The soul is a zoo—and has long been figured so. In Book IX of the Republic Socrates asks his interlocutor to picture a many-headed beast or chimaera. The monster is “an image of the soul in speech,” a tripartite image combining “a manifold and many-headed beast that has a ring of heads of tame and wild beasts” with the single image of a lion and the image of a man (588b-c).
Plato’s picture of the soul recurs in later intellectual history. In medieval allegory each sin and passion is represented by a specific emblematic animal. Fallen man is a collection of brute antagonists. In his verse epistle “To Sir Edward Herbert,” John Donne compares man to “a lump, where all beasts kneaded be; / Wisdom makes him the ark where all agree” (ll. 1-2).1
From out of the variety of fauna employed in the figuring of the mind and its activity we might choose the blind and burrowing mole as an especially curious specimen. The lowly mole may be thought an unlikely candidate for the mind’s mascot, but I’ve encountered eight instances of the Mole metaphor of the mind in eighteenth-century literature.
The mole is a limit case in the Age of Enlightenment but also a demonstration that just about any animal will suffice for metaphorizing.2
John Keats enlists the mole at least twice in his poetry. In his “Sonnet to Sleep” he pleads, “Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords / Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole” (ll. 11-2).3
In the eighteenth century, conscience is more readily figured with vultures. Keats retools the metaphor with surprising effect by picturing a subterranean mental space.
The mole reappears in Keats’ Isabella and is put to a different use:
Who hath not loiter’d in a green church-yard,
And let his spirit, like a demon-mole,
Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,
To see scull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole;
Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr’d,
And filling it once more with human soul? (ll. 217-22)
The mole makes a different sort of appearance in the fourth volume of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, when Pamela transcribes the following lines from John Dryden’s All for Love:
And yet the Soul, shut up in her dark Room,
Viewing so clear abroad, at home sees nothing:
But like a Mole in Earth, busy and blind,
Works all her Folly up, and casts it outward
To the World’s open View— (IV.53, p. 335).4
The mind is a mole, locked in, a creature incapable of introspection. We are hypocrites, and “at home” the mind is only “busy and blind.” Dryden’s use of the mole is more representative of the period’s pessimism than Keats’ more original uses.
In the context of Pamela the mole would seem connected to John Locke’s “dark room” of the mind (II.xi.17) so that Dryden’s lines become one of the precedents for the better known Lockean metaphor. Or at least Richardson puts the two authors together: Pamela quotes Dryden in her discussion of Locke’s pedagogical theory. Perhaps Richardson is having some fun with philosophers who claim, like Locke in his “Epistle to the Reader,” to be a mere “Under-Labourer[s] in clearing the Ground a little, and removing some Rubbish, that lies in the way to knowledge.”
The mole is an explicit figure for the sceptic philosopher in Samuel Boyse’s philosophical poem Deity, or the more grave than wise natural philosopher of fossils who appears in John Gay’s epistle “To a Lady on her Passion for Old China.” Boyse’s philosopher is a “sceptic mole;” Gay’s “digs for knowledge, like a Mole.”
In Henry Brooke’s novel The Fool of Quality one Mr. Mole appears. He is an atheistic philosopher who prefers “Justification by Charity” to “Sanctification by Faith” and scuffles with the devout protagonist (IV.xvii, p. 270). In the particular context of Brooke’s Methodist novel Mr. Mole is portrayed as a villain. The mole who flees the light is then both a mascot of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment.
Hegel, measuring the slow progress of philosophy from Thales to his own moment, pictures Spirit itself as a mole working inwardly, often opposed to itself, growing stronger, until it bursts through the crust of the earth and into the light.
The mole reappears in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield. The vicar’s son, Moses, upends moral sense philosophy in making the point that we are not to judge the feelings of others by what we would feel in their place. Moses claims that a poor “man’s mind seems fitted to its station:” “Howsoever dark the habitation of the mole to our eyes, yet the animal finds the apartment sufficiently lightsome” (58).5
Goldsmith’s novel displays and ironizes eighteenth-century notions of hierarchy. Moles often appear in moments of perspective adjustment, and the mountain and the mole-hill are paired throughout the century. Each creature is fit to its station in the Great Chain of Being, and the lowly mole pores on its clods in a kind of Augustan profundity.6
In Blake’s Book of Thel, Thel’s motto contrasts eagle and mole, asking,
Does the eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole:
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?
Or Love in a golden bowl?7
Blake suggests the mole knows things the eagle does not. Moses’ pedantic equation of the laboring poor with burrowing insectivorous mammals proves more appalling.
In eighteenth-century poetic diction moles are “poor,” “low,” “busy,” and “laborious.” We imagine a mole-ish multitude.
Moses’ apologetic for poverty is heavily ironized by Goldsmith. The mole-man in question, the impoverished Mr. Burchell, is a wealthy man in disguise. It is the Primrose family who are blind to his actual station for he is, in fact, Sir William Thornhill, kind and generous uncle of their wicked landlord, Squire Thornhill. In the expanding irony of the narrative the entire Primrose family is plunged into far worse straits than those of the (fictitious) Mr. Burchell, so that Moses has ample opportunity to judge the feelings of Burchell from his own newly lowered station.
In the longer history of ideas the mole is rescued by Marx and Marxist authors. Low and laborious associations present an opportunity for reversal as that same mole that appears in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History is made to figure the coming revolution.8
The propinquity of man and beast in the chain of being was widely recognized in the eighteenth century, but the full theological implications of consanguinity may have been slower to dawn.9 The period’s fascination with wild boys and learned pigs, its experiments with singerie, and its deep moral (and financial) investment in the breeding of pets indicates that beasts had become something more than our ontological neighbors on the Chain of Being.
A metaphor of mind confuses tenor and vehicle, frame and focus, topic and comment, mole and mind. In the eighteenth century the ability to distinguish species was troubled, and the efforts of natural philosophers and poets to inhabit comfortably a position “midway from nothing to the deity” or to measure accurately that position’s coordinates proved to be a project demanding endless nuance and revision.10
Notes
1 See J. B. Bamborough’s discussion of these lines in The Little World of Man (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1952) 15-6.
2 In his Essay on Man Alexander Pope asks, “What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme, / The mole’s dim curtain, and the lynx’s beam” (ll. 211-2).
3 Keats’ may have in mind William Cowper’s translation of Giovanni Battista Andreini’s Adamo. In Adamo Satan is twice figured as the “sightless mole of hell” (IV.ii and V.vi). The play is practically infested with mole metaphors. Both Adam and Eve compare themselves to the blind creature.
4 Dryden’s All for Love is the most Shakespearean of his plays. The mole metaphor may be an indirect allusion to the following lines from Hamlet: “Well said, old mole! Canst work I’ th’ earth so fast? / A worthy pioneer!” (I.v.162-3). Richardson uses the mole—or rather mole-hill—metaphor again in Clarissa. The burrowing creature is smuggled into that text in a similar manner when Belford quotes the following lines from Nathaniel Lee’s Oedipus:
Each mole-hill thought swells to a huge Olympus;
While we, fantastic dreamers, heave and puff,
And sweat with our imagination’s weight (qtd. VII.1).
5 A similar sentiment is available in Samuel Jackson Pratt’s Sympathy, in which the poet notes that “A due proportion to all creatures given, / From the mole’s mansion to the seraph’s heav’n.”
6 The poet Leonard Welsted is treated in The Dunciad. He is compared to a didapper, an eel, and then at more length, a mole. Welsted is instructed to mark the mole “in his dirty hole” who keeps a “mighty stir” below but only to raise a molehill (V. 199, note 3).
7 Compare the following lines from The Visions of the Daughters of Albion: “Does not the eagle scorn the earth and despise the treasures beneath? / But the mole knoweth what is there, and the worm shall tell it thee” (ll. 158-9). Of course, the pairing of mole and eagle is not original to Blake. Locke writes, “The ignorance and darkness that is in us, no more hinders nor confines the knowledge that is in others, than the blindness of a mole is an argument against the quicksightedness of an eagle” (IV.iii.23). And in George Berkeley’s Alciphron Euphranor complains, “You can easily conceive, that the sort of life which makes the happiness of a mole or a bat, would be a very wretched one for an eagle” (II.14). Edmund Burke uses the pairing to characterize John Law’s flights of commerce: Law’s land bank scheme “was wherewithal to dazzle the eye of an eagle. It was not made to entice the smell of a mole, nuzzling and burying himself in his mother earth” (300).
8 The revolutionary mole metaphor is analyzed in John Milfull’s essay “Notes from Underground: of Moles, Metros, and Messiahs.” Australian Humanities Review. Issue 37. 2005. Link
9 See A. O. Lovejoy’s treatment of Pope, Bolingbroke, and Soames Jenyns in The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001) 195-8. In her Fables of Modernity Laura Brown observes that Lovejoy is unable to make sense fully of the comparatively late—late in the history of the idea—realization that man and animal are neighbors on the scale of being and must therefore, according to the principle of continuity, blend or shade together. Brown sees the issue as becoming available “in the intellectual discourse at the same time that the modern encounter with alterity gained cultural prominence;” in Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001) 228. Brown would rescue Lovejoy’s history of ideas by placing it in a richer cultural history of the period.
10 The quotation is from Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, or, the Complaint and the Consolation (Toronto: Dover Publications, 1975) 3. See Lovejoy, Chain of Being 190.