-
Chapter 10: The Unbounded Self: Dreaming and Identity in the British Enlightenment
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Chapter The Unbounded Self Dreaming and Identity in the British Enlightenment phyllis mack John Rutty (1697–1775) was an Irish physician and Quaker elder whose diary was unique in being published as written, at his own insistence, without being censored by the Quaker leadership. The diary contains an extraordinarily detailed, day-by-day account of Rutty’s struggle to overcome his most serious ingrained weaknesses: a tendency to anger, an equal tendency to overeat, and—most distressing by far—an inordinate love of science. Rutty agonized over his digestion because it interfered with his concentration in meetings for worship (‘‘Ate too much today. To eat and drink to live is the point! Animal, be humbled!’’). He berated himself for hitting a servant and for being obsequious toward his superiors (‘‘A shocking view of myself: fierce to inferiors, viciously complaisant to superiors or equals, for the base views of profit of false honour’’). Chiefly, he worried that his motives for doing science were corrupt. There was too much interest in the intellectual pleasure of experiment, and too little in the ultimate purpose of science as an act of reverence toward God (‘‘At a meeting: Lord give more love, and less ardour for knowledge!’’).1 In 1776, a year after his death, there appeared another autobiographical work, an account of a dream (he called it ‘‘a dream, vision, or ecstasy’’) that Rutty had experienced twenty-two years earlier and that had empowered him to change his life.2 Being very ill after a dangerous fever, ‘‘I perceived that something extraordinary was about to agitate my mind. Conscious of my own weakness, and fearful of being deceived, I determined to minute down in writing everything that should happen, together with 208 The Eighteenth Century the exact time to be noted by my watch, which I placed on the table before me for this purpose, in order that whatsoever should occur might be rigorously examined, after the exercise impending should be finished.’’3 During a sleep that lasted for two hours and forty minutes, Rutty dreamed that he was in heaven, where God had enlightened his understanding. ‘‘They seem to have been rather certain sensations,’’ he wrote, ‘‘[rather] than argumentative propositions offered to the mind; this much however is certain, that by virtue of those impressions my heart was captivated with the love of God to a greater degree than ever in my life before.’’4 He felt himself to have undergone ‘‘an instantaneous change from a morose and perverse to a sweet state, and a certain superior and uncommon power supporting me.’’ This was succeeded by a state of acute depression and loss of faith, followed by the recognition that God’s nature is a mystery: ‘‘the wind bloweth where it listeth, and we hear the sound thereof, but knoweth not where it cometh.’’5 The account culminated in a short address to the medical community in which Rutty defended the spiritual veracity of the dream by pointing to his own subsequent change of personality: ‘‘My peace and joy flows as a river, a joy equal to which I never felt before, so solid, so steady, so rational.’’6 The diary reveals that this last affirmation was a product of wishful thinking, for Rutty actually struggled until his death to recapture the sense of fullness that he had experienced during his single epiphany. Yet the dream did change and sweeten Rutty’s life. It allowed him to practice science , seek spiritual friendship, and observe the duties of a Quaker elder with at least an intermittent feeling of confidence and equanimity. On April 6, 1775, about two months before Rutty’s death, the Methodist leader John Wesley wrote in his journal, ‘‘I visited that venerable man, Dr. John Rutty, just tottering over the grave, but still clear in his understanding, full of faith and love, and patiently waiting till his change should come.’’7 While its language is wholly untypical of eighteenth-century religious writing, Rutty’s account foregrounds two elements that characterize many texts of the period: a vagueness about the nature and origin of dreams or visions and a focus on the emotions generated by the dream rather than the dream’s specific message. The dream’s opacity made him depressed and confused, but the feeling of sweetness and the improvement in his temperament over many years reinforced both his own will to selfimprovement and his belief that he lived and acted under the direction of a...