“I should like you to consider that these functions [including passion, memory, and imagination] follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels.”—so writes Descartes in his Treatise on Man (108).

The hypothetical “I should like you to consider…” constructs mechanical, artificial man as a philosopher’s fiction. Man, A Machine, polemicizes La Mettrie one hundred years later.

The eighteenth century is characterized by intellectual historians as a period in the grips of a clock-work metaphor. Cartesian philosophy exempts consciousness from mechanist reduction, but the message gets mistaken and the mind, too, is figured as a machine.

Reduction is a mallet that treats every problem as a nail. Whack! “passion’s fierce illapse … polishes anew / By that collision all the fine machine” (Akenside The Pleasures of the Imagination II.158-62). Whack, whack!

Suppose the body a hydraulic system; the nerves, so many vibrating wires; the passions, illapse and impulse; and the mind, a mill. At what point does metaphor itself overleap some divide between the physical and mental?

In the opening of Hobbes’ Leviathan we are carried away by mechanism: “For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life?” (3).

Automata come alive. Engines move themselves. The intentional stance itself is nearly automatic, and we readily personify machines.¹

Personification is a device, and the assignment of a belief or a desire to a complicated piece of machinery is an unusual variety of reduction. To treat a machine as a person is a way of simplifying mechanism. Mechanical complexity is reduced by personification.

Locke, wrangling with the Cartesian proposition that the soul thinks always, offers a reductio ad absurdum: “It is doubted whether I thought at all last night or no; the question being about a matter of fact, it is begging it to bring, as a proof for it, an hypothesis, which is the very thing in dispute: By which way one may prove any thing, and it is but supposing that all watches, whilst the balance beats, think; and it is sufficiently proved, and past doubt, that my watch thought all last night.” (II.i.10).

Reduction, even absurd reduction, delivers us thinking watches.

The figure of the watch or clock is commonplace in the period. What is surprising, perhaps, is the regularity with which it is used to metaphorize the mind. Alexander Pope, for one, is explicit in picturing a clock-work soul in his Essay on Man:

Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul;
Reason’s comparing balance rules the whole (Epistle II, ll. 59-60).²

Adverse cogs turn here. Such is the structure of the couplet. Machines are personified; the mind is a machine.

Bernard Mandeville scores a materialist point, comparing the soul to a mainspring. Do not complain to the Mandevillean materialist that dissection will not discover the soul:

The Brain of an Animal cannot be look’d and search’d into whilst it is alive. Should you take the main Spring out of a Watch, and leave the Barrel that contain’d it, standing empty, it would be impossible to find out what it had been that made it exert itself, whilst it shew’d the Time (Vol. II, 4th dialogue).

The volatile particles that perform the “Labour of the Brain” are no more observable in the cold corpse than the steam that drives the engine when the fire is out and the water cold. We imagine vivisections of an engine. Or the machinery of modern brain surgery.

Clocks and watches recur in eighteenth-century philosophy—but not exclusively in materialist contexts. The clock figures in teleology too. Joseph Butler, in the preface of his Fifteen Sermons, compares the “inward frame of man” to a watch: “Appetites, passions, affections, and the principle of reflection” are so many parts that must, like the pieces and parts of a watch, be put together if we are to apprehend the purpose of the design.³

Pope’s metaphor of reason as a balance is probably borrowed from Pierre Bayle. Certainly the metaphor passes from Bayle into the Clarke-Leibniz debates. And while it is Clarke who makes much trouble for the metaphor in the eighteenth century,⁴ it is Leibniz who is remembered for denying machine metaphors in philosophy of mind:

a sentient or thinking being is not a mechanical thing like a watch or a mill: one cannot conceive of sizes and shapes and motions combining mechanically to produce something which thinks, and senses too, in a mass where [formerly] there was nothing of the kind—something which would likewise be extinguished by the machine’s going out of order (Preface 66-7).⁵

This is often presented as a knockdown argument. Leibniz’s thought problem is the mill that grinds to grist materialist theses. But watches and mills continued to serve as metaphors for the mind in the period in spite of Leibniz. New machines serve still today.

I encourage the reader to explore mechanist metaphors for the mind in the database. (Try a new beta version here.) Bacon, Defoe, Smollett, Francis Brooke, and Wollstonecraft, among others, picture the mind as a machine.

Examples are so many gears, balances and countersprings. One pushes against another in the perception of a reader. The collection of metaphors is a mechanical practice, I admit. But through arrangement an intelligence shows itself.

Notes

¹ “Intentional stance” is Daniel Dennett’s term of art. See The Intentional Stance. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. An important character appears and reappears in Dennett’s arguments as if part of some eighteenth-century it-narrative. That character is the thermostat. See, for example, pp. 22, 25, 29-34.

² The watch metaphor also appears in Essay on Criticism: “‘Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none / Go just alike, yet each believes his own” (ll. 9-10). I hear the watch miss a beat in the couplet as the caesura comes late and the “none” that closes the first line slips on to “Go” without being endstopped.

In these lines then the watch is not so much an emblem of mechanism as of fallibility. Indeed, in the eighteenth century the connotations of mechanism are not always what we might expect. See Jessica Riskin’s excellent article on “Eighteenth-Century Wetware” published in Representations vol. 82 (Summer 2003) pp. 97-125. Link. Eighteenth-century machines are not to be imagined on the model of Victorian mechanism.

³ Butler abandons the comparison quickly enough: “A machine is inanimate and passive: but we are agents” (327).

⁴ On Clarke’s and Leibniz’s competing uses of clock and balance metaphors, see John Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1983. pp. 131-7.

⁵ This passage from the preface of Leibniz’s New Essays on Human Understanding is further elaborated in Monadology:

If we imagine that there is a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that we could enter into it, as one enters into a mill. Assuming that, when inspecting its interior, we will only find parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception (§17).