For Karen Parker Lears
Sine qua nihil
Not unfortunately, the universe is wild—game-flavored as a hawk’s wing. Nature is miracle all: She knows no laws; the same returns not, save to bring the different.
—WILLIAM JAMES, QUOTING BENJAMIN PAUL BLOOD
Introduction
IN THE BEGINNING, everything was mixed up with everything else. All living things inhabited a boundaryless world. Identities were fluid, species and sexes interchangeable. All was in constant flux, until a trail of cosmic accidents led to tension and eventual separation between women and men, humans and animals, gods and mortals. Yet even after this fragmentation, earthly creatures continued to inhabit an animated universe, where rocks, trees, plants, and animals were all ensouled with a mysterious force or spirit—what anthropologists would call manitou, or mana—a force that kept the fragments from flying apart.
This, in rough outline, was the origin tale told by many indigenous peoples throughout the world. It shaped their sense of a cosmos where humans were not unique and superior beings, but participants in a common world undivided by barriers between wildness and civilization. The universal presence of mana enabled animals to intervene in human affairs, to serve as messengers from an unseen spirit world or as instruments of divine purpose. What united these perceptions was an animistic outlook that made certain conceptual categories—matter and spirit, body and soul—pliable and permeable. The fluidity of this worldview flowed from the deep but implicit conviction that the universe is alive.
This book traces how animistic thinking survived in the modern Anglo-American world, even while most indigenous peoples were being exterminated or reduced to marginality. The fate of the animated universe is a huge and elusive subject, and my method for finding a way through it is to track the cultural history of a single complex idea—the notion of animal spirits. The phrase has recently returned to contemporary currency, as policy intellectuals have revived John Maynard Keynes’s idea that the key to investor confidence is the presence of animal spirits—“the spontaneous urge to action.” Buoyed by animal spirits, the ideal Keynesian investors would deploy capital for productive purposes and with any luck would create more of it. Capital, from the Keynesian view, could be conceived as a shimmering magnetic force at the core of economic life. Like the mana of indigenous peoples, it was a product of the human imagination that took on a life of its own: it could be conjured into existence, directed toward certain purposes, but rarely controlled completely. Keynes had hit on a fundamental insight that even his devotees have left largely unexplored: the world of finance capital, despite its apparatus of quantified rationality, is governed at bottom by fantasy and fear.
My interpretation follows the idea of animal spirits in two forms: a loosely defined outlook acknowledging the centrality of spontaneous energy in human experience, and a metaphysical worldview—the philosophical successor to animistic thinking that was known as vitalism. The bundle of beliefs and emotions that constituted a modern version of mana went by various names—life force, libido, élan vital—and the history of these vitalist ideas is part of the history of animal spirits. By following the parallel but often convergent threads of animal spirits and popular vitalism, I hope to illuminate another way of being in the world, one that thrived on the margins and beneath the surfaces of conventional thinking—an alternative to the dominant ethos of human centrality and mastery. One might call it “deep America,” in deference to its marginality and invisibility, its absence from most of the official conceptions of what America was (and is) all about. But there have been times, as we will see, when strong vitalist currents have run close to the surface of everyday life. And nearly always they have possessed a subtle, unacknowledged potency, for good and ill.
My own view is that animal spirits—and the currents of vitality they embody—constitute a crucial part of what it means to be human, as well as an essential reminder of the animality humans share with the nonhuman world. Yet I am also aware of how often the celebration of unalloyed vitality has sponsored violence, in vigilante or state-sanctioned forms. This sponsorship has continued to our own time, when the siren song of regenerative war has repeatedly served to justify inflicting destruction on innocent populations. The most profound vitalist thinkers have resisted this temptation and recognized the risks of exalting raw force. That is why Keynes and William James play such an important role in this narrative. They epitomize the most humane and capacious understanding of animal spirits—an understanding that led James to imagine a moral equivalent of war and Keynes to conceive capital investment as an instrument of the common good. Theirs is the version of vitalism that we need to resurrect at this fraught historical moment. The story of animal spirits and popular vitalism has important implications for contemporary public life.
At first this story may seem restricted by its white masculine focus. In the early part of this narrative, down to the end of the eighteenth century, the people who struggle to articulate the idea of animal spirits are nearly always white men and their vitalist discourse is often shaped by their white maleness. But after 1800, white women begin appearing more often, empowered by evangelical Christianity, New World mobility, and various forms of feminism. They make their own contributions to defining animal spirits, and their definitions reflect their own ambitions and longings. People of color, too, eventually appear as subjects in their own right, after long service as objects of white vitalist fantasy. Animal spirits, over the course of my narrative, cross racial and gender boundaries.
The connotations of “animal spirits” change over time, but the phrase nearly always embodies an effort to capture the relationship between the material or organic world and an invisible realm of spirit. Though one can find that melding of matter and spirit in a vast variety of settings ranging from Papua New Guinea to the Bight of Benin, the best place to begin tracking it, for my purposes, is among the indigenous peoples of North America. They were the people whose worldview—strange but also in some obscure ways familiar—confronted Europeans when they began encountering the New World.
* * *
Animistic thinking shaped Native Americans’ encounters with animals, whom they endowed with spirits. The Cree of northern Canada, for example, imagined a delicate dance of hunter and hunted that required close attention to the animal’s spirit as well as its flesh. According to the Cree, animals deliberately presented themselves to the hunter to be killed. When the meat was consumed, the soul of the animal was released to be reunited with flesh in another body that could be hunted again. But animals would not return to a hunter who had mistreated them—by causing undue pain in killing them, by failing to observe proper procedures in butchering and eating them or disposing of their bones, by killing unnecessarily for sport instead of need, and by refusing to share the meat or wasting it.
For the Cree as for other Native Americans, hunting was not the human pursuit of wild animals, alien beings from another world; it was a ritual connecting participants in the same world. A successful hunt was proof of amicable relations between humans and animals, based on mutual trust and linked to a cosmic economy of shared resources. Hunting was not only a search for food but a ritual of reciprocity. And at the core of Native American cosmology, as the ecologist Paul Shepard wrote, was “a pantheon of animal spirits”—beginning, perhaps, with the great aurochs represented on cave walls but ultimately encompassing all creatures.
Still, some creatures were more powerful than others, and none more than the wolf. The Cheyenne, Lakota, and Blackfoot all credited the wolf with teaching them how to hunt. One or two Cheyenne hunters, for example, would mimic a wolf’s behavior and don a wolfskin in order to approach buffalo on the Great Plains. Not seeing a large pack of hunters, the buffalo would not be alarmed. Once in close, the hunters would loose their arrows, ensuring a kill. The Koyukon of central Alaska held the belief that they, too, were taught to hunt by wolves. The name of the Tonkawa tribe, who lived in what is now Oklahoma, could be translated literally as “the people of the wolf.” Believing they were descendants of a mythical wolf, they refused take up any sort of farming. For them as well as for some other tribes, the killing of a wolf was taboo—the equivalent of killing a family member. In a story told by the Ojibwe, Original Man complained of loneliness and the Creator provided the wolf as his companion. After a time, when man and wolf had seen all things, the Creator separated the two but linked their fate. “What shall happen to one of you shall happen to the other,” the Creator said. This was a prescient prophecy, as the wolves in North America were nearly exterminated at about the same historical moment when the Ojibwe, like other Native Americans, met a similar fate.
The history of Native American cosmologies resists reduction to neat binary opposition between hunter-gatherer and agricultural worldviews. It may be, as some scholars have argued, that nomadic hunter-gatherers see the world in terms of fluidity and complementarity, while farmers and pastoralists see it in terms of opposition and duality. The domestication of animals, from this view, may be seen as key to a broader shift in human-animal relations, from trust to domination. Yet elements of the animistic worldview survived among more settled Native American civilizations. One of the most striking is the belief that animals mediate between seen and unseen worlds, which has lasted to the present among the Hopi of the North American Southwest, who have been farming in the same arid region for centuries.
Hopi cosmology postulates the intimate coexistence of temporal and spiritual realms. “When a bowl of nyookwivi (mutton stew) is set before you, the nyookwivi is of the world. The steam that rises is the nyookwivi that belongs to the other world,” a Hopi informant told the anthropologist Mark Bahti in 1990. The two worlds occupy the same space. When building a house, the Hopi leave a small patch unplastered so that “the unseen people of the spirit world might plaster it in their world with an equally unseen plaster,” Bahti writes. Animals as well as people populate that invisible world, and the animals’ spirits, like the people’s, are embodied in the katsina dolls and costumes that are used in traditional Hopi rituals. All animals with a significant role to play in the spirit world (and many have one) command respect in the temporal world, whatever their utility or lack of it in everyday Hopi life.
The Hopi spirit world is a place where, according to a Hopi religious leader, things are “just the same, just the same. Only a little different.” Animals often “act human”—deer, antelope, and mountain sheep dance to increase their kind, for example. They shed their fur or feathers at will. They are often indistinguishable from humans, and are referred to as if they were members of other tribes, “snake people,” “badger people,” and the like. When snake people shed their skins, it is said, they look like the Hopi.
Snakes and many other animals serve as messengers, carrying prayers to the spirit world. Eagles beseech the cloud people to create rain-bearing formations. Frogs and turtles are likewise “spirits that can help us” due to their association with water. Turtles and eagles are often “sent home” (sacrificed) so their shells and feathers can be used in sacred ritual. All these practices suggest that the Hopi see the spirit world as more powerful, influential, and permanent than the temporal world. They demonstrate not only what William James called “the reality of the unseen” to the Hopi, but also the power of the unseen to penetrate and inform everyday life. This principle pervaded traditional visions of universal animacy.
For their part, Europeans retained the idea of an animated universe long after they had shifted from hunting and gathering to producing food. Animism informed Greek and Roman mythology, where gods became swans, wolves, and other earthly creatures, as well as popular Christianity, where ritual objects acquired magical power to mediate relations with the supernatural. In animistic belief systems, the animal who is sacrificed is a gift from the cosmos but is also self-given, embodying the reciprocity of eater and eaten. By swallowing the enspirited flesh of a god or godlike creature, humans acknowledge their place in a system where death is no less essential than life. From Ovidian metamorphoses to the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist, animistic thinking survived in a variety of cultural idioms.
Yet early Church fathers struggled with some success to separate their cult from older animistic ideas. The Christian idea of the Incarnation—word become flesh, God become man—posed particular problems. Theologians redefined it by insisting on the separation between the physical human and the spiritual divine in Jesus, though the whole subject remained murky and contested terrain, especially among the vast unlettered majority. Among orthodox ecclesiastics, there was a gradual pull away from the commingling of nature and the supernatural. The earliest Christian imagery blurred boundaries between humans and animals by, for example, representing three of the four evangelists with animals’ heads.
By the ninth century, such hybrids had largely disappeared from orthodox iconography; and by the thirteenth century, feminine earth spirits and wild beasts were beginning to be associated with evil forces. What was passing away was something important—the primal myth “that, beneath the masks of feathers and fur, the animals and plants are a sacred society, rich in marriages, festivals, speech, commerce, the whole range of social intercourse,” as Shepard wrote. Monotheism eradicated this vision when it deprived animals of numen, or spirit.
The triumph of monotheism in Europe set up an ontological conflict between the Old World and the New. Visions of wildness and hybridity dominated early European travelers’ reports from the strange New World across the sea, where beasts were like men and men like beasts, where the inhabitants might be deferential and even noble. But reports persisted of remote places populated by “wild men” with goats’ horns and dogs’ heads. These were wondrous but also monstrous creatures, from a monotheistic and human-centered point of view. Here as at other, later moments in the history of Anglo-American consciousness, “wild” meant incomprehensible to Western eyes or minds, or simply out of human control. In New World aboriginal consciousness, by contrast, wildness was not projected onto a menacing Other in a howling wilderness but incorporated into the myriad differences that characterized a common world.
The Europeans who waded ashore onto Caribbean islands and the east coast of the Americas carried with them an outlook decidedly different from the worldview of the native populations. The Spanish, despite their church’s capacity to assimilate indigenous beliefs, promoted an ethos of dominion over nature—not to mention over the native population. For the English, the distance between New and Old worldviews was widened by the Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation. The merger of Newtonian science and Puritan religion elevated soul over body, active mind over inert matter, in a synthesis of rationalist dualism. Max Weber’s formulation, despite its limitations, still holds: among many scientists and laypeople alike, a disenchantment of the world was taking hold—a proto-Cartesian view of human rationality’s triumph over inert nature and animal automata. And for educated English Protestants, the deity in charge was an abstract Providence, impersonal and unmoved by Catholic cajolery. Under His aegis, liturgical rituals and artifacts meant to summon the spirit world began to look (and sound) like mere hocus-pocus.
But behind this scrim of no-nonsense empiricism, English minds were a tangled mass of animistic myths and lore. The English settlers headed for North America started out from a land roiling with religious and economic upheaval. In both realms, an animated universe survived and even flourished.
Animistic survivals were most apparent in religious practice. Vestiges of medieval Church magic continued to inspire a broad range of the population, from Roman Catholics and High Church Anglicans to unlettered villagers paying homage to sacred oaks and holy wells. Early evangelical revivalists, too—proponents of “enthusiasm”—began to recognize the benefits of preaching in wilderness settings, where the faithful could feel the presence of God more intimately than in a church or meetinghouse. Even Puritans still saw visions, heard voices, and looked for signs and portents in the natural world. In 1635, the Puritan Rev. Richard Mather, gathering his shipmates on deck to see an enormous porpoise the crew had caught, celebrated the occurrence as a portent of God’s favor. For Protestants as well as Catholics, ravens, magpies, and other birds could be interpreters of the cosmos, omens of future events—spring, rain, death. The English settlers’ cultural baggage was filled with tales of human-animal metamorphoses, those by not only Ovid but Dante and the twelfth-century French poet and fabulist Marie de France, as well as the upstart John Donne, whose poem “Metempsychosis” describes the progress of a human soul through various plant and animal avatars.
Yet while there was some resonance between Native American and English visions of animacy, the differences were more important than the similarities. Like Native Americans and other Europeans, the English told folktales that featured animals as examples of human traits. But while for Native Americans animals were inspirited creatures, endowed with mana, for the English, spirits might inhabit animals in more demonic form, as witches’ familiars (the devil’s diabolic accomplices), or as the fleshly shapes the devil himself assumed—black dogs, foxes, and the like. English and Indians agreed that animals were good to eat, but while native hunters treated prey with respect and performed rituals of reciprocity, the English declared their dominance, reducing animals to objects of sport and amusement, or to markers of status.
But the English did pioneer the animation of the economic realm. As the historian Eugene McCarraher observes (moving a step beyond Keynes), speculative capitalists promoted “the meretricious ontology of capital, in which everything receives its value—and even its very existence—through the empty animism of money. It proclaims that capital is the mana or pneuma or soul or élan vital of the world, replacing the older enlivening spirits with one that is more real, energetic, and productive.” While this “empty animism” was more metaphorical than metaphysical, its influence was profound. In the trading houses of the City of London, animal spirits took a new form, playing a central role in motivating investors and keeping the whole business humming—as Keynes would notice, centuries later.
But as this book will make clear, animal spirits were never reducible to their economic role. The history of the term unveils its broad significance as a leitmotif—not only in the citadels of finance but in the broader society as well. Tracking animal spirits reveals the thinness of orthodox dualism. Despite official commitments to the superiority of spirit over flesh, the Elizabethan English (and their American colonists), Anglican and Puritan alike, inhabited a fluid cosmos where ontological boundaries blurred and opposites overlapped.
Indeed the word “spirit” itself reveals significant ambiguities. Its original meaning was bodily: breath. Aristotle’s De spiritu was all about respiration. Yet even by Aristotle’s time an alternative connotation had emerged, especially in Stoic tradition; spirit began to imply soul. What later, dualistic thinkers would imagine to be an exalted, ideal entity (the soul) was paired linguistically with an essential physiological process—the inhaling and exhaling of air.
The phrase “animal spirits” compounds the ambiguity. It is etymologically descended from anima, soul—a meaning that has survived for centuries in the notion of a being animated by vitality or soulful life. Yet by the late 1500s, “animal” had also come to refer to nonhumans, lower beings lacking soul or even intellect, or else to the portions of human nature that humans had in common with those lower beings. In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598), the supercilious Nathaniel dismisses the oafish constable Dull: “His intellect is not replenished, he is only an annimall, only sensible in the duller partes.” The tendency to link animality with “the duller partes” was reinforced by Puritans when they equated the “animal man” with the “natural man”—the man or woman who had not been transformed through the saving grace of conversion.
Amid these blurred boundaries, animal spirits played a fluid role in medieval and early modern thought, operating as emissaries between body and soul. The first influential figure to discuss animal spirits was the second-century Greek physician Galen, whose ideas shaped European assumptions about the body for a millennium and a half. According to Galen and his subsequent interpreters, animal spirits were a “subtil, aiery substance” that connected the ventricles of the brain with the sense organs and played a critical part in visual perception. They became rays of light that entered the brain through the eyes but were also emitted from the eyes outward, into the world beyond the perceiving self. Animal spirits thus rendered the air itself an organ of perception, which acted on the crystalline lens in the eye and allowed it both to exude spirit and perceive objects. This elaborate theory survived in fugitive forms for centuries. It is a prototypical instance of the cultural work done by animal spirits—providing palpable form to impalpable processes, linking immaterial with material existence. In this case the sense organ in question (the eye) had already acquired spiritual significance from classical and biblical authors, who agreed that the eye was the mirror, or window, of the soul.
For centuries, the struggle to find a place for the soul (and later the mind) in the body would focus fitfully but frequently on animal spirits, which were defined in a bewildering variety of ways. The question that puzzled most thinkers was: Were animal spirits corporeal or spiritual, visible or invisible? Sometimes it seemed they were everything and anything: within the same treatise, their “subtil, aiery substance” could be characterized as air, light, fire, and liquid—something evanescent, fleeting, and fugitive, but still physical.
By the early nineteenth century, the medical profession had largely discarded animal spirits, but the concept increasingly pervaded the vernacular—even while the kindred idea of philosophical vitalism emerged among Romantic thinkers. Preoccupation with primal vitality took many forms; animal spirits spilled over the boundaries of the self and permeated the cosmos as invisible sources of energy—animal magnetism, mesmerism, electricity. A fascination with Force and Energy as ends in themselves became a kind of secular religion, while financial markets gyrated in tandem with the flow of animal spirits, or at least Keynes’s version of them.
Managers and moralists sought to contain the vitalist ferment with numbers, creating the appearance of orderly progress and efficient control. The inadequacy of their efforts is one of the leitmotifs of this book. By no means do I intend to dismiss the value of statistical knowledge, any more than Keynes did. Instead, I follow Keynes in recognizing that while statistics can provide invaluably precise description, they can easily be overvalued and misused as tools of interpretation and prediction. Yet social scientists and policymakers still seek, more insistently than ever, to quantify the unquantifiable sources of vitality—in human beings and throughout the cosmos.
Posed against the background of a dominant ethos devoted to managerial mastery, animal spirits serve as entrée into an alternative way of thinking and being in the world. This animistic worldview has flourished among idiosyncratic thinkers for centuries, but it has begun to acquire new legitimacy in our own time as scientists have rediscovered the uses of animist-derived ideas in physics, botany, geology, and epigenetics. All of these tendencies coincide with an efflorescence of ecological thought and converge on a common wisdom: we inhabit a living cosmos. That is the recognition that animates this book.
But to begin with the first chapter of the story, we must return to the point of departure for most Englishmen who arrived on North American shores in the early 1600s: Elizabethan London.
1Between Body and Soul
SIXTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON was a dangerous place, where sudden reversals of fortune were commonplace. Waves of plague swept repeatedly through the city, littering the streets with piles of corpses that had been healthy people only days before. House fires were a constant menace, another reminder of the vagaries of fate. As one Elizabethan chronicler wrote, “He which at one o’clock was worth five thousand pounds, and, as the prophet saith, drank his wine in bowls of fine silver plate, had not by two o’clock so much as a wooden dish to eat his meat in, nor a house to cover his sorrowful head.” Fire, the giver of warmth and light, was also an agent of calamity. Sex posed equally contradictory possibilities: the act of creating life imperiled its creators; sublime union could result in catastrophic denouement—venereal disease, stillbirths, fatal infections, failed deliveries.
The structures of Elizabethan feeling were fraught with violent contrasts, and the sharpest was between life and death. Reminders of one’s personal mortality were everywhere, beginning for Londoners with the dead plague victims in their streets. The plague embodied the perversities of fate—coming and going mysteriously, striking healthy people down swiftly, leaving physicians baffled. “Whence it cometh, wherof it ariseth, and wherefore it is sent,” a scornful preacher said, “they confess their ignorance.” The medical profession was equally helpless in its treatment of other fatal illnesses; indeed its bleeding and purging remedies often hastened the victims’ demise. But even for the lucky ones who survived conventional treatment, life was always precarious and often short.
The physical facts of death were an everyday presence, impossible to ignore. Bodily decomposition bore witness to the transiency of beauty and the inevitability of decay, underscoring the insignificance of mere mortal life. The notion of the dead body as a banquet for worms pervaded common speech. “A plague o’ both your houses!” cries the dying Mercutio, “they have made worms’ meat of me.” It was difficult to forget that flesh, however lovely or vigorous, was always just a few heartbeats away from putrefaction.
Still, there were ways to keep the specter of death at arm’s length. Early modern people were used to frequent sickness and early death; they cultivated low expectations and stoical resignation, often with the aid of alcohol. The poet John Taylor’s tribute to ale captured its central place in Elizabethan social life: it “doth comfort the heavy and troubled mind; it will make a weeping widow laugh and forget sorrow for her deceased husband … It is the warmest lining of a naked man’s coat; it satiates and assuages hunger and cold; with a toast it is the poor man’s comfort; the shepherd, mower, ploughman, and blacksmith’s most esteemed purchase; it is the tinker’s treasure, the pedlar’s jewel, the beggar’s joy, and the prisoner’s loving nurse.”
