ONE

Theories of Knowledge
and Perception

The study of the mind and its processes, with historical theories of knowledge and perception as central considerations, is necessary for any understanding of Baroque art. In the Baroque era, writers express varying points of view stemming from various ways of regarding or charting the human soul or mind (for the terms soul and mind were almost always synonymous). The faculty theory of the mind was deeply entrenched in the culture. This theory, based on the faculty psychology developed by the ancient Greeks, had been refined and expounded for more than two thousand years. Without an historical knowledge of the mythology of the mind and its attendant terminology, we cannot tell how artists and theorists of the Baroque age described their thoughts, either explicitly or implicitly, nor can we understand rhetorical theory, aesthetic and critical movements, social influences, natural tastes, the importance of the new scientific discoveries, and the Baroque parallels and comparisons between the arts. Once the ideas and terminology are understood, the use of the faculty psychology becomes noticeable where before it was not, because most of the terms are still present in modern speech, albeit with changed meanings.

Knowledge of both the theory and the use of popular and erudite ideas behind art is a means to comprehend what painters, writers, and composers tried to do and express. Since they communicate their ideas and feelings to us through works of art, we are the losers if we neglect responding to their art as much as possible in their own terms. Painters often depicted personifications of parts of the mind, or appealed to them, and depended on their viewers to use the accepted terminology to analyze character through gesture, color, and posture. Poets often use the terminology for character analysis and depiction to describe the mind or its parts, and they try to achieve certain effects in the minds of readers and audiences through description, figures of speech, and diction. And musicians appeal to one part of the mind or another through melody, key, tempo, rhythmic patterns, and harmony, besides often writing songs about the parts of the mind. Each artist does in each medium what others in other media also try to accomplish. All artists use the terminology and concepts as well to describe their own minds, their thinking processes, and their emotional states.

The most important issues in the relationship between mind and art in the Baroque era concern the ways in which the mind can impose rational form on the seeming chaos of the worlds of nature and imagination. To most, there was only seeming chaos in nature because they believed in the existence in nature of an ultimate, rational, although undiscernible order, resolved within the principle of discordia concors, that the seeming disorder of the existent world is a part of a larger ordered scheme that is divine reality. Some thought science was beginning to discover and realize order through observation of natural phenomena, but others, more Neoplatonically inclined, believed that nature is the product of the ordering intelligence of “The One,” the perfection which can be perceived only through imagination or vision, religious or artistic (or both). As they had always done, poets, painters, and musicians, whether they were Neoplatonists or Neo-Epicurean materialists, tried to order both nature and imagination through artistic form; this ordering was a function of the rational faculties of the mind, or the conscious reason. Whereas science in theory deals directly with facts and logic, art of necessity expresses and appeals to faculties that are both rational and irrational, although instruction of the reasonable, or first, soul, is in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, usually thought of as the most important purpose of art. Instruction, however, can take place in various ways. Some thought that even if a work of art does not instruct overtly through morals, maxims, or demonstrations of poetic justice, it should be harmoniously well proportioned, reflecting in its own order and harmony the harmony God created in the universe. In this way, a work of art, the microcosmic reflection of the macrocosm, expresses and appeals to the most rational part of the mind, as well as to the highest emotions, and in its total effect induces in the whole soul and body that balance, harmony, and proportion the soul ideally should possess in itself, should impose on and share with the body, and should take pleasure in perceiving and receiving.

The thought and feeling that either the human mind or a work of art is a microcosmic reflection of the macrocosm, God’s total creation, and the belief and trust in the reasonable soul—the highest part of the soul, the part mankind shares with angels—were more widespread at the beginning of the Baroque era than at the end. The advances of the new science persuaded many to think of mankind more objectively, more in terms of man as animal, denying or at least distrusting the highest soul and denying the connection of man to angels (or even denying altogether the idea of angels). Such negativistic ideas, although terrifying to some and disturbing to others, influenced artists of all kinds. A reduction in the belief in man’s potentialities is pessimistic, and the scope of mankind’s artistic potentialities in general and in specific works of art contracted accordingly, both literally and theoretically. Nevertheless, the vocabulary and the general theories of knowledge remained fairly constant. Shakespeare, for example, probably could not have written The Tempest (1611), with its faith in the Neoplatonic theories of harmony of the soul, in the last part of the century. The play, however, was liked and understood in the English Restoration (1660), as it was at the beginning of the seventeenth century. There are differences, however: the profound morality in equating Prospero with the highest faculties, an intellectual appeal, was not so important to Restoration audiences as titillation or amusement (an appeal to the second soul). The adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest by John Dryden and Sir William Davenant (1667), as well as that by Thomas Shadwell (1674), add scenes to Shakespeare’s play that are merely diverting to the emotions or passions.

Dryden and Davenant’s addition of a man who has never seen a woman may have something to do with the history of the noble savage or with theories of education based on the idea of the mind at birth as a tabula rasa, but it detracts from the harmony and dignity of Shakespeare’s unity, including Shakespeare’s balanced use of the grotesque, the farcical yet terrifying aspects of Trinculo, Stephano, and Caliban. As Willard Farnham argues, “In the hands of Dryden and Davenant Caliban loses dignity and gains vulgarity.”¹ The dignity Caliban has emanates, in Farnham’s words, from “strange nobilities of spirit.” Such “nobilities of spirit” come from Caliban’s implicit unity with the cosmos: the connections of the vegetable and animal faculties with divinity. That is, nobility of soul comes from a belief or feeling that in the essential divinity and unity of all created things all things tend toward a mystical oneness. In Dryden and Davenant’s conception, there is less feeling for a unified cosmos, for earthly creatures do not partake of divinity. As Farnham says, Caliban is changed from “a monstrous underling capable of strange nobilities of spirit into a monstrous underling pure and simple” (p. 159). In Shakespeare’s play, at the end, Caliban shows some potential for developing the highest parts of his soul. In Dryden and Davenant he does not because of their lack of belief in the highest soul. Dryden and Davenant’s other additions to Shakespeare’s Tempest are also almost totally overt appeals to the lower faculties, the baser parts of the soul. In the case of Hippolito, they amuse and titillate the viewers, arousing in them emotions of superiority over the comically naive character on the stage. In Hippolito’s case, Dryden and Davenant also use as their model Hobbes’s conception of a natural man, someone who primarily seeks pleasure and power, who has no higher soul to share with the angels, who cannot comprehend the abstraction of death when he is dying. In The Tempest, where Restoration theories of mind and of artistic purpose can be compared with earlier ideas, there are in Dryden and Davenant’s and Shadwell’s changes ramifications of the complex and profound mixture of ideas in the Baroque age.

The psychological terms used to describe and explain the faculties of the soul or mind were so pervasive in the Baroque era that they were a part of everyday learned conversation. They were as much a part of an accepted mythology of man and his mind as our own Freudian mythology and are sometimes equally confusing, for although the vocabulary for both psychologies is supposedly precise, it is used imprecisely in everyday speech, with changing meanings for single terms. Yet the mythology used by a seventeenth-century creator (or audience, for that matter) to explain how the mind works is effective. Its ready-made reality corresponds to psychological and physiological phenomena which we can see they observed in themselves. It therefore was and still is pragmatic, also like twentieth-century Freudian psychology. That is, it emanates from experience, from observed human behavior and feelings; it professes no knowledge of the internal mechanism of thinking and reacting. In its own sphere, the faculty psychology is practical, serviceable, and highly complex. Louis Martz, for example, voices astonishment at the penetration of the seventeenth-century masters of self-analysis.² One of the problems is that their terms are not that unfamiliar to us and often are used as a part of our own language, but with changed meanings. We still lose our “temper”; we are supposed to use our “imaginations” to figure things out; and either we memorize something or we learn it “by heart.”

I

The mind (or soul) is usually divided into three parts (sometimes called separate souls): the reasonable (the highest), the sensible or concupiscible (the second), and the vegetable (the lowest). The various faculties (among them the understanding, the imagination, and the memory) are lodged in the three parts of the soul, and they receive, judge, and determine emotions, expression, and actions. Their location depends on their functions. The map or mythology of the soul has much to do with art because it not only explains how artists thought their own and other people’s minds worked but also helps us evaluate the status of an art or a work of art: the higher the faculties art expresses and appeals to, the higher and more important is the art or the work of art itself. The vocabulary of the faculty psychology is everywhere, and it is difficult to understand critical theory, theories of rhetoric, or even popular taste unless we know the changing emphases placed on the different parts of the soul or mind.

F. N. Coeffeteau’s Table of Humane Passions With Their Causes and Effects (1615) is a very clear, short exposition of the faculty psychology of the soul and in general agrees with all other theories.³ According to Coeffeteau, the lowest part of the soul, and the least applicable to art, is that called “vegetable”:

Its powers are principally those which nourish, which contribute to the growing and increase, and which serve to generation: and those have other powers for instruments to their actions, as the power to draw, the power to retaine, the power to expell the excrements, the power to digest the nourishment. . . . [Preface]

The main power of the vegetable soul is that of “the natural appetite,” which “draws the nourishment” and expels that which the natural appetite abhors. This part of the soul is too low to have senses or knowledge, and mankind shares its functions with both animals and plants. The seeming knowledge of the natural appetite is innate, given by “that sovereign intelligence” which is God or nature, thus presupposing an ordering force which transcends existent nature.

The second part of the soul, the part shared with animals (but not plants) is called sensitive or concupiscible. It is higher than the vegetable part because it has more sophisticated powers: “the faculty to know, the faculty to desire, and the moving powers” (the faculty of action, controlled or directed either by desire or by knowledge). To refine further, Coeffeteau says:

The knowing powers are of two sorts, that is to say the exterior and interior. The exterior are the five senses of nature, as seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, the which as messengers carry to the interior powers indued with knowledge, whatsoever we can comprehend and desire. [Preface]

The senses, however, are limited by the objects each perceives. Thus, “the eyes are only employed to judge of the difference of colours, as betwixt white and black, and never seek to meddle with that which concerns the sound, smelling, and other qualities which have nothing in common with colours” (Preface). The exterior senses send their signals to be judged by the “common sense,” the first interior power, which decides what is harmful or healthful. The common sense, then, operates judgmentally on a very low level, more in terms of cleverness, survival, and everyday, spur-of-the-moment decisions. Since the common sense has no memory, and no judgment other than that of self-preservation, it sends

all it has gathered, compared, and distinguished, to another [interior] power meerely knowing, which is called the imaginative [the imagination or fancy]; as that wherein are graven the forms of things which are offered unto it by the common sense, so the end of the knowledge may remain after they are vanished away. [Preface]

Attached to the imaginative power is a faculty that preserves ideas and the forms of things, the memory, the storehouse out of which the imagination may draw, when needed, the forms of things remembered to present to the common sense. The common sense then compares that which immediately confronts it with what it has confronted before; thereby it determines whether that which has been perceived is dangerous, pleasurable, uncomfortable, and so on.⁴

The imagination produces images or ideas or conceptions; it brings together disparate ideas; and it is often the word-producing faculty. The status of the imagination varies from theory to theory, and definitions, discussions, and arguments about the imagination cause most of the seventeenth-century controversies concerning the arts. Coeffeteau viewed its status as low, subservient even to the common sense, and people of a rationalistic persuasion agreed. If the imaginative power is in ascendance (if it uncontrollably starts envisioning horrid shapes or wonderful scenes on its own volition), overruling the common sense, a person under its power would be clearly mad, given to morbid fears, hallucinations, and unrealizable, utopian dreams. There would be no control by the common sense for self-preservation. Therefore, as Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) says, lovers are mad (p. 96). Burton lists as diseases of the imagination “phrenzy,” madness, melancholy, dotage, hydrophobia (rabies), lycanthropy (werewolves), and St. Vitus’s dance (p. 120); he thought these maladies were caused by “motions” of the imagination, and we know from elsewhere that motions are equated with emotions and passions. Envy, for example, is a “motion.” Burton says, “The imagination is the common carrier of passions” (p. 221). In other theories, the imagination is sometimes located in the upper soul and is almost equal to the understanding, a variation used by the Neoplatonic thinkers, who give great importance to an artist’s imaginative vision. In such Neoplatonic theories, the imagination envisions people not as they are but as they ought to be. The outcome of such differing theories is that imagination can raise human beings to glorious heights or can degrade them utterly. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, disagreement over the status of imagination caused disputes over the relative excellence of Raphael or Michelangelo, the excellence of Shakespeare, the relative greatness of Homer or Virgil, and the struggle between French and English views of art.

Besides the eight knowing faculties (the five exterior senses plus the common sense, imagination, and memory) there are in the second soul two “appetitive,” or desiring, powers wherein “the desires are formed”: “The concupiscible or desiring power, and the irascible or angry powers” (Preface). Both are necessary for survival. For example, a lion (appropriately, an animal) that desires to eat another animal will starve if it lacks the irascible power to overcome obstacles in the way of fulfilling its desire for food (Preface). In a more abstract description, someone who wants to pursue an apparent good or avoid an apparent evil reacts this way (the good or evil is only apparent because the second soul cannot distinguish abstractions, only concrete, immediate desires):

Whenas any difficulty ariseth and opposeth itself to the desire of the concupiscible, [the irascible] comes presently to succour it; and enflaming the blood, excites choler, hope, courage, or some other like passion ... to make him surmount the difficulties which cross the contentment of the soul. [Preface]

Alone, such motions can lead to theft, murder, or rape, or by chance to heroic actions of one kind or another, because there is no rational force to guide them. A person ruled by this part of the soul is bestial at best, criminal at worst.

The second part of the soul houses all the passions or emotions (fear, admiration, anger, pity, terror, love, horror, lust, and astonishment), that is, the motions or passions that artistic devices try to express and move. When we are emotionally moved, we feel motions inside us, in this part of the second soul. A work of art that appeals to the second soul, therefore, addresses itself to the baser appetites, emotions, or feelings, as they can be conjured up by the imagination. In our terms, pornography does this (as it appeals completely to unintellectual appetites), and so do more respectable art forms that appeal primarily to more acceptable emotions (such as the sentimental paintings of Norman Rockwell). Those who are not relativists still consider art of this kind lower than other kinds because they believe mankind superior to animals absolutely, not merely different from them. It was as true in the seventeenth century as it is today that materialists who deny any soul higher than the sensitive assign little importance to the value of a single human being or to a single work of art as a superior intellectual and imaginative effort of a single human being (although they often profess a great concern for mankind as a whole). Those who think man capable of at least visualizing beauty of a higher kind think otherwise and are more concerned with the abilities and worth of individual artists (or human beings, in general) in terms of innate qualities of spirit, not merely in terms of acquired wealth or power, physical prowess, or ideological position.

The last part of the sensitive soul is “the faculty [of] moving from one place to another.” This faculty is not centrally located but “is dispersed and resides in the sinnewes, muscles and ligaments, and ... is dispensed over all the members of the creature” (Preface). The power of physical movement may be controlled by the appetite for its purposes, and the irascible and moving powers are linked in their functions. They do not usually come into play when we experience works of art, unless we are moved by that art to slash pictures, to assault actors, or to perform some other kind of irrational action (which we may designate after the fact as good or bad), the kind often stimulated by propagandistic devices, unintellectual devices used in a work of art to incite people to action. Dryden’s play Amboyna or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English (1673) has such a purpose; it was intended to raise English nationalistic emotions and to incite the English to seek revenge against the Dutch.

The highest soul, the most noble, is the part known as the reasonable soul, that part which is peculiar to mankind (of all creatures on earth). It has two “principall powers”: the understanding and the will. The understanding is that power which receives the forms sent to it by the imagination, universalizing them according to abstract principles. Coeffeteau says,

The office of our understanding, particularly of that which we call possible, is to receive, and in receiving to know, and in knowing to offer unto the will those kinds of formes, which are sent unto it from the imagination. It is true, that being a more noble power than the sensitive, it cannot receive those images and formes, so material, gross, and sensible, as they are of themselves in their particular being, for that they are not proportionable to the purity and excellence of her condition. By reason whereof the philosophers have placed in our soules another power wonderfully noble, whose office it is to purge and to clothe as it were [in] a new lustre, all the images or formes which are found in the imagination or fantasie [fancy]; and by the meanes of this light, to cause those formes which were materiall, sensible, and singular, to become so purified from these earthly conditions as they seem universal. [Preface]

The understanding generalizes and abstracts a specific action or happenstance, comparing it to abstract truth or analyzing it in itself. Some of its functions, therefore, are distinguishing good from evil, right from wrong. For example, the second soul may passionately desire someone else’s property, but the understanding will indicate that it is both wrong to desire that property and wrong to take it because on principle (an abstraction) the property belongs to someone else. Louis Martz in The Poetry of Meditation (1954) expresses the idea clearly: “As long as the understanding remains unbiassed by the passions, it will easily distinguish between truth and falsehood, between real evil masquerading as good, and real good under the false appearance of evil” (p. 120). Antoine Arnauld says the same thing in L’Art de pensée (1662). But there is disagreement in the Baroque era on even the existence of such a part of the soul. Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) denies not only the existence of innate qualities of the highest part of the soul but also the existence of the part itself, arguing that people act only for their own interests (appetites and pleasures). He thinks that man is an animal, superior to other animals only in that he can improve the faculties he shares with them. Hobbes says,

For besides sense and thoughts and the train of thought, the mind of man has no other motion: though by the help of speech and method the same faculties may be improved to such a height as to distinguish men from all other living creatures.⁵

Hobbes’s ideas are always in the minority in the seventeenth century, yet the materialistic views he represents gained respect toward the end of the century and always lurk somewhere in the background of any metaphysical statement in the period, whether in art or in philosophy. Hobbes sees man as an object, as a machine to be observed or manipulated. This view fits in generally with the development of science. Obviously, this attitude is a commonplace in the twentieth century, for example in the assumptions of behavioristic psychology. Hobbes, in denying the association of the human mind or soul with divine beings or qualities, and in equating human beings with animals, expresses one of the most important ideas developed in and following the period, one which has much to do historically with the status and function of art.

The last faculty of the soul is the will. When it is controlled by the understanding, will is called the intellectual appetite. However, if the understanding is bypassed, that is, if the passions prove too strong for the understanding, the will causes the body to act according to the desires of the appetite. As long as the reasonable soul commands the appetite (or passions), all is well, but if for some reason,

by bad education, or by customes, or by the organs being unsound, or for that his will has bad inclinations; so as reason cannot enjoy her power, and subject the sensual appetite unto her; but contrariwise he abandons himself in prey unto this disordered appetite, and suffers himself to be transported by his furious motions [passions]. So as suddenly when as fantasie [fancy or imagination] offers to the appetite, the formes which she receives from the senses, under the show of good or evil; he without stay to have them judged by the discourse of understanding, and chosen by the will, commands of himself the moving power, and makes it act according to his pleasure. And herein consists the disorder which the passions cause in the life of man, which divert him many times from the laws of reason. [Preface]

The passions, when aroused, distemper the body, causing it to lose its harmony or temper—hence our phrase “losing one’s temper.” Whenever the understanding is deficient in any area of a person’s mind (or in his whole being) and passion grows at that weak point, that person’s behavior is controlled by emotions, passions, or humours. Passions and humours are therefore disharmonious aberrations which have eluded the control of the understanding or reasonable soul, causing a lack of harmony and enforcing irrational behavior. In the seventeenth century, humours and passions were regarded as physical deformities. When a passion was raised, it was believed to alter a person physiologically (an idea we are now rather redundantly proving true).⁶ Coeffeteau says, “That which is called passion, say they, is no other thing, but a motion of the sensitive appetite, caused by the apprehension or imagination of good or evill, the which is followed with a change or alteration in the body, contrary to the laws of Nature” (p. 2). Lomazzo (1584) discourses on the same idea in Book II of his Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Carvinge, and Building, in a chapter entitled “How the bodie is altered by imitation.” To Lomazzo, imitation (art) raised passions which in turn alter the body.⁷

Historically, people thought those who were subject to passions degraded or mad. They thought man naturally wants to be closer to God and the angels, and the more reasonable he is, the closer he is to that higher state of existence. Man’s natural soul or disposition is in balance or temper, and passion upsets that balance (Coeffeteau, pp. 12-26). If a humour or passion takes over a person or character completely, he becomes completely distracted, or mad. The madness (which can vary in degreee, the less serious being merely irrationality) may be temporary, depending on whether the reasonable soul can or cannot reassert its primacy after it has once succumbed to a passion or humour. To Robert Burton, passions are the cause for all the bad things in the world that are ascribable to mankind. To him, even original sin emanates from the passions. Shakespeare’s character Macbeth (1605) is a case in point. As he succumbs to his passions, he becomes more and more bestial and more and more unbalanced, or mad. Passions also cause imbalance and disaster in Milton’s Satan and Samson, Dryden’s Maximin, Racine’s Phèdre, and others. The same kind of passions are illustrated in paintings and expressed by music. The humours and passions induce disharmony, and the musical analogy is important. In Shakespeare’s King Lear (1605), Cordelia tries to cure King Lear, to bring his soul back into harmony, by playing music (IV, vii), since the right kind of music was thought capable of bringing the passions back into harmony through its own harmony (Burton, pp. 478-79). The power of music to cure the passions is expressed frequently throughout the whole century.⁸

Because of their discordancy the humours became the basis for comedy. The discord within the play is resolved into harmony, or a seeming harmony, at the end. Ben Jonson’s comedies of humour display characters moved by aberrant humours, as do those of his Restoration disciple Thomas Shadwell. In the English Restoration, however, the word humour becomes diluted, less precise, at times analogous to a quirk or amusing habit or trait. But the same general idea about its being an aberration or deformity holds true, except that the emphasis is often more external than internal; less importance is placed on the substantive inner physical deformity as it becomes more acceptable to view mankind as more animal than angel. Melantha’s humour or aberration for French fashions and language in John Dryden’s Marriage à la Mode (1673), for example, is superficial and foolish, not so all-permeating and destructive as Sir Epicure Mammon’s lust for gold in Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) or even the assorted humours displayed by the characters in his Silent Woman (1609). However, it still shows her lack of judgment. The same kind of comparison holds true for Jonson and Shadwell. As affective theories of art, in which the importance of art lay in the way it appealed to the affections or passions, gained headway, the importance of humours as serious deformities lessened. Comedy became more of an amusement and less instructive.

The idea that the understanding, or reason, should control the passions of the second soul was universally accepted. Coeffeteau’s reference to distemperate passions and his earlier reference to blood both concern the humours or fluids. A humour (connected with the second soul) may become uncontrollable when the highest soul has a weakness. One humour, or alteration in the soul, might become dominant, and a person would be out of temper. The highest soul keeps a person in temper, in an harmonious condition and therefore content, by intellectually controlling the humours and passions. Art, which appeals to the passions and desires, arouses them, “enflaming the blood” and so forth, through artistic imitation or artifice. Such exercise of the passions is felt by Plato to strengthen them and is thus bad. This idea is still strong in the seventeenth century. Control of the passions, according to Plato and Galen, comes through exercise of control.⁹ To Burton, reason can make us living saints; whereas “lust, anger, ambition, pride” make us into beasts (p. 119). Like Galen, he believes that imagination can be strengthened by exercise (p. 469). A superior person, for example, Shakespeare’s Prospero, in exercising control over his passions is balanced; an inferior person such as John Ford’s Giovanni in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633) is more subject to the whims and storms of his baser emotions and passions. If control by the reasonable soul separates mankind from lower forms of life, a work of art that powerfully raises passions or emotions alters its audience or spectators physically, changing them perhaps for the worse.¹⁰

Art that was thought to appeal primarily to the emotions, upsetting the soul’s harmony, was usually not considered art of the highest kind. An epic such as Virgil’s Aeneid, as it portrays the manners of the rather stoical Aeneas, was therefore thought to be a higher art form than a tragedy such as Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, which deals primarily with the passions. A rationally harmonious painting such as Raphael’s School of Athens was thought of as more admirable than Titian’s passionate Bacchus and Ariadne.¹¹ Such a concept not only influences the audience but also the creator. Certain kinds of art became more noble: if an artist in any medium wanted to show off his excellence in the best way, he would appeal to the highest part of the soul. Thus, Jonson wrote Sejanus (1603); Dryden always dreamed of writing an epic; and Milton as the culminating work of his career as a poet wrote Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671). All these works appeal primarily to the understanding and are only reinforced by appeals to the imagination and passions. In Paradise Lost, Satan, for example, depends on appeals to the second soul; God and his angels appeal to the reason.

II

The idea of the soul as tripartite is at least as old as the writings of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle and is certainly pervasive in Western Europe from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century.¹² Although Coeffeteau’s theory of the soul is not expressed in exactly the same way by all writers, the general outline is much the same. Plato’s image in The Phaedrus of the soul as a charioteer and his horses and his analysis of the three parts of the soul in The Republic, Book IV, are very much in accordance with Coeffeteau’s view and with what was generally believed by thinkers in the Baroque period. All the following writers were familiar to the seventeenth century: Galen postulates three kinds of souls, saying that he agrees with Plato. He points out that wine excites the irascible soul, causing it to overcome the rational,¹³ a commonplace definition of drunkenness.¹⁴ Boethius postulates the same three souls in the same way.¹⁵ Montaigne mentions the three actions of the soul, the imaginative, the appetitive, and the consenting.¹⁶ He says that it is the understanding (not the imagination) which orders everything and which acts, rules, and reigns; all other faculties are blind and deaf, without soul.¹⁷ The same views are held by Seneca, Cicero, Quintilian, and Plutarch. The Epicurean Lucretius is, of course, the exception, and Dante, for example, shows his disapproval of Epicureanism by placing Epicureans in his circle six of hell. Those who affirm there is nothing to man beyond body are the ultimate heretics (Inferno, Canto X). Renaissance and Baroque writers identify a materialist such as Machiavelli with denial of the highest part of the soul.

Pierre Charron, in his lengthy, involved analysis of the soul (De la sagesse [1603]), places memory and imagination, along with understanding, in the reasonable soul.¹⁸ Yet, the result of his explanation is pretty much the same as Coeffeteau’s. Imagination is the root of opinion (which is irrational); imagination leads to madness when not controlled by the understanding (I, p. 62), and it is terrible (terrifying) when it is in ascendance over the rational faculties (I, p. 63). Descartes’s more scientific analysis discusses the soul’s two main parts: “We call the inferior part of the soul sensitive and the superior part reasonable” [la partie inférieure de l’âme qu’on nomme sensitive, et la supérieure qui est raisonable].¹⁹ The eloquent Jean-Louis Guéz de Balzac (1597–1654), whose letters were translated several times in England during the last part of the seventeenth century, says,

Having deprived the imaginative poet of judgment, I have left him nothing now, but an instrument to commit faults with. You know, when the cyclops was blind, his great strength incumber’d him, and serv’d only to advance the danger of his fall. Our opinions therefore appear to be the same, though they differ’d in the expression; and I conceive, that the fancy alone, in what degree of perfection it can possibly be, is uncapable of being a parent of anything, but monsters, or of treading in the right way, but by accident and fortune. [Letter of 19 June 1638]

He also says that the passionate part “is a tyrannical power, which the sense usurpeth over the reason, and which makes us see, that the neighborhood of the imagination, is extreamly contagious to the intellectual part, and that there is more body than soule in this proud creature [man], which thinks itself borne to command all others” (letter of 10 August 1629).²⁰

The fascination that Baroque artists indicate for the associations the different parts of the soul have is embodied in Charles Le Brun’s drawings of pig-men, crow-men, and others (see Plates 19–21). Persons who resembled certain animals were thought to share their passions and appetites.

Seventeenth-century writers who disagree with the traditional organization of the soul, denying the highest functions of the reasonable soul, document dissenting, although important, attitudes toward the arts and toward behavior in general. Writers in the tradition of Epicurus or Lucretius, such as Thomas Hobbes and Walter Charleton, express ideas of the faculties similar to those of the other writers previously mentioned, but they differ significantly in their analyses. Both Hobbes and Charleton maintain that the senses are the source of all knowledge and understanding, an idea that distinctly affects their opinions of art.²¹ Yet Hobbes is more important than Charleton. He recognizes nothing that is not palpable to the senses, neither essence as separate from the body, nor immortality, nor innate ideas. Man, to Hobbes, is a sensational animal. Hobbes agrees with Lucretius, who says that the senses are more important than abstract reason, that touch and sight are provoked by the stimulus of particles, and that what stimulates the senses sets in motion the delicate substance of the mind within. The senses are the sources of knowledge because they perceive facts, and facts are analyzed by the judgment, the critical faculty which gains its knowledge from experience (which comes through the senses). Human endeavors that deal with the reality of facts are thus the most important to mankind. Hobbes says that in histories, unlike art, “the judgment must be eminent” (p. 66) because histories instruct us about facts. Art has to do only partially with experience and judgment because it is fiction or “imagined history,” not fact. Art emanates from the imagination; yet since it has to have its basis in reality or nature to be understandable, judgment has to be present in a regulatory capacity. Hobbes says, “A great fancy [uncontrolled by judgment] is one kind of madness” (ibid.). Therefore, “In a good poem, whether it be epic or dramatic, as also in sonnets, epigrams, and other pieces [and by implication in other kinds of art as well], both judgment and fancy are required, but the fancy must be more eminent” (ibid.).

Artistic endeavors as emanations primarily from the imagination (or fancy) are to Hobbes, and others like him, products of an inferior activity. Imagination (which is linked to memory) does not deal with sensory perception or facts, and its remembrance of experience fades over time. To Hobbes, imagination, therefore, “is nothing but decaying sense” (p. 27), and works of art entertain or titillate the passions, rather than instruct or teach the highest parts of the mind. To Hobbes, a work of art’s utility or function is to tease the senses or prevent boredom; art has for its great end an inferior purpose, delight. In other words, art appeals primarily to the passions or appetite and should not concern itself principally with instructing the understanding.²² All art is therefore rated below the more useful sciences, especially music, the instructive powers of which are supposed to appeal to the innate capacities of the understanding as it perceives the absolute harmony of the universe in the harmony of music. Contrary to Hobbes, Thomas Mace, a musician representative of older Neoplatonic theories of art, says that man’s true understanding is innate, that understanding of music is not attained by art or education but by an “inward ear and sense.”²³ Hobbes would have laughed at such words.

Much of the significance of seventeenth-century thought lies in the changes of attitude toward the human soul that occurred during that time, changes reflected in artistic productions. There is no exact point at which ideas like Hobbes’s suddenly took over, but the cultural drift was toward man as animal, away from the ascendance of the reasonable soul as a soul mankind shared with angels. The main impetus for this drift of ideas was the new science and the attendant Neo-Epicureanism, which saw man in connection with his natural environment rather than in connection with divine forces and ideas; that is, man as a complicated machine rather than an image of God. Neoplatonism opposes such views. Art constructed according to Neoplatonic proportions and balances supposedly appeals through form to the highest faculties of the reasonable soul.

Neoplatonic refers generally to the ideas expressed by Plotinus in his Enneads and by the writings and thoughts that emanate from them, through St. Augustine, Boethius, the Florentine Platonists, and the seventeenth-century English Neoplatonists. Briefly, the term Neoplatonist describes someone who believes in the oneness of the universe and all it contains; that existent things are merely poor imitations of divine or absolute realities; that divine reality consists of perfect harmony, proportion, goodness, virtue, and so forth; that divine reality can be envisioned by the artist through his imagination as a part of his highest soul; and that in art the artist as a creator attempts to communicate divine reality to the recipients of his art. Unlike Plato, who banishes most art and artists from his Republic because they exercise the passions, a Neoplatonist thinks of an artist as a creator, an analogue of God who brings peace, harmony, and understanding to the soul through elevated art. Art becomes one of the noblest of human activities. The expansiveness and transcendental heights of such a belief presuppose a partial divinity of the human soul, in direct opposition to materialistic or physically bounded views of human nature. Materialistic views are irrational, dependent on the senses as the primary sources of knowledge. A Neoplatonic view appeals to, and depends on, the understanding, in its most elevated sense.

As the century goes on, appeals to the understanding become more overt and less a function of form. If an appeal to the understanding is a function of form, it is expressed through balance and regularity, an imitation of the symmetry and beauty of the universe (which in itself is an imitation of God’s harmony and infinite goodness). Such art helps by example to bring the soul into a state of harmony and goodness. If an appeal to the understanding is overt, it appears as a moral, and usually depends for its effect on manipulation of the emotions. Art of all kinds more and more was made to manipulate the passions and appetites of the second soul. The Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, in Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et le peinture (1719), for instance, points out that the most important function of art is to dispel ennui, an idea duly noted by David Hume in Of Tragedy (1757). Such a point of view is not found literally in the seventeenth century, although the Chevalier de Méré and Saint-Évremond (as influenced by the Neo-Epicurean Pierre Gassendi), as well as Hobbes and others, are seventeenth-century forerunners of such a view. And works of art produced for people who regard art in such a way tend to become trivial; the raison d’être of art thus viewed is its entertainment value. In the seventeenth century, art lost prestige as the ever-increasing study and explanation of natural phenomena gained importance, for the human being became in itself a natural phenomenon to be studied and explained, a superior animal rather than a divine essence. The reverberations of such a profound change in thinking spread further in the eighteenth century and are still universally felt.

At the end of the seventeenth century, the writings of two well-known English philosophers, John Locke and the third earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper), shed light on ideas and attitudes current in the preceding years. John Locke, in many respects Hobbes’s philosophical descendant, denies innate ideas, so judgment and wit (or imagination) come from experience; and products of wit, as in Hobbes, are inferior. He says:

Wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy; judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully, one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to one thing for another. This is a way of proceeding quite contrary to metaphor and allusion; wherein for the most part lies that entertainment and pleasantry of wit, which strikes so lively on the fancy, and therefore is so acceptable to all people, because its beauty appears at first sight, and there is required no labour of thought to examine what truth or reason there is in it. The mind, without looking any further, rests satisfied with the agreeableness of the picture and the gaeity of the fancy. And it is a kind of affront to go about to examine it, by the severe rules of truth and good reason; whereby it appears that it consists in something that is not perfectly conformable to them.²⁴

If we see Locke and Hobbes as part of their own age, we recognize that their various analyses of knowledge and understanding are important in that they denigrate artistic pursuits, making them less serious endeavors than other kinds of activities such as the pursuit of science (which deals with facts).

Locke’s pupil Shaftesbury, in Characteristicks (1711), argues against Hobbes and Locke. He opposes the Hobbesian view that man is naturally passionate and self-serving and reinstates the importance of art for instruction of the highest soul, using examples from art throughout his work. Shaftesbury’s aesthetic antecedents are Plato, the Cambridge Neoplatonists, and Plotinus, with whose views he tries to assimilate the ideas of seventeenth-century scientists.²⁵ Believing in innate ideas, and that a work of art is an image of God’s creation, Shaftesbury says,

That [the supreme power] which fashions even minds themselves, contains in itself all the beauties fashioned by those minds [human creators], and is consequently the principal source and fountain of all beauty. . . . Therefore whatever beauty appears in our second order of forms [works of art], or whatever is derived or produced from thence, all this is eminently, principally, and originally in this last [highest and absolute] order of supreme and sovereign beauty. . . . Thus architecture, music, and all which is of human invention, resolves itself into this last order.²⁶

Since the mind of a human artist, to Shaftesbury, is analogous to the mind of God, or a prime mover, its highest faculties are the ordering faculties (the judgment or understanding), plus the imagination as it invents, envisions, or images what will be created. The imagination is important because only through it can we envision absolute beauty. Although absolute beauty (or the universe itself) is imagined, or conceived or perceived, through the imagination, Shaftesbury distrusts the imagination alone; he feels that both the understanding and the imagination are needed in the creation and perception of artistic works. There are hints throughout Shaftesbury, as there are in Plato, that art that is so enticing to the imagination and passions requires in its lovers a strong judgment to overcome its blandishments.²⁷ The same is true for the creator: his judgment has to be strong or it will be overpowered by the strength of his imaginative vision. Imagination can be an elevated faculty, but because it is also connected to the lower emotions it must be controlled. Shaftesbury says that although the affections (or passions) are the moving forces within us, fancy and appetite have nothing to do with good sense (II, pp. 112-24). The images artists should form, although emanating from the passions to the imagination (albeit of an elevated nature), should be of a “rational kind.” In great art, therefore, imagination and judgment are united on the highest plane, and art besides merely giving pleasure has a moral and social utility:

Let poets, or the men of harmony [musicians] deny, if they can, this force of nature [the passions], or withstand this moral magic [truth of art]. They for their part, carry a double portion of this charm about them. For in the first place, the very passion which inspires them is itself the love of numbers, decency, and proportion [a passion for rules and order, a higher form of passion combined with understanding; a low passion, for example, is anger. Shaftesbury says that the lower passions are “employed another way.”] and this too, not in a narrow sense, or after a selfish way (for who of them composes for himself?), but in a friendly and social view, for the pleasure and good of others, even down to posterity and future ages. [I, p. 90]

Shaftesbury imagines a soul which is in balance and harmony on a very high level of sensibility and rationality, and he sees art as appealing to the whole soul at once, rather than as a series of rhetorical devices which appeal first to the senses and then perhaps to the judgment. Generally speaking, his conception of the soul is similar to, and grows out of, notions that existed in the seventeenth century.

The seventeenth-century struggle between the view of man as a passionate, sometimes clever animal versus the view of man as a reasoning image of God produced a split between skeptical pessimism and belief in man’s perfectibility. Jeremy Collier’s skepticism about human reason, in his Essays Upon Several Moral Subjects (1697), expresses ideas that would not be generally found at the beginning of the seventeenth century. His first chapter, “Upon the Weakness of Human Reason,” concludes by saying that we should believe our senses, an idea in general agreement with Hobbes and suspect to Plato, St. Augustine, and Neoplatonists of all periods. It is ironic that Jeremy Collier, the same moralistic divine who objects so strongly to the immorality of the English Restoration stage, says that we should believe our senses. He is misled by a split view of man and the universe. Collier obviously fails to understand that his trust in the senses not only denies the purpose of his divine calling but also denies ultimately that he is justified in establishing standards of morality.²⁸

The split grew larger in the eighteenth century. The more skeptical of the early eighteenth-century writers, who thought men, their minds, and their potentialities more limited, produced art that is correspondingly more limited in scope and more pessimistic, such as Pope’s Dunciad (first published in 1728) and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).²⁹ Shaftesbury’s optimistic view emphasizes more the importance of goodness of the imagination and individual genius. We are still the beneficiaries and victims of both views.