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 PHILOSOPHY OF MIND IN THE EARLY
MODERN AND MODERN AGES

The early modern period is arguably the most pivotal of all in the study of the mind,
teeming with a variety of conceptions of mind. Some of these posed serious questions
for assumptions about the nature of the mind, many of which still depended on notions
of the soul and God. It is an era that witnessed the emergence of theories and arguments
that continue to animate the study of philosophy of mind, such as dualism, vitalism,
materialism, and idealism.
Covering figures in philosophy such as Descartes, Hobbes, Kant, Leibniz, Cavendish
and Spinoza, Philosophy of Mind in the Early Modern and Modern Ages provides an
outstanding survey of philosophy of mind of the period. Following an introduction by
Rebecca Copenhaver, sixteen specially commissioned chapters by an international team of
contributors discuss key topics, thinkers, and debates, including

• Hobbes,
• Descartes’ philosophy of mind and its early critics,
• consciousness,
• the later Cartesians,
• Malebranche,
• Cavendish,
• Locke,
• Spinoza,
• Descartes and Leibniz,
• perception and sensation,
• desires,
• mental substance and mental activity,
• Hume, and
• Kant.

Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, enlightenment

philosophy, and the history of philosophy, Philosophy of Mind in the Early Modern and
Modern Ages is also a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as religion,
history of psychology, and history of science.
Rebecca Copenhaver is Professor of Philosophy at Lewis and Clark College, USA. Her
work has appeared in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Res Philosophica, Philosophical
Quarterly, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Journal for
the History of Philosophy, British Journal for the History of Philosophy and The Oxford
Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century. Copenhaver is the editor of the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Philosophy section of the Routledge Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.
The History of the Philosophy of Mind
General Editors: Rebecca Copenhaver and Christopher Shields

The History of the Philosophy of Mind is a major six-volume reference collection,

covering the key topics, thinkers and debates within philosophy of mind, from
Antiquity to the present day. Each volume is edited by a leading scholar in the
field and comprises chapters written by an international team of specially com-
missioned contributors.
Including a general introduction by Rebecca Copenhaver and Christopher
Shields, and fully cross-referenced within and across the six volumes, The His-
tory of the Philosophy of Mind is an essential resource for students and research-
ers in philosophy of mind, and will also be of interest to those in many related
disciplines, including Classics, Religion, Literature, History of Psychology, and
Cognitive Science.

VOL.1 PHILOSOPHY OF MIND IN ANTIQUITY

edited by John E. Sisko

VOL.2 PHILOSOPHY OF MIND IN THE EARLY AND HIGH MIDDLE AGES

edited by Margaret Cameron

VOL.3 PHILOSOPHY OF MIND IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES AND

RENAISSANCE
edited by Stephan Schmid

VOL.4 PHILOSOPHY OF MIND IN THE EARLY MODERN AND

MODERN AGES
edited by Rebecca Copenhaver

VOL.5 PHILOSOPHY OF MIND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

edited by Sandra Lapointe

VOL.6 PHILOSOPHY OF MIND IN THE TWENTIETH AND

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES
edited by Amy Kind
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND IN
THE EARLY MODERN AND
MODERN AGES
The History of the Philosophy of Mind,
Volume 4

Edited by Rebecca Copenhaver

First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Rebecca Copenhaver; individual chapters,
the contributors
The right of Rebecca Copenhaver to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Copenhaver, Rebecca, 1971– editor.
Title: Philosophy of mind in the early modern and modern ages / edited by
Rebecca Copenhaver.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: The history of the philosophy
of mind ; Volume 4 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017060253 | ISBN 9781138243958 (hardback : alk. paper) |
ISBN 80429508158 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy of mind—History—17th century. | Philosophy of
mind—History—18th century.
Classification: LCC BD418.3 .P4844 2018 | DDC 128/.20903—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017060253
ISBN: 978-1-138-24395-8 (Vol IV, hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-50815-8 (Vol IV, ebk)
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 CONTENTS

List of contributorsvii
General introductionxi
REBECCA COPENHAVER AND CHRISTOPHER SHIELDS

Introduction to volume 4 1
REBECCA COPENHAVER

1 “Where is my mind?”: locating the mind metaphysically

in Hobbes 16
AMY M. SCHMITTER

2 The Cambridge Platonists: material and immaterial substance 43

JASPER REID

3 Descartes’ philosophy of mind and its early critics 69

ANTONIA LOLORDO

4 Reflection and consciousness: the later Cartesians 91

STEVEN NADLER

5 Malebranche on mind 107

JULIE WALSH

6 Cavendish and Conway on the individual human mind 134

KAREN DETLEFSEN

7 Locke and the metaphysics of “state of sensibility” 157

VILI LÄHTEENMÄKI

v
 C ontents

8 Spinoza on thinking substance and the non-substantial mind 174

BETH LORD

9 Two theories of mind as an immaterial substance: Descartes

and Leibniz 195
MARTHA BRANDT BOLTON

10 Leibniz on perception, sensation, apperception, and conscientia220

CHRISTIAN BARTH

11 Leibniz on appetitions and desires 245

JULIA JORÁTI

12 Minds and persons in the Clarke Collins Correspondence 266

WILLIAM UZGALIS

13 Mental substance and mental activity in Berkeley 284

MARGARET ATHERTON

14 Thomas Reid’s common sense philosophy of mind 298

TODD BURAS

15 Persons and passions in Hume’s philosophy of mind 318

ANGELA M. COVENTRY

16 Kant on the mind 342

ANDREW BROOK

Index 363

vi
 CONTRIBUTORS

Margaret Atherton is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University

of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She works primarily in the history of early modern
philosophy, with special focus of Locke, Berkeley, philosophy of perception
and the recovery of early modern women in philosophy. She is the author
of Berkeley’s Revolution in Vision (Cornell University Press, 1990) and has
edited several collections, including Women Philosophers of the Early Mod-
ern Period (Hackett, 1994), and has published numerous articles in her areas
of interest.
Christian Barth is a lecturer in philosophy at Humboldt University Berlin. He is
the author of Objectivity and the Language-Dependence of Thought: A Tran-
scendental Defence of Universal Lingualism (Routledge, 2010) and Intention-
alität und Bewusstsein in der frühen Neuzeit: Die Philosophie des Geistes von
René Descartes und Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Klostermann, 2017) and has
published numerous articles on contemporary philosophy of mind and lan-
guage as well as on early modern thinkers, with special focus on Descartes
and Leibniz.
Martha Brandt Bolton is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New
Brunswick. She has written numerous articles on various aspects of the work of
a number of early modern philosophers, including Descartes, Locke, Leibniz,
Arnauld, Catharine Cockburn, Berkeley and Hume. Her recent work focuses
on Locke’s Essay and Leibniz’s Nouveaux Essais, Descartes and Locke on the
relation between substances and modes, and Mary Shepherd’s metaphysical
system and theory of perception.
Andrew Brook is Chancellor’s Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Sci-
ence Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at Carleton University,
Ottawa, Canada. He is the only person to have been president of both the
Canadian Philosophical Association and the Canadian Psychoanalytic Soci-
ety. He has about 130 publications, including eight authored, co-authored or
edited books.

vii
 C ontributors

Todd Buras is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University. He is

co-editor (with Rebecca Copenhaver) of Thomas Reid on Mind, Knowledge,
and Value (Oxford University Press, 2015). His essays on Thomas Reid have
appeared in journals such as Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy and Phe-
nomenological Research, Journal of the History of Philosophy and History of
Philosophy Quarterly.
Rebecca Copenhaver is Professor of Philosophy at Lewis and Clark College,
USA. Her work has appeared in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Res Philo-
sophica, Philosophical Quarterly, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, History of
Philosophy Quarterly, Journal for the History of Philosophy, British Journal for
the History of Philosophy and the Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the
Eighteenth Century. Copenhaver is the editor of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth-
Century philosophy section of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Angela M. Coventry is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Portland State Uni-
versity. She is the author of two books: Hume’s Theory of Causation: A Quasi-
Realist Interpretation and Hume: A Guide for the Perplexed. In addition, she
has published several articles and book reviews in journals such as Hume Stud-
ies, Locke Studies, Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy, History of Phi-
losophy Quarterly, Mind and The European Legacy.
Karen Detlefsen is Professor of Philosophy and Education at the University of
Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on early modern philosophy, including the
history and philosophy of education, and women in the history of philosophy.
She has published on a number of figures in early modern philosophy, includ-
ing Astell, Cavendish, Conway, Descartes, Du Châtelet, Hobbes, Leibniz,
Malebranche and Wolff, covering topics in metaphysics, the natural sciences
and political philosophy. She has held grants from the National Science Foun-
dation, the American Council of Learned Society (with Andrew Janiak, Duke
University), the Australian Research Council (with Jacqueline Broad, Monash
University) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (with
Lisa Shapiro, Simon Fraser University, and Marguerite Deslauriers, McGill
University).
Julia Joráti is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University. Her
research focuses on early modern philosophy, particularly Gottfried Leibniz.
She is the author of Leibniz on Causation and Agency (Cambridge, 2017) and
of numerous articles on Leibniz’s metaphysics, philosophy of action and phi-
losophy of mind.
Vili Lähteenmäki is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the University
of Helsinki. His published work includes articles on attention, perception, con-
sciousness and the self in Descartes, Cudworth, Locke, Clarke and Collins, as
well as methodological reflections related to conceptual change in historical
theories concerning subjectivity.

viii
 C ontributors

Antonia LoLordo is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. She is

the author of Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of a New Philosophy (Cambridge,
2007) and Locke’s Moral Man (Oxford, 2012), as well as papers on Descartes,
Edwards, Gassendi, Hobbes, Hume, Locke and Malebranche. She is currently
working on an edition of Mary Shepherd’s Essays on the Perception of an
External Universe.
Beth Lord is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. She is the
author of Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Philosophy and Immanence
From Jacobi to Deleuze (2011) and Spinoza’s Ethics: An Edinburgh Philo-
sophical Guide (2010), and editor of Spinoza’s Philosophy of Ratio (2018)
and Spinoza Beyond Philosophy (2012). She is working on a book on Spinoza
and equality.
Steven Nadler is the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy and the Evjue-
Bascom Professor in Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His
books include Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas, Malebranche
and Ideas, Spinoza’s Ethics: An introduction, Occasionalism: Causation
Among the Cartesians, Spinoza: A Life, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s
Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age and The Philosopher, the
Priest and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes. His edited books include The
Blackwell Companion to Early Modern Philosophy and Spinoza and Medieval
Jewish Philosophy.
Jasper Reid is a senior lecturer in philosophy at King’s College London. He has
published articles on figures including Henry More, René Descartes, Nicolas
Malebranche, George Berkeley and Jonathan Edwards, and is the author of The
Metaphysics of Henry More (Springer, 2012).
Amy M. Schmitter is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta (Can-
ada), and currently serves as Editor for the Canadian Journal of Philosophy and
Hume Studies, as well as Secretary for the Canadian Philosophical Association.
Although she dabbles in many things, her main areas of research are the his-
tory of early modern philosophy, and the philosophy of art, with special atten-
tion to issues of power, representation, the passions, gender and methodology.
Recent and forthcoming publications include articles on Descartes, Poulain de
la Barre, Malebranche and Hume, as well as work in the Oxford Handbook
of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century, the Oxford Handbook of
British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, the Cambridge Companion to
Descartes’s Meditations and the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
William Uzgalis is an Emeritus Professor in the School of History, Philosophy
and Religion at Oregon State University. He has published a modern edition of
The Correspondence of Samuel Clarke and Anthony Collins 1707–08, Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding: A Reader’s Guide, as well as a
number of articles on Collins, Locke and emergent properties.

ix
 C ontributors

Julie Walsh is an assistant professor at Wellesley College. She has published in

early modern philosophy, with focus on the metaphysics and ethics of human
freedom, both human and divine, including papers in the Journal of the His-
tory of Philosophy, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Journal of
the American Philosophical Association, and History of Philosophy Quarterly.
She also has research and teaching interests in the work of the women philoso-
phers of the medieval and early modern periods.

x
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Rebecca Copenhaver and Christopher Shields

How far back does the history of philosophy of mind extend? In one sense, the
entire history of the discipline extends no further than living memory. Construed
as a recognized sub-discipline of philosophy, philosophy of mind seems to have
entered the academy in a regular way only in the latter half of the twentieth cen-
tury. At any rate, as an institutional matter, courses listed under the name ‘Philoso-
phy of Mind’ or ‘The Mind-Body Problem’ were rare before then and seem not
to have become fixtures of the curriculum in Anglo-American universities until
the 1960s.1 More broadly, construed as the systematic self-conscious reflection on
the question of how mental states and processes should be conceived in relation
to physical states and processes, one might put the date to the late nineteenth or
early twentieth century.
One might infer on this basis that a six-volume work on The History of Philoso-
phy of Mind extending back to antiquity is bound to be anachronistic: we cannot,
after all, assume that our questions were the questions of, say, Democritus, work-
ing in Thrace in the fifth century BC, or of Avicenna (Ibn-Sînâ), active in Persia in
the twelfth century, or of John Blund, the Oxford- and Paris-trained Chancellor of
the see of York from 1234–1248, or, for that matter, of the great German philoso-
pher and mathematician Leibniz (1646–1716). One might on the contrary think it
prima facie unlikely that thinkers as diverse as these in their disparate times and
places would share very many preoccupations either with each other or with us.
Any such immediate inference would be unduly hasty and also potentially mis-
leading. It would be misleading not least because it relies on an unrealistically
unified conception of what we find engaging in this area: philosophy of mind
comprises today a wide range of interests, orientations, and methodologies, some
almost purely a priori and others almost exclusively empirical. It is potentially
misleading in another way as well, heading in the opposite direction. If we pre-
sume that the only thinkers who have something useful to say to us are those
engaging the questions of mind we find salient, using idioms we find congenial,
then we will likely overlook some surprising continuities as well as instructive
discontinuities across these figures and periods.
Some issues pertinent to mental activity may prove perennial. Of equal impor-
tance, however, are the differences and discontinuities we find when we investigate

xi
 R E B E C C A C O P E N H AV E R A N D C H R I S T O P H E R S H I E L D S

questions of mind assayed in earlier periods of thought. In some cases, it is true,

we find it difficult to determine without careful investigation whether difference
in idiom suffices for difference in interest or orientation. For instance, it was once
commonplace to frame questions about mental activity as questions about the
soul, where today questions posed about the nature of the soul and its relation to
the body are apt to sound to many to be outmoded or at best quaintly archaic. Yet
when we read what, for instance, medieval philosophers investigated under that
rubric, we are as likely as not to find them reflecting on such core contemporary
concerns as the nature of perception, the character of consciousness, the relation
of mental faculties to the body, and the problem of intentionality – and to be doing
so in a manner immediately continuous with some of our own preoccupations.
That said, even where upon examination we find little or no continuity between
present-day and earlier concerns, this very difference can be illuminating. Why,
for instance, is the will discussed so little in antiquity? Hannah Arendt suggests
an answer: the will was not discussed in antiquity because it was not discovered
before St. Augustine managed to do so in the third century.2 Is she right? Or is the
will in fact discussed obliquely in antiquity, enmeshed in a vocabulary at least ini-
tially alien to our own? On the supposition that Arendt is right, and the will is not
even a topic of inquiry before Augustine, why should this be so? Should this make
us less confident that we have a faculty rightly called ‘the will’? Perhaps Augus-
tine not so much discovered the will as invented it, to give it pride of place in
his conception of human nature. A millennium later Thomas Aquinas contended
that the will is but one power or faculty of the soul, as an intellectual appetite for
the good (ST I 82, resp.). Is he right? Is the will as examined by Augustine and
Aquinas the same will of which we ask, when we do, whether our will is free or
determined?
A study of the history of philosophy of mind turns up, in sum, some surprising
continuities, some instructive partial overlaps, and some illuminating discontinui-
ties across the ages. When we reflect on the history of the discipline, we bring
into sharper relief some of the questions we find most pressing, and we inevitably
come to ask new and different questions, even as we retire questions which we
earlier took to be of moment. Let us reflect first then on some surprising continui-
ties. Three illustrations will suffice, but they could easily be multiplied.
First, consider some questions about minds and machines: whether machines
can be conscious or otherwise minded, whether human intelligence is felicitously
explicated in terms of computer software, hardware, or functional processes more
generally. Surely such questions belong to our era uniquely? Yet we find upon
reading some early modern philosophy that this is not so. In Leibniz, for instance,
we find this striking passage, known as ‘Leibniz’s mill’:

Imagine there were a machine whose structure produced thought, feel-

ing, and perception; we can conceive of its being enlarged while main-
taining the same relative proportions, so that we could walk into it as we
can walk into a mill. Suppose we do walk into it; all we would find there

xii
 G eneral introduction

are cogs and levers and so on pushing one another, and never anything
to account for a perception. So perception must be sought in simple sub-
stances, not in composite things like machines. And that is all that can be
found in a simple substance – perceptions and changes in perceptions;
and those changes are all that the internal actions of simple substances
can consist in.
(Monadology §17)

Leibniz offers an argument against mechanistic conceptions of mental activity in

this passage, one with a recognizably contemporary counterpart. His view may
be defensible or it may be indefensible; but it is certainly relevant to questions
currently being debated.
Similarly, nearly every course in philosophy of mind these days begins with
some formulation of the ‘mind-body problem’, usually presented as a descendant
of the sort of argument Descartes advanced most famously in his Meditations, and
defended most famously in his correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia. Cen-
turies before Descartes, however, we encounter the Islamic polymath Avicenna
(Ibn-Sînâ) wondering in detail about the question of whether the soul has or lacks
quantitative extension, deploying a striking thought experiment in three separate
passages, one of which runs:

One of us must suppose that he was just created at a stroke, fully devel-
oped and perfectly formed but with his vision shrouded from perceiving
all external objects – created floating in the air or in space, not buffeted
by any perceptible current of the air that supports him, his limbs sepa-
rated and kept out of contact with one another, so that they do not feel
each other. Then let the subject consider whether he would affirm the
existence of his self. There is no doubt that he would affirm his own
existence, although not affirming the reality of any of his limbs or inner
organs, his bowels, or heart or brain or any external thing. Indeed he
would affirm the existence of this self of his while not affirming that it
had any length, breadth or depth. And if it were possible for him in such
a state to imagine a hand or any other organ, he would not imagine it to
be a part of himself or a condition of his existence.
(Avicenna, ‘The Book of Healing’)

Avicenna’s ‘Floating Man’ or ‘Flying Man’, reflects his Neoplatonist orientation

and prefigures in obvious ways Descartes’ more celebrated arguments of Medita-
tions II. Scholars dispute just how close this parallel is,3 but it seems plain that
these arguments and parables bear a strong family resemblance to one another,
and then each in turn to a yet earlier argument by Augustine,4 more prosaically
put, but engaging many of the same themes.
The point is not to determine who won the race to this particular argument, nor
to insist that these authors arrive at precisely the same finish line. Rather, when

xiii
 R E B E C C A C O P E N H AV E R A N D C H R I S T O P H E R S H I E L D S

we study each expression in its own context, we find illuminating samenesses

and differences, which in turn assist us in framing our own questions about the
character of the quantitative and qualitative features of mind, about the tenability
of solipsism, and about the nature of the human self. One would like to know, for
instance, whether such a narrow focus on the internal states of human conscious-
ness provides a productive method for the science of mind. Or have our philosophi-
cal forebears, as some today think, created impediments by conceiving of the very
project in a way that neglects the embodied characteristics of cognition? From
another angle, one may wonder whether these approaches, seen throughout the
history of the discipline, lead inexorably to Sartre’s conclusion that ‘conscious-
ness is a wind blowing from nowhere towards objects’?5 One way to find out is to
study each of these approaches in the context of its own deployment.
For a final example, we return to the birthplace of Western philosophy to reflect
upon a striking argument of Democritus in the philosophy of perception. After
joining Leucippus in arguing that the physical world comprises countless small
atoms swirling in the void, Democritus observes that only atoms and the void are,
so to speak, really real. All else exists by convention: ‘by convention sweet and by
convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour;
but in reality atoms and void’ (DK 68B9). This remark evidently denies the real-
ity of sensible qualities, such as sweetness and bitterness, and even colour. What
might Democritus be thinking? By judging this remark alongside his remaining
fragments, we see that he is appealing to the variability of perception to argue that
if one perceiver tastes a glass of wine and finds it sweet, while another perceiver
tastes the same glass and finds it bitter, then we must conclude – on the assump-
tion that perceptual qualities are real – that either one or the other perceiver is
wrong. After all, they cannot both be right, and there seems little point in treating
them as both wrong. The correct conclusion, Democritus urges, is that sensible
qualities, in contrast to atoms and the void, are not real. The wine is neither sweet
nor bitter; sweetness and bitterness are wholly subjective states of perceivers.
Readers of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British philosophy will recog-
nize this argument in Locke and Berkeley. Locke presents the argument to support
his distinction between primary and secondary qualities: primary qualities being
those features of objects that are (putatively) in objects, independently of percep-
tion, such as number, shape, size, and motion; secondary qualities being those fea-
tures of objects subject to the variability of perception recognized by Democritus.
Locke struggles with the reality of secondary qualities, sometimes treating them
as ideas in our minds and other times as dispositions of the primary qualities of
objects that exist independently of us. Democritus, by contrast, aligning the real
with the objective, simply banishes them to the realm of convention. And Berkeley
appeals to the same phenomenon on which Locke founds his famous ­distinction –
the variability of perception – to argue that the distinction is unsustainable and
thus embraces the anti-Democritean option: the real is the ideal.
We may ask which if any of these philosophers deserves to be followed. As an
anecdotal matter, when beginning philosophy students grasp the point of arguments

xiv
 G eneral introduction

from the variability of perception, they become flummoxed, because before hav-
ing their attention focussed on the phenomenon of variability, most tend to think
of sensible qualities as intrinsic monadic properties of the external objects of
perception. This issue in the philosophy of perception, straddling as it does dif-
ferent periods and idioms, remains a live one, proving as vivid for us as it was
for Democritus and Locke.
When we find similar philosophical arguments and tropes recurring in radically
different periods and contexts throughout the history of philosophy, that is usually
at least a strong prima facie indication that we are in an area demanding careful
scrutiny. Unsurprisingly, arguments concerning the nature of perception and per-
ceptible qualities offer one telling illustration. Still, we should resist the tempta-
tion to find continuities where none exist, especially where none exist beyond the
verbal or superficial. We should moreover resist, perhaps more strongly still, the
tendency to minimize or overlook differences where they appear. One of the intel-
lectual joys of studying the history of philosophy resides precisely in uncovering
and appreciating the deep discontinuities between disparate times and contexts.
On this score, examples abound, but one suffices to illustrate our point. The title
of a widely read article written in the 1960s posed a provocative question: ‘Why
Isn’t the Mind-Body Problem Ancient?’.6 This question, of course, has a presup-
position, namely that the mind-body problem is in fact not ancient. It also seems
to betray a second presupposition, namely that there is a mind-body problem: a
single problem that that engages philosophers of the modern era but that escaped
the ancients. This presupposition raises the question: what is the single, unified,
mind-body problem that the ancients failed to recognize? In fact, when we turn
to the range of questions posed in this domain, we find a family of recognizably
distinct concerns: the hard problem, the explanatory gap, mental causation, and so
on. Not all these questions have a common orientation, even if they arise from a
common anxiety that the mind and the body are at once so dissimilar that inquir-
ing into their relationship may already be an error, and yet so similar in their
occupation and operation as to obliterate any meaningful difference.
We might call this anxiety categorial. That is, it has seemed to various philoso-
phers in various eras that there is some basic categorial distinction to be observed
in the domain of the mental, to the effect that mental states belong to one category
and physical states to another. That by itself might be true without, however, there
being any attendant problem. After all, we might agree that there is a categorial
distinction between, say, biological properties and mathematical properties, and
even that these families of properties are never co-instantiable. After all, no num-
ber can undergo descent with modification, and no animal can be a cosine. That is
hardly a problem: no one expects numbers to be biological subjects, and no one
would ever mistake an organism for a mathematical function. The problem in the
domain of the mental and physical seems to arise only when we assume that some
objects – namely ourselves – exhibit both mentality and physicality, and do so in
a way that is systematic and unified. Bringing these thoughts together we arrive at
a mind-body problem: if mental and physical properties are categorially exclusive

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while we ourselves are mental and physical at once, we must be what we cannot
be, namely subjects of properties that cannot coincide.
In this sense, Cartesian dualism might be regarded as a solution to the mind-
body problem, at least this mind-body problem, one which simply concedes its
conclusion by affirming that minds and bodies are irredeemably different sorts
of substances displaying different sorts of properties. Needless to say, this ‘solu-
tion’ invites a series of still more intractable problems concerning the interaction
of these postulated disparate substances, about the location of the mental, and so
forth. Even so, when the Cartesian expedient is rejected on these or other grounds,
the old problem re-emerges, in one guise yielding an equally desperate seem-
ing sort of solution, namely the total elimination of the mental as ultimately not
amenable to a purely physicalistic characterization.7 Eliminativism, no less than
Cartesianism, solves the mind-body problem by effectively by concession.
One should accordingly look afresh at the problem as formulated. In fact, when
one asks what these purportedly mutually excluding properties may be, several can-
didates come to the fore. Some think properties such as being conscious are mental
and cannot possibly be physical, perhaps because conscious states are ineliminably
subjective, whereas all physical properties are objective, or because mental prop-
erties are essentially qualitative, whereas physical properties are only quantitative.
Descartes’ own reasons, though disputed, seem to have been largely epistemic: pos-
sibly one can doubt the existence of one’s body, whereas it is impossible, because
self-defeating, to doubt the existence of one’s own mind or mental states (Meditation
II). If these property-differences obtain in these domains and are in fact such as to
be mutually exclusive, then we do now have the makings of a mind-body problem.
Returning, then, to the question pertinent to our study of the ancient period, we
may ask: do the ancients draw these sorts of categorial distinctions? If so, why do
they fail to appreciate the problems we find so familiar and obvious? Or do they in
fact fail to draw these categorial distinctions in the first place? If they do not, then
one would like to know why not. One can imagine a number of different options
here: one could fault the ancients for failing to pick up on such starkly categorial
differences; one could credit them for astutely avoiding the conceptual muddles of
Cartesianism. Some argue, for instance, that Aristotelian hylomorphism embraces
a framework of explanation within which Cartesian questions simply cannot arise,
thereby obviating an array of otherwise intractable problems.8 Although we do not
attempt to litigate these issues here, one can appreciate how an investigation into
ancient approaches to philosophy of mind yields palpable benefits for some modern
questions, even if and perhaps precisely because such questions were not ancient.
Needless to say, we never know in advance of our investigations whether the
benefits of such study are forthcoming. To make such discoveries as can be made
in this area, then, we need ask a set of questions similar to those we asked regard-
ing the mind-body problem, mutatis mutandis, for other philosophical problems
in the mental domain, broadly construed, as they arise in other periods of philoso-
phy beyond ancient philosophy as well.

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If we proceed in this way, we find that the study of the history of philoso-
phy of mind offers the contemporary philosopher perspectives on the discipline
which, however far below the surface, may yet guide our own inquiries into the
mental and physical, and into the character of mental and physical states and
processes. This is, of course, but one reason to engage the studies these six vol-
umes contain. Other researchers with a more purely historical orientation will
find a wealth of material in these pages as well, ranging across all periods of
western philosophy, from antiquity to that part of the discipline that resides in
living memory. Our historical and philosophical interests here may, of course,
be fully complementary: the history of philosophy of mind takes one down
some odd by-ways off some familiar boulevards, into some dead-ends and cul-
de-sacs, but also along some well-travelled highways that are well worth tra-
versing over and again.

Notes
1 A perusal of the course offerings of leading universities in the US tends to confirm this.
To take but one example, which may be multiplied, a search of the archives of the Uni-
versity of Notre Dame lists one course in ‘Philosophy of Mind’ offered as an advanced
elective in 1918 and 1928, 1929, but then no further course until 1967, when ‘The Mind-
Body Problem,’ began to be offered yearly off and on for two decades. In the 1970s,
various electives such as ‘Mind and Machines’ were offered intermittently, and a regular
offering in ‘Philosophy of Mind’ began only in 1982. This offering continues down to
the present. While we have not done a comprehensive study, these results cohere with
archive searches of several other North American universities.
2 Arendt sees prefigurations in St. Paul and others, but regards Augustine as ‘the first phi-
losopher of the will and the only philosopher the Romans ever had’ (1978, vol. ii, 84).
3 For an overview of these issues, see Marmura (1986).
4 On the relation between Descartes and Augustine, see the instructive treatment in Mat-
thews (1992).
5 Sartre (1943: 32–33).
6 Matson (1966). Citing Matson’s question, King (2007) went on to pose a continuing
question of his own: ‘Why Isn’t the Mind-Body Problem Medieval?’. In so doing, King
meant to oppose Matson, who had claimed that the one should not assume that medieval
philosophers, although writing in a recognizably Aristotelian idiom, similarly failed to
engage any mind-body problem. After all, he noted, in addition to their Aristotelianism,
they accepted a full range of theistic commitments alien to Aristotle.
7 Eliminativism about the mental has a long a chequered history, extending at least as far
back as Broad (1925) (who rejects it), but has its most forceful and accessible formula-
tion in Churchland (1988).
8 Charles (2008) has advanced this sort of argument on behalf of hylomorphism.

Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. 1978. The Life of the Mind, vols. i and ii. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.
Broad, C. D. 1925. The Mind and Its Place in Nature. London: Routledge & Kegan.

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Charles, David. 2008. “Aristotle’s Psychological Theory”. Proceedings of the Boston Area
Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 24: 1–29.
Churchland, P. M. 1988. Matter and Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
King, Peter. 2007. “Why Isn’t the Mind-Body Problem Medieval?” In Forming the Mind:
Essays on the Internal Senses and the Mind/Body Problem From Avicenna to the Medi-
cal Enlightenment, 187–205. Berlin: Springer.
Marmura, Michael. 1986. “Avicenna’s Flying Man in Context”. The Monist 69(3): 383–395.
Matson, Wallace. 1966. “Why Isn’t the Mind-Body Problem Ancient?” In Mind, Matter,
and Method: Essays in Philosophy and Science in Honor of Herbert Feigl, 92–102. St.
Paul: University of Minnesota Press.
Matthews, Gareth. 1992. Thought’s Ego in Augustine and Descartes. Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943. “Une Idée fondamentale de la phénomenologie de Husserl:
L’intentionalité”. In Situations I. Paris: Gallimard.

xviii
 INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 4

Rebecca Copenhaver

1. Introduction
The beginning of the early modern age teems with a variety of conceptions of
mind. Looking there, we find conceptions familiar to us today, such as dualism.
But we also find striking alternatives that unsettle the categories we inherited
from the framework we now call Cartesian, though Descartes (1596–1650) him-
self may not have claimed that framework. In the 1600s matters of mind were
still matters of soul, and the emerging sciences sought to incorporate the mind
into God’s natural order, sometimes quite literally. Doing so required confront-
ing a number of topics that would embarrass an austere mechanistic dualism: the
similarities between human minds and animal minds, the coincidence between
living things and things with minds, the nature and variety of mental activities
other than thought (sensation, perception, the passions). We find vitalism, panpsy-
chism, non-mechanistic materialism, idealism, and still more positions about the
mind and its place in creation for which we have no -isms. What unites these early
modern approaches is a search for unity: a picture of the universe that makes sense
of mind and nature. This project finds grand expression in Spinoza (1632–1677)
and Leibniz (1646–1716), each of whom insist that the mind and its role in the
universe cannot be explained by, or in relation to, mechanistic causation: the uni-
verse itself is an expression of mind, for its most fundamental relation is a mental
relation: intelligibility.
Why, then, did Locke’s (1632–1704) remarks that God could make matter think
send shock waves through the philosophical community?1 The idea was far from
new. Locke’s remarks shocked not because of what he claimed, but how he treated
that claim: perhaps God made matter think, perhaps thinking is distinct from
matter – either way, it would be a brute fact about which we can only speculate.
Rather than seek a grand system of nature by which we can explain mind by
locating it within that system, Locke took a different approach. Here we find the
beginnings of a subtle but important shift away from the metaphysics of mind to
what we would now call psychology. We find philosophers attending less to what
the mind is and more to what the mind does. The shift is by no means abrupt,
as though for the first time people were thinking about the nature of sensation,

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perception, memory, imagination, consciousness, and other mental activities. But

the methods and aims of the science of mind changed nonetheless. Methodologi-
cally, natural philosophers sought regularities in nature, including regularities
that could explain how minds work. The scope of the natural philosopher’s pro-
ject extended only to what could be subsumed under increasingly general laws
describing such regularities. This included anatomy and other mechanisms of
mind, but it also included phenomena that could be observed by reflective atten-
tion to the operations of mind.
By the time we reach Hume (1711–1776) and Kant (1704–1804), we find our-
selves in different territory from that inhabited by the early moderns. The dif-
ferences between the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the early modern
period do not support the familiar and satisfying story of a brave generation of
philosophical rebels throwing off all scholastic tradition to create a philosophy
for the modern era. Nevertheless, by the late 1700s the philosophy of mind was
profoundly changed, its subject narrowed from the whole of nature to the nature
of mind, and its conception of the nature of mind expanded to include what mind
presents to those with minds. A natural philosopher who wished to explain per-
ception, for example, had to observe carefully what perceptual experience is like
for perceivers, by perceivers’ own lights. These methodological changes did not
culminate in Kant but rather persisted through the nineteenth century. It was not
until the late nineteenth century that psychology emerged as a discipline inde-
pendent of natural philosophy. The seeds of that science, however, were planted
in the modern era.

2. Materialisms
Because early modern conceptions of mind are so various, and some remote from
our current vantage, it is useful to enter this philosophical landscape by consider-
ing a system that is both austere and familiar: the mechanistic materialism of Hob-
bes (1588–1679).2 Hobbes is a materialist: all the operations of nature, including
the operations of mind, are operations of matter. He is also a mechanist: matter
is portioned by place, and motion is transferred by contact. All the operations of
nature, from the behavior of plants and non-human animals, to the activities of
mind, are particular instances of a universal phenomenon: matter in motion.
Mechanistic materialism affords tremendous explanatory breadth, but that
breadth raises a host of related problems. Why are some motions in matter sensi-
tive, as when one touches a warm plate, while others are not, as when one warm
plate touches another? Why are some motions in matter world-directed, as when
one sees a cup on a table, while others are not, as when one places a cup on a
table – my seeing is about the cup, but the cup is not about the table. Similar
questions arise for motions in matter that are normative and teleological. We see
early on something like the hard problem:3 in order to maintain the explanatory
benefits of treating the operations of mind as unified with the other operations in
nature, one must explain by appeal to the same principles – matter, motion, place,

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impact – the difference between mental material motions and non-mental material
motions.
One promising approach to these problems, taken by Hobbes and others, looks
to the point of interaction that most clearly exhibits both matter in motion and
mental activity: sensory events, and the results of sensory events. Perceiving,
imagining, conceiving, remembering – all trace back to a moment in which a sen-
sory organ is materially affected (impressed), which affection is felt. This moment
of felt impression is a representation, or fit to give rise to a representation, which
informs at least in part because it is a moment of transmission. Mental material
motions differ from non-mental material motions in being representational in the
broadest sense of the term. This solution characterizes the mental while securing
its materialist, mechanistic legitimacy through a kind of genealogy that traces
back to moments of felt material impression.
And yet even among materialists, one finds a nagging dissatisfaction that repre-
sentation alone is too inert, too passive, to account for the varieties of intentional-
ity, normativity, and teleology found in such mental activities as remembering,
judging, planning, and resolving. In response, Hobbes and others appealed to a
notion that is alien to us now: conatus, understood variously as endeavor, impe-
tus, resistance, and force. Materialists such as Hobbes still understood conatus
as a motive aspect of matter, but the appeal to conatus reveals an anxiety that
something in addition to mere matter in motion is required for a complete account
of a nature that includes minds. Yet this anxiety may be special to mechanistic
materialism. As we will see (section 4), there were other materialisms in the early
modern age that did not want for spirit and activity.

3. Dualisms
Materialism promises to make sense of the mind and nature through unity: it
presents a single system of the world that incorporates the mind, quite literally.
Despite its name, dualism seeks the same end: to provide an exhaustive, unified
account of the operations of nature and the mind’s occupation in it. Dualists of the
early modern age did not propose two worlds: a manifest world of material things,
and a second, ghostly animation, invisible and submerged.4 If that is Cartesian-
ism, then no one in the early modern period proposed or promoted it, including
Descartes (1596–1650).5 Moreover, there is no single dualism that characterizes
this period. Early modern dualism was born and developed in dispute. Descartes,
More (1614–1687), Cudworth (1617–1688), and others wrote in response to one
another, both in correspondence and in publication. The result is a variety of
dualisms formed by intense philosophical disagreement and in reaction to non-
dualist systems such as those proposed by Hobbes and Spinoza. Finally, despite
Descartes’ self-proclaimed originality, his work and the work of other early mod-
ern thinkers is continuous with the philosophies of the late Middle Ages and the
Renaissance. The Cambridge Platonists in particular worked from astonishing
breadth of influences, from classical sources including Stoicism and Atomism, to

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the late Platonism in Origen (185–253 CE) and Plotinus (204/5–270 CE), as well
as Kabbalist and Hermetic mysteries.6
There are more dualisms, then, than are dreamt of in the philosophies of the
current curricula in Anglophone universities. The dualism we find there is familiar
to us: it is the dualism of minds and bodies. But the dualism that animated More,
Malebranche (1638–1715), and others was the dualism of nature and super-nature:
of creation and its creator.7 If materialism faced the problem of distinguishing
mental material motions and non-mental material motions, the challenge for dual-
ists like More was to maintain the distinction between the animating spirits that
explain and regulate operations in nature and the super-natural spirit that is God.
The Cambridge Platonists find both material and immaterial substance in
nature. But these are characterized not by Descartes’ principal attributes of exten-
sion and thought. Rather, they are characterized by degree and hierarchy of activ-
ity or vitality. On the top of this hierarchy stand the intellects of immaterial spirits
(souls), as we find in humans. Non-human animals are souls as well: they are
animate and active, though they lack will. Plants too are immaterial spirits, though
non-conscious. And even inanimate things exhibit activity whose regularity in
nature is explained by animating spirit. At the bottom of the hierarchy stands
material substance: purely passive, divisible extension. This limiting case of a
substance lacking all spirit is what keeps this view dualist: if one were to commit,
as Conway (1631–1679) does, to a nature no part of which lacks spirit, mon-
ism threatens (see below).8 The threat is twofold: if nature is spirit through-and-
through, the distinction between nature and super-nature collapses, and if that
distinction collapses, the hierarchy of nature, with its degrees of imperfection and
corruption, becomes identical with divine spirit.
This notion of material substance – a substance lacking all spirit, vitality, and
animation – sustains the central distinction between nature and super-nature. If
some materialists added a soupçon of conatus to account for force or activity in a
world otherwise going through the motions, some dualists appealed to matter to
anchor spirit to the natural world it animates. This accommodation is difficult to
maintain, however, because when it comes to what we would now call the actual
world, it is not clear that such a substance exists for someone like More: both
spirit and matter are extended, and spirit is extended throughout nature. Matter is
passive extension, but is regulated by animating spirit and so all passive matter
found in nature has non-zero animation. The limiting case of a substance lacking
all spirit is thinkable – what we would now call an epistemic possibility – but it is
not clear that it is a metaphysical possibility. But this worry is a fruitful one, moti-
vating the intricate and grand systems found in Conway, Cavendish (1623–1673),
Malebranche, Leibniz, and Spinoza, among others.
Descartes’ substance dualism – a dualism of material and immaterial substances –
though familiar to us, was an outlier in his day, controversial among his con-
temporaries, including Mersenne (1588–1648), Gassendi (1592–1655), Arnauld
(1612–1694), Hobbes, and among later Cartesians.9 But in correspondence with
Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680), Descartes generated a version of the

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mind-body problem that persists today, though without the ontological catego-
ries he adopted.10 Those categories included substances, essences, and modes: a
substance depends on nothing else for its existence; an essence is an attribute or
property of a substance that makes it the substance it is – an essence is the prin-
cipal attribute of a substance; a mode is a way of having an attribute. Moreover,
Descartes holds that every substance has at most one principal attribute – one
essence. Descartes is a substance dualist; there are two substances: material sub-
stance, whose principal attribute is extension, where being a cube is a way of
being extended, and immaterial substance, whose principal attribute is thought,
where being a thought of a cube is a way of thinking. Because each substance has
at most one principal attribute, that which is extended does not think, and that
which thinks is not extended.
Nevertheless, it is apparent to Descartes that the mind and the body interact, as
when a cube makes an impression on the senses, and as when a decision to pick
up the cube leads to bodily behavior. Elisabeth is particularly worried about the
latter – about mind-to-body interactions that involve changes in material sub-
stance. By Descartes’ own physics, changes in material substance must be by
contact and impact. But the mind is a thinking, unextended substance, and so
cannot be in contact with, or impact, anything – only extended substance can do
that. Given these commitments, Elisabeth asks, how can we account for mental
causation of material change while adhering to the physics to which Descartes is
committed? Descartes’ response is curious and unsatisfying: material and imma-
terial substances are primitive notions, by which we understand body and mind
respectively, and a third primitive notion – the notion of the mind-body union – is
appropriate for understanding interactions between mind and body. But what is
the mind-body union? Is it another substance? If so, what is its principal attribute?
Is its principal attribute the power to move body other than by contact or impact?
If so, this won’t satisfy Elisabeth, who seeks an explanation of how mental causa-
tion works that is at least as satisfying as, if not continuous with, the explanations
physics gives of body-body causation.

4. Monisms
Materialism is, of course, a kind of monism. There is but one kind of substance –
material substance. For Hobbes, as for Descartes, material substance was under-
stood mechanistically: all material change is explained by matter in motion. And
Descartes is precise about what makes this substance material: it is extended, or
perhaps more accurately, it is extension. But not all materialists are mechanists,
and not all materialists accept Descartes’ restriction that a substance have at most
one essence or principal attribute. If the single substance that comprises nature is
both extended and minded – both essentially extension and mind – and if mind
is activity or spirit, then material change and its causes are not a problem. Mate-
rial change is what active spirit does, and each is at once the essence of a single
substance. Elisabeth’s problem, which remains for us, is not a problem for these

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monists. Their problem is the one that worried More and kept him a dualist: how
to maintain a distinction between the natural, created world, with its imperfections
and evil, and the super-natural cause of that world, in a way that does not impute
those evils and imperfections to the essence of divine spirit.
Cavendish responds to this worry in a way that became more frequent and
familiar as the modern age proceeds. While she continues the search for unified
explanations, she is less concerned with completeness than those who produced
grand, universal systems, such as those found in Spinoza or Leibniz.11 Her topic is
nature and its workings. Nature is animate creation, and to study it, one ought to
observe its variety and operations rather than seek a single, universal metaphysics
that includes both nature and super-nature. That would require either spiritualiz-
ing bodily extension, thus obliterating nature, or ossifying spirit, leaving us with
the inert matter of mechanistic materialists.
The object of Cavendish’s observational science is created substance – nature –
and about this, she is a monist. There is a single substance characterized essen-
tially as bodily extension (matter) and animate self-motion (mind). She is a mate-
rialist because the substance that is nature is an extended body; indeed, strictly
speaking, nature is one body. But she is not a mechanistic materialist. Because
motion, like extension, is essential to material, animate substance, the motion that
any part of material substance has, it has essentially. Because the motion that a
part of substance has, it has essentially, it cannot cease to have that motion without
ceasing to be, so wherever it is, its motion is. But, argues Cavendish, mechanistic
material change requires transfer of motion from one part of matter to another,
something that is impossible if motion is essential to matter. Motion can be no
more transferred than can extension.
What, then, accounts for material change? Material, animate substance is self-
moving. Portions of matter interact, but not mechanistically. Rather, self-motion
is mutually coordinated through sympathy, as when one portion senses or per-
ceives a likeness between itself and another, and through sensitive, perceptual,
and rational acts by which portions arrange and rearrange themselves in reaction
to, and to invite reactions from, other portions. Nature is itself a single body. What
makes a portion of it, a portion – an individual – is the intimacy and integrity of
the mutual coordination of self-motion in the portions that compose it.
A single kind of explanation thus suffices for, and explains, the tremendous
variety of bodily forms, their composition, decomposition, and transformation.
A finch, a human, and a whale are portions of a single nature, different from one
another and from other finches, humans, and whales by maintaining – for a time –
a homeostatic equilibrium of parts through self-moving sympathetic, sensitive,
perceptual, and rational self-motion. This self-motion is material motion, so the
processes by which individuals and species form, maintain, and lose homeostatic
integrity are material processes. But the bodily differences among individuals and
species are also mental differences. The mental lives of human and non-human
animals are thus both distinctive and continuous, differing in composition and
degree of the same fundamental material self-moving processes in nature.

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Like More, Cavendish appeals to the notion of inanimate matter – matter devoid
of all motion, activity, and vitality – in her taxonomy of nature, alongside animate
sensitive and animate rational matter, and yet insists that inanimate matter alone
of itself is never found in nature. The infinitely divisible plenum that is material,
animate substance expresses all three aspects – inanimate, animate sensitive, and
animate rational – at once. By contrast, More’s protégé, Conway, holds that cre-
ated substance, nature, is an expression or emanation of the essence of the creator:
vitality. As such, no part of nature can be without some degree of the essence from
which it emanates and is an expression. There is matter, but there is no dead mat-
ter. There is a single substance characterized essentially as extended and living,
and processes, such as sympathy, knowing, and love, that are at once material and
vital. These processes account for the mutability of nature and the morphological
and psychological differences among creatures. Unlike Cavendish, but like More,
Conway views these differences as hierarchical and moral, in degree of perfection
and rarefaction: Soul is not immaterial; it is the most rarified expression of active
material substance. Body is not dead matter; it is the most condensed expression
of active material substance.
Changes in morphology reflect changes in perfection, and are self-activated.
Imperfections of body are expressions of imperfection of spirit, but because the
rarer, more perfect expressions of substance regulate the denser, less perfect
expressions, creatures can become better (or worse) through regulated self-acti-
vation. The perfectibility or near perfectibility of creatures is a material change
exhibited in the hierarchy of nature, so that portions of active substance can trans-
form themselves: what was once a rock can become a horse, and what was once
a horse can become a human. Nevertheless, Conway maintains the distinction
between nature and super-nature, though not by appeal to a thinkable but non-
actual inanimate matter: creation expresses the essence of its creator by being
vital throughout, but unlike creation, God is perfect and immutable.
The monisms of Cavendish and Conway should intrigue philosophers inter-
ested in the current variety of responses to the mind-body problem. Both embrace
the fundamental mental. And both embrace the fundamental (though non-mecha-
nistic) material. In both we find a model of panpsychist, pananimist materialism.
More precise comparisons to the current taxonomy of positions may or may not
illuminate: should we understand them as property dualists, neutral monists, Rus-
sellian panpsychists? What Cavendish and Conway offer readers today, however,
is not merely model – a way of positioning oneself in philosophical space. They
remind us, as do so many authors in the early modern and modern age, of the
explanatory goals that got us here in the first place: what they sought, and we seek,
is an understanding of the complexity, variety, regularity, and unity of the whole
of the natural world, with the starting assumption that the mind – of which the
human mind is but one instance – is in nature.
Scholars of modern philosophy unfamiliar with Cavendish and Conway will
be intrigued by the similarities between their monisms and the grand systems
developed by Spinoza and Leibniz.12 Leibniz retains the nature/super-nature

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 R ebecca C openhaver

distinction with his focus on simple, created substances – monads – of which the
universe is infinitely composed. The nature of these created substances is activity
and their principal activity is perception or representation, particularly perception
of body – corporeal substance. Corporeal substance just is the perception a monad
has of its body, and a body is itself composed of infinitely many substances per-
ceiving their own bodies. Relations among monads are not causal, but perceptual
or representational: each monad expresses and represents all other monads by
representing itself from a position that is exhausted by the spatial and temporal
relations it bears to all other monads. Leibniz’s system is far more intricate than
can be captured in this brief description, and I invite readers to learn some of
what his system offers from the experts on Leibniz who have contributed to this
volume.
I also invite readers to consider Berkeley’s (1685–1753) idealism, also a kind
of monism.13 According to Berkeley, there is only one substance, which is imma-
terial and perceiving (mind) and modes of this substance (ideas). Ideas are of
sensible qualities, including extension. Extended bodies, such as apples, or one’s
own body, are complexes of sensible qualities. Bodies are thus real and extended,
but immaterial. They depend for their existence on substance – they are, after all,
collections of modes of mental, spiritual substance – but in particular, they depend
on being perceived by the mind of which they are modes: their essence is to be
perceived; esse est percipi. The apple on your table persists even when you are not
perceiving it because the sensible qualities that compose it do not depend on your
finite mind for their existence. Rather, they depend on the divine mind, which
itself depends on nothing else for its existence.
Spinoza’s system, like Leibniz’s, is grand and intricate.14 But it is also pro-
foundly radical because he rejects the dualism of nature and super-nature. There
is one substance – God or nature – and nothing transcends it. This substance
conceives of itself and in doing so is the cause of itself. It also conceives of itself
in infinite ways, and these ways are attributes. Thus the one substance has, or is,
infinite attributes. Everything that exists is either substance or a mode: a finite
thing that depends for its existence on substance. The essence of substance is
thinking, and minds are modes of this essence; they are ideas thought by sub-
stance. A mind is an idea of a body. Thinking and extension are both ways that
substance conceives of and expresses its self-causing nature. Because thinking
and extension are expressions of a single nature, the order of ideas and the order
of corporeal events are related not causally but by intelligibility, or representation.
A human mind, for example, is a representation of its body. By better understand-
ing our natures as finite modes of infinite nature expressing itself in thought and
extension, we better conceive ourselves, and because the essence of nature is
thinking, the more adequate our self-conception, the more intimate we become
with the nature of whose self-causing self-conception we are modes. While Spi-
noza rejects the dualism of nature and super-nature, he is as concerned as others
with our potential for improvement, perfectibility, or near-perfectibility, and his

8
 I ntroduction to volume 4

concern is still grounded in theism, though it is a theism few in his day could
recognize or tolerate.

5. The science of human nature

Anglophone universities in the early modern and modern age located what we
now call philosophy of mind as part of what they called moral philosophy. This
sounds odd today. We think of moral philosophy as the study of ethics, the study
of the sources and nature of moral norms, and perhaps the study of the sources
and nature of social and political norms. But when philosophers of the modern age
sought an understanding of the human mind and its operations, their interests were
practical. Some of this interest was recognizably moral: the identity of persons
over time, particularly after death, is required for the distribution of divine reward
and punishment after the resurrection;15 the liberty of human agents is required to
prevent imputing error, imperfection, and evil to the divine will.16 These explicitly
moral concerns are apparent in the approaches to the mind-body problem sur-
veyed above. The dualisms of material and immaterial substance, of nature and
super-nature, and the monisms that resist these, are ways of accounting for and
reconciling the imperfection, improvability, and accountability of human minds.
But by the mid- to late 1700s, the study of mind shifts gradually from the whole
of created nature to the nature of mind, and from the nature of mind to the indi-
vidual acts and operations of the human mind in particular – to what Hume (1711–
1776) would call the science of human nature, which he describes as introducing
“the experimental method into moral subjects.”17 This new science of mind is
part of moral philosophy because it seeks to understand the human mind and its
operations in terms of its practical ability to help us achieve what is necessary
for the purposes and benefits of ordinary life. The better we understand how the
mind works, the better we can use our minds to improve ourselves and the world
we inhabit. The emphasis on human improvement is not new; one sees it explic-
itly, in Descartes, Malebranche, More, Conway, Spinoza and others. But in the
1700s the study of mind moves gradually from the metaphysics of substance to
the operations of mind, and the study of mind is seen as foundational to the many
burgeoning sciences within and without the academy, from chemistry and geol-
ogy to agriculture and economics. These flourishing sciences are all things we do
with minds; if we hope to do them well, we must first understand how minds are
best used.
Philosophers throughout the 1600s and 1700s, from Descartes and Male-
branche, to Locke and Reid (1710–1796), divided the powers of the human mind
between the operations of the understanding and the will: thinking and volition.
The distinction was often drawn in terms of passivity and activity, indicating that
the difference between the two categories is a matter of degree, with the purely
passive ability to receive felt impressions through sensory stimulation forming
one end of the spectrum, and the active power to exert volitions forming the other.

9
 R ebecca C openhaver

Apart from this very general division, philosophers agreed on little else, from
which powers to assign to the understanding and which to the will, to whether a
particular power was passive or active, to the nature and operation of the particu-
lar powers themselves. How should we characterize attention, for example: on the
one hand, we attend routinely and automatically; on the other, attention can clearly
be directed voluntarily. Is imagining passive or active? Descartes insists that it is
active, but for Hume the imagination is often beyond direct control. And just what
is imagining, or the imagination, in the first place? Is imagining having images,
derived from but not beholden to the data of sensory impressions? Or does it com-
prehend, as Hobbes claims, all of the mental activities of both the understanding
and the will? Are these options mutually exclusive? A reader new to the philo-
sophical works of the age is also likely to be tripped up by mere nomenclature.
Reid’s theory of perception is what we expect: an account of sensory experience
of external objects. But for Locke and others, perceiving comprehends all the
powers of thinking including judging, reasoning, imagining, knowing, as well as
what we now call sensory perception.
There is thus no single approach to individual operations of mind typical of early
modern and modern philosophers. To understand their views on perception, imagi-
nation, consciousness, and other mental activities, we have to examine the details.
The contributions to this volume do just this, revealing an eclectic variety of theo-
ries – some familiar, some remote. Nevertheless, a glimpse at one way of thinking
about the activities of the understanding can give us some insight into the begin-
nings of the new science of mind. Call this way the theory of ideas. It was held
in some version by philosophers throughout the modern period, though Locke’s
version was particularly influential.18 Locke distinguished between two sorts of
ideas: ideas of sense and ideas of reflection. Ideas of sense are formed in response
to sensible objects – they are the mind’s response to the moment of felt impression
when objects affect us through our sensory organs. Ideas of sense are sensations –
ideas of sensible qualities such as red, green, hot, cold, bitter, sweet, hard, soft.
We are passive with respect to sensible ideas – we do not form them voluntar-
ily and we cannot prevent ourselves voluntarily from having them (unless one
counts moving one’s body in order to change one’s sensations). Once an idea of
sense is formed from an impression – say, the sensation of green while admiring
an apple – such an idea can be formed again without a present sensible green
object or green impression. I may have the idea of green without any green things
affecting my senses. And ideas of sense, once formed, can be combined in acts of
imagination and judgment in order to form complex ideas of sensible things like
apples, and to form chains of reasoning using complex ideas like apple, fruit, and
so on. Ideas are the basic unit of mental activity – a single resource used in com-
mon by all the operations of the understanding.
If the theory of ideas is a contribution to the new science of mind, one might
wonder which observations and experiments are used to support it. What evidence
do we have for the existence of ideas, and the operations on ideas, that this theory
uses to explain mental activity? Today we are used to thinking of observation

10
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
looking up one or two other of our former acquaintances.

First and foremost is our good friend Rubric, who,

becoming a trifle more infirm, as well as convinced that his
"cure of souls" is over-weighty for his single strength, has
taken to himself a curate, who, by some, is reckoned as
much too fast as the rector was, by others, thought too
slow. It is to be hoped, however, that after a little shaking
up together, as they are both good men and true, the
mixture of fast and slow will be found the right pace for all
parties concerned.

Then there are the Wilsons (Matthew and his family) of

Low Beech, and High Beech also. It falls to my lot to report
of them that they are prospering in the world, apparently.
Matthew is as industrious and plodding as ever; so is his
wife. He pays his rent (of both farms), and also his tithe
and poor's-rate punctually, and without more than the
regular amount of grumbling which certain days in the year
(especially tithe-paying days) always witnessed, for they
were not yet commuted.

The married son lives at High Beech, as has been

previously intimated, and being of a prudent turn of mind,
and having got his late uncle's furniture at a low valuation,
he is contented with the knobby-seated parlour chairs
aforementioned. He is the better satisfied with them that he
rarely uses them, preferring to rest and refresh himself in
the roomy kitchen of the old farmhouse.

His younger brothers work on the farm, or on one or

other of the farms, and are understood to be keeping an
eye (of hope and expectation) on two other of the squire's
farms which report says will soon be vacant. So "Long live
the Plough," say we.
 It is a small trouble to the Matthew Wilsons that they
never hear from Walter—never have heard from him, nor of
him, except indirectly, since he went to Australia.

"His spirit is that high," says the father, "that he doesn't

choose to let us know what he is doing; which isn't much, I
reckon, or else we should have heard his brag soon enough,
I'll warrant."

But for all he talks about his eldest son in this fashion,
he knows in his heart, what he does not care to
acknowledge, that why Walter keeps such silence has a
deeper and sadder reason, or unreason; and that the
quarrel (for a quarrel there is) is traceable to much
underdealing on the part of himself and his.

They never say much, if anything—these thriving

Wilsons—of their niece or cousin, Sarah Tincroft. I am afraid
it rather galls them to think of her being "a grand lady;" and
that, in fact, their ill-nature and injustice towards her
turned out to be, as they believe, the making of her. There
are few sayings oftener found true, than that people almost
always dislike those whom they have striven without cause
to injure, except, perhaps, this other saying, that a sure
way to incur the lasting ill-will of some persons is to confer
on them a signal benefit. I do not know how this too well-
known fact is to be accounted for, except by supposing that
to receive a great boon with true gratitude from one whom
we had always looked upon as an equal, requires
magnanimity of which few are capable. This, however, is a
digression: we return to our narrative.

There is yet another reason, however, why the Wilsons

are chary of speaking of Mrs. Tincroft. They dare not do this
in the hearing of their daughter Elizabeth, of whom I have
not yet spoken, but of whom I have somewhat to say. Poor
remorse-stricken Elizabeth! Here is her little story:

Not long after the death of her uncle Mark, and the
annexation of High Beech to Low Beech by her father, Miss
Elizabeth was made sensible of having, of course
undesignedly and unaidingly on her part, become the object
of admiration to a certain rich young farmer in the
neighbouring parish. How could she help this? She wanted
to know, when her brothers joked her about it.

And how could she prevent his leaving his own parish
church every Sunday to walk three miles, through almost all
weathers, to hers—being suddenly enlightened, as he said,
as to the superiority of dear good Mr. Rubric's discourses?
No, she couldn't prevent this any more than she was able to
prevent his offering her his arm on her return home from
church, and his insisting on relieving her of the weight of
her prayer-book even before they had left the building. And
this, although it took Mr. Admirer, otherwise named Smith,
another long mile out of his way.

And so the intimacy increased as weeks and even

months wore on, till Elizabeth was called upon, as she
thought, to yield up her heart, or what she believed to be
that seat of affection, without much struggling, to the—Ah,
well! We will not talk about the little blind god Cupid, which
is heathenish; but without even so much as mentioning the
name, you know what I mean, darling wife and daughters.

But poor Elizabeth was unwise. To be sure, it was

pleasant to think of stopping from the hard work of Low
Beech Farm, which now she began to despise for its
smallness and meanness, into the cosy, comfortable
position of a rich farmer's wife, with no occasion to do more
work than she pleased, and with fine furniture and plenty of
servants at her command. And, oh! Who of all the fair
readers of this history has not had day-dreams like this?
Nevertheless, Miss Elizabeth would have been happier if she
had not yielded up her fortress so readily; for Mr. Admirer
had never yet taken a step that he could not retrace without
fear of "damages."

And he did retrace his steps, every one of them. First,

the attendances at church slackened—but perhaps Mr.
Rubric was getting prosy; or perhaps the new curate (for he
had now made his appearance) was not to the gentleman's
taste. Still, there were other days in the week besides
Sunday, when he would have been welcomed to Low Beech.
But he did not come. And then—but let us draw a veil over
the rest; only it soon became known that the cautious
gentleman (an admirer no longer) was about to be married,
indeed—but not to Elizabeth Wilson. Worse even than this,
the unfeeling man had the hardihood to boast of his
achievement at Low Beech Farm, saying that at last the
blushing damsel there did go in for it so strong, and was so
sentimental over it, that he could not stand it any longer.

This being conveyed to the forsaken one by a dear

female friend, who thought she ought to know what the
perfidious man said of her, was the sharpest, deepest cut Of
all. She could have borne anything else, Elizabeth said; but
to be called SENTIMENTAL!—she who had despised
sentiment in her cousin Sarah!

One Sunday, a few weeks after this terrible blow, Miss

Elizabeth opened the great family Bible, which, covered with
green baize, ordinarily lay in repose on a side-table in the
state-room (otherwise called the parlour) of Low Beech
farmhouse, a room always smelling damp and musty, but
carefully swept and garnished every seventh day, and put to
use after dinner every first day (unless the roads were
muddy), and on first days only.

Well, one first day, or Sunday, Miss Elizabeth, happening

to be curious concerning some birth, death, or marriage
therein recorded, opened the family Bible to refresh her
memory respecting that particular event. And then, being in
a reflective mood, she turned over the leaves of the heavy
volume, not to find consolation under her trial, nor
instruction to her ignorance, I am sorry to say, but to forget
her harassment in meditating over the wonderful
engravings interspersed throughout the book. In doing this,
her eye caught the word "treacherously" on the large
letterpress of the page opposite one of those pretty
pictures. The word tallied with the poor forlorn one's
thoughts; for had she not known treachery? So she read
the verse. This it was:

"Woe to thee that spoilest, and thou wast not

spoiled; and dealest treacherously, and they
dealt not treacherously with thee! When thou
shalt cease to spoil, thou shalt be spoiled; and
when thou shalt make an end to deal
treacherously, they shall deal treacherously with
thee."

Now, I am grieved to say, Elizabeth Wilson was not a

Bible student. But, like many others who rarely open the
sacred book, she had a kind of superstitious reverence for,
not unmingled with fear of, its "lively oracles." And now,
without knowing or seeking to know of whom and on what
occasion those ominous words were originally spoken by the
prophet, she gave them, rightly enough, a general
application. More than this, she believed that they had a
particular application to herself, and that they now stared
her in the face to taunt and condemn her.

"Oh, it is true!" she cried, hastily shutting up the book.

"I did deal treacherously with poor dear Sarah, and now it is
come home to me just as the Bible says. He" (the false and
fickle one, she meant) "has dealt treacherously with me, to
punish me for what I did to my poor cousin and my brother
Walter."

We need not follow the distressed girl in her self-

reproaches, which were loud and long, and were openly as
well as often repeated—so often that her father and mother
and brothers got tired of hearing them; the more so, that
they themselves did not mean to repent of their misdeeds
as Elizabeth was doing. It is enough to say that since that
time, the heart-stricken girl has always stood up for her
cousin Sarah and her brother Walter when they have been
spoken about; and, indeed, often drags in their names and
their virtues, and their sufferings of social and domestic
martyrdom—so often that father, mother, and brothers now
dread to make the slightest allusion to them, in Elizabeth's
presence, at all events. Possibly they also feel some pangs
of remorse, especially when they think of the absent and
expatriated eldest son and brother. But remorse is not real
sorrow.

This is rather a dull chapter perhaps, but it will not have

been written in vain, if it should start a few serious
reflections in any thoughtless mind. There is an old saying
that unmerited curses come home to roost. And it is quite
as true of treachery, such as has been rather hinted at than
described in our previous pages.
 CHAPTER XX.
HOW TOM GRIGSON SPED IN HIS WOOING.

AND now for Tom Grigson, and how his wooing sped.
That he is married has already been told in the early part of
our story, and to the lady of his first choice, moreover. But,
having promised to give some account of this important
matter, we must invite our readers to accompany us (and
Tom) one fine day to the place called the Mumbles, which,
as already intimated, had strong attractions to the younger
Grigson, even in the early days of our history.
 Tom had left college—had had enough of Oxford, he
said. The truth is, he and Oxford did not very well agree
with each other. Understand me, they never exactly fell out;
that is to say, Tom had been neither rusticated nor plucked.
He had passed his "Little-go" with tolerable credit. What
might have happened at the "Great-go" can never be
known, as Tom was too modest, say, to face the ordeal. At
all events, he had brought home his cap and gown
unsullied; but it would not have broken his heart to know
that he should never wear gown, of any shape or texture,
again.

But what was Tom to do? He had only a younger son's

portion, and that was a small one. As to waiting to step into
his brother's shoes, such a thought had never entered his
head. He would have despised himself, if it had. And, good-
tempered as he was, he would have quarrelled with any one
offhand who had hinted at such a conclusion. Besides,
Richard, though so many years older than himself, might
outlive him for all that. Still, when the question occurred to
him as to how he was to make his way in the world—and in
spite of his habit of putting off disagreeable topics the
thought would come into his mind now and then—he was at
a loss for a reply. He had learned "how not to do it" with
great success at Oxford. But "how to do it" was yet to be
proved.

He could hunt and shoot and ride (his brother's horses,

of course) to perfection, or pretty near it, it is true; but as
he was not likely to be a candidate for the situation of a
gamekeeper or whipper-in, or master of the hounds even,
these qualifications were not likely to help him on in the
world much. So Richard Grigson sometimes reflected, when
he saw Tom employing himself industriously enough in
these special gifts, but otherwise "taking it easy," as he
said. But Richard was too fond of his brother to want to part
with him, and so contented himself with hoping and trusting
and half-believing in something turning up unexpectedly so
as to solve the difficult problem.

How, under such circumstances, could Tom (as we must

go on calling him) possibly commit the imprudence of falling
seriously in love with Kate Elliston or any other Kate? Or
how could that young lady for a moment seriously think of
Tom as her future husband? And yet so it was. And the
infatuated youth, on the fine morning of which I am
thinking, rode over to the Mumbles as happy perhaps as the
richest fellow in the world; for on the previous day he had
made the young lady an offer, and had been accepted—
conditionally.

On his way he met Mr. Elliston, the owner of that large

house and estate. Mr. Elliston was also on horseback, and
he saluted the young gentleman thus:

"Well met, Grigson. I was going over to your brother's

place expressly to have some talk with you; but as you are
come so far, I'll turn back, and say my say at the Mumbles.
I suppose you will like that as well, on the whole?"

"A good deal better," said Tom, lightly; and then his
heart began to beat a little faster than usual, for he was not
quite sure as to what Kate's father might have to say to
him, looking so serious too.

Mr. Elliston was the father of the gentleman of whom

mention has already been made in these memoirs, as
having, according to Miss Elizabeth Wilson's version,
discarded a certain Miss Summerfield for a richer prize; and
it was further reported that he had been advised, if not
compelled, to this course by the old gentleman, who knew
as well as any one—so the gossip-mongers said—how many
shillings should go to make a guinea.

Now, the condition on which Tom had been blushingly

accepted as a lover by the fair Kate, was that her father's
consent to the arrangement should be obtained. And though
the young gentleman had reason to believe that he was a
special favourite with the old one, he was not quite sure
whether that favour would safely carry him over the bridge
which still lay between him and the fulfilment of his hopes.
So, between hoping and fearing, Tom rode silently alongside
Mr. Elliston till they reached the stable-yard of the Mumbles,
where he gave up his horse to the groom, and, on further
invitation, followed the master of the great house into his
study.

"So," said the old gentleman, when the door was closely
shut, "I understand you have been talking to Kate."

"She has told you, then, what passed yesterday?" said

Tom, eagerly.

"Of course she has. She is a good girl, and has made an
open breast of it."

"And may I venture to hope, sir, that you will consent to

my—to make me—to make Kate, I mean—happy?" blurted
out Tom, stammering rather awkwardly. "She—that is, we—
love one another very much, sir," said Tom, looking very
red, I daresay.

"In other words," said the grey-headed senior, very

gravely, "you propose to be my son-in-law—at some future
time—and venture to hope that I see no objection to the
arrangement. But suppose I do see a very serious and
grave and almost insuperable objection to it, my dear Tom,
what would you say then?"
 Tom had no hesitation in saying and believing that the
hypothetical objection being only almost, and not entirely
insuperable, it might be overcome.

Mr. Elliston was not so sure of this.

"You must have seen long ago, sir," pleaded the lover,
"that there were attractions at the Mumbles which I could
not resist."

"You give me credit for great powers of discernment,"

said the old gentleman, smiling, in spite of his grave
countenance. "But granted that I supposed you were
attracted by the pleasure and advantage of my society, for
instance—I am not sure that this warrants me in approving
of your—shall I call it presumption?—in aspiring to my
daughter's hand. Moreover, I may have been pleased with
you as a guest, and may like you as a friend and
acquaintance and welcome visitor, and yet not think you
altogether a suitable match for my daughter."

"I know I am not in all respects worthy of Miss Elliston,"

said puzzled Tom; "and yet—"

"Let me say what I was going to say, young man,"

continued the elder. "And I may as well tell you at once that
I have known, as well as you can tell me now, what your
attraction was in coming to my house; and I have waited for
some such interview as this."

"Then I may hope," said the other, "that my suit is to

prosper; for I am sure, sir, you would not have permitted
me to indulge expectations to disappoint them at last."

"I have waited this opportunity," continued the host, "to

tell you that, much as I like you, as you are now going on,
you cannot marry my daughter; and that it entirely depends
on yourself whether or not Kate can ever be your wife. Now,
I know as well as you can tell me what your possessions
and prospects are. You have no home, properly speaking;
you have no profession; your independent income was not
sufficient to maintain you at college—it is swallowed up now
in your personal expenses; and yet you want my girl for a
wife. How do you mean to support her?"

"I'll work, sir," cried Tom, frantically; "I'll work hard, sir.
I'll work the skin off my bones."

"Poor Tom! Dear Grigson!" said the gentleman more

kindly than he had yet spoken, "I have no doubt you think
so, but what will you work at? You cannot answer that
question, so I will answer it for you. You are not fit for the
law. You have no vocation, as I have often heard you say,
for the Church, otherwise the living of your parish, which is
in your brother's gift, might eventually come to you. But
you have set this aside as out of the question, and I honour
you for your honesty. Now listen: I have a living in my gift;
I offer it to you, and if you choose to accept it, you shall
marry my daughter as soon as she and you can agree on
the subject. I have told Kate so, and now I tell you so. But
you must either accept or refuse; and I should not wonder if
you were to refuse it."

Puzzled Tom looked up into his old friend's face. "I don't
understand you, sir," he said, faintly; adding, with
emphasis, "There is nothing that I would not do, not
inconsistent with honesty and the honour of a gentleman."

"Ah, there it is! I said I thought the objection would be

insuperable; for, of course, you would consider it a great
sacrifice of the honour, and a great lowering of the dignity,
of a gentleman to go into trade."
 "Trade, Mr. Elliston?"

"Yes, trade. Look you here, Mr. Grigson, my money was

made in trade. My father and my grandfather before him
were in trade. In my early life, I was in trade, and if you
have Kate for a wife, you must go into trade too. You are
cut out for it; you have good common sense, a clear head,
and a cool one. You have plenty of pluck, and plenty of
industry, if well applied. The old firm with which I first
became connected forty years ago, and a prosperous one it
is still, wants an active partner. You will do as well as
another, and better. If you choose to put your aristocratic
notions into your pocket and go in for trade, I will furnish
the capital wanted, and you shall have Kate into the
bargain."

Tom looked rueful enough. The Grigsons, the old county

family, that might have come in with the Conqueror, for
anything that can be told, had never suffered the
contamination of trade. They had been in the Church (one
of them a bishop), in the law (one of them a judge), in the
army (one of them a general); but in trade, never. So Tom
thought. And then he asked, falteringly—

"Wouldn't it do if I were to go into farming, sir? My

brother's largest farm, Broad Lees, eight hundred acres or
more, will soon be vacant; at any rate, the lease will be out
next Michaelmas; and I have had a talk with Dick about it. I
should like that better than going into trade, Mr. Elliston."

"I daresay you would; and you would like to be a

gentleman farmer, I have no doubt. You could hunt and
shoot and ride, and make ducks and drakes of your money
—that is, if you had the handling of any; and in three years
you would be—well, I won't say where. But, nice as you
think it, I can tell you, you would never make money at that
sort of work, nor even keep it; at least, that is the opinion I
have formed. No, no, my dear fellow; I stick to my first
offer. Take it or leave it."

"And Kate—Miss Elliston, I mean—does she ap-ap-prove

of your decision, sir?"

"She submits to it, at any rate."

"I should like to consult my brother about it," said Tom,

on whom the unexpected proposal had produced an
extraordinary effect, not to be easily understood by any
who are not intimately acquainted with the strong feeling,
bordering on absolute contempt, with which certain persons
—some educated, some uneducated—look down upon trade
and traders.

We could produce numerous examples of this extreme

prejudice, but it is not needful. The reader must take for
granted that it does exist, and that Tom Grigson had
imbibed it. Of course he had heard, in one way or another,
that Mr. Elliston had at some former time been in some kind
of business (he had never troubled himself to find out in
what kind of business) in London; and that, having made a
large fortune by trading, he had retired to the country, and
bought the estate on which he now lived. He knew, too, that
Mr. Elliston had all, or most of, the tastes and feelings of a
gentleman, which he rather wondered at.

And let it be confessed, that when he first of all became

conscious of the peculiar sensation which, for want of a
better word, we call love, towards the fair Kate, he made a
strong though unsuccessful effort to overcome it, on the
ground of her distant connection with what he would, in any
other case, have called the "shop." And when eventually, he
made up his mind not to let that obstacle stand in his way,
he gave himself credit, I am afraid, for wonderful
magnanimity in overlooking that blot on the lady's
escutcheon, and for great discernment in having arrived at
the conclusion that the ex-tradesman's daughter was after
all not unworthy of his fond admiration.

I daresay that this part of our veracious history will be

looked upon by some readers as apocryphal. But it is not;
and, taking our word for it that it is a true representation, it
may be conceived how great a blow it was to poor Tom's
self-pride to be told that he must stoop still lower than he
had yet stooped, in order to possess the prize he longed for.

All these thoughts and remembrances possibly rushed

through Tom's mind in a few brief moments; and then
followed his mental resolution, "After all, I can't and won't
give up Kate;" adding aloud, "I should like to consult my
brother about it."

"By all means speak to Mr. Richard," said the old

gentleman; and there the subject was, for that time,
dropped, Master Tom being quietly, though courteously
enough, dismissed without seeing the young lady for whom
he was expected to make such a sacrifice.

Tom returned to the Manor House somewhat

disconsolate, and was soon pouring out his sorrows into
Richard Grigson's ear.

"Why, this is another Tincroft affair," said the elder

brother, when the younger had gone over the several items
of the previous interview. He said it with such mock gravity
that Tom remonstrated.

"Don't laugh at me, Richard. I want your advice."

 "To follow if you like it, I suppose. Well, Tom, here goes,
then."

But as I am writing Tom's history only in brief, and just

so far as concerns our friend John Tincroft, it is enough to
say that the elder brother gave the younger brother very
good advice, and the younger brother took it. For the very
next day he presented himself at the Mumbles, and was
again in conference with Kate's father.

"I am come to say I will do everything you wish me to

do, sir, if I may still hope for your consent," said Tom, and
feeling when he had said it as Cæsar may have felt when he
crossed the Rubicon.

"I don't often contradict myself or recall my words, and

I have no wish to do so now, dear Tom," said the old
gentleman, as he took Tom's outstretched hand and shook
it. "And I wish you to believe that, according to my notions,
I am doing the best I can for you and Kate."

"I hope it may turn out so," said Tom; "and now I am in
for it, I'll do my best to fulfil your expectations. But Richard
thinks, and I am afraid, that I shall make a poor hand at
business of any sort, never having been used to it."

"I am not at all afraid of that," replied the elder. "If a

man goes in for doing his best, as you say, he is in a fair
way to succeed, whatever he attempts, unless he is an
absolute blockhead, which you are not, Tom. Of course it
will be strange to you at first, but you will get on by degrees
—fast, too, for you will be sure to like it. If I could only be a
young man again!" said the senior, with enthusiasm, as he
called to remembrance former days of successes and
triumphs.
 And then, with a sigh, he added more soberly, "It will all
come to you in good time, Tom; and you won't stand alone,
remember. You will have two partners who know what
business is, and how to do it; one of them is Kate's brother,
you know, and the other is likely to be a member of
Parliament soon, as well as a tradesman. Think of that!"

Well, to be sure, there was something in that idea, Tom

thought; and then it occurred to him that he had not been
informed of the nature of the business into which he was to
be so unceremoniously thrust, and in which he was
expected to become so expert. And as it is no particular
concern of ours, it is enough to say that, being satisfied on
this head, Tom made no further objection to the plans of his
future father-in-law, except to say that his brother, on good
cause being shown, would furnish half the capital required
in carrying them out. This being eventually conceded, all
diligence was used in getting through the preliminaries.

And in less than a month, Mr. Thomas Grigson found

himself a citizen of London, with a private office in the heart
of the city, and in lodgings five or six miles away, looking
out for a home for Kate. This was soon found and furnished;
and barely six months had passed away before the bells of
Mumbleton Church one day rang a merry peal, and all
Mumbleton was in an uproar of rejoicing, because Kate
Elliston had taken to herself a husband, and changed her
name to Kate Grigson.

And so they were married; and our friend Tom, having,

as already intimated, spent part of his honeymoon with his
old fellow-collegian at Tincroft House, went back to his
pretty villa on the banks of the Thames, and liked his home
with its surroundings, and loved his young wife none the
less for having to spend the greater part of the day away
from it and her in the active business of life.
 It will, perhaps, be incredible to some of my readers
that Tom really began to take an interest in, and to like, the
excitement of everyday trade. But it is true, nevertheless;
and it is equally true that when any man does "with all his
might" whatsoever his "hand findeth to do," provided it is
an honest and upright doing, he will hardly fail of liking to
do it.

It is true that Tom's love for his old country life and
occupations did not diminish as time wore on. His riding and
driving he kept up, for he rode to and from the city daily,
and found time also to drive his Kate out in her pony-chaise
now and then. As to hunting and shooting, a week or two in
September, and another week or two after Christmas, spent
at the Manor House with brother Richard, satisfied all his
longings.

And he, after a time, began to pity "poor Richard," and

to wonder how he could manage to exist all the year round
in his country home. At any rate, his (Tom's) own pretty
villa on the banks of the Thames had increasing charms and
attractions for him, which threw all the glories of the Manor
House into the shade; while "the house in the city was
nothing to be ashamed of," Tom averred. In fact, every year
added to the balance in his favour as a partner in the firm,
while at least every other year added to the olive branches
around his table.

And so the whirligig of time carried Tom on until we find

him, some sixteen years after his marriage, on a summer
evening with his eldest son (a boy of fifteen or thereabout)
rowing in a pair-oar boat, with the Kate of early days acting
as steerswoman, and looking almost as young as when Tom
first made her acquaintance.
 Presently the oarsmen rested on their oars to admire
the bright hues of sunset, to which their attention had been
called by the lady at the helm.

"It is very beautiful," said the elder. "It puts me in mind

of an evening, some sixteen or seventeen years ago, Kate,
when—do you remember when and where?"

The lady thought perhaps she did; but she wasn't sure.
She had witnessed a good many lovely sunsets when her
home was at the Mumbles.

"Yes, and since then, Kate. But the evening I mean was
an especially lovely one. And the best of it is, that since that
evening, there has been a long day of sunshine for us. By
the way, a fellow was in our house to-day who had come
over from Australia—he lives at Sydney when he is at home
—and I happened to ask him if he knew young Wilson—
Walter Wilson—you remember him, don't you?"

"I remember hearing enough about him and his cousin

whom he was to have married, and didn't."

"Just so, because she married somebody else, and

became—you know who."

"I never like to remember that when we go—you know

where, for I think she didn't use her poor cousin well," said
the lady.

"And I think," rejoined Tom Grigson, laughing, "that

Walter didn't use his poor cousin well."

"Ah, yes; you men always take sides with us women—

when you can."
 "Yes, dear, when we can; and you women with us men.
I suppose it is the natural order of things. But, anyhow,
Wilson isn't much to be pitied. Brooks, the Sydney man,
knows him; says he is one of the most thriving men in the
colony, and, what is as much to the purpose, has one of the
best of women for a wife, and one of the prettiest girls for a
daughter that he has ever known. They do business
together, Brooks says, he and Wilson, principally in wool;
and the Wilsons sometimes come to Sydney, and
sometimes he goes up the country to Sedley Station, as
Wilson's place is called. So it seems to have all turned out
for the best—for him, at any rate."

And so the talk went on, till presently the sunset hues
died away, and the oars were resumed; and they little
thought how another sunset was at this time drawing on,
thousands of miles away, to close in the happy day of the
prosperous man of whom they had lightly spoken. But
before we come to this, we must go back a few years in our
narrative.

In the same month and in the same year in which Tom

Grigson settled down in his nest on the banks of the
Thames, an event of equal importance to other parties took
place at Sedley Station, in New South Wales.

When Walter Wilson left England, after that last

despairing sight of his lost love previously mentioned, he
made up his mind that the pole-star of his life had
disappeared—that his sun had set, never more to rise—that
the romance of existence was, to him, past and gone. A
good many such foolish and incongruous images rising in
his mind, found words in a letter he wrote to Ralph Burgess
while on his outward-bound voyage, whereat Ralph good-