Flesh in the Age of Reason (25 page)

Such was the gross origin of the imperial itch: the root cause was anger, and that was basically choleric humour. And, addressing religious enthusiasm, Swift declared, ambivalently, that the corruption of the senses was the generation of the spirit: all that pretended to nobility was merely a symptom of some internal disorder. In a ‘Digression on Madness’, Swift has his unreliable narrator insist that such craziness is itself of great benefit to mankind – for were not imperial conquerors, the founders of new religions, and the framers of new discoveries in philosophy all out of their minds?

In Section VIII of the
Tale
, the Hack proudly introduces the learned Aeolists who maintain ‘the original cause of all things to be wind’ – their interpretation of the ‘
anima mundi
; that is to say, the spirit, or breath, or wind of the world’.
*
Soul is thus by implication dissolved by that philosophical sect into a load of hot air. And this
disturbing possibility is returned to in
The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit
, a satire against canting Quakers claiming to be inwardly possessed by the voice of God and to speak with divine tongues. Once again, Swift dwells on the somatic pathology which makes the human machine emit such senseless noises in perfect assurance that they are the revelations of truth – that is, ‘enthusiasm’, which ‘may be defined,
A lifting up of the Soul or its Faculties above Matter
’. There are, assures the Hack, developing the conceit,

three general Ways of ejaculating the Soul, or transporting it beyond the Sphere of Matter. The first, is the immediate Act of God, and is called,
Prophecy
or
Inspiration
. The second, is the immediate Act of the Devil, and is termed
Possession
. The third, is the Product of natural Causes, the effect of strong Imagination, Spleen, violent Anger, Fear, Grief, Pain, and the like. These three have been abundantly treated on by Authors, and therefore shall not employ my Enquiry. But, the fourth Method of
Religious Enthusiasm
, or launching out the Soul, as it is purely an Effect of Artifice and
Mechanick Operation
, has been sparingly handled.

He would, however, change all that.

This device enables Swift to fell two foes with one stone: he targets those bogey men, the antinomian free spirits who claimed to ‘ejaculate’ transcendental truth, while, at the same time, he mocks those equally vain physiologists who believed their mechanical science encompassed the whole truth of the human animal.

Swift enjoys toying with hazardous speculations as to the corporeal springs of consciousness. It was ‘the opinion of choice
Virtuosi
, that the Brain is only a Crowd of little Animals’, he teases,

but with Teeth and Claws extremely sharp, and therefore, cling together in the Contexture we behold, like the picture of
Hobbes’s Leviathan
…. That all Invention is formed by the Morsure of two or more of these Animals… That if the Morsure be Hexagonal, it produces Poetry; the Circular gives Eloquence; If the Bite hath been Conical, the Person, whose Nerve is so affected, shall be disposed to write upon the Politicks; and so of the rest.

Zealous scientists were the brethren of canting zealots: both set themselves up (or were set up by Swift) as infallible oracles. He had not a grain of sympathy for religious enthusiasts, but he found equally foolish the medico-scientific materialism encouraged by Descartes and Hobbes – man reduced to machine. Anybody who thus collapsed the truly complex into the simple was a fool. He who reduced the fake complex to its core was a satirist devoted ‘to the universal improvement of mankind’. Mankind, for Swift, was certainly in need of it.

Another project with which Swift was involved – how extensively is debatable – was
The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus
, a further satire on learned folly cobbled together by a club of Tory wits, headed by the Scottish physician, John Arbuthnot. ‘The design’, recalled Alexander Pope, ‘was to have ridiculed all the false tastes in learning, under the character of a man of capacity enough that had dipped in every art and science, but injudiciously in each.’

