in the many reviews of historical and natural philosophical treatises he had been reading. But it is also to be registered in dream essays like this one, which repeat that reading in small. Akenside’s dream vision is overrepresented by people who would have been called the “moderns,” including several members of the New Philosophy. Bacon takes his place near Fame, displacing Columbus. The dreamer insists that the “Discovery of a new World” was “but a slender Acquisition of crude Materials” that are “improv’d and perfected in that immense World of Human Knowledge and Human Power … discover’d” by the natural philosopher. Galileo, Harvey, Newton, and Locke are also seated there, with Milton and Pope. Except for a brief scuffle among comic authors, ending the dream by waking the dreamer, the essay concludes with the relatively elaborated entrance of Milton, the “blind, old Man,” who enters with the “Air of an ancient Prophet,” supported (and emblematically represented) by the “Genius of England.” Milton is the last to enter, and hence is seated at the end of the table. But in the way that the essay strives to order its materials, in fact to put disordered public materials into the greater order of the dream space, the mutability of Milton’s position, and indeed of fame generally, is corrected in the discourse which accompanies his entrance; the dreamer’s “Conductor” insists that Milton will “continually ascend … in the Goddess’s Favour,” in order “at last [to] obtain the highest, or at least the second Place in these her Solemnities.” Joseph Warton celebrated the essay as among the Akenside’s chief accomplishments, a signal example of his particularly curatorial mind. “The guests,” he notes, “are introduced and ranged with that taste and judgment which is peculiar to the author.”138 Like the “throne of the goddess” of Modern Fame itself, which is “composed of different Materials, laid up in a beautiful Architectonick Manner,” the dream means elegantly to order mental materials according to a single, attenuated idea. And these guests, in the style of a battle of the books, are personifications of the biographies and histories Akenside had been reading.
This dream, and Milton’s place in it, help signal what made Hollis’s gift so welcome. Dry as this dream is, it offers a full portrait of Akenside in his cognitive bed. Eve’s bed is haunted by Satan, but Milton’s bed (like Akenside’s, which it was to become) is inhabited by crowds of poets, authors, thinkers, and statesmen. It is the place where collections of things, whether by reading or the wide way of the senses, are posed in meaningful arrangements and returned to language. Wordsworth is unfair in claiming that because the scholar in his cabinet “drinks the spirit breathed / From dead men” that the scholar must therefore be of “their kind”; it is through conference with the dead that poets like Akenside found themselves most fully inspired. What Akenside inherited from Locke and Milton was in the end a set of convictions about language as metaphor, sustaining distinctions between body and mind, even while guaranteeing the embeddeness of ideas in haptic experience. This is what caused it to resonate for Akenside, for the bed was the very site where Milton was reputed to have done his most exacting cognitive work.
CASE 2
DESIGN
4. Robert Hooke’s Camera Obscura — 5. Raphael’s Judgment of Paris 6. A Gritty Pebble — 7. An Oval Portrait of John Woodward 8. A Stone from the Grotto of Egeria — 9. Venus at Her Toilet
Exhibit 4. Robert Hooke’s Camera Obscura
Let us, then, let fall the curtains of Milton’s bed, and return for a moment to the dark room that John Locke carried around in his head. Locke mentions it in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, while discussing the origins of knowledge; “external and internal sensation,” he insists,
are the only passages … of knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this dark room. For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without: would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man, in reference to all objects of sight, and the ideas of them.1
This passage is well known because it summarizes the critical claim of Locke’s epistemology, its governing rule and the order toward which all its remarks tend. There is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses, Locke insists, and the admittance, sorting, storage, and arrangement of objects within a container-like space summarizes the work it may do.2 And the figure doesn’t only turn up here. Locke’s cabinet shows up repeatedly in the Essay; it underwrites his lengthy and carefully argued rejoinders to Edward Stilling-fleet;3 it reappears in an even stronger and more compact form in his last book, the unfinished Conduct of the Understanding: the mind is a “secret cabinet within.”4 This cabinet, then, is more than a figure; it is a coordinating condition for what the mind can and cannot be thought to do. It provides the possibility of thinking about thinking at all, turning complex questions of being and intentionality into distinctions of within and without, inside and outside, contained and uncontained. The cabinet is Locke’s most powerful and seductive conceptual metaphor.
4. “An Instrument of Use to take the Draught, or Picture of any Thing,” in Robert Hooke, Philosophical Experiments and Observations (London, 1726). Courtesy University of Michigan Special Collections.
So, how did this container-like space get there? That is, how did Locke’s image of the mind’s dark room arrive in his mind, if the mind contains nothing but sensory materials and its own reflections? One possibility is that Locke is merely describing the mind’s native structure, the facilities that make it possible to accept and to sort ideas in the first place. This would be to understand the “dark room” as something innate to the mind itself—even, perhaps, an innate idea, something lurking there even before the mind thinks it. This, however, poses problems; the Essay was after all begun in an effort to dispel the doctrine of innate ideas. A less radical but related possibility would be to accept the “dark room” as a mere metaphor describing powers already existing; the dark room would in this sense be one metaphor among others, used instrumentally to describe a set of affordances the mind would have had anyway. But Locke himself has already described the understanding as an emergent property, growing stronger and more evident as the mind becomes stocked with ideas (see Exhibit 1). That is, it remains to be seen how a mind could include some things while excluding others, much less how it could make the distinction between “in” and “out,” without the more categorical ideas of rooms, closets, and containers of all sorts. In light of Locke’s imperative to trace ideas back to their originals, his insistence that it would help us correct our understanding if we chased our conceptual vocabulary back to its haptic grounding, we should perhaps rather entertain a third possibility. Perhaps Locke’s whole system, the room that seems to evade the system of categorical distinctions that it enforces, is itself a function of its own emergent logic. Perhaps the dark room is not a mere metaphor among others but something more intimately felt than this, a structuring condition and space to be dwelled in. Locke after all did not invent the idea of the dark room; he witnessed it at work, or, in other words, experienced it. For this dark room, even as a private image of the mind to itself, had a very public circulation, at once as an optical gadget, and as a space where the intellect might be put on display.
Had we timed it right, we might have caught Locke, possibly already carrying an imperfectly figured room in his head, seated at a public assembly, setting eyes on a technical device that was making the rounds of the Royal Society.5 This device was the camera obscura, and it would come to offer the organizing center of Locke’s epistemology, the very place where a working relationship with the environment is hardened up into a stable structure.6 The device is simple; it is essentially a pinhole camera, and can be produced
