activates parts of the same neural networks that light up when someone grasps something bodily and materially.28 The implication is that overlapping sets of neurons fire whether the word is thought, written, spoken, or heard, but also when something is grasped, or even when someone else is seen to be grasping something—actually or conceptually.29 The brain’s motor, visual, and proprioceptive circuits provide the ground of transfer where relations in space are bartered for relations between concepts. What is more, while it matters when a metaphor is mostly a dead one (as, for example, in the case of “apprehend”) many of the same general areas of the brain seem to be employed in conceptual as in related motor or proprioceptive processing.30 Embedded in etymology, Locke suggests, are clues to atavistic acts of intellection, for the web-work of the symbolic catches up fragments of its aboriginal embodiment.31 Conceptual systems are overlaid on patterns that emerge in sensory experience, even when the words labeling those concepts do not always own those concepts’ metaphorical debts in an obvious way.32 As Locke puts it, “The dominion of man, in this little world of his own understanding,” is “much the same as it is in the great world of visible things,” his laborious intellect working on ideas much in the same way as a craftsman might work with his collection of materials.33
The cognitive theory of metaphor has come under fire for underestimating the extent to which culture may come to shape metaphor—especially how context or situation may even map itself backwards into the understanding of and interaction with the material world.34 It seems to offer, in other words, little room for “socio-cultural situatedness.” George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, for instance, argue that the fundamental experience of containment, childhood experiences with putting things in and out of boxes, and so on, shapes by the royal road of metaphor a host of conceptual structures—not least our metaphors for memory, which include “filling the mind” and “retrieving information.”35 A number of studies on the embeddedness of exactly this metaphor, however, note that theorizations of containment tend to depend on inherited uses of containers, and that different cultures develop, therefore, strikingly different conceptual models.36 What we clearly need, then, is not a simplistic theory of concepts located immediately in rudimentary facts about the body but a nuanced theory that locates the haptic ground of conceptual metaphor in the mind’s elaborated and entangled relationship with its working environments. Speaking more immediately, we need a theory that locates thinking in its embodiment, thought as a property of an ecology. Especially in the case of a metaphor that becomes important for the mind’s understanding of itself (“the mind is a container”), what we need is a theory that can do two things at once. It must account for the way that an ideal system may be modeled on a material context at the same time that that material context is, in turn, modified by the ideal system doing its work. And it must do all of this while remembering that it is the system itself, the dialectical to-and-fro of the theory and practice, that makes it possible to think the mind/body split in the first place.
This suggests, then, that we may usefully think of the two halves of Locke’s remarks as linked. On the one hand, Locke notes, concepts are borrowed from bodily experience; on the other, ideas are stored and coordinated in the mind similarly to how things would be stored and coordinated in the cabinet. It is worth remembering, at this point, Locke’s lifetime habit of collecting, organizing, and collating books. His working model of mind would refer us, in this sense, to shelving and sorting practices at work in the cabinet, a cabinet that he was quite possibly in when he penned the lines that now stand as some of the most famous in the Essay.37 Locke began composing his library while studying at Christ Church, Oxford, with an eye toward a career in medicine, and his early acquisitions are, not surprisingly, books on topics of theology, medicine, and chemistry.38 But he also invested heavily in books of natural philosophy and natural history, including what one scholar calls the single most complete private collection of the works of Robert Boyle.39 Locke’s holdings throughout, therefore, were heavily weighted toward those thinkers who would pave the way for thinking of the mind as a library: Aristotle and Cicero among the ancients, but also Francis Bacon, Thomas Willis, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke among the moderns, with a selection of such Renaissance humanist thinkers as Milton, Spenser, and Thomas Browne.40 Taken together, these volumes provide a compact history of the origin of Locke’s system of conceptual metaphorics (his theory of ideas as objects) from Renaissance contact with Greek and Latin originals. Indeed, Locke’s library contained the precise books, from Aristotle to Bacon, that would have allowed him to construct a reasonably exhaustive prehistory of the notion, expressed in the second book of Locke’s Essay, that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses.41 This is of course a container theory of mind, the master metaphor of Locke’s epistemology.
But this is library as content; we are interested in the library as metaphor, indeed, as ecology, as a place where Locke might elaborate the relationship between thinker and materials of thought. And this requires a more detailed return to the site of work, in order to establish one way that Locke’s philosophical system found its bedrock in a set of learned gestures and habits. Fragments of Locke’s library survive—enough to reconstruct the elaborate systems he developed to tackle exactly the related problems of storage and coordination not just of books but of ideas. The library was elaborated over three rough phases: an early phase of acquisition, which was interrupted by a pair of extended visits to the Low Countries; a second phase of coordination, in which the books he continued to acquire while abroad and the books being held for him in England were together entered in an interleaved copy of Thomas Hyde’s Catalogus impressorum Librorum Bibliothecae Bodleianae;42 and a final phase, beginning after his return in 1688, when he was reunited with his total collection of books and set to put them in a meaningful, indexed order.43 These phases roughly accompany the years he began, worked up, and published the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which he started in 1671 but completed only in 1688. I mention this at length for two reasons. The first is that Locke strove to achieve continuity in his library despite his shifting circumstances; it is a curious detail of his life as a collector of books that he seems never to have purchased a duplicate.44 This was made possible in part by the Catologus, which operated as a sort of epitome and vade mecum of the library itself. It is also partly because Locke continually had his library and its books in mind even during his separations from them.45 The second is to note that Locke’s elaboration, on the one hand, of the mind as a cabinet, and his development, on the other, of his cabinet as an increasingly stable repository of ideas, together suggest the dialectical to-and-fro that characterizes a cognitive ecology, a working space of thinking that, in Locke’s case, also provides the model for thought.
Locke’s cabinet provided an apt metaphor for mind because the space was structured to match, in fact to materialize, the rudimentary and analytically prior metaphors underwriting Locke’s sense of how cognition works. These more rudimentary and hence capacious metaphors are different species of the same basic conceptual source domain: the mind is a container. In this analytically prior formulation, Locke imagines the mind as a sort of camera obscura—a “dark room” that allows images to enter and fall upon a suitable surface like a wall or a screen (see Exhibit 4).46 The mind has the capacity, called “contemplation,” Locke writes, to hold a small set of such ideas “for some time actually in view.”47 This would be to perceive something (etymologically, “to take” or “to capture” it), and to extend or to attenuate that perception across time. It is as though the understanding stood within a miniaturized chamber, viewing images cast upon a two-dimensional surface, contemplating them simply as they come and go. But contemplation on present sensory ideas is the exception rather than the norm; indeed, in his Essay Locke gives to “contemplation” the shortest space possible, offering little more than a barely ornamented definition. Indeed, he gives to “contemplation” a space appropriate to how long the mind is able actually to contemplate, without recourse to any supports. For, according to Locke’s system, we far more often “retrieve” ideas that are “laid up in store … when need and occasion calls for them.” It is for this reason that the dark room emerges as an important transitional metaphor. Locke almost instantly appends to the image of the dark room an extensive storage function: