This book is the catalogue of a museum of embedded cognition, so what better place to start than an actual bed, especially a bed which is also a favored seat of the muses? The time is roughly 1663; the Stuart monarchy had recently returned to the throne of England, kicking off what is widely recognized as a rich phase of cultural, scientific, and economic development. The place is a dilapidated garret in St. Giles-without-Cripplegate, around the corner from Grub Street, a low-rent district populated by writers. The poet is John Milton (1608–1674), now totally blind but at work on his most visionary poem. The best portrait of the author in his space of thinking is by Jonathan Richardson; Richardson was a minor portraitist, but his most influential image was possibly this brief verbal sketch of Milton, for it has given rise to numerous interpretations—by Fuseli, Delacroix, George Romney, and others. Many of these interpretations capture Milton in an armchair, with a curtained bed merely suggested in the background, but Richardson is not so demure. Milton, Richardson writes, “frequently Compos’d lying in Bed in a Morning…. I have been Well inform’d, that when he could not Sleep, but lay Awake whole Nights, he Try’d; not One Verse could he make; at Other times flow’d Easy his Unpremeditated Verse, with a certain Impetus and Æstro, as Himself seem’d to Believe. Then, at what Hour soever, he rung for his Daughter to Secure what Came.”1 Who visited Milton, while he lay in his curtained bed? His daughter was there, but this was after the fact. Also present, we know because he says so, was Milton’s Muse. She was an inconstant bedfellow; Milton pleads in the invocation of Paradise Lost for her to “sing,” relaying to his amanuensis whatever would come. And while the daughter always arrived late to the event, the Muse was there before the fact; she kicks the whole machine into motion, “visit[ing]” his “slumbers nightly, or when morn / Purples the east.” This, then, is a museum in the word’s primitive sense: a site or seat of the muses. It provides one popular way of thinking about poetic production as a sort of “inspiration.” This is Milton’s word, which Richardson effaces: Milton’s Muse, elsewhere named Urania, the Muse of astronomy, “inspires / Easy [his] unpremeditated verse.” Indeed, the scene is so apt as a site of poetic inspiration that Milton himself painted a similar scene of dream-work in the poem he composed with Urania’s aid (see Exhibit 2). All the elements are there: blindness and insight, poverty and inspiration, sublimity and the solitary seeker. This condensation of themes helps account for the popularity of Richardson’s description; Milton in his chamber would become a Romantic-era set piece.
But this is partly to misread the scene—as Richardson himself would have known. Richardson believed the mind to be a collection of images, and painting to be a process of judicious culling and arrangement. What is more, Milton would have agreed. When Milton has Adam sketch for Eve his understanding of the mind’s work, it is a straight version of what Richardson would later theorize: the mind is a repository, and thinking is the arrangement of ideas. And while Adam surely overlooked some important details, Paradise Lost nevertheless also offers us a museum of this second sort: the allusive compendium of a world of learning. It offers us both: Urania and the library. It aims at once to recover the vision of an untroubled paradise—an ecology in which “knowledge” is the only forbidden thing, in which angels descend to breathe visions into the minds of their recipients—while at the same time offering the digested collection of an impressive lifetime’s worth of learning. It is, at once, the song that Milton’s Muse sings through him, while at the same time the epitome of what its author could bring to bear on the subject. And so meeting here are, seemingly, two theories of poetics: poetry as the product of musing—of “inspiration”—and poetry as the condensation of a life of study. They are, however, stitched together by a system of metaphors, the most embracing of which is the metaphor of the museum, which is itself at once material and ideal, collection of things and site of the muses.
Exhibit 1. John Locke’s Commonplace Book
Angel etymologically means “messenger”; inspire means “breathe in.” The words are of course critical in Milton’s epic, but they also turn up, linked, in a more surprising place, a philosophical treatise begun just as Paradise Lost was seeing its way into print.2 This is in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding—but to see what angels and inspiration are doing there requires a bit of groundwork. And just as Richardson sketches Milton in a compositional ecology, so too Locke’s Essay stages the author in a place of thinking. Locke is discussing the “steps by which the mind attains several truths” when he proposes that
the senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet: and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory, and names got to them. Afterwards the mind proceeding farther, abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names. In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with ideas and language, the materials about which to exercise its discursive faculty: and the use of reason becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment.3
1. An incomplete index from John Locke’s medical notebook for the years 1662–1667. Bodleian Shelfmark MS. Locke f.25. Courtesy Bodleian Library.
This is the core of Locke’s epistemology of “cognitive contact,” in which ideas rise directly out of encounters with material sensation;4 from the start, the mind is an empirical observer, receiving and storing experience in little nugget-like atoms called ideas.5 Knowledge by this account would not seem to be a repertoire for the body moving in space, or an available set of strategic interactions with tools, or even a set of habits of deportment; it doesn’t seem to be of much use for playing an instrument (though Locke meditates on this elsewhere) or for walking, breathing, or swinging a hammer. It doesn’t provide much room for poetry or inspiration. The mind by this account is what develops general concepts from particulars, which is in turn equivalent to the working up of language from the things experienced by the senses. Francis Bacon, more than a generation earlier, had kicked off the project of the new sciences by calling for a thorough remodeling of learning; he insisted that the task of philosophy should be to establish “in the human intellect … a true pattern of the world as we actually find it.”6 Locke offers an epistemological system that makes sense of this task; Locke’s “empty cabinet” makes it possible to think of mental activity as a pattern for natural philosophical practice. The link between practice and concept is in this regard quite explicit; stocking the mind is like stocking the cabinet, mental processes leaning on a distinct set of habits, which will turn out to be elaborated in haptic engagements with the world.
A strange habit has sprung up in our reading of Locke. We have learned to read him as an entry in a history of ideas, when his prose, especially when he touches nearest on the nature of the mind’s ideas themselves, embeds itself continually in a history of practice. Locke’s own remarks lead back toward embodiment, especially in spaces like his library; the pressure even of this passage is not toward abstraction, though this is the process it describes, but rather toward a set of learned movements. Locke insists that the acquisition of ideas, and even the development of reason, recalls and is formally equivalent to the material processes of sorting books in a library. Jules Law, elaborating Richard Rorty’s claims about the rhetoricality of metaphor (metaphor as one world-making choice among others) argues that the brilliance of Locke’s achievement is precisely the ambiguity of his figures; Locke, Law argues, deliberately leaves his metaphors unpacked.7 But Locke only appears to leave his metaphors unpacked while we confine ourselves to conceptual source domains; that is, his metaphors are only unpacked if we think that they refer us to an imagined set of relations. Locke’s own prose all along points us toward practical, embodied engagement with objects in space. This particular image works because the cabinet provides the working space where a relationship between the curator and a stable system of storage may become duplicated as a model for an internal relationship between the mind and its objects. Even while ideas rise from objects, Locke’s prose returns us to particulars. If you want to unpack his metaphors, you will have to unpack his library.
So, does Locke represent