Singular Devices: Minds at Work from Montesquieu to Diderot

Eighteenth-century descriptions of esprit and the persona of the thinker often insisted on the interplay of “le physique et le moral.” This idea was often illustrated through analogies that compared the embodied mind to a device that operated via fine-tuned response and motion. Whereas physicians used such analogies to warn scholars about the health dangers of overstudy, other authors deployed them for positive, heuristic purposes. The two main examples examined here are Montesquieu and Diderot, who figured the complexities of thinking through models that included musical instruments, the “spider in its web,” and the mechanical apparatus known as the tableau mouvant.