motions in the mind finding their way even to the surface of the skin. Adam perhaps silently assumes that a bed, in a grotto, is a retreat from the world, where reason and fancy can work uninterrupted. As Milton well knew, however, a bed does not offer a retreat from the world; it offers a different form of engagement. As Milton has his Muse, so Eve has a visitor; and as Milton, inspired, would wake in the morning, calling his daughter to report what he has heard, so Eve calls Adam to relay what she has witnessed. The first Muse was not Urania; it was Satan, who was during the night discovered by Ithuriel and Zephon,
Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve
Assaying by his devilish art to reach
The organs of her fancy, and with them forge
Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams,
Or, if, inspiring venom, he might taint
The animal spirits that from pure blood arise
Like gentle breaths from rivers pure, thence raise
At least distempered, discontented thoughts,
Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires
Blown up with high conceits engendering pride.97
Two theories of dream-work are offered, here; Satan indifferently puts each to the test, intent only on subverting what he takes to be the even tenor of Eve’s untroubled sleep. In the first version, Satan is attempting directly to access Eve’s imagination, bypassing the wide way of the senses directly to implant ideas there. This presents the imagination as a laboratory—what Robert Hooke in virtually the same year compared to a “suppelex” or workshop (Exhibit 11); in this account, Satan is a dualist, for the mind is its own place, functionally isomorphic with a laboratory, even if ontologically unlike. In the other, however, Satan is a monist, attempting to work directly through what appears to be a distributed soul. Here, it is not particular “organs of her fancy” that count but Eve’s blood, breath, hopes, aims, and desires. It is a question of “taint[ing]” her blood as a way of altering her “spirits.”
Woven throughout Milton’s alchemical trope of dream-making, governing the sublimation of words to ideas, is “spirit”—that tricky word Locke takes time from his remarks on metaphor briefly to unpack. It is possible, though by no means necessary, that Locke was thinking of Milton’s poem when he remarked on “angel” and “spirit” (“messenger” and “breath”) as examples of metaphor and its instruments; Locke after all had more than one copy of Paradise Lost in his library, and he was sympathetic to at least some of Milton’s politics. In any case, the circumstances of Eve’s dream display a similar set of metaphorical crossings. Satan “inspires venom”; Eve’s “animal spirits” are raised “like gentle breaths”; her desires are “blown up”; and so on. Satan appears in Milton’s account not just a bit like a minor poet, or like a poet who is like an alchemist; “spirit” leans on an etymological borrowing widely employed in imagining the poet’s breath as the motive force for returning life to formless matter. Or, to put a finer point on it, Satan appears formally like Eve’s Muse, “breathing” into her ear in the same way that Urania might inspire a poet to write. The paradox is that if there is any figure who insists on his own disembedded intellect, it is the very agent working so assiduously upon Eve’s; Satan’s first sin is to misrecognize and to disavow his relationships with and among the other angels, and his continued pride all along hovers around his own compact faith that his “mind is its own place.”98 Satan’s first sin was his experiment in philosophical dualism.
What at first looks like a straight version of the Scholastic dualism Milton inherited gives way to a more complexly entangled ecology; a simple theory of the mind as a container gives way to a more nuanced sense of thinking as an ecologically embedded activity. This shift, in the course of the poem, parallels Milton’s own intellectual development, over the course of his life. Milton arrived at an integrated sense of the intellect as an emergent entity, what Stephen M. Fallon calls his “ontological integrity.”99 The critical passage in defense of this mature monism also appears in Paradise Lost; unlike the dualist system put in the mouth of Adam, this passage has also become an important one in establishing a prehistory of ecological writing, the so-called greening of Milton.100 It is Raphael speaking, offering a metaphysical system. The world is:
… one first matter all,
Indued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and in things that live, of life;
But more refined, more spirituous, and pure,
As nearer to Him placed or nearer tending
Each in their several active spheres assigned,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportioned to each kind. So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More airy, last the bright consummate flower
Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit
Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed
To vital spirits aspire, to animal,
To intellectual, give both life and sense,
Fancy and understanding, whence the soul
Reason receives, and reason is her being.…101
The image Milton settles upon is appropriate to Adam’s garden, but this is not, in itself, what marks this as an ecological thought. The path that Milton traces here, from substance to spirit, is the clearest articulation of Milton’s monism; Adam and Raphael are bound to one another by their shared substance, differently “refined” according to the different “spheres” to which they have been “assigned.” No matter, no spirit: only the complex mutual dependencies of “one first matter” differently “indued.” As Milton puts it, in his De Doctrina, “Man is a living being, intrinsically and properly one and individual. He is not … produced from and composed of two distinct and different elements.” This is a rejection of the classical dualism of the Schools, the commonsense position he is at pains to complicate. “On the contrary,” Milton concludes, “the whole man is soul, and the soul man: a body, in other words, or individual substance: animated, sensitive, and rational.”102
The pressure of Raphael’s speech to Adam, the sense it produces, is multiply upward, and looks in this sense to be a different route to the upward pressure Locke calls “abstraction”; it borrows from an embodied vocabulary to describe the passage from cruder forms of matter “up” to spirit in its greater refinement. And it repeats this pressure in an image, a stalk bursting upward into fruit, from earth to matter and qualities more rare. Like the “spirits … breathe[d]” by the flower, so the things of the world give gradual way to things intellectual. This is what Milton calls “aspiration,” the relentless drive of things more grossly material toward more “vital spirits.” The sublimation of thing to thing, root to stalk to flower to spirit, may in fact be more subtle than even the simile suggests; it seems that precisely the spirit expressed by the flower, though naturally “indued” with different form, becomes “spirits … intellectual,” the stuff of reason and the soul. Adam and Eve tend the garden; it repays them with the substance of mind. Here, then, lies the kernel of something formally like the system Locke worked up out of the stuff of his library; “reason,” he reminds us, “becomes daily more visible, as