More hopeful souls also clung to the redemptive promise of Christian faith. Longings to transcend the vulnerability of a mortal body encouraged the exaltation of an immortal soul. Yet while eternal life offered deliverance from decay, it also included the possibility of endless punishment for sins committed in this life. Wayward believers faced the prospect of a miserable few decades in this world followed by everlasting damnation in the next. Still, there was a way out. Flesh could be redeemed by spirit, and both be reunited after death in the resurrected body. Visions of salvation evoked the promise of eternal wholeness. The question was how to reach that dreamed-of state. Protestants and Catholics disagreed violently, but politics and theology did not necessarily disturb ontology. For most English people, foundational assumptions about the ground of being remained intact; they continued to inhabit an animated cosmos where body and soul blended, where matter was infused with spirit. How those fusions occurred was determined in part by liturgical tradition, but not entirely. There was always a surplus of enchantment in the cultural atmosphere, available for multiple purposes—medicinal, recreational, and even (eventually) financial.
According to the textbook tale, the Enlightenment fostered the transition from enchanted tradition to disenchanted modernity—from a sacred cosmic order based on faith and fear to a rational, secular universe based on Newtonian science, and from a social world stifled by communitarian conformity to one hospitable to individual choice. Enlightenment thinkers, in this tale, were benign rationalists, so committed to the life of reason—to an orderly mind in an orderly cosmos—that they tended to underrate the ungovernable power of passion in human motivation and the unpredictable role of chance in cosmic affairs generally.
For some time now, historians have been complicating this picture. What has emerged is a darker, wilder version of the Enlightenment—a mental habitat more hospitable to occult forces and mysterious vital principles than the textbook version of Enlightenment rationality could ever have been. In this atmosphere, animal spirits shuttled between body and soul, animating the cosmology of divines like Donne and Milton, novelists like Laurence Sterne, and a host of philosophers and scientists who were trying to figure out how visible matter produced invisible thought and feeling. The deeper one probed into these mysteries, the more elusive certainty seemed. The disenchantment of the Anglo-American mind remained precarious and incomplete; patterns of medieval thought persisted in altered form. Enchantment survived enlightenment.
THE AMBIGUITIES OF ENCHANTMENT
Medieval dreams of resurrection melded sacred and secular life, shaping the larger significance of Carnival as well as other festivals. Before the Reformation, English villages joined the rest of Catholic Europe in celebrating the days leading up to Ash Wednesday with a riot of sensuous excess. The annual rituals of Carnival—the parading of giant sausages through the streets, the mock plowing performed by unmarried women—framed food and sex with larger liturgical meaning. Carnival endowed flesh with spirit, prefiguring the posthumous reembodiment of soul in heaven. Meanwhile, here on earth, the fragility of flesh made the experience of the senses all the more piquant and precious.
Everyday devotions enacted theological truths. Catholic preoccupation with Jesus’s bodily suffering flowed from the church’s doctrine of the Incarnation: “the Word became Flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Humanity melded with divinity, and worm’s meat became the body of Christ. The interpenetration of body and soul was epitomized in the eucharistic sacrifice—swallowing the God, drinking His blood. The sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, undergirded by the doctrine of transubstantiation, resonated with the sacramental feasting of many indigenous peoples. Despite theologians’ efforts to separate Christ’s godhood and manhood, the Eucharist kept animistic magic at the core of the Christian faith.
The magic of the medieval church sustained a Christian version of an animated cosmos. Spirit interacted with matter at every turn—investing relics, statues, images, and ritual gestures with magical efficacy. The most common ritual gesture available to the laity was the sign of the cross: it was used by ordinary folk to ward off evil spirits along with more palpable dangers, and by priests to exorcise the devil from persons, animals, and objects, as well as to endow organic or material entities with sacramental significance. Holy water was holy because it was blessed by a priest using the sign of the cross, and such blessings benefited body as well as soul. Water, once consecrated, had medical uses as a tonic for sick cows, sheep, and people. Church rituals, talismans, and amulets ensouled the material world, creating an enchanted path between the self and God. Popular understanding of the Eucharist reinforced belief in the physicality of the divine, which broadened to obscure the boundaries between the visible and invisible worlds, encouraging the faith that sacraments could promote physical as well as spiritual well-being. The common practice of baptizing puppies, kittens, lambs, and foals was based on the belief that baptized babies, of whatever species, “got on better” after the ritual had been performed.
Though orthodox thinkers distinguished between religion and magic, village priests and laity merged the two realms by undermining the distinction between prayers and spells or charms. This fostered the popular assumption that mere repetition of verbal formulas could automatically guarantee their efficacy. The most popular repetitive ritual became the praying of the rosary, originally known as the Marian Psalter—150 “Hail Marys” divided into equal groups by ten “Our Fathers.” Prayer beads helped the worshipper keep track. According to Roman Catholic lore, the need for praying the Marian Psalter was revealed to St. Dominic by the Blessed Virgin Mary during the thirteenth-century crusade against the Albigensian heretics, who stressed a radical duality between body and soul. The point of the Marian Psalter was not meditation but repetition of words with (one hoped) magical efficacy.
Theologians opposed magical thinking but accepted the consequences of earlier syncretic strategies, which church authorities had deployed when they preserved the veneration of holy wells, trees, and stones by turning pagan sites into Christian ones and substituting saints for pagan divinities. Sometimes the pagan divinities survived, in all but name. On the eve of the Reformation, English men and women inhabited a material universe pervaded by spiritual forces.
But by the mid-1500s, the more militant English Protestants—popularly known as Puritans—had pushed their protest beyond mere objection to the rule of Rome. They had begun challenging the Catholics’ animated universe, dismissing the attribution of magical powers to consecrated objects, scorning the celebration of feast days throughout the liturgical year. In the battle between Carnival and Lent, Puritans sought a permanent victory for Lent—and ultimately achieved it, at least as far as the traditional celebration of fleshly excess was concerned. Carnival celebrations devolved from liturgical feasts to market fairs as Puritanical sentiments spread, even among Anglicans. Yearnings for a kind of spiritual (as well as social) transparency spurred efforts to purify the practice of Christianity—to put plain speech in place of mumbo-jumbo, plain dress in place of excessive display, biblical truth in place of papal decree.
Political change licensed Puritanical frenzy. After 1558, when Elizabeth’s succession to the throne secured Protestant rule, militant mobs felt emboldened to smash icons, wreck churches, and burn down monasteries. Disdain for the claims of enchantment took vigorous popular form. At Downhead in Somerset, a man was heard to say his “mare will make as good holy water as any priest can.” Disenchanting the priests’ supposedly magical power was one of the priorities of Protestant business. Orthodox theologians, Anglican and Puritan, rejected claims for the sacraments’ magical efficacy; so, eventually, did Counter-Reformation Catholic theologians, responding to Protestant critiques of Romish superstition. Many Christians of various denominations reasserted the divide between a transcendent God and a fallen world. In subsequent decades, some would embrace René Descartes’s philosophical restatement of this dualism: man was the only creature with a “rational soul”; the others were mere automata. It would be hard to find a more disenchanted vision of the universe.
Yet as Keith Thomas and other historians have made clear, the cosmos of the early modern West remained enchanted in many ways, for most people. Even the most militant Protestants (indeed sometimes especially they) inhabited a universe enveloped with spiritual significance; they heard voices, saw visions, and dreamed divinatory dreams. In many English minds, the everyday world of common sense coexisted with another, enchanted one, shimmering and fluid, washing up along the shores of consciousness, seeping into the interior.
This was how the animated universe survived, in fits and starts, in eddies and backwaters. Long after the Reformation, among common folk but also many of the more educated, the nonhuman universe remained enchanted. Animals retained their significance as messengers from the unseen world, who might possess preternatural power for good or ill—dogs had a sixth sense of danger; cats and other creatures could still be witches’ familiars; magpies and ravens still served as omens and auguries—and astrology survived as a system of cosmic correspondences that explained otherwise inexplicable occurrences. Among English Protestants, the process of disenchantment was fitful, uneven, and incomplete.
Yet Protestantism was not the only challenge to medieval enchantment. A more potent alternative was what McCarraher calls “the religion of modernity”—the emergent belief system generated by modern capitalism, which involved not the disenchantment but the misenchantment of the world in the service of a new deity, money. The nascent capitalist worldview, like its Christian rivals, reflected the upheavals, scarcities, and insecurities of everyday life in early modern London. The desperate search for reliable sustenance ranged well beyond the precincts of poverty. Ambitious young men without a trade were dependent on political preferment, which in turn might be dependent on military adventure, including expeditions to America sponsored by men with mobile capital in search of investment opportunities. The omnipresence of risk facilitated the emergence of a commercial and financial system based on credit—an invisible force that was meant to rationalize risk but also, paradoxically, reinforced it. The presence or absence of credit could generate overnight rise or ruin.
Belief in the possibility of magical self-transformations was one of many religious features accompanying the rise of capitalism. The capitalist religion of modernity, as both its creators and critics realized, invoked divine sanctions for commerce and incorporated the fetishistic appeal of commodities. But the most fundamentally religious dimension of capitalist misenchantment was the mysterious power of money to reconstitute the essence of value—to transform it from something comparatively stable to something fluid and ever-changing.
The liberal philosopher John Locke celebrated money’s transformative powers when he distinguished between use value and monetary value, declaring his preference for the latter because it “altered the intrinsic value of things.” Money possessed the power to beget more money, especially when it took the impalpable form of credit—a concept that revealed its religious roots in its etymological descent from credo: “I believe.” Finance capital, trading in invisible assets, was a faith-based enterprise; fortunes were made and lost on the basis of fantasy, rumor, and fear. Centuries before Keynes was born, speculative capitalists were demonstrating the accuracy of his insight.
To be sure, there were other sorts of capitalists at work in the early modern world as well, notably the sort devoted to calculation, efficiency, double-entry bookkeeping, and disciplined achievement as a way of life—Weber’s ideal type of early modern man, whose Protestant ethic was turning into a spirit of capitalism. Some finance capitalists undoubtedly resembled the Weberian type in certain ways, but many cultivated a more emotionally charged ethos, one more attuned to the fluctuations of the emerging business cycle.
While the notion of animal spirits captured the emotional turbulence at the core of capitalism, it also illuminated alternative visions of universal animacy—some rooted in sacramental tradition, others resonating with newer forms of enchantment. The English Reformation was a time (and place) of religious searching, along and outside the borders of orthodoxy. Few seekers left a more revealing record than the poet and preacher John Donne.
Donne’s poems evoked a vibrant state of being—above and below theological controversy—where flesh and spirit merge in ecstatic union. T. S. Eliot glimpsed this synthetic vision in his classic essay “The Metaphysical Poets.” According to Eliot, these poets felt their thought “as immediately as the colour of a rose.” Donne, for Eliot, was an especially strong example of this immediacy. “A thought to Donne was an experience,” Eliot wrote, “it modified his sensibility.” But from Eliot’s view, Donne was among the last of his kind. The capacity to fuse thought and feeling, Eliot thought, had fallen victim to a “dissociation of sensibility” in the later seventeenth century. In fact, that fusion had survived, and Donne was a key figure in its survival.
A BRACELET OF BRIGHT HAIR ABOUT THE BONE: JOHN DONNE
Donne was born in 1572 to a prominent Catholic family and brought up amid long-standing resentment of Protestant persecution. One of his great-great-great-uncles was the martyred Thomas More, and his uncle Jasper Haywood was a Jesuit priest who had been banished from England for sedition. Donne’s father, a successful ironmonger who kept his Catholicism to himself, died when John was four. His mother soon remarried a physician with friends at Court, who was also a camouflaged Catholic. Recalling his youth, Donne acknowledged his own “hydroptique immoderate desire of humane learning and languages,” which was its own form of “voluptuousness.” He entered Oxford at twelve, accompanied by his brother Henry, who was a year younger. (Precocious enrollments were not unusual at the time.) Four years later the boys were withdrawn by their family, so they could avoid taking the required Oath of Allegiance to the Protestant crown. Like other literate young men with connections at Court, Donne took to reading law at Lincoln’s Inn.
Early on he discovered his passion for poetry. “Though like the Pestilence and old fashion’d love,” he wrote, “Ridlingly it catch men.” A big part of its appeal, for Donne, was the opportunity it provided to celebrate the melding of romantic and erotic experience—and also to imbue sentimental conventions (or what would later become sentimental conventions) with larger philosophical significance. In Donne’s early lyrics, his biographer John Stubbs writes, “matters of the heart become matter.” Lovers are emotionally entangled through things left behind after lovemaking—trinkets, keys, and the like. In popular romances, this became a familiar device, but for Donne it had a larger significance, connecting with his lifelong conviction that matter could be infused with spirit.
Donne’s poetry posed a powerful counterpoint to the separation of disembodied, analytical mind from inert, manipulatable matter, partly by exploring the limits of the quantitative thinking that underwrote those dualities. Mathematically literate, Donne was aware of the advances in that discipline during his lifetime toward the expansion of a symbolic mathematical language. Yet he was also aware that mathematical symbols, despite their apparently objective existence in the world, were in fact humanly fashioned cognitive structures that frame our perceptions of the world and shape our orientation to it.
Not everything is best apprehended through numbers, as Donne realized, and his poetry illuminates the areas of human experience that resist quantitative measurement. “The Computation” deploys hyperbole to show how inadequately numbers convey an anxious lover’s impatient wait for his inamorata: by the end, the “years, since yesterday” amount to 2,400; every hour has seemed like a hundred years. This trope, too, becomes a sentimental convention, but the idea behind it has a place in the subsequent history of philosophy. Donne’s poem anticipates (by three centuries) the philosopher Henri Bergson’s experience-centered notion of time as “duration.” The quantification of time was a key example of the modern effort to objectify subjective experience, using the apparent precision of numbers to create the impression that the immeasurable had been successfully measured. From Donne to Bergson, devotees of animal spirits and their vitalist fellow travelers would challenge the quantifiers’ claim.
For all its intellectual ambition, Donne’s poetry could also celebrate the pleasures of the flesh for their own sake. In “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” he lovingly describes each article of clothing as the woman removes it, concluding with an exuberant apostrophe:
Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee.
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be,
To taste whole joys.
Yet from early on, celebrating the pleasures of the flesh was also compensation for pain incurred elsewhere. Poetry, Donne wrote in 1593, was a “cherishing fyre which dryes in mee / Griefe which did drowne mee.” He was grieving over the death of his brother Henry, who had been arrested for harboring a fugitive Jesuit and imprisoned at plague-ridden Newgate, where he died within weeks. John blamed the rigidity of the Catholic resistance for placing his brother at the mercy of the merciless Protestant state. The poet had begun to realize that there was no career path forward for a young Catholic who sought a place at Court. One way to signal his fealty to the Protestant regime was to volunteer for one of Elizabeth’s many military missions against the Spanish, an assault on Cádiz. It turned into an ordeal of fetid nights belowdecks, oppressive days on deck in still, relentless heat, and fitful fights with the Spanish that left scorched bodies flailing helplessly in the sea. Still, it was a politically useful signal of Donne’s break with the Roman Catholic Church—a good career move, with no harm in repeating it. He volunteered for a similar mission to the Azores in 1597.
Donne’s break with Catholicism left him metaphysically at sea. He had grown skeptical of all doctrinal claims, suspicious that there were political motives behind them—as indeed there often were, on both sides of the Protestant-Catholic divide. Court life was a never-ending round of self-interested jostling for advantage—a vision of hell, as far as Donne was concerned. In his poems he tried to refine his notion of patriotism, distinguishing between “a rotten state” and “England, to whome we owe, what we be, and have.”
Yet, soon after he returned from the Azores, he attached himself to that rotten state, by securing a court position as secretary to Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Seal. Among other responsibilities, Egerton headed the government effort to imprison, torture, and execute leading Catholics who refused to bend a knee to the new regime. Donne served (however indirectly) as a cog in the machinery of that systematic suppression. Though Donne always opposed torture, he blamed the Roman Catholic minority for their refusal to accept what he had come to believe was legitimate political authority.
He was also engaged in a private search for the best path to eternity— a Protestant quest that revealed a shift in his sensibility, though not in his fundamental beliefs. His quest was epitomized by “The Relic.” The poem revealed a complex blend of Catholic and Protestant impulses, along with other divisions that haunted early modern minds—flesh and spirit, body and soul, life and death. Addressed to a departed lover, “The Relic” begins in a graveyard, with a reminder that cemetery space was limited in London and existing graves were often disturbed to entomb new occupants:
When my grave is broke up again
Some second guest to entertain …
And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
Will he not let us alone,
And think that there a loving couple lies,
Who thought that this device might be some way
To make their souls, at the last busy day,
Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?
