persists, the corresponding flip in figurative logic, already evident in Cavendish’s and Newton’s work, becomes more evident in turn. If particular elements within the brain or nervous system can be compared to the whole person, then the whole person can be represented as an element within a huge, universe-spanning nervous system.