British Journal for the History of Philosophy

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Powers, abilities and skills in early modern

philosophy

Federico Boccaccini & Anna Marmodoro

To cite this article: Federico Boccaccini & Anna Marmodoro (2017) Powers, abilities and skills
in early modern philosophy, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 25:3, 435-442, DOI:
10.1080/09608788.2017.1320761

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BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, 2017
VOL. 25, NO. 3, 435–442
https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2017.1320761

INTRODUCTION

Powers, abilities and skills in early modern philosophy

Federico Boccaccinia and Anna Marmodorob
a
Department of Philosophy, University of Liege, Liege, Belgium; bFaculty of Philosophy,
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

ABSTRACT
This introduction presents a brief overview of the concept of ‘mental power’ in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and focuses on the issue of how a
sample of influential thinkers of that period conceptualized the human
agent’s mental abilities and skills as governing perception, action and moral
behaviour. This leads to innovative accounts which partially ground, in a
broad sense, modern psychology. The representative thinkers included in this
special issue are: Descartes, Cudworth, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume and Kant.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 9 March 2017; Revised 12 April 2017; Accepted 16 April 2017

KEYWORDS Early modern psychology; mental power; mental faculty; metaphysics of powers

My mind to me a kingdom is. (Sir Edward Dyer (1543–1607))

Among various themes examined in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

philosophical writings, the pervasive notion of ‘faculty’ has been widely
studied (Perler, The Faculties; see also Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will; Hatfield,
‘The Cognitive Faculties’). During these two centuries, a new psychological use
of an old metaphysical concept (dynamis, potentia) arises and it is employed
by philosophers for describing cognitive and moral capacities within a new
theory of human nature. However, the study of mental abilities is not novel,
it is reshaped on the basis of the scientific method, the systematic mechaniza-
tion of nature, observation and experience, the study of perception and vision,
the study of human body, new concepts emerging from natural philosophy
and the study of matter, and the like. Limits and stimulus-dependency of
the mind had long been a central part of seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century philosophical discussions about the scope of thought as well as the
existence of a ‘disengaged’ – pure – part of it: paraphrasing Locke, one can
say that mental powers concern all that can fall within the compass of the
mind.

CONTACT Federico Boccaccini federico.boccaccini@ulg.ac.be Department of Philosophy, Uni-

versity of Liege, Place du XX Août, 7-9, 4000 Liege, Belgium
© 2017 BSHP
436 F. BOCCACCINI AND A. MARMODORO

Scholars of early modern philosophy have focused on early modern cri-

tique of the Aristotelian-scholastic theory of vegetative, sensory and intellec-
tual faculties of the soul. The concept of ‘mental power’, in contrast, has
received little attention.
At first glance, ‘power’ and ‘faculty’ might seem synonyms, used to replace
the locution ‘being able to’. Further Latin words, to which the concept of
power is linked, are in use, potestas, potentia, facultas, virtus and vis. From
the mid-twelfth century on, the meanings of all these technical terms naturally
shade into each other. When a gradual emergence of a cognitive shift arises,
many concepts are transformed on the basis of a new conception of
nature. In Leibniz, for instance, vis activa does not precisely coincide with
potentia activa, seu facultas; Kant distinguishes between the concepts of Ver-
mögen ( facultas) and Kraft (vis, force or power) in his lectures on metaphysics.
A thin and subtle line separates metaphysics and psychology; each operation
of the mind can be described through two different conceptual oppositions:
actuality vs. potentiality, and action vs. passion. A power can be active but not
actual, or can be passive and actual. Thus, ‘able to act’ describes something
different from ‘be actualized’. Moreover, if an active, or passive, power can
be moved from potentiality to actuality, a facultas seems to play a role in
this process. Is it the case that powers and faculties map accurately onto
each other? Let us suppose that there is no distinction between faculty and
power for referring to things that the mind can do. If this were the case, phi-
losophers should explain why and how, for instance, people recognize by
experience a set of different sensory powers, such as sight, hearing, touch,
taste and smell, which manifest themselves, however, through (with no neces-
sity to be subordinated to) one and same (invisible) faculty, i.e. sensibility.
Additionally, mutatis mutandis the point applies to the further existing
powers within the faculty of intellect: attention, intuition, the capacity to
express thoughts in language, skills in literacy and numeracy, the ability to
speak a foreign language and the like. So it seems that a faculty can be struc-
tured into several powers; thus, one cannot reduce powers to mental faculties.
One thing is to say that something is a mental faculty within the human soul;
another is to say that all the living creatures are endowed with natural
capacities, abilities, skills or powers. Consequently, a history of the develop-
ment of the concept of faculties does not entirely coincide with a history of
the development of the concept of mental powers. Since psychological fac-
ulties are ‘composed’ somehow by mental powers, we need to define
power first to achieve a better understanding of faculties. Possibly this is
one of the reasons why early moderns attacked and abandoned the old meta-
physical conception of soul’s faculties, while, however, continuing to debate
about, for or against, the powers of thought – from Descartes to Kant, who
marks the limits of what we can think and know. The notion of psychological
faculty has an explicative role in the acquisition of knowledge and solves the
 BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 437

problem of scepticism. Mental powers on the other hand account for the
psychological mechanism of how human beings can learn, remember, be con-
scious, pay attention and act.
Despite their roots in scholastic doctrine, powers are not mysterious
residual scholastic entities in the mind of an agent. What is a mental
power? As Reid remarks in the first essay of the Essays on the Active
Powers of Man (1788), although the idea of power does not have its origin
in either sense perception or reflection, all human beings are endowed
with the conception of power, which is manifested in behaviour – we
exercise a power just thinking about something or acting in the world.
Putting it differently, although the concept of power is simple and cannot
be logically defined, its use is nevertheless justified in virtue of all natural
operations of the mind – capacities, abilities, skills or dispositions – which
manifest, in some sense, a cognitive or active power. But, as Kenny
points out,
in discussing abilities, and indeed dispositions and attributes of all kinds, the phi-
losopher must be constantly on his guard against the temptation to hypostatize
them. […] The difference between a power and its exercise or vehicle is a cat-
egory difference, not a difference like that between solid and shadow.
(The Metaphysics of Mind, 72)

During the early modern period, different classifications and accounts of

powers have been drawn and they reflect similar and dissimilar approaches
among philosophers. Main empiricist and rationalist accounts of powers are
often related to a different conception of the activity of thinking or are the
result of opposite epistemological principles about the nature of such activity:
powers have long been analysed and classified in terms of sensible or rational,
active or passive, cognitive or moral, simple or complex, actual or potential,
innate or acquired by experience or education. The articles collected in this
volume represent a small part of this wide range of approaches to mental
powers among early modern philosophers.
The issue opens with a paper by Gary Hatfield on Descartes’ account of sense
perception. Hatfield offers an interpretation of that account situated within the
context of Descartes’ wider philosophical project – namely, the shaking off of
the Aristotelian shackles of his schoolmen predecessors, and the systematic
mechanization of the natural world. As Hatfield illustrates, Descartes’ mechan-
istic conception of the process of sense perception of both ensouled and unen-
souled animals centred on the rejection of the scholastic idea that extrinsic
bodies transmit ‘sensible species’ to sense organs. In earning his appellation
as the ‘father of modern philosophy’, Descartes favoured an account of sense
perception which replaced the obscure ‘powers of the sensitive soul’ to
receive ‘tiny floating images’ with one that appealed to the geometric features
of the transmission of light, the stimulation of fleshly nerves and ultimately, a
438 F. BOCCACCINI AND A. MARMODORO

starkly mechanist ontology of corpuscular matter having only the properties

size, shape, position and motion.
The particular focus of the paper concerns the complexities of Descartes’
account of sense perception in constructing a theory of how the purely
mechanistic filament and fluid movements which constitute brain states
can be causally related to the phenomenal experience of light and colour
which the mind experiences. Drawing inspiration from Descartes’ conception
of the ‘natural geometry’ involved in the perception of distance, Hatfield’s
contention is that, for Descartes, the relation between the mechanical activi-
ties of the brain and the phenomenal content of the mind in the act of sen-
sible perception functions as a law-like regularity established and
maintained by the consistency of the operations of nature. Hatfield argues
that Descartes, drawing on the scholastic discussions of Aristotle’s De Interpre-
tatione, conceived of that relation as a semiotic one, wherein brain states func-
tion as signs of intrinsic sensations imbued with phenomenal content. As
Hatfield explains, this affords Descartes’ theory of sensible perception a
purely mechanistic conception of the ‘powers of the sensitive soul’, one
grounded in the natural co-variance between the corpuscular motions in
brains and the phenomenal content of minds.
Even if the Cartesian project of relegating various powers of the soul to the
mechanically mediated effects of corpuscular fluctuation was widely regarded
as successful, some saw the vestigial dualism of this new philosophy as an
opportunity to reformulate a proper taxonomy of those powers. Sarah
Hutton’s paper focuses on the details of one attempt to do so by Ralph Cud-
worth, the famed Cambridge Platonist. Although Cudworth had a ‘polydy-
namic’ conception of the mind, where a plethora of powers – of perception,
sensation and passion, mechanical and self-movement – were held together
in active, coordinated unison by a further ‘self-power’ (hegemonikon or autex-
ousion), Hutton is particularly interested in his novel account of the uncon-
scious (or ‘inconscious’) aspect of the mind. In anticipating Leibniz’s
recognition of the need for a theoretical grounding of both conscious and
unconscious mental activity, Cudworth’s aim, like Descartes and other seven-
teenth-century naturalists, was to form a theory of mind which ‘saved the
phenomena’, which he recognized must include unconscious mental events
– dreaming, the life support operations of the body (the continuance of
breathing and heartbeat), inattention, habitual activities, reflexes, etc.
Drawing from a variety of sources across Cudworth’s writing, Hutton argues
that these unconscious activities are under the guidance of and directed by
the overarching ‘self-power’ of the mind which, in the absence of a separate
faculty of will, holds them together like the wise charioteer of the Phaedo.
Although Cudworth at places identifies the autexousion of the soul with its
conscious activity of ‘self-awareness’, which would seem to tell against its
ability to be responsible for unconscious activity, Hutton notes that one of
 BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 439

Cudworth’s central metaphysical posits – the ‘plastic nature’, an active energy

responsible for governing the operations of the natural world – is a mental
power which performs its cosmic governance without consciousness. She ten-
tatively suggests that because for Cudworth the soul is a kind of microcosm of
the universe, it too may have a ‘plastic nature’ (a suggestion supported by a
number of texts), and that this may take over the role of the soul’s ‘self-
power’ during periods of unconsciousness.
The next contribution turns our attention to Locke in an examination of his
conception of the attentive power of the mind. Matthew Stuart notes that
although Locke thinks that this power is explanatorily basic, it plays a central
role in many of the explanations given of some foundational activities of the
mind: the formation of memory, of ‘clear and distinct ideas’ (a particular empha-
sis of the philosophers of his time) and of abstract ideas. But what, for Locke, is
the power of attention, and how does it perform these foundational mental
tasks? Stuart helpfully discerns Locke’s rather precise attribution of power to
the power of attention: it operates within a spectrum of degrees, its initiation
is semi-voluntary, its scope limited to entertaining only a few ideas and its
strength in doing so is limited to only a finite period of time. Given the
Lockean philosophy of mind according to which ‘ideas’ are the immediate
objects of perception, Stuart claims that, for Locke, we pay attention to outer
physical objects by paying attention to the ideas of them in our mind.
Locke’s conception of how we do so is rather complex, but Stuart interest-
ingly argues that our paying attention to an idea consists in our making it
transparent in such a way that we ‘look through’ it to the (outer) object
itself. On this interpretation, exercising the power of attention on outer
objects in the process of sense perception is tantamount to perceiving their
ideas more clearly, and indirect perception, where one’s attention is divided
among a set of sensory ideas, contrastingly consists in the distributed
‘opacity’ of those ideas. Stuart observes that his interpretation seems to con-
flict with Locke’s contention that ‘one cannot fail to perceive the ideas in one’s
mind, and they cannot fail to be just as they are perceived to be’, but argues
that the conflict is only surface-level, and that his interpretation respects the
spirit of that maxim.
In Oberto Marrama’s paper, Spinoza’s theory of consciousness, a topic
which has recently gathered a great deal of attention, is examined in detail.
Historically, it has been a long-standing question whether Spinoza’s metaphy-
sics even allows for a coherent theory of individual consciousness, given its
commitment to ‘substance monism’ and ‘thought-extension parallelism’,
which seems to entail that every extended finite being is also a thinking
being. Although most commentators have attempted to furnish the Spinozis-
tic ontology with distinct instances of consciousness by taking inspiration
from some passages in the Ethics which appear to link differing degrees of
consciousness with the differing degrees in the activity of one’s body,
440 F. BOCCACCINI AND A. MARMODORO

Marrama argues that the distinction of an active mind from a passive one is not
related to the presence or absence of consciousness. Furthermore, on Marra-
ma’s interpretation of Spinoza, the presence or absence of consciousness is
not even a valid criterion with which to distinguish human from non-
human minds. Marrama argues that taking Spinoza’s metaphysics seriously,
according to which every individual mind truly is an idea in the mind of
God, entails that all finite beings must be conceived as being endowed
with the power of consciousness.
The issue’s next paper takes an in-depth look at another sort of metaphys-
ical holism, in the form of the pre-established harmony of the Leibnizian meta-
physics. Pauline Phemister’s paper explores Leibniz’s metaphysics of monads
as primitive active and passive forces dominant over the subordinate monads
that comprise their organic bodies and with which they form animal and
animal-like corporeal substances, pointing to the tension between physical
and ethical implications of the Leibnizian philosophical position. Phemister
explicates the way in which Leibniz’s ‘windowless’ monads experience the
extrinsic world by its effects upon their organic bodies. For Leibniz, there
exists a pre-established harmony not only between one’s own body and
soul, but also between one corporeal substance and the entirety of the uni-
verse, in virtue of the interconnected and compensating perceptual experi-
ences of monads. Drawing on this fact, Phemister details how, in the
Leibnizian metaphysics, the perceptual experiences of our souls – both
those we are consciously aware of, and those we are not – have an effect
upon and are affected by the entire universe. According to Phemister, Leib-
niz’s pre-established harmony among monads encourages the adoption of
a holistic ethics wherein one’s own attitudes and beliefs play a central role
in creating a quite literal metaphysically moral fabric of the world.
Lorenzo Greco’s contribution examines Hume’s analysis of the concept of
acting conscientiously, in light of his metaphysical (or perhaps, anti-metaphys-
ical) commitments. Hume was, after all, a famous denier of the existence of an
immaterial soul and defended a compatibilist conception of free will which rele-
gated our freedom to a kind of ‘feeling within the breast’ – so what can ‘acting
according to conscience’, for Hume, really amount to? In other words, according
to Hume, what is it which has a conscience, and how could it make any differ-
ence? Greco argues that Hume, as was his wont, rejected the understanding of
conscience as a kind of mental power, which is capable of controlling one’s
behaviour. Instead, for Hume to act according to one’s conscience is to do
little more than to perform an action in accordance with a kind of self-surveying
of one’s own conduct and not, Greco argues, to act by means of the overarching
prowess of a semi-infallible capacity to command one’s behaviour (as it was
commonly understood at the time).
The last two papers in this volume focus on the major critic of unjustified
pretentions of reason, Immanuel Kant, and various aspects of his account of
 BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 441

the powers of the mind and their intrinsic possibility. In John Callanan’s paper,
Kant’s important notion of the ‘spontaneity’ of the mind is examined. For Kant,
the powers of the mind are twofold: one is receptive, exhibited primarily in the
‘sensitive intuition’ of spatial representation, the other spontaneous, exhibited
in the representation of concepts in the mind and so, in the activity of think-
ing. Callanan shows that Kant’s conception of the spontaneity of the mind is
no mere metaphor, and is not reducible to the simple ‘liberty of indifference’
typically associated with the freedom of the will that the mind has in its ability
to choose one of two alternative possible courses of action. Instead, Callanan
argues, the spontaneity of the mind refers to the fact that it has the power to
bring about intrinsic representational content which is irreducible to some set
of previously received content. In other words, Callanan claims that, for Kant,
‘spontaneity’ refers to the way in which mental content arises – namely,
ungrounded in any other content. Callanan argues that, drawing inspiration
from Cudworth and Rousseau, Kant’s conception of the spontaneity of mind
is a kind of active power (in contrast to the passive perceptual power of the
senses), in that it plays a role in the creation of mental content which arises
from itself. The role of this power in perceptual experience is to secure the
truth conditions for empirical knowledge via the familiar Kantian, transcen-
dental means, as this spontaneous power of the mind provides the very possi-
bility of such knowledge.
In closing out the volume, Patricia Kitcher’s paper provides a detailed and
comprehensive look at the power of apperception in Kant’s transcendental
philosophy. Aided by a comparison with the psychological research of his con-
temporary Johann Nicolaus Tetens (1736–1807), whom Kant studied, Kitcher
gives an analysis of why the power of apperception is often understood as
one which is transcendental, inexplicable and free. Although each of these attri-
butes in some ways apply to Kant’s conception of apperception, Kitcher claims
that previous interpretations of Kant’s metaphysics have confused the precise
role of apperception and, in failing to distinguish whether it functions as the
explanans or the explanandum in his theory of cognition, have delivered an
imprecise account of the concept. In this wide-ranging discussion, Kitcher
argues that, upon closer examination and taken in full, Kant’s writings fail to
construct a fleshed-out metaphysics which explains how apperception – or
any other power, for that matter – is itself possible.

Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to Gary Hatfield for his helpful comments on the first full draft of
this introduction, as well as to each of the contributors for their useful suggestions. A
special thanks is due to the Editor of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy,
Michael Beaney, for his support and guidance along the way.
442 F. BOCCACCINI AND A. MARMODORO

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Kenny, Anthony. The Metaphysics of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Perler, Dominik, ed. The Faculties. A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.