Donne imagines a sympathetic gravedigger, who believes that he has uncovered the remains of a “loving couple” lying together. The “bracelet of bright hair,” he assumes, is a clever “device” that links the couple’s bodies after death and allows their souls to find each other at this very spot on “the last busy day” of the resurrection. The gravedigger refrains from disturbing the grave, and the poem proceeds to envision how in a time of “misdevotion” the grave becomes an object of pilgrimage, the bracelet a venerated relic. True devotion, Donne implies, would be directed not to the bracelet but to the actual miracle of the love it represented. Despite his embrace of this Protestant sentiment, the ex-Catholic in Donne remained fascinated by a relic’s power to meld bodies and souls.
While Donne’s personal religious synthesis would be years in the making, his employment with Egerton evoked more immediate emotional turmoil. He lived in Egerton’s house with the status of a senior servant, but he took meals with the family and they treated him as a social equal. Among those at the table was Ann More, a wellborn fourteen-year-old girl who was staying with her aunt, Egerton’s second wife. Both he and she were entranced, and before long they were conducting a furtive courtship in the nooks and crannies of the labyrinthine Egerton mansion. When Ann moved back to her parents’ country estate, returning to London only for brief and occasional visits, Donne was engulfed by erotic longings, depression, and drift.
Ultimately he pressed his suit, and Ann responded. Two lovers champing at the bit of paternal disapproval could not be held back by mere convention. On December 19, 1601, the seventeen-year-old Ann and Egerton’s twenty-nine-year-old secretary—an ex-Catholic with no prospects apart from Egerton’s patronage—were secretly married. When Egerton learned of the union, he was enraged and dismissed Donne immediately. The young couple were thrown back on their own resources, the most abundant of which was their love for each other.
Donne’s marriage reinforced his reinvention of himself, and transformed his conception of love from promiscuity and predation to tenderness and devotion. His poems praising enduring sexual love and blissful monogamous unions were unprecedented, and popular. Married love, Donne felt, was love without nervousness, without the anxious fretting induced by jealousy and suspicion. It was like a waking up, a sunrise. “For love, all love of other sights controules, / And makes one little room, an everywhere,” he wrote. The couple’s first child was named Constance, and in “The Extasie,” the poet holds his lover fast on a “Pregnante Bank” while the day and the river run by. The poem meditates on the interdependence of body and soul, which in Donne’s medieval psychology are linked through the action of spirits produced by the blood.
As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like souls as it can,
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtle knot, which makes us man
So must pure lovers’ souls descend
T’affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in prison lies.
To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love revealed may look;
Love’s mysteries on souls may grow,
But yet the body is his book.
The union of bodies necessarily accompanies the union of souls, revealing a glimpse of the mysteries of love to “weak men” who haven’t a clue what it’s all about. The role of spirits in this process is foundational. Donne did not explicitly refer to animal spirits, but the provenance was clear: he was describing a Christian version of what physiologists since Galen’s time had called animal spirits. As, years later, Donne told his congregation at St. Paul’s in London: “In the constitution and making of a natural man, the body is not the man, nor the soul is not the man, but the union of these two makes up the man; the spirits in a man which are the thin and active part of the blood, and so are of a kind of middle nature, between soul and body, those spirits are able to do, and they do the office, to unite and apply the faculties of the soul to the organs of the body, and so there is a man.” As the crucial links between body and soul, Donne’s spirits were at the heart of what it meant to be human. The “extasie” he experienced with Ann was an awakening into full humanity.
Yet practical demands increasingly intruded on their idyll. For years Donne tried and failed to secure a place at court, while Ann continued to bear children—twelve in all, four of whom survived to adulthood. By 1609, when he was about to turn forty and had been only occasionally employed for eight years, he had fallen prey to chronic melancholy. The omnipresence of death in plague-ridden London intensified his fear of posthumous punishment, especially given his insistent memories of his flesh-fueled “idolatrous” youth; he was haunted by visions of his “profane mistresses” stalking by, and by visions of hell that recalled the burnt bodies leaping from a burnt ship off Cádiz. For the next five years he kept a journal recording the fearful wandering of his soul, among various eternities.
Still, he continued to write poetry celebrating the melding of matter and spirit. In 1611, before he left for a temporary assignment on the Continent as an assistant to the diplomat Robert Drury, Donne addressed “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” to Ann, who was pregnant and staying on the Isle of Wight with her sister. After invoking the romantic convention that souls could be together while bodies were apart, Donne turned to a strikingly material image to represent how the couple would transcend their separation:
Our two souls, therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
The blending of matter and spirit surfaced most clearly in a poem Donne wrote in 1612 to commemorate the second anniversary of the death of Drury’s daughter Elizabeth.
She of whose soul, if we may say, ’twas gold,
Her body was th’electrum, and did hold
Many degrees of that; we understood
Her by her sight, her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say, her body thought …
Who with God’s presence was acquainted so,
(Hearing, and speaking to him) as to know
His face in any natural stone, or tree,
Better than when in images they be …
The “electrum” was an alchemical term for an alloy of gold and silver, which (the alchemist hoped) was en route to becoming pure gold—an analogue to Elizabeth’s thinking body, which was better able to see the face of God in stones and trees than in man-made images. Elizabeth, Donne imagined, inhabited an animated universe. Since he had never met the girl, the poem was clearly a projection of Donne’s own spiritual yearnings.
Entