The Mind is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought by Sean Silver (review)

Sean Silver’s new book, The Mind is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought, holds out hope to all of us who fear our puttering might be getting in the way of serious thinking. Instead of regarding a time-consuming crafting habit or a fascination with home-brewed beer as a distraction, we might instead regard these activities as constitutive parts of our cognitive ecologies. At least that is how Silver interprets Locke’s book-buying, Addison’s coin-collecting, and Walpole’s eccentric curating style. By reassessing the centrality of hobbies and habits to intellectual discovery, Silver’s book calls into question an increasingly prevalent cultural narrative about the deterioration of the line between pleasurable hobbies and professional pursuits. Silver’s book may not allay the anxieties of critics concerned that it has become more difficult in modernity to separate “life” from “work,” but for those looking for the hidden benefits of hobbies, The Mind is a Collection has a surprisingly encouraging message. Silver’s book allows us to see anew the intuitive relationship between life and work and, more specifically, to appreciate the synchrony between pleasurable hobbies and intellectual insight, daily environments and innermost thoughts, and, most broadly, the ongoing mutual shaping of living and thinking.

Through a series of case studies, Silver sets out to show the entanglement of mind and matter in the mental processes and physical environments of scientists, writers, and artists of the long eighteenth century. “Environment” is a loose term in Silver’s book, gesturing toward physical spaces, habits, and collections that both reflect and shape thought. Milton’s bed and Hooke’s laboratory are environments as well as Addison’s coin collection and Woodward’s rock cabinets. These spaces are inhabited as well as created; they can be entered into, pulled out of a drawer, or peered through, as in the case of a camera obscura. Examining the curated objects and spaces of Pope’s grotto or Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, for example, Silver discovers “the embeddedness of intellect in its material surroundings” (15). These portraits of embedded thinking, Silver contends, should replace the reigning critical story of the period’s pervasive dualism. Eighteenth-century epistemology is too often casually associated with “naïve dualism” (269), Silver contends, and “[t]hinkers of the seventeenth century are often accused of having installed, at the very core of the new epistemology, a strange break between mind and matter, subject and object” (15). Silver does not discuss the contemporary critics he has in mind who defend a dualist separation of mind and matter in eighteenth-century thought (it would be interesting, for example, to know how Silver sees his work intersecting with long-running discussions about secularity and enchantment). However, Silver’s accounts of the situated media practices of his subjects are consistently interesting and often surprising. Detailing Locke’s book habits—from buying, reading, and notating books to organizing his volumes into a highly personalized library—Silver convincingly demonstrates that Locke’s physical handling of books and mental digestion of them both shaped the way he conceived thought. Commonplacing, Silver shows, illuminates Locke’s ideas about how the mind abstracts particularities into general categories. If, as Silver suggests, we can trace how environments shape thought, the tantalizing possibility emerges of grasping what it was like to think like Locke or Pope. The Mind is a Collection suggests that, in fact, these complex men left behind revealing portraits of their inner lives and that, in some cases, we can enter into these spaces. We can visit Pope’s grotto, as Silver does (first, unsuccessfully, as a graduate student led astray by the mischievous J. Paul Hunter and then, later, as a cannier assistant professor) to see, two hundred years later, how Pope plastered its low ceiling with Italian sculptures from a land he never visited that nevertheless helped define the imaginative and physical spaces in which he worked.

Silver’s...