The Mind Is a Collection. Sean Silver

learned through exhaustive education. It resides, on the contrary, in the “internal feeling,” which “must certainly proceed from the transforming power of Imagination, whose rays illuminate the objects we contemplate; and which, without the lustre shed on them by this faculty, would appear unornamented and undistinguished.”²⁸ What is interesting to Duff is not the work of the imagination to collect, to assemble, and to dispose; he insists on its transformative potential, its ability to “shed light” as part of its own autotelic purpose. Indeed, he suspects that the imagination is weighed down rather than developed by experience, that the greatest poet is not the one with the greatest stock of images but the untaught genius: Shakespeare, for instance, or Ossian. The poet is no longer the careful conservator of imaginative materials, not the curator of a treasury of ideas; his imagination emerges as itself “an innate treasure,” working its visions from immediate contact with nature.²⁹ Duff, like Young and Wood, therefore starts from the relatively common claim about the mind’s combinative powers, about its capacity to collect and to organize materials. He however bends his project toward the ultimately triumphant model of the imagination that is differently the engine of the works of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, those poets who shaped nineteenth-century English literature. The ways in which we mostly use the concept of imagination today—as the mind’s special power to produce something out of itself—are vestiges of this twist over the last half of the eighteenth century, and therefore represent a relatively recent shift in meaning in the twenty-five-hundred-year history of Western art.

      Collections

      As a metaphor, “the mind is a collection” is nearly as old as Western philosophy—but conditions changed in roughly the middle of the seventeenth century, causing it to gain new purchase and conceptual weight. When someone like John Locke conceived of the mind as a cabinet, he was drawing from a long philosophical tradition; the figure of the intellect as a collection already counted nearly two millennia of influence when he made it among the foundational gestures of his empiricism. But Locke’s thoughts were also directed much closer to home; for while Locke spent parts of twenty years compiling his Essay on the Human Understanding, he spent a yet longer span of time compiling a remarkable library of books.³⁰ When he remarks on the work of the memory to treasure up ideas, we should remember that he was what we would call a bibliophile; when he remarks on the importance of histories—collections of facts—in the operation of reason, we should attend to his indexing practices in a library stocked with books of natural history (Exhibit 1).³¹ This is what changed. Locke was a member of one of the earliest generations of private individuals with the means to amass large personal collections of books. Similarly, when Addison compares the mind to a cabinet of medals, we should take note that he was a coin collector (Exhibit 13); when he remarks on the paths that thoughts take, we should remember that he was a gardener, was busy planting at the same time that he was publishing his seminal treatises on both gardening and the pleasures of the imagination (Exhibit 14). When Joshua Reynolds constructed a model of mind as a gallery of images, we should remember that he assembled the single largest collection of paintings outside the Royal Collection and was, in the end, responsible for one of the era’s great experiments in this line: the Royal Academy of Art (Exhibit 21). Finally, as one additional example, when Horace Walpole speaks of wit as a caretaker—as the careful arrangement and disposition of things in the mind—we should remember that he lived in a house that was itself designed to be a flexible receptacle for his vast collection of antiquities (Exhibit 18). When he socked away china, Gothic antiques, coins, medals, paintings, and miniatures in his Twickenham villa, the stakes were higher than hoarding; he was participating in a practice of constructing, and exhibiting, one’s own way of seeing and grappling with the world. Indeed, he was constructing a working space of thought, made precisely to his taste. This was not merely a performance for a visiting public (though it was this also);³² it was a performance, too, for himself. Locke’s library, Addison’s medals, Reynolds’s gallery, Walpole’s villa: each of these is a cognitive ecology in a strikingly literal sense—a space which not only was involved in habits of thought but which turned up as well in its caretaker’s models for mental work.

      Possibly against common sense, then, theories of the mind as a museum predated collecting, at least as the popular practice that collecting became in the eighteenth century. For it was only around the turn of the eighteenth century that collecting practices caught up to the models of mind that anticipated them. When Hans Sloane was born in 1660, London had only one museum of note open to the public. This was the quirky, cramped Museum Tradescantianum, the lifetime collection of the John Tradescants (father and son) that had been put on display in Lambeth in a building called the Ark.³³ Collecting as a popular practice was therefore relatively new when Locke made bold to call the mind a cabinet, or when Robert Hooke called the mind a Repository. But by the time Sloane died, ninety-two years later, it seemed only natural that he would leave his large and surprisingly diverse collection to the public. During Sloane’s long and productive life, he had accrued the collections of more than two dozen other collectors, putting together his own massive private museum, which was a resource to himself, his friends and his colleagues. In the same period of time, a dozen or so semipublic museums had sprung up in London and surrounding areas. The Tradescants’ museum had been acquired—some say stolen—by Elias Ashmole, but others had moved in to take its place.³⁴ Numerous networks of collectors emerged—whole cultures dedicated to the acquisition, arrangement, and appreciation of prints, shells, stones, coins, paintings, antiquities, and a range of other affordable collectibles.³⁵ The effect was general—a sea-change in how people experienced the world. “In no previous age did writers,” Jean Hagstrum for instance reminds us, “possess such considerable collections of prints and engravings,” and, likewise, “in no previous period in English literature could a poet assume knowledge of great painting and statuary in the audience he was addressing.”³⁶ So when Sloane’s will arranged the terms, and provided the vast and diverse core collection, for the foundation of the British Museum, it signaled what had already become apparent: the politics of possession were changing, and these were reflected in the collections appearing all over town.³⁷

      The standard account of the rise of the museum tells the story of the conquest of nature by professionalized collecting; over the course of Sloane’s lifetime, as this standard account has it, those small, intensely personal and idiosyncratic spaces, filled with the quirky, the odd, and the wonderful, gave way to professionalized, organized, and organizing endeavors. The trajectory of Sloane’s own collection would tend to confirm this.³⁸ What before, these studies argue, was an exclusive practice that consisted mostly of the gathering of strange novelties for their own sake was subsumed by an organized and public practice, part of a larger, later bureaucratized, project of natural philosophy.³⁹ This narrative is exactly the argument posed by Susan Pearce, in her influential On Collecting;⁴⁰ it is compelling in part because it is the story often told during the Enlightenment, where widespread linkages between political Whiggism and Newtonian empiricism combined to craft a story of the progressive upsweeping of individual practices into national purposes.⁴¹ Yet the focus on large, institutional museums has obscured the persistence of living collecting practices that flourished outside the regularizing grid of natural historical inquiry. Some of these collections were indeed absorbed into much larger collections. Some were even purchased by, acquired by, or otherwise passed through the hands of Sloane himself (Exhibit 14, for instance). Other collections, however, continue even now to exist more or less as they were originally imagined, the husks of once living cognitive practices, the idiosyncratic spaces of thought.

      John Woodward, for instance, owned what he believed to be a Roman shield, which after his death passed from being the most curious of curiosities to being just a relatively minor example of late Renaissance art; it now sits, slightly dusty, in a less-visited room of the British Museum.⁴² It has in other words been swept up into the professionalized telling of material history. But Woodward’s core collection, his collection of mineralogical specimens, persists as specified in the terms of his will; his rocks lie in their original cabinets, in a special room, set aside from the remainder of Cambridge’s geological collection at the Sedgwick Museum (Exhibit

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