The Matter of Mind, 1650-1750

Jonathan Kramnick's Actions and Objects aims to improve our understanding of how some English philosophers, poets, translators, and novelists from 1650 to 1750 describe human minds and actions. Presenting close readings as "examples" and "case studies" (11-12) in this vast field, the book also aims to identify and engage with "large, period-defining concepts of character or consciousness" (11). More broadly, Kramnick intends to revise what he takes to be the current consensus on the issue of how self, mind, and consciousness are represented during the period: whereas "the predominant model has favored the growth of inwardness, sympathy, and subjectivity," Kramnick emphasizes "things external, like the elemental parts of matter or the chains of causes or the forms of contract" (11). His book thus directs us to register the "largely unacknowledged role of external factors in the period's conception of mind" (2), and it draws attention to how our focus on inwardness and privacy has prevented us from observing the ways in which mental states are located outside the mind, reduced to particles, and conceived as public sites that are continuous with what is external to them.

The book for the most part succeeds in providing accurate scholarly accounts of how the authors it selects think about this subject, much of which falls under what we now think of as "the philosophy of action." After an introductory chapter in which he lays out his project, Kramnick cites his primary texts judiciously to describe the debate amongst philosophers and theologians from the period: we get clear accounts of the public debate on free will between Hobbes and the Anglican theologian John Bramhall in the 1650s; the continuation of this debate in the second decade of the eighteenth century between the deist Anthony Collins and the theologian Samuel Clarke; and Hume's views on the matter in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Kramnick proceeds in the second chapter to observe the discussion of matter, consciousness, and free will in one of the major texts of the Lucretian/Epicurean revival of the later seventeenth-century, Thomas Creech's 1682 translation of Lucretius' first-century BC poem, De rerum natura. Lucretius, Kramnick shows, attempts to affirm an atomistic materialism by which consciousness emerges from the movement and collision of insentient atoms. But in order to account for how consciousness causes physical action and movement, Lucretius ends up attributing will to those atoms and thereby compromises his postulate of insentient atomistic matter. Since one of the great poets of the period, Rochester, was clearly interested in the materialism he found in both Hobbes and Lucretius, Kramnick turns to him and, on the basis of the libertine's translations of Lucretius and Seneca, finds that Rochester eliminates either the person as the locus of states of mind, or states of mind altogether (85). Since Locke directly addresses these questions of consciousness and free will in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Kramnick concludes this chapter by carefully analyzing Locke's use of the terms man, person, and consciousness in the first two editions of this great work (1689 and 1694) and quite rightly observes Locke's speculative and skeptical views concerning how consciousness and the atoms that make up material substance are related to each other (96).

Citing several of Rochester's obscene poems in the following chapter, Kramnick examines the libertine's diverse views on how sexual desire is related to action. At the same time, he makes a reasonable case for the generalization that Rochester reveals how people's behavior, including their sexual behavior, is caused not so much by their own mental states as by the arrangement and motion of the bodies and sites around them. Kramnick then returns to Locke's Essay to observe how, in light of his correspondence with William Molyneux, he revises the chapter entitled "Of Power" to reflect his understanding of how "uneasiness," and also the mind's power to suspend its force, enter into...