The theme inspiring the mock-serious
Memoirs
is that rather Lockean question, the making of a man, the fabrication of an individual: what is it to assume an identity, to be Martinus Scriblerus himself and no one else? A virtuoso in rhetoric, anatomy, classical learning and natural philosophy, Martinus is displayed as a wonder – yet an enigma: is he nothing other than the sum of the inputs stuffed into him from infancy (his ‘programming’, as we would say)? Does he have a real identity, or is he but an artificial construct, some android, automaton or a monster? Is he purely and simply the product of his education, that Lockean dream? And, if so, does that leave him lacking in some
je ne sais quoi
, some essential interiority? Or, as postmodernists might hold, is the self something which, in any case, exists only when discursively constructed: is Martinus Scriblerus nothing other than what is being memorialized? And if so, where does that leave the memorializing persona? As ever, Augustan satirists make merry with the spectre of infinite regress, and the threat to the bedrock of truth posed by unreliable memorialists as well as unreliable autobiographers like Gulliver.

Martinus Scriblerus – Martinus presumably because of Martin
Luther and the Protestant ego, Scriblerus as one afflicted by the itch of writing, that disease pitilessly mocked by Swift and others – is the darling son of Cornelius, a doting father whose fond ambition it is to rear a prodigy of greatness. Having established Martinus’s noble genealogy, the
Memoirs
proceed to document the pedagogical labours of his pedantic parent, who has trustingly combed the educational treatises of the ancients to learn how to fashion the perfect specimen: ‘The good Cornelius also hoped he would come to stammer like Demosthenes, in order to be as eloquent; and in time arrive at many other Defects of famous men.’

Martinus was thus the ultimate hothouse creation, formed after the dreams and schemes of a father engulfed in erudition and deaf to common sense – Cornelius was clearly the inspiration for Walter Shandy. His project of building a model man is burlesqued as a quintessentially
modern
imbecility, through Cornelius himself is, ironically, an idolater of the ancients.

Through a series of droll chapters, the
Memoirs
dwell on the physical and medical nostrums which dominate Cornelius’s heroic man-building (to devote so much attention to mere matters of the body is itself a mark of the misguided). The father is obsessed, for example, by food: the right diet will be the making of the model man – long before Feuerbach, he knew that man is what he eats. Cornelius has also got it into his head to perform prophylactic surgery, a most idiosyncratic alternative to circumcision. His pride and joy, he is persuaded, will be the better for the removal of his ‘spleen’ – both the bodily organ and the temperament. The literal-minded Cornelius is so short-sighted as to imagine that a constitutional trait can be rectified by a physical cut – in any case, what presumption, to think that mankind is wise enough to redesign the God-given!

Receiving medical instruction as part of his higher education, Martinus himself gets involved in a comic dissecting ‘accident’ – one grosser than those described in the
Spectator
. Intending to perform an autopsy, he buys the corpse of a criminal, and instructs his servant to deliver it:

As he was softly stalking up stairs in the dark, with the dead man in his arms, his burthen had like to have slipp’d from him, which he (to save from falling) grasp’d so hard about the belly that it forced the wind through the
Anus
, with a noise exactly like the
Crepitus
of a living man.

Is there, this cameo prompts, truly any distinction between a living and a dead man’s fart, and so by implication between farting and speaking, between sound and speech, between the animate and the deceased?

While a medical student, Martinus toys with various modish systems of medical reductionism which Arbuthnot and his friends clearly scorned. Ambitious to explain the dispositions of the mind in somatic terms, he considers (in a way reckoned by the wits to be shallowly reductionist) ‘
Virtues
and Vices as certain Habits which proceed from the natural Formation and Structure of particular parts of the body’, much as ‘a Bird flies because it has Wings, and a Duck swims because it is web-footed’. Various conclusions are drawn by our hero.

1st, He observ’d that the Soul and Body mutually operate upon each other, and therefore, if you deprive the Mind of the outward Instruments whereby she usually expresseth that Passion, you will in time abate the Passion itself; in like manner as Castration abates Lust.

2dly, That the Soul in mankind expresseth every Passion by the Motion of some particular
Muscles
.

3dly, That all Muscles grow stronger and thicker by being
much us’d
; therefore the habitual Passions may be discerned in particular persons by the
strength
and
bigness
of the Muscles us’d in the expression of that Passion.

Rather as with phrenology later, the exercise of the body was here, albeit satirically, being touted as the royal road to the perfection of the soul.

