Locke's Wild Fancies: Empiricism, Personhood, and Fictionality

This idol which you term Virginity,
Is neither essence, subject to the eye—
No, nor to any one exterior sense,
Nor hath it any place of residence,
Nor is't of earth or mold celestial,
Or capable of any form at all.
Of that which hath no being do not boast:
Things that are not at all are never lost.

—Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander

——————————"The things,
Which we see not how they are mov'd and swayd,
Ye may attribute to yourselves as Kings,
And say, they by your secret powre are made:
But what we see not, who shall us perswade?"

—Edmund Spenser, Two Cantos of Mutabilitie

Thought . . . expresses exactly what is, precisely because what is is never quite as thought expresses it. Essential to it is an element of exaggeration, of overshooting the object, of self-detachment from the weight of the factual. . . . Thus every thought resembles play . . . as soon as thought repudiates its inviolable distance and tries with a thousand subtle arguments to prove its literal correctness, it founders.

—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

The Baconian roots of experimental science thrived upon an accumulation of real knowledge and wore a promise of universal application. Once the calendars of learning were properly distributed and inventoried, nothing, even immortality itself, was held by Bacon to be impossible. The pioneers would find out causes, and the smiths would produce the effects. So Bacon cautions his reader, "I would not have such knowledges . . . to be thought things imaginative or in the air . . . but things of bulk and mass."¹ Impelled by the same belief in the potential unity of the particulars and forms of knowledge, John Wilkins among others supposed that there was a natural or philosophical language capable of declaring the essences of what it named, whose alphabet, a real character, would indicate the true relations of those essences in stenographic form. At all points Bacon and his followers sought to distinguish between the legitimate ambitions of experimental knowledge and "high and vaporous imaginations."² Bacon compares degenerate natural magic with Arthurian romance, and solid learning with Caesar's Commentaries.³ In his dedication of Micrographia to the Royal Society, Robert Hooke set strength of imagination to one side in favor of "a sincere Hand, and a faithful Eye," for (he added), "The Truth is, the Science of Nature has been already too long made only a work of the Brain and the Fancy."⁴ Yet it is the case that the boundaries of the real were habitually negotiated by what Locke later called "wild fancies." These wild fancies (often personifications of nonhuman agents) were supposed antithetical to "things of bulk and mass," but they were suggested by unaccountable passages of the experimental process itself, or from the provisional assumptions they forced eyewitnesses to make. The fable of Ixion, who coupled with a cloud instead of with Juno, bringing forth chimerae and monsters instead of true progeny, is Bacon's warning against the free indulgence of such fancies. But, given the incomplete state of knowledge, the fancies themselves were unavoidable. One had to imagine what one could not see or demonstrate. This essay aims to uncover the seed of imagination in the investigation of the real, and to trace from that a forking model of fiction. From a governed fancy flourishes the realist novel, whose principle of verisimilitude is founded upon an imagined but credible picture of the truth. From a wild fancy, however, spring all those tales of animate things and intelligent animals that populate the genre of fiction we now know as "it-narratives."

The inheritors of Bacon's program were committed to the rigors of experimental practice, but they were much less confident about the discovery of causes. Newton famously refused to hypothesize a cause of gravity, for example, for fear of making the absence of real knowledge the site of an occult force. In their disagreements about the air pump, Boyle and Hobbes, although they were both mechanists committed to the impossibility of self-moving matter, accused each other of alleging the motion of matter without a cause. Boyle's belief in...