the Enlightenment, where widespread linkages between political Whiggism and Newtonian empiricism combined to craft a story of the progressive upsweeping of individual practices into national purposes.41 Yet the focus on large, institutional museums has obscured the persistence of living collecting practices that flourished outside the regularizing grid of natural historical inquiry. Some of these collections were indeed absorbed into much larger collections. Some were even purchased by, acquired by, or otherwise passed through the hands of Sloane himself (Exhibit 14, for instance). Other collections, however, continue even now to exist more or less as they were originally imagined, the husks of once living cognitive practices, the idiosyncratic spaces of thought.
John Woodward, for instance, owned what he believed to be a Roman shield, which after his death passed from being the most curious of curiosities to being just a relatively minor example of late Renaissance art; it now sits, slightly dusty, in a less-visited room of the British Museum.42 It has in other words been swept up into the professionalized telling of material history. But Woodward’s core collection, his collection of mineralogical specimens, persists as specified in the terms of his will; his rocks lie in their original cabinets, in a special room, set aside from the remainder of Cambridge’s geological collection at the Sedgwick Museum (Exhibit 6). Woodward’s museum was in its own way crucial in the development of modern geology, but the very fact that it stands apart, sealed in its own particular room, is one sign that it continues to tell a story different from that of the Sedgwick collection that enwraps it. (Adam Sedgwick, who held the Woodwardian Chair endowed by the will, was the person perhaps most responsible for modernizing geology—but his story was not Woodward’s [Exhibit 7].) What is more, a collector like Woodward, especially irascible Woodward, would have bristled at the suggestion that his cabinet was only a failed experiment waiting to be rescued by mature geology.43 He had a different object in view. Indeed, this object is visible in the museum in a number of different ways, the organizing principle of the museum turning up in its arrangement, but also in several of the objects that the collection itself contains: object as object, thing as end. Looked at this way, Woodward’s collection captures a set of mental habits and a way of ordering the world. It is a relic of a life of activity. Many such collections survive—a few in situ—but they all perfect their own poetics, capturing the mind which composed them (and which they helped produce); they are the material relics of the activities in which the curatorial mind was engaged. When Woodward put pen to paper to describe his cabinet, or Alexander Pope his grotto, Reynolds his gallery, or Hooke his repository, it was with the conviction that the cabinet or grotto or gallery or repository had a particular, complete, and totalizing story to tell—which was in part a story of how each person saw the world and his place in it (see Exhibits 6, 7, 8, 11, and 21).
Each of these places offered a materially contingent model of cognition, formalizing thought as embedded in, and routed through, materially constructed worlds.44 They are particularly metaphorically rich, spaces which are themselves instantly recognizable as metaphor (sketchbooks and ledgers of accounts, for example) or which are the material rudiments of master metaphors governing other, subordinate metaphors (books, libraries, cabinets). The library, Jennifer Summit notes, has long articulated a problem of knowledge meant to be understood as a basic problem of cognition; the library came to be not a mere sorting and storage unit but a material experiment in experiences of doubt and certainty. Libraries and librarians are in this sense historically and evolutionarily linked in mutually reflexive processes of “sorting, selecting, preparing, and internalizing information”; the library made possible a model of thinking based on the storage, recall, and arrangement of little nuggets of knowledge, differently called facts, information, or ideas.45 The same processes at work in the library might therefore be understood to be at work in the mind, a vocabulary developed among the objects of learning shifted into ways of thinking about intellection generally. Such a space actively enabled the “creative, rather than static” work of memory, providing a model of how a conservative faculty might be made productive.46 And, as the library made possible such a modeling, it responded as well to developments in how the mind was understood, a point made explicitly clear in John Evelyn’s “Method for a Library According to the Intellectual Powers.” Epistemological theory, in this respect, has real consequences for how the world is arranged, and vice versa, a process visible, for instance, in the library of John Locke (Exhibit 1).
Metaphor
The empiricist revolution was not originally a revolution “out there,” as though it were a communal effort to create better rocket fuels or cancer drugs; it was, on the contrary, very much a revolution beginning “in here,” a project of mental discipline, meaning to match conceptual systems to an observable world of things. The central pillar of Bacon’s empiricist program was his effort to establish “in the human intellect … a true pattern of the world as we actually find it and not as someone’s own private reasoning hands it down to him.”47 The language appropriate to this project, as the argument goes, was suspicious of metaphor. The number of new philosophical languages developed in and around the Royal Society attests itself to the importance of matching labels to things, without the slippage introduced when words are made to do double work.48 In thinking about the place of metaphor in the empiricist project, historians of science have been quick to quote such moments as Locke’s eloquent attack on eloquence—where Locke, among other things, derides the use of tropes and figures in the pursuit of truth. And, to the extent that he was generally uncomfortable substituting a more poetic word where a prosaic one would do (his own powerful deployment of images notwithstanding), this is a generally accurate description of the empiricist project. Locke insists, in a much-cited passage, that “all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment.”49 In this sense, Locke may be said to be echoing Francis Bacon, John Wilkens, Henry Power, and a host of scholars in the same, ultimately Aristotelian tradition, who were working to transform communication from a medium of persuasion to a medium of transmission, replacing eloquence, in the common formulation, with plain facts.50
Many of the passages in which the plain style is most eloquently defended are, however, themselves promoted by dazzling turns of metaphorical prose. Take, for instance, Robert Boyle’s famous defense of the plain style: “Our design is only to inform Readers,” Boyle insists, “not to delight or perswade them…. To affect needless Rhetorical Ornaments in setting down an Experiment,” he continues, “were little less improper than it were … to paint the Eye-glasses of a Telescope.”51 Understood this way, metaphor would merely be, as Richard Rorty points out, like “using italics, or illustrations, or odd punctuation or formats. All these,” he writes, “are ways of producing effects on your interlocutor or your reader but not ways of conveying a message”;52 they are, in other words, relics of an age where communication was understood to involve rhetorical persuasion rather than the conveyance of a message. This is a keynote of the empiricist project; language in the empiricist mode is meant to be a medium for facts, information, or ideas.53 Yet Boyle’s appeal at the very least adjusts itself through a strikingly posed rhetorical ornament—which Boyle himself surely recognized. Boyle in other words encourages us to be suspicious of metaphor through a suspicious metaphor; he paints his own eyepiece. This is the first way that plain anti-rhetoricality itself leans on a set of rhetorical conventions, indeed encases itself in a rhetorical purpose, for its inbuilt work is after all to persuade.54
Boyle’s deployment of the showy metaphor of the painted eyepiece distracts attention from a different level of metaphorical work, threading its way through his prose.55 The focus on metaphor as a rhetorical choice ignores the more fundamental role that metaphor plays
