of the “Memory”; similarly, he programmatically confuses the index with the faculty of “Judgment.”70 This is because the index provides a place for the dialectical elaboration and systematization of Locke’s epistemology, especially of the relationship between the faculty of the understanding and its mental materials. Each commonplace entry involves two separate acts of transfer. First, a quotation is selected as an epitome of a text, and then, as part of the process of putting it in the commonplace, a single word is developed to pose it as part of an abstract category. These two transfers anticipate Locke’s sense of the mind as a collection: the “senses at first let in particular ideas, to furnish the yet empty cabinet,” Locke remarks; thereafter, the mind, “by degrees growing familiar with some of them,” “abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names.”71 The first variety of transfer in the commonplace, from book to notebook, echoes the work of the senses, identifying ideas that can be stored as facts.72 The second, however, begins to capture the intellect as an emergent property, developing only when the store is full enough that reason may begin to arise alongside the categories of thought. This latter process is what is properly called “abstraction,” for it is the method “whereby ideas taken from particular beings become general representatives of all the same kind.” But it clearly leans against “abstraction” in its other meaning, the summarizing of the contents of a book. It may be, Locke elsewhere surmises, that there are “species” existing in the world prior to experience. But it is the mind, in its curatorial habits, that develops general names—“abstracts” them—from the materials of thinking. The commonplace is therefore itself a measure of “the use of reason,” which, Locke remarks, “becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment.”73 Reason, writes Charles Taylor, is for Locke “above all a property of the process of thinking, not of the substantive content of thought”;74 nor does reason stand somehow apart from its work. “Reason,” in Locke’s idiom, develops through the curatorial compilation and organization of “its materials.”
Locke’s headings are the trick whereby past contexts anticipate present occasion; the index is where Locke’s metaphors of abstraction bottom out, for it is the site where he might witness himself working out new abstract categories from the raw material of the old. There is, however, an important reverse movement, which finds these abstractions reinstalled at the site of the collecting activity in the first place. The tricky thing is how to identify passages ripe for abstraction, even while in the act of reading. As anyone who has compiled an index will know, the development of these general ideas or heads comes secretly to bear an important formative function, slipping back into the reading process. Just as the development of names for general heads in the commonplace will provide “general names, applicable to whatever exists conformable to such ideas” in the future, so too, Locke remarks, we “take for the perception of our sensation” that which is in fact “an idea formed by our judgment.”75 So, for instance, our repeated exposure to convex shapes, Locke observes, teaches us that what appear in the eye to be certain flat disks of light will actually turn out to be spheres if handled and turned on all sides.76 Prior work by the judgment to compile the mathematical notion “sphere,” abstracted from numerous past experiences of flat disks, sneaks so swiftly into experience that by the time fresh sensations reach what Locke calls the “presence chamber” of the mind, they are already altered by the organizing work of the judgment.77 We do not see flat disks and then figure out that they are spheres; we simply see spheres. What appear to the intellect to be passively received sensory ideas are already shaped by the “workmanship of the understanding.”78 Shaped by “conformity with our own experience,” the understanding participates in a secret way in constructing the world it beholds.79 So, too, rather than arriving late to a field of examples already assembled, the index of Locke’s commonplace is already entangled in the project of compilation, for it is the categories emerging there that help Locke identify the abstracts to copy in the first place. The explosion of indices in printed books was a sign of the times, of the reorganization of knowledge as content.80 But in Locke’s case, and in the cases of the thousands of people who adopted his method, we may say that their science produced the tail that it itself grasped—collected matter suggesting index headings that in turn suggest new matter to collect. The index is not merely a method of collation and organization; it is also a system of reading.81 What begins as a local conception of abstraction in the material habits of collection ends up getting smuggled into how Locke perceives the very activity of thought; what begins as the mere development of general names from observed particulars—abstraction, in other words, as itself an abstraction—ends up becoming, in the way of all abstractions, a judgment passing as a perception.
Locke’s indexing system is a system suited to the mind he understood himself to have: one that collects nuggets, files them away, and develops general names according to the ideas it possesses. Likewise, the theory of mind he develops is one suited to, and metaphorically founded on, the filing systems through which he did the work of thinking. He does not go quite so far as to suggest that reason itself is a mere offspring or epiphenomenon of the storage of ideas—that it rises autogenetically out of the mere accrual of facts. Nor does he suggest that we may choose freely the way that we divide up sensations into objects or abstracts. Though the “contents” of the mind “are derived from experience,” and therefore particular to the individual and his social context, “the psychological,” remarks Graham Richards, “stays formally fixed,” arriving in the end at seemingly essential and universal rules and methods, the very rules and methods it is the work of the Essay to discover.82 Indeed, Locke’s optimism is in the end anchored by the notion that collections of the same simple ideas will suggest the same abstract ones, providing, Locke hopes, a vocabulary for rational discourse.83 In his intellectual practice, however, he discusses perfectible but ultimately idiosyncratic methods of storage, sorting, and recall as the routes to discoveries about the world. And in this system, the labor of abstraction, the work of commonplace linked to library, ends up providing the master metaphor governing his epistemology. The mind as cabinet and cabinet as mind end up unconsciously coordinating a host of subordinate operations about the workmanlike nature of the intellect. What starts out as a mere metaphor, a work of judgment, slips back in as a structuring condition, shaping not only how the mind witnesses itself but also the way that it organizes its environment. The final sign of this dialectical process is the Essay itself, which emerged, in the end, as what Locke called “a copy of my own mind, in its several ways of operation.”84
Exhibit 2. John Milton’s Bed
The networks of metaphor elaborated in Locke’s cabinet provide a way of returning to the question of who visited Milton behind the curtains of his bed. Present there was his Muse, who “inspires / Easy” his “unpremeditated verse.” But also crowding Milton for his bedcovers were masses of poets, philosophers, writers, and thinkers who provided the grist of his deep reading. Like so many of his contemporaries, Milton was a keeper of commonplaces. Among the handful of his manuscripts that have survived the passage of time is a commonplace book owned, compiled, and consulted by Milton in his literary and poetic practice. Composed mostly of passages of political importance, the commonplace—now at the British Library—is a folio manuscript originally consisting of 126 leaves, of which more than half remain unused.85 It contains entries ordered only by the order in which Milton encountered them in his reading and thought to copy them or have them copied for him. The surviving commonplace limits itself only to the three contemporary branches of moral philosophy—“Ethicus,” “Oeconomicus,” and “Politicus”—among which it is most heavily invested in the last. It contains, therefore, quotations from Machiavelli and John Speed, historical exempla and excerpts from church historians, and remarks on ethics and politics generally. There was nothing particularly revolutionary in the form of the commonplace; unlike Locke, Milton did not propose a flexible indexing system, working up “heads” as his thinking evolved. Milton’s choice of topoi, writes Ruth Mohl, is after traditional categories, dealing with political and moral questions.86 It was accordingly useful to Milton in forming rhetorical answers to traditional political and religious questions, which is exactly how he seems to have used it.