work of commonplace linked to library, ends up providing the master metaphor governing his epistemology. The mind as cabinet and cabinet as mind end up unconsciously coordinating a host of subordinate operations about the workmanlike nature of the intellect. What starts out as a mere metaphor, a work of judgment, slips back in as a structuring condition, shaping not only how the mind witnesses itself but also the way that it organizes its environment. The final sign of this dialectical process is the Essay itself, which emerged, in the end, as what Locke called “a copy of my own mind, in its several ways of operation.”84
Exhibit 2. John Milton’s Bed
The networks of metaphor elaborated in Locke’s cabinet provide a way of returning to the question of who visited Milton behind the curtains of his bed. Present there was his Muse, who “inspires / Easy” his “unpremeditated verse.” But also crowding Milton for his bedcovers were masses of poets, philosophers, writers, and thinkers who provided the grist of his deep reading. Like so many of his contemporaries, Milton was a keeper of commonplaces. Among the handful of his manuscripts that have survived the passage of time is a commonplace book owned, compiled, and consulted by Milton in his literary and poetic practice. Composed mostly of passages of political importance, the commonplace—now at the British Library—is a folio manuscript originally consisting of 126 leaves, of which more than half remain unused.85 It contains entries ordered only by the order in which Milton encountered them in his reading and thought to copy them or have them copied for him. The surviving commonplace limits itself only to the three contemporary branches of moral philosophy—“Ethicus,” “Oeconomicus,” and “Politicus”—among which it is most heavily invested in the last. It contains, therefore, quotations from Machiavelli and John Speed, historical exempla and excerpts from church historians, and remarks on ethics and politics generally. There was nothing particularly revolutionary in the form of the commonplace; unlike Locke, Milton did not propose a flexible indexing system, working up “heads” as his thinking evolved. Milton’s choice of topoi, writes Ruth Mohl, is after traditional categories, dealing with political and moral questions.86 It was accordingly useful to Milton in forming rhetorical answers to traditional political and religious questions, which is exactly how he seems to have used it.
2. Milton, poised between his amanuenses and his museum. Eugène Delacroix, Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to His Daughters. © 2014 Kunsthaus Zürich. All rights reserved.
Over the course of his lifetime, Milton would develop a profound sensitivity to the entanglement of minds with places—an embedded monism. But this is not what he inherited, or where his thinking started. Milton cut his teeth on the Aristotelianism of Christ’s College at Cambridge, where he began keeping his first set of commonplaces.87 The Cambridge curriculum he experienced was generally Aristotelian in the late Continental and Scholastic tradition;88 Aristotle’s De anima and Parva naturalia composed by far the greatest part of the proto-psychological theory Milton learned,89 though he was exposed as well to later works in the classical and medieval line elaborating Aristotle’s epistemological insights: Cicero’s philosophical and rhetorical works, Hermogenes’s Ars Rhetorica, and so on.90 Milton’s commonplace was one element of an inherited way of thinking, the Ciceronian, ultimately Aristotelian model of mind in which “invention” is the ranging of the mind over its stock of images.91 Milton himself remarks on the Ciceronian use of the commonplace in his essay The Art of Logic (1672); any rhetorical and logical inquiry begins, he insists, at the commonplace, gathering useful materials, and organizing them into an efficient design.92 The crucial point, the keynote equally for the influential strand of poetics passing through Milton and, in the event, to the empiricist project generally, is just that there is nothing in the mind but what is first in the senses. Although this would later be voiced by Locke and others, it finds its way into the British curriculum through medieval Scholasticism; as Thomas Aquinas phrased it in the Summa, nihil in intellectu est, non quod fuerit prius in sensu.93 All mental work merely manipulates objects received through the wide portals of the eyes, ears, nose, and so on.
This is clearly not a theory of poetic creation from inspiration; it is the theory of poetic creation as the just rearrangement of things already collected and available to the intellect. “There is no proceeding in invention of knowledge,” as Cambridge-trained Francis Bacon puts it, “but by similitude”; invention is entirely limited to the right ordering of things in the mind resembling things in the world.94 At least, this is how Milton’s poetics were experienced in the eighteenth century. The workmanlike poetics implied by the Aristotelian cognitive model were admired by more than one of Milton’s eighteenth-century critics. Samuel Johnson, for example, remarked that Paradise Lost displayed “the united force of study and genius; of a great accumulation of materials, with judgment to digest, and fancy to combine them: Milton was able to select from nature, or from story, from ancient fable, or from modern science, whatever could illustrate or adorn his thoughts.” In reading Paradise Lost, Johnson concludes, “we read a book of universal knowledge.”95
Where, then, is the room for inspiration? What use could a Muse possibly be to a mind like this, except as a shallow figure for the mind’s rote work of selection?96 This is precisely the question motivating a crucial moment in Paradise Lost—in which the ultimate action of the poem depends upon a scene of instruction. Words in Adam’s mouth could almost be in Francis Bacon’s, John Locke’s, or a tutor at Milton’s Christ’s College in Cambridge, for it is here that Milton offers the clearest statement of this standard version of the mind’s work. Eve has just awoken, troubled and half-seduced in a dream, the blush of her excitement still on her cheeks; Adam offers her his understanding of the mind’s structure, organizing it into reason and its lesser faculties. “In the Soule,” Adam reports,
Are many lesser Faculties that serve
Reason as chief; among these Fansie next
Her office holds; of all external things,
Which the five watchful Senses represent,
She forms Imaginations, Aerie shapes,
Which Reason joyning or disjoyning, frames
All what we affirm or what deny, and call
Our knowledge or opinion; then retires
Into her private Cell when Nature rests.
Oft in her absence mimic Fansie wakes
To imitate her; but misjoyning shapes,
Wilde work produces oft, and most in dreams,
Ill matching words and deeds long past or late. (5.100–113)
Milton offers a relatively straight version of the faculty psychology that traces its origins to Aristotle; the conceptual work of Reason hangs on the imaginations summoned by Fancy because thought is conducted entirely through the manipulation of mental materials. Adam assumes that Eve’s fancy is operating autotelically, spinning “Wilde work” out of “words and deeds” summoned up from her (still very new) memory. He asserts a theory of the mind’s faculties as though they were discrete from the materials upon which they work; what is more, it is a fantasy of control—of the clear possession of ideas—which is only complicated when Reason retires. An Aristotelian before the fact, Adam has in other words summarized what someone might have learned at Cambridge in the first half of the seventeenth century.
Over the course of his life, however, Milton adopted a nuanced monism—a development that became important to how he understood the mind’s work. The depth of his commitment has been the subject of debate, but the outlines of
