The Physicality of Thought: Electric Quackery and the Residence of the Soul

“Animal spirit refused to go quietly largely because there was, at the beginning of the long eighteenth century, no obvious successor and clearly some influence passed along the nerves, to and from the brain. However by the mid-eighteenth century, there was at last a contender which began to grow in popularity: electricity.” – C.U.M. Smith, “Brain and Mind in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century (p. 21)

“But the greatest curiosity, upon which the fate of the island depends, is a loadstone of prodigious size… By means of this loadstone, the island is made to rise and fall, and move from one place to another. For, with respect to that part of the earth over which the monarch presides, the stone is endued at one of its sides with an attractive power, and at the other with a repulsive. … But it must be observed, that this island cannot move beyond the extent of the dominions below.” – Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Book III, Chapter III)

     In retrospect, it’s easy to laugh at the misdirected theories and experimentation pursued by scientists of the past, especially when the truth appears so obvious to us now. However, with regard to the study of electricity in the eighteenth century, no lens of hindsight was necessary for intellectuals to scoff at some of their peers. As Smith says, “The study of electricity in the mid-eighteenth century hovered between science, quackery and entertainment” (22). Men like Franz Mesmer were administering iron solutions and attaching magnets all over the bodies of patients in order to channel the flow of their magnetic aether. The archaic concept of animal spirit had not gone away, but had merely transformed to more closely resemble the modern discoveries.

     Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels bitingly satirizes the quackery of his contemporaries. When Gulliver visits the grand academy of Lagado, he witnesses filthy, unkempt researchers slaving on projects “for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers” and operations “to reduce human excrement to its original food” (Swift, Chapter V). At the same time, their neglected homes and farmland fall into ruin. These harebrained efforts, while exaggerated, do not stray too far from the practices going on in the academic community at Swift’s time. Gulliver’s Travels captures the culture of confusion, but at the same time as it derides the desperation of these pseudo-scientists, it owns the mystery and uncertainty at the core of the contemporary brain science.

     In the passage excerpted above, Gulliver describes the majestic mechanism behind Laputa, the floating island. The imagery associated with this island implicates it as a substitute for the human brain: it is “exactly circular,” composed of “the several minerals in their usual order, and over all is a coat of rich mould.” The rain that falls on the island is “conveyed in small rivulets toward the middle” (Swift, Chapter III). This description echoes the poetry of Keats, who relies on mountainous ridges and narrow streams to convey the creases and nerves of the brain. Also like Keats, Swift assigns a sentient being dominion over the natural landscape. Like Psyche in Keats’s “Ode to Psyche” or the charioteer in “On Sleep and Poetry,” the Laputian monarch claims the island as his “demesne.” Giving the brain—composed of mere animal, vegetable, and mineral elements—a distinctly personal protector implies subscription to the belief that brain and mind, or brain and soul, remain separate. The soul resides in the brain—indeed it is essentially trapped there, much as Gulliver informs his readers that the monarch cannot move the island beyond the bounds of his own kingdom—but the soul is personal, while the brain is just the wiring that allows it to communicate with the body and the outside world.

     The means of this communication in the eighteenth century remained opaquely obscure. Swift’s choice of an enormous magnet as the driving force behind Laputa anticipates the rise of electricity as the presumed neural fluid. Even Laurence Sterne, writing later in Tristram Shandy, mocks the pervasive application of electricity to psychological phenomena: “A man and his Hobby-Horse, tho’ I cannot say that they act and re-act exactly after the same manner in which the soul and body do upon each other: Yet doubtless there is a communication between them of some kind, and my opinion rather is, that there is something in it more of the manner of electrified bodies” (Sterne 55). Unlike the foolish scientists in Lagado, however, Swift does not hasten to experiment and explain. By choosing a suitably fantastical image for the brain—a floating island with almost magical magnetic properties—he eschews too much scientific speculation. He recalls in this image the romanticism of Keats’s poetry, in which lyricism and mystery fill in the gaps of understanding. It is fascinating to observe how prominent eighteenth-century scientists would frequently express their discoveries in verse, as if to counteract the chaos of the unknown, by giving it that quality of poetry which somehow makes the unknown beautiful.