A Physiology of the Imagination: Anatomical Faculties and Philosophical Designs

Abstract

<p>This study charts the eighteenth-century phenomenon that is the faculty of imagination. I follow its disciplinary conversion from neurology to philosophy, and, ultimately, to literary criticism; the physiological and philosophical conjunctions that originate with an internalist reconstruction of Thomas Willis' Anatomy of the Brain, carry over into the imaginative principals of temporality in A Treatise of Human Nature, and provide narrative unity and sensory parameters to an understudied literary criticism of attention. This project identifies the key concepts within psychophysiology to be imagination, original sensations, habitual ideas, cross-faculty interdependence, an involuntary system of sensible impressions, and associative modes of attention that collectively form the coherent elements of its tradition. The Anatomy provides the anatomical schematics for the faculties and nervous physiology, and positions the imagination to be the preeminent faculty that responds to sensation and links faculty processes. It also rejects the seventeenth-century division between rational and sensitive souls; cerebral complexity demonstrates cognitive capacity as either rational or sensitive. The corpuscular generation of animal spirits contextualizes materialism before the 1700s. Willis suggests the involuntary and voluntary systems, though united, have distinct functions, a discovery that explains Willis' two localizations for memory as natural and rational. Applying Willis ' physiology as a framework to navigate the Treatise's eighteenth-century terminology, the Treatise achieves a textual synthesis between imagination and the passions. This physiological reading of the Treatise's theory of association establishes the sustainable limits in cognitive attentions. It finds the imagination to be an associative compulsion and a comparative act that perpetually reconstructs ideas. Finally, Hume's physiological method grounds the aesthetics of Alexander Gerard and Lord Karnes. The latter take Hume's attention, association, and faculty interdependence, as a model for the reader's ability to successfully sustain attention upon narrations. They show that narrative conjunctions depend on the strength that sensations forge lasting associations. These studies may have different applications in view, but their core ideas demonstrate a coherent and pervasive methodology.</p>