worldview into a tool for the new philosophy and its inductive methods—or, in other words, “abstraction” as a natural process of intellection.66 Locke at most titled commonplace volumes according to inherited categories—physica, theologica, medica—but his indices, where the real organizational work of recollection was prepared, were organized according to the present state of his learning, his interests, how he had already learned to understand the world, and, in general, what he observed as he read. The system begins with Locke reading; when he comes across a passage that seems important to him, he considers (in the words of an eighteenth-century editor) “to what head the thing [he] would enter is most naturally referred; and under which, [he] would be led to look for such a thing.”67 Armed with a single word (“Epistle” is Locke’s apt example), Locke consults his index. Here, heads will be gathered according to their first letter and following vowel, so it is necessary to begin by seeing if there are other Epistolary notes already entered. Had there already been an entry in “Ei,” Locke would have found the page number in the index, and turned to that page. Finding “Ei” empty, however, he turns to the first blank page in the book and copies out the passage verbatim. When he is finished copying, he inserts the head in the margin, and turns back to the index, where he writes the number of the page in the commonplace book under “Ei.” Some of Locke’s many imitators developed ways of reintroducing categories back into the index itself; one user, for instance, inserted heads in superscript in the index: “Go—13Gold coin, 21Gold Mine,” and so on.68 Locke simply wrote these categories in the margins of each page, whereby, in his words, “the Heads present themselves at First Sight.”69 It is worth pausing to make the point explicitly. Locke’s index was by no means the only technology whereby mental models were realized in curatorial practices—and curatorial practices in the vocabularies of intellection. But between Locke’s space of work and his theory of the intellect we may witness a cognitive ecology at work, where the logics of abstraction are distributed between keeper and collection.
More than one of Locke’s contemporaries instantly recognized the metaphorical work of his commonplacing system; John LeClerc for instance begins his celebration of Locke’s commonplacing system with the advantages it has for the development of the mind. In his preface to the pamphlet containing Locke’s indexing system, LeClerc categorically confounds the commonplace with the “Treasury or Store-house” of the “Memory”; similarly, he programmatically confuses the index with the faculty of “Judgment.”70 This is because the index provides a place for the dialectical elaboration and systematization of Locke’s epistemology, especially of the relationship between the faculty of the understanding and its mental materials. Each commonplace entry involves two separate acts of transfer. First, a quotation is selected as an epitome of a text, and then, as part of the process of putting it in the commonplace, a single word is developed to pose it as part of an abstract category. These two transfers anticipate Locke’s sense of the mind as a collection: the “senses at first let in particular ideas, to furnish the yet empty cabinet,” Locke remarks; thereafter, the mind, “by degrees growing familiar with some of them,” “abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names.”71 The first variety of transfer in the commonplace, from book to notebook, echoes the work of the senses, identifying ideas that can be stored as facts.72 The second, however, begins to capture the intellect as an emergent property, developing only when the store is full enough that reason may begin to arise alongside the categories of thought. This latter process is what is properly called “abstraction,” for it is the method “whereby ideas taken from particular beings become general representatives of all the same kind.” But it clearly leans against “abstraction” in its other meaning, the summarizing of the contents of a book. It may be, Locke elsewhere surmises, that there are “species” existing in the world prior to experience. But it is the mind, in its curatorial habits, that develops general names—“abstracts” them—from the materials of thinking. The commonplace is therefore itself a measure of “the use of reason,” which, Locke remarks, “becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment.”73 Reason, writes Charles Taylor, is for Locke “above all a property of the process of thinking, not of the substantive content of thought”;74 nor does reason stand somehow apart from its work. “Reason,” in Locke’s idiom, develops through the curatorial compilation and organization of “its materials.”
Locke’s headings are the trick whereby past contexts anticipate present occasion; the index is where Locke’s metaphors of abstraction bottom out, for it is the site where he might witness himself working out new abstract categories from the raw material of the old. There is, however, an important reverse movement, which finds these abstractions reinstalled at the site of the collecting activity in the first place. The tricky thing is how to identify passages ripe for abstraction, even while in the act of reading. As anyone who has compiled an index will know, the development of these general ideas or heads comes secretly to bear an important formative function, slipping back into the reading process. Just as the development of names for general heads in the commonplace will provide “general names, applicable to whatever exists conformable to such ideas” in the future, so too, Locke remarks, we “take for the perception of our sensation” that which is in fact “an idea formed by our judgment.”75 So, for instance, our repeated exposure to convex shapes, Locke observes, teaches us that what appear in the eye to be certain flat disks of light will actually turn out to be spheres if handled and turned on all sides.76 Prior work by the judgment to compile the mathematical notion “sphere,” abstracted from numerous past experiences of flat disks, sneaks so swiftly into experience that by the time fresh sensations reach what Locke calls the “presence chamber” of the mind, they are already altered by the organizing work of the judgment.77 We do not see flat disks and then figure out that they are spheres; we simply see spheres. What appear to the intellect to be passively received sensory ideas are already shaped by the “workmanship of the understanding.”78 Shaped by “conformity with our own experience,” the understanding participates in a secret way in constructing the world it beholds.79 So, too, rather than arriving late to a field of examples already assembled, the index of Locke’s commonplace is already entangled in the project of compilation, for it is the categories emerging there that help Locke identify the abstracts to copy in the first place. The explosion of indices in printed books was a sign of the times, of the reorganization of knowledge as content.80 But in Locke’s case, and in the cases of the thousands of people who adopted his method, we may say that their science produced the tail that it itself grasped—collected matter suggesting index headings that in turn suggest new matter to collect. The index is not merely a method of collation and organization; it is also a system of reading.81 What begins as a local conception of abstraction in the material habits of collection ends up getting smuggled into how Locke perceives the very activity of thought; what begins as the mere development of general names from observed particulars—abstraction, in other words, as itself an abstraction—ends up becoming, in the way of all abstractions, a judgment passing as a perception.
Locke’s indexing system is a system suited to the mind he understood himself to have: one that collects nuggets, files them away, and develops general names according to the ideas it possesses. Likewise, the theory of mind he develops is one suited to, and metaphorically founded on, the filing systems through which he did the work of thinking. He does not go quite so far as to suggest that reason itself is a mere offspring or epiphenomenon of the storage of ideas—that it rises autogenetically out of the mere accrual of facts. Nor does he suggest that we may choose freely the way that we divide up sensations into objects or abstracts. Though the “contents” of the mind “are derived from experience,” and therefore particular to the individual and his social context, “the psychological,” remarks Graham Richards, “stays formally fixed,” arriving in the end at seemingly essential and universal rules and methods, the very rules and methods it is the work of the Essay to discover.82 Indeed, Locke’s optimism is in the end anchored by the notion that collections of the same simple ideas will suggest the same abstract ones, providing, Locke hopes, a vocabulary for rational discourse.83 In his intellectual practice, however, he discusses perfectible but ultimately idiosyncratic methods