Such speculations as to body–mind interaction naturally plunge Martinus into what we have seen was one of the great debates of the time, the soul’s location. Was Descartes right to quarter it in the pineal gland? At first Martinus ‘labour’d under great uncertainties’
– ‘sometimes he was of the opinion that it lodg’d in the Brain, sometimes in the Stomach, and sometimes in the Heart’ – but then he changes his mind: ‘Afterwards he thought it absurd to confine that sovereign Lady to one apartment, which made him infer that she shifted it according to the several functions of life: The Brain was her Study, the Heart her State-room, and the Stomach her Kitchen.’ Then he comes round to Willis’s view:

He now conjectured it was more for the dignity of the Soul to perform several operations by her little Ministers, the
Animal Spirits
, from whence it was natural to conclude, that she resides in different parts according to different Inclinations, Sexes, Ages, and Professions. Thus in Epicures he seated her in the mouth of the Stomach, Philosophers have her in the Brain, Soldiers in their Hearts, Women in their Tongues, Fidlers in their Fingers, and Rope-dancers in their Toes.

And finally it is back to Descartes, ‘dissecting many Subjects to find out the different Figure of this Gland’:

He suppos’d that in factious and restless-spirited people he should find it sharp and pointed, allowing no room for the Soul to repose herself; that in quiet Tempers it was flat, smooth, and soft, affording to the Soul as it were an easy cushion. He was confirm’d in this by observing, that Calves and Philosophers, Tygers and Statesmen, Foxes and Sharpers, Peacocks and Fops, Cock-Sparrows and Coquets, Monkeys and Players, Courtiers and Spaniels, Moles and Misers, exactly resemble one another in the conformation of the
Pineal Gland
.

Yet more animal satire reminiscent of Swift.

Speculations as to the soul’s embodiment inevitably led to all the issues raised in the Locke controversy: if Locke were right that the personality lay in ‘conscious selfhood’ – one seemingly rather contingent and precarious – where did that leave the soul?

Setting the cat among the pigeons, the Scriblerans concocted spoof letters from a ‘Society of Freethinkers’, which reproduced and mock-seriously endorsed Collins’s arguments against Clarke, designed to sabotage the Christian/Cartesian doctrine of an immortal,
immaterial ever-thinking soul. The fictitious society’s Secretary opened by bluntly admonishing Martinus for wasting his genius ‘in looking after that Theological Non-entity commonly call’d the
Soul
’ – what was it but a ‘Chimera’, upheld only by ‘some dreaming Philosophers’ and other ‘crack-brain’d’ fellows’?

Playing devil’s advocate, the Scriblerans gave seeming endorsement to the Secretary’s Collinsian disproof of the Clarkean soul. And as he successively dismissed the Christian rationalist’s main points, the ever-conscious soul was reduced to a figment of the imagination.

The first of Clarke’s ‘Sophisms’ refuted was the contention ‘that
Self-consciousness
cannot inhere in any system of Matter, because all matter is made up of several distinct beings, which never can make up one individual thinking being’. Here lay what Clarke considered his trump card – ‘self-consciousness’ is undivided, and hence matter, being divisible, could never unite diverse acts into those of ‘one individual thinking being’. The Secretary took Collins’s counter – thought is divisible and consciousness can emerge from the combined operation of all the particles of a thing, that is, thinking matter – and drove it to its logical extreme, through the use of a ‘familiar instance’:

In every
Jack
there is a
meat-roasting
Quality, which neither resides in the Fly, nor in the Weight, nor in any particular wheel of the Jack, but is the result of the whole composition: So in an Animal, the Self-consciousness is not a real quality inherent in one Being (any more than meat-roasting in a Jack) but the result of several modes or qualities in the same subject.

The ‘familiar instance’ was, of course, meant to be ludicrous, but it was prophetic of the monistic materialism of the future.

What was so wrong, asked the Secretary, with a soul marked by changeability not permanence? It was just like the stocking of the notorious old miser Sir John Cutler, which, though endlessly darned, still remained the item of hosiery he wore: