Flesh in the Age of Reason (26 page)

Sir John Cutler had a pair of black worsted stockings, which his maid darn’d so often with silk, that they became at last a pair of silk stockings. Now supposing those stockings of Sir John’s endued with some degree of
Consciousness at every particular darning, they would have been sensible, that they were the same individual pair of stockings both before and after the darning; and this sensation would have continued in them through all the succession of darnings; and yet after the last of all, there was not perhaps one thread left of the first pair of stockings, but they were grown into silk stockings, as was said before.

What would Locke have made of the self-consciousness of a sock?

Consciousness
à la
Locke was, held the freethinkers, the
sine qua non
of personality, even though that self-presence might well be intermittent, and its organic substrate (like the worsted-cum-silk) something whose very physicality changed all the time. Mutability was impishly being represented as inherent to the soul’s very being. The subversive implications of such views, derived from Locke via Collins, are plain: what it is to be a human has become remarkably nebulous. Like Swift in his
Mechanical Operation of the Spirit
, the Scriblerans were targeting the pretensions of those modern philosophers who nonchalantly sacrificed time-honoured and lofty ideals of humanity for modish speculations potentially destructive of all moral order.

The shocking dissolving of personality prompted by freethinking was further teased out in the facetious account of Martinus’s marriage. Martinus falls in love with Lindamira, one of a pair of Siamese twins exhibited at a freakshow. As was discussed in
Chapter 6
, conjoined twins were in the news and attracting debate, the model in this case being a set of twins, Helena and Judith, displayed in London in 1708. Born in Hungary, they were united at the buttocks and they shared a common vagina and rectum. Following popular folklore, it was held that their malformation was the result of their mother’s having seen, during gestation, a pair of monstrous dogs joined with their heads in opposite directions. The twins attracted the attention not only of scientists and sightseers but also of the wits. ‘Here is the sight of two girls joined together at the back,’ remarked Swift, ‘which, in the newsmonger’s phrase, causes a great many speculations; and raises abundance of questions in divinity, law, and physic.’

In the rodomontade offered in the
Memoirs
, Martinus, to the freakshow owner’s chagrin, elopes with Lindamira, her sister Indamora perforce accompanying. To obtain redress, the proprietor takes Martinus to court, on the grounds that, given the manner in which the two are joined, every time Martinus exercises his conjugal rights over the former he commits bigamy (and incest) with the latter. To complicate matters, the owner marries Indamora off (‘while her sister was asleep’) to the black prince Ebn-Hai-Paw-Waw, another member of the travelling show, provoking Martinus to cross-petition for relief from this unforeseen extension to his already tense ménage.

The court case was particularly complicated in Cartesian and Christian terms, because Lindamira and Indamora constituted, if two selves, something more than one and less than two bodies. How many souls were they? Was it a case of two souls housed in a single body, like Locke’s example of Socrates awake and Socrates asleep? Did both of the souls, or individuals, equally exercise legal proprietorship over the whole of the conjoint body, or only over certain demarcated parts of it? Since the law treated the wife as her husband’s property, the court had to decide whether, as Martinus maintained, the twins together ‘constitute but one wife’, or whether, as the black prince’s counsel maintained, they were ‘two distinct persons’ and could thus be owned and enjoyed by two husbands at once. Crucial to the forensic reasoning was the familiar question of where in the body lay the soul, specifically the female soul.

The sticking-point proved the pudenda. Martinus’s lawyer, Dr Pennyfeather, maintained that as Lindamira–Indamora ‘hath but
one
Organ of Generation, she is but
one individual Person
, in the truest and most proper sense of Individuality’. One organ of generation equalled one person, because it equalled one soul; and the genitals, he maintained, were the seat of the soul in women – was not that manifest from the tyranny sex exercised over them? ‘Where there is but one Member of Generation,’ the learned doctor contended, ‘there is but one body, so there can be but one Soul; because the said organ of Generation is the Seat of the Soul.’ He went on to reassert the theological doctrine of traducianism: ‘it has been the opinion of
many most learned Divines and Philosophers, that the Soul, as well as Body, is produced
ex traduce
’ (that is, through the act and organs of generation). This was specially true of women!

To resolve these ticklish questions, recourse was finally had to the traditional jury of matrons, who examined the twins and determined that ‘the Parts of Generation in Lindamira and Indamora were distinct’. On that basis the judge decided that they could be the property of two husbands, while warning the brothers-in-law to take care lest they slid into adultery or incest. Thankfully, all was resolved when a higher court decided to dissolve both marriages ‘as proceeding upon a natural, as well as legal Absurdity’.

The tale of Martinus and the Siamese twins betrays flagrant chauvinist bias and that prurient fascination with the minutiae of female sexuality typical of the misogynistic Swift and his cronies. Profound questions were nevertheless being raised as to the integrity of the self, the relations of mind and body, and the boundaries between one person and another, indicative of the climate of problems created by the new personality philosophy floated by Locke – the
Memoirs
in fact specifically added gender to the melting-pot. The arguments raised there, and in Swift’s satires, in a facetious tone, so as to sabotage trendy views, were rapidly destined to become the radical staples of the next generation.

The great business of his life was to escape from himself;
this disposition he considered as the disease of his mind.

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS

At first glance the life of Samuel Johnson reads as a classic moral tale of Smilesian self-help, exertion triumphant over adversity. Born in 1709 in provincial Lichfield, he grew up sickly, being taken at the age of 3 by his mother to London to be cured by Queen Anne’s ‘royal touch’ of the ‘king’s evil’ (scrofula): physical illness thereafter dogged his long but painful life.

Poverty forced him to leave Pembroke College Oxford without a degree, and the next two decades brought unremitting struggle. Moving in 1737 to London, he obtained employment on the
Gentleman’s Magazine
as a hack writer and parliamentary reporter, before his career as a man of letters was given a decisive boost when he was commissioned to prepare a
Dictionary of the English Language
, which was eventually published in 1755. Meanwhile he began to appear in print in his own right.
London
, a savage satirical poem on the ‘great wen’, appeared anonymously in 1738; and eleven years later he published the equally sombre
The Vanity of Human Wishes
, an imitation of the tenth satire of Juvenal, expressive of his own dark vision of human folly. A year later, he began to bring out the
Rambler
, a magazine in the
Spectator
mould (though entirely without its insistent cheeriness) which ran didactic essays on morals, manners and religion. This was followed in 1758 by the
Idler
, equally moralistic in its commentaries on human failings, and one year later by his only extended work of fiction, the moral fable
Rasselas
.

Johnson’s later years were crowned by his
Lives of the English Poets
and his edition of Shakespeare, monumental feats of scholarly criticism. By then he had gathered into the informal group known as the Club the leading literary figures of the day, and not only received a government pension (1762) but (posthumously) was the subject of the first immortal biography of a British man of letters, James Boswell’s
The Life of Samuel Johnson
(1791). Overall, a success story, indeed, it seems. But that was only the public face of the ‘great cham of English letters’: there was an inner Johnson racked by anxiety that he could never be what he knew he should be, a rational Christian properly in control of himself.

Throughout his periodical writings and in the opinions recorded by Boswell, Johnson repeatedly and unambiguously gave expression to a Christian ideal of a divine order in which God had given man free will so that his immortal half could triumphantly master the flesh. It is a world view fleshed out and authenticated by the learned citations which permeate the
Dictionary
– no disinterested compendium of definitions but a covert primer in Johnsonian tenets, a citadel of traditional learning buttressing his own views on human nature and conduct.

As the
Dictionary
abundantly shows, Johnson was a dualist through and through: body and soul were ontologically distinct, and the human amalgam was an ‘incorporated mind’ – the phrase confirms how he prioritized the spirit. Just like Descartes or Samuel Clarke, he held that the soul never slept: ‘That the soul always exerts her peculiar powers, with greater or less force, is very probable.’

The
Dictionary
treated the rational soul as categorically different from the ‘sensible soul’ found throughout the animal kingdom, and also from the senses among humans. Isaac Watts was here quoted, separating
soma
from soul: ‘As we learn what belongs to the body by the evidence of sense, so we learn what belongs to the soul by an inward consciousness.’ For Johnson, the soul was neither the agent nor the object of mere sense, and it emphatically had no base-camp in the body. ‘That the soul and angels have nothing to do with grosser locality is generally opinioned’ – it is Joseph Glanvill who is being quoted.

The main bodily whereabouts touted for the soul were the pineal gland, the blood and the brain. Johnson referred to belief in the first under ‘pineal’, but the brain was the proposed locale which got most attention in the
Dictionary
, and that view was treated with some ridicule. Glanvill was quoted again, characterizing the brain as a ‘quagmire’, with a ‘
clammy
’ consistency unsuitable for ‘supporting the motion of thought’; the High Church divine Jeremy Collier was hauled in to endorse this in an even more contemptuous strain: ‘The brain… looks like an odd sort of bog for fancy to
paddle
in.’ The brain was doubly ripe for the
Dictionary
’s raillery: not only was it a false address for the immaterial soul, it also betokened intellectual arrogance.

The soul–body distinction was absolute, and the temporal union of the two was, in Johnson’s view, a mystery beyond human understanding. Man‘is compounded of two very different ingredients, spirit and matter’ – it is Jeremy Collier who is again being ventriloquized – ‘but how such unallied and disproportioned substances should act upon each other, no man’s learning yet could tell him’. Johnson himself further endorsed this unequivocal divide between body and soul in his definition of ‘life’ as ‘union and co-operation of soul with body’, and in his denotation of ‘trance’ as ‘a temporary absence of the soul from the body’. The soul–body link was prominent in the inventory of human ignorance – and one which also served to confirm the wisdom, power and glory of God. In some quotations the soul was even depicted as being in immediate communication with the celestial world, almost closer to God than to man: ‘Our souls, piercing through the impurity of flesh’ – here Johnson is quoting Sir Walter Raleigh – ‘behold the highest heavens, and thence bring knowledge to contemplate the everduring glory and termless joy.’ It is noteworthy that, although Johnson quoted extensively and approvingly from Locke in the
Dictionary
– he was his favourite philosopher – he did not include any of his more subversive and heretical views, such as ‘thinking matter’ or conscious selfhood.

Johnson thus advanced a noble vision of man. It was one quite removed from the Enlightenment belief in a natural science of man
and also from enlightened expectations of human happiness, a point bluntly made by his moral tale
Rasselas
.

Son of the Prince of Abyssinia, Rasselas is confined in a valley where he lives free of all vexations. Despite these utopian delights, however, he is not happy, and this prompts him to ponder the grand questions of life: ‘Every beast that strays beside me has the same corporeal necessities with myself…. I am hungry and thirsty like him, but when thirst and hunger cease I am not at rest.’ To resolve his questions and discover what life is truly like, Rasselas concludes that he must escape from this ‘happy valley’. But how? Turning to the ‘new science’, he consults an expert full of wonderous plans for flying chariots. He will build an escape machine – on condition that none shall be allowed to copy it. But when constructed, the machine merely flaps its wings uselessly and dives, Icarus-like, into the lake. In this ominous false start there lay a moral; had the prince been alert, it would have spared him his trip.

Rasselas next meets the poet Imlac, who describes life in the world beyond. And eventually he shows the prince the way to escape. Taking with them his sister and her lady-in-waiting, they go first to Cairo, where they see men living in carefree gaiety, but Imlac warns that this is illusory: ‘There is not one who did not dread the moment when solitude should deliver him to the tyranny of reflection.’ In disgust he turns away from so thoughtless a life.