In an age of faculty psychology minds are busy, populated places. When I consult the metaphors of mind used by eighteenth-century writers to image the self’s interior, I find repeated and significant personifications of the mind’s contents.

In particular, that new fixture of empiricist philosophy, the idea, is readily personified. Sensations are so many ministers who appear before the sovereign soul, passions are so many unruly citizens, and each faculty may step into some civic or social role. Within are strangers, stage actors, servants, crowds, savage tribes, judges and lawyers, generals, lowly foot soldiers, ghost-memories, and close-knit families. Undoubtedly, further personifications escape my census-taking.

Introspection and meditation—activities that are meant to be lonely, personal, and private—discover the populated structure of the mind.

Consider the mind of Robinson Crusoe. Isolated for more than twenty-four years on his desert island, Crusoe is unable to sleep one night. He describes his insomnia retrospectively: “It is as impossible as needless to set down the innumerable Crowd of Thoughts that whirl’d through that great Thorowfair of the Brain, the Memory, in this Night’s Time” (200). Crusoe’s mind in isolation is figured as a busy place—a crowded thoroughfare. Lonely Crusoe (that literary, that mythical paradigm of the solitary individual) owns a populated mind.

In the novel’s episodic narrative, Crusoe’s reverie follows his exploration of a Spanish shipwreck, and his exclamation, “O that it had been but one or two; nay but one soul saved out of this ship!” (193). Should we read the “Crowd of Thoughts” as hypnagogic wish-fulfilment? No. I interpret the figuration as an indication of the phenomenology of reverie: loss of self in the hustle and hurry of one’s own thoughts. Crusoe’s sleeplessness provokes a specific serious reflection. He acknowledges that there may be hundreds of cannibals frequenting his island at any time, all lurking just out of sight.

The loss of self in a crowd of thoughts is featured in Montaigne, David Hume, Edward Young, and James Beattie. Each writer identifies the same phenomenology but adjusts the image and puts it to a different use.

There is, finally, the historical background that I am obliged to reference. In an age of faculty psychology minds are populated, busy places, yes. And London—even more so than Amsterdam or Paris—is a busy, populated place. According to the seventeenth-century statistician Gregory King, two-thirds of all English townsfolk were living in London by 1680. The population of England doubled in the eighteenth century.¹ In the novel Evelina the eponymous ingénue arrives in London and walks the Mall in St James Park. She is astounded by the crowds and writes that she has never seen “so many people assembled together before … all the world seemed there” (29).

Eighteenth-century metaphors of mind would seem to register the Malthusian crush. It proves impossible to be alone with one’s thoughts. Ideas throng and crowd the mind like so many pleasure-seekers in St James Park. They prowl just at the edge of consciousness. The hortus conclusus is overrun with prostitutes and cutpurses—perhaps even cannibals.

Notes

¹ Roy Porter, London: A Social History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994), p. 131.