in part by the Catologus, which operated as a sort of epitome and vade mecum of the library itself. It is also partly because Locke continually had his library and its books in mind even during his separations from them.45 The second is to note that Locke’s elaboration, on the one hand, of the mind as a cabinet, and his development, on the other, of his cabinet as an increasingly stable repository of ideas, together suggest the dialectical to-and-fro that characterizes a cognitive ecology, a working space of thinking that, in Locke’s case, also provides the model for thought.
Locke’s cabinet provided an apt metaphor for mind because the space was structured to match, in fact to materialize, the rudimentary and analytically prior metaphors underwriting Locke’s sense of how cognition works. These more rudimentary and hence capacious metaphors are different species of the same basic conceptual source domain: the mind is a container. In this analytically prior formulation, Locke imagines the mind as a sort of camera obscura—a “dark room” that allows images to enter and fall upon a suitable surface like a wall or a screen (see Exhibit 4).46 The mind has the capacity, called “contemplation,” Locke writes, to hold a small set of such ideas “for some time actually in view.”47 This would be to perceive something (etymologically, “to take” or “to capture” it), and to extend or to attenuate that perception across time. It is as though the understanding stood within a miniaturized chamber, viewing images cast upon a two-dimensional surface, contemplating them simply as they come and go. But contemplation on present sensory ideas is the exception rather than the norm; indeed, in his Essay Locke gives to “contemplation” the shortest space possible, offering little more than a barely ornamented definition. Indeed, he gives to “contemplation” a space appropriate to how long the mind is able actually to contemplate, without recourse to any supports. For, according to Locke’s system, we far more often “retrieve” ideas that are “laid up in store … when need and occasion calls for them.” It is for this reason that the dark room emerges as an important transitional metaphor. Locke almost instantly appends to the image of the dark room an extensive storage function: the mind, he notes, is just like such a closet with a small opening “would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there.”48 The development of his argument begins, that is, to situate itself in a more elaborated and embracing metaphorical context. This context is of course the library or repository, in which mental states, refigured as “ideas,” may be “laid up” or stored like “dormant pictures,” where they may either be recalled at will or turn up according to their own associations and affordances. The library, that is, offers to Locke what has elsewhere been called a “regimen of the mind.”49 It offers a way of visualizing, of making present to the mind as Locke understands it, a system of natural memory; it offers a solution to the problem posed by the theory of the mind as a chamber like his own, a solution to Locke’s concern that objects entering through that chamber’s small openings should, as he hoped, “stay there.”50
Taken together, Locke, his cabinet, and the library it contained provide the ecology in which Locke’s remarks about the cabinet-like structure of the mind are immediately embedded. The network provides a way of speaking: the understanding with its ideas is like a curator in a cabinet. A second problem emerges, however, which Locke’s shelving system was not designed to handle. This is the problem of recollection—and it is his solution to this problem that cuts to the core of Locke’s metaphorical theory of metaphors. As Locke puts it, a man who seeks but is unable to find “those ideas that should serve his turn, is not much more happy in his knowledge than one that is perfectly ignorant.”51 For the “business … of the memory,” Locke remarks, is not merely to store up impressions but “to furnish to the mind those dormant ideas which it has present occasion for.”52 This problem for the active and goal-oriented mind, the one embedded in what he calls a “present occasion,” or, colloquially, a man’s “turn,” demands a system in which ideas are linked to the subject at hand. It requires, therefore, a related but distinct technology, for the ordering of knowledge as though it were a collection of things will involve more than the ability to store ideas in a stable, organized place. It also demands the organization and collation of ideas so that they can be integrated into present circumstances. What is wanted is a system where a context—a “present occasion”—might already suggest a shifting and adaptable constellation of related ideas or concepts, which nevertheless point back to the material and exemplary ground from which they emerged.
The creation of links between present occasion and ideas of use, Locke insists, is partly a power that memory already has. Among the natural work of memory is the retention of associations between ideas, as those ideas are patterned by experience. This is an old idea, that turns up, among other places, in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, who is in turn indebted to Aristotle’s De Memoria.53 The mind of itself creates groupings among ideas of things it witnesses together. But the development of such associations is also a capacity that can be mastered and perfected, and it is in the working out of this problem in the library that Locke put a traditional form to new use. He was the inventor of a new system of collating and storing extracts, a system that was destined to become, in part for the fame of its author, the most popular method for note taking until the end of the eighteenth century.54 This is Locke’s New Method of Common-placing. Locke’s copy of Hyde’s Catalogus was geared toward the regular filing away of the matter of knowledge, but his series of notebooks laid out by the New Method worked that knowledge up into patterns and systems for their instant, motivated use. It provided therefore a second set of metaphors, overlaid upon the first, which helps explain how things witnessed in the world are liquidated into the materials of thinking.55
Like the library, the commonplace was an old technology when Locke encountered it. It emerged through Renaissance humanist practice, developed out of theories of poetics as they were understood to have been conceived by Cicero and Quintilian (see Exhibit 2).56 The book of commonplaces (topos koinos in Aristotle’s Greek or locus communis in Cicero’s Latin commentary) provided the backbone to the Scholastic brand of philosophical inquiry and the classical style of rhetorical disputation alike.57 Cicero, especially as he was received in Locke’s England, understood the development of oratory to hinge on what he called “inventio.” This category meant to include more than merely the discovery (invention in its etymological sense) of a happy order or the spontaneous development of an effective turn of phrase; it expanded over the Renaissance to include the gathering, storage, and recollection of examples with an eye to their use in narrative or argument.58 All of this counted as “inventio.” The commonplace, as Locke encountered it, was a heuristic device dedicated to the kind of rhetorical making that inventio demanded;59 the “declared purpose of … the serious commonplace book,” as it has recently been put, was “action,” specifically for “the better arming one’s arguments in speech or writing.” It was organized to store examples according to arguments already well known.60 The humanist commonplace was based on inherited categories; largely because it was geared toward disputation in traditional questions of ethics and theology, the Renaissance commonplace began as a sort of grid of traditional topics, and it located examples to fit.61 Many of these commonplaces, indeed, were printed volumes already filled in, minor encyclopedias with prepared entries and suitable for a wide range of cultural work; numerous early modern and premodern writers—Montaigne, Shakespeare, even Milton62—have been shown to have relied on such prepared commonplaces. Culling examples from a wide array of sources, traditional commonplaces were harnessed to a recognizable polemic end, gathering examples and rhetorical resting places as the mirror of a Renaissance cosmos, assembling in small the proof of the divine order of the world. They offered a relatively standardized way of dividing up the realms of knowledge.63 As Ann Blair puts it, “Explananda … become ‘commonplaces’ in the technical as well as the colloquial sense: in being selected from their original source and entered into the commonplace book [extracts] become self-evident truths.”64
Locke’s
