The Mystery of Matter

The Mystery of Matter Erica Da Costa (bio) Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death. Ed. Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2012. 333 pages. $70.00. The larger question framing Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall's Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death is this: is it possible to historicize matter itself? This problem is a stirring one in our own era marked by the upheaval of conceptions of the nature of matter and its correlate, space-time, including the puzzles of observer-influence, of dark matter, and of string theory. The history of physics, however, is to be distinguished from what this book is designed to consider: the history of matter, meaning the study of the quality of temporality found in the object itself rather than the history of the development of a discipline. In the introduction, Deutsch and Terrall position their primary inquiry in relation to the immaterialism of George Berkeley, whose radical claim was that matter did not fundamentally exist. Samuel Johnson's agitated response to Berkeley's claim—kicking a large stone and shouting, "I refute it thus"—incites a debate that Vital Matters deliberately seeks to revivify. But Deutsch and Terrall erode the strictly oppositional nature of the Johnson-Berkeley debate [End Page 103] by noting that at "the heart of eighteenth-century materialism in its myriad forms is the mystery of matter" (4). The study of matter was greatly complicated in the early modern period by the conundrum of living bodies, as one philosopher after another found previous assumptions about animate matter to be a shifting sand. Though Descartes has structured our notions of consciousness and its relation to the body, Cartesian mechanism did not successfully lay the foundation for the study of biological matter. Theories of generation proliferated. Georges Buffon, concerned with the tendency of matter to organize itself, theorized "internal molds" that directed development. But Diderot, as the editors point out, embraced the enigma that the "procreative power that operates perpetually . . . is for us . . . a mystery whose depths it seems we will not be allowed to sound" (6). This volume offers twelve often exhilarating essays that engage the history of materialism and consider, especially, "how material objects, the evidence of our senses, the body's insensible operations, the nature of life and movement, lend themselves to historical and textual analysis" (3). Jonathan Kramnick confronts what philosophers now call "the hard problem of consciousness" by first returning to Thomas Creech's 1682 translation of Lucretius's On The Nature of Things and beginning with the observation that Lucretius had turned the universe into matter, composed only of "atoms and void" (13). The problem of consciousness follows from the question, "how do material things like atoms produce ephemeral things like thoughts?" (14). Like so many other questions that have followed us into the twenty-first century, this one came to the fore at the moment when secular ideas about agency began to goad us. Kramnick elegantly applies twentieth-century perspectives on the hard problem to seventeenth-century perspectives, a feat he achieves in part because the most crucial puzzle remains unchanged: at no point has the bottomless chasm between mental and physical worlds ever been successfully spanned. Lucretius was happy to "explain and predict mental phenomenon according to the laws of atomic motion" (18), however, accepting his explanation would mean allowing that thoughts are not actually identified with persons, but merely with shape and order. The notion that a self could be separated from consciousness was not one that could be tolerated by John Locke or almost any of Lucretius's (Western) successors. Besides the hard problem, there is also the question of mental causation and free will. How did Lucretius address the seeming fact, Kramnick asks, that thoughts produce actions: "My wanting to type a sentence of this essay [End Page 104] must be able to cause my fingers to move across the keyboard" (23)? Lucretius's solution to this problem was to make the mental event almost indistinguishable from the physical event, a...

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