The Yard of Wit. Raymond Stephanson

Seed, than the Similitude, which is betwixt those Parts which prepare the Seed, and the Brain. These two parts in short, have in a manner the same Structure; they both consist of several small Pipes which suck in the most spiritous parts from the Mass of the Blood; and so we may say that the Testicles are in a manner a second Brain, since they do filtrate as the Brain doth, a Liquor which is almost as penetrating, and as spiritous as the Animal Spirits.”³⁸

      Of course, the shift from literal to homologous connection did not happen in a vacuum, and depended on parallel developments in neuroanatomy and new theories about cerebral and neurological function, particularly as they were set forth by Thomas Willis, arguably the most significant neurophysiologist of the early modern period.³⁹ In writing of the nerves which affected the testicles, and wanting to correct the erroneous belief that semen was derived from nervous fluid in the brain, Willis offered an account of the interrelationship of seed, blood, animal spirits, brain, and testes which provided the dominant conceptualization of such matters through much of the eighteenth century. Excessive discharge of semen, he reasoned, produces a general debility of brain and nerves because the replenishment of seed requires an immediate flow of blood and animal spirits to the genital area, thus temporarily robbing the brain of its own requirements.⁴⁰ But while Willis’s and De Graaf’s physiological models helped to banish older connections in favor of the more complex similitude later described by Verduc, what they retained from classical assumptions was the notion that brain and testicles were still linked by a complex fluid economy which functioned as an inverse hydraulic relationship. As major physiological entities in the hierarchy of bodily organs, the brain and testicles shared the same system of fluids, competing for animal spirits or vital matter in the blood; according to nearly every commentator in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, maximum health and stability were achieved for each organ and for the body as a whole when a happy physiological balance of fluid-making and fluid-use could be maintained. Within what has been called “the sublime order of the spermatic economy,”⁴¹ this meant neither the excessive discharge nor prolonged retention of semen. Reflecting the state of knowledge at mid-century, Robert James’s A Medicinal Dictionary (1745) would present the orthodox view that “Retention of the Semen induces a Torpor and languid State of the Body, and often lays a Foundation for terrible nervous Disorders…. Venery ought to be only moderately used, lest too great an Evacuation of the Semen should prove prejudicial to Health…. Nor should Persons indulge themselves in Venery after strong Application of Mind” (3: s.v. “VENUS”). A balanced fluid economy assured health, and this entailed occasional rather than frequent sexual intercourse; masturbatory emission was unnecessarily wasteful and potentially harmful. Excessive venery might not shrink one’s brain to the size of a fist, as Galen had warned, but it would surely interfere with a man’s ability to think.

      But the inverse relationship of brain and testicles via sperm was not merely a mechanical matter. What was most significant about the updated use of classical literalism was the newer conceptualization of the relationship of male body and male mind encouraged by the homology itself. And in this regard, the impact of Willis’s neurophysiological theories are particularly important. Because concepts of mind and soul were now commonly localized as brain and nervous system, the newer male brain-male genitalia correspondences—whether direct or inverse—were not simply issues of animal health, but also raised important questions about how masculine consciousness might be informed by the organs of generation. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had inherited from classical medical models an identification of maleness with the reproductive system, but the meaning of that system had changed as a result of improved physiological experimentation, the advent of the microscope in medicine, and new embryological and neurological speculation. The older symbolism, as we have seen, was about hierarchy and analogy in which seed, yard, and testes were one of many markers linking the man to issues of legitimacy or power within the frameworks of law, citizenship, paternity, or reproductive potency. The medicalized version of the moderns absorbed some of these older constructions, but now viewed genitalia as an important effect on the brain/mind; reproductive biology, in other words, was generating a model of an essentialized maleness whose consciousness and experiential history might be understood as linked to the condition and activities of the sexual parts.

      But it is in the non-medical discourses that we find the larger cultural ramifications of how the genitals-mind correspondences were absorbed and then played out through a variety of verbal codes, many of which informed the self-mythologizing narratives of male literary communities. From the most simplistic mechanical versions of the equation to the sophisticated adaptations of Laurence Sterne, the historical record reflects an interest in this newly sexualized male brain whose sensibility and deepest thinking could be understood as inescapably linked to the privy parts. As we will see, the interrelated head and groin were often conceived in subtle symbolic terms, as in Diderot’s epistolary observation that “Il y a un peu de testicle au fond de nos sentiments les plus sublimes et de notre tendresse la plus epurée” [“There is a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness”].⁴² This is a complex notion, intimating a deep link between mental conception or sensibility and the generative production of spiritous seed in the testes. In this symbolic short-hand, creative acts are not about male brain-wombs but rather the microscopic making of the seminal liquor which expands and unfolds as a male principle of body and mind. Sterne offers up his own comic redaction of the brain-testes homology in Walter’s meditations on the seat of the soul, one of whose possibilities is the “very thin, subtle and very fragrant juice which Coglionissimo [big balls] Borri, the great Milaneze physician, affirms, in a letter to Bartholine, to have discovered in the cellulae of the occipital parts of the cerebellum.”⁴³ Hilariously blurring the distinction between semen and neurospinal fluid, Sterne implies that great thoughts about the brain—indeed, the soul itself—might come from the personified testicles of the good Italian doctor. Satirists such as Swift would also come to the mind-genitals equation with a sophisticated sense of their interaction, even though his put-down of the Fanatic would depend on the crudest reduction of intellect and spirit into lust and sperm:

      the Seed or Principle, which has ever put Men upon Visions in Things Invisible, is of a Corporeal Nature: For the profounder Chymists inform us, that the Strongest Spirits may be extracted from Human Flesh. Besides, the Spinal Marrow, being nothing else but a Continuation of the Brain, must needs create a very free Communication between the Superior Faculties and those below: And thus the Thorn in the Flesh serves for a Spur to the Spirit. I think, it is agreed among Physicians, that nothing affects the Head so much, as a tentiginous Humor, repelled and elated to the upper Region, found by daily practice, to run frequently up into Madness…. I have been informed by certain Sanguine Brethren of the first Class, that in the Height and Orgasmus of their Spiritual exercise it has been frequent with them *****; immediately after which, they found the Spirit to relax and flag of a sudden with the Nerves, and they were forced to hasten to a Conclusion. (A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit)⁴⁴

      In this comical parley of body and mind, Swift anatomizes religious hypocrisy by deploying iatromechanical concepts which transformed mind and body into simple machine laws. However, he also insinuates an inescapable presence of a genital sexuality as it will affect the farthest reaches of mind into philosophy, religion, and the visionary. While Swift might parody “mechanical operations” as a methodology for investigating the interface of body and mind, his own ironic play with “Spirit”—as ineffable mind/soul, animal spirits, or sperm—points to the complex linkage of consciousness, nervous system, and libido.

      That the very seat of male thought or masculine identity could be influenced or even defined by a man’s sexual organs is a significant historical formation, but in this early phase the newer symbolism which came into being was characterized by contradictoriness. As we have seen, the conceptualization of the traffic between brain and genitalia contained a fundamental tension: on the one hand, the relationship could be a directly proportional one in which the presence and activity of testicles, yard, and seed created and defined a physical and mental maleness itself (as with notions of aura seminalis); on the other, the mind-genitalia connection could be inversely proportional (as with the brain-testicles homology), which meant a potential antagonism between genital and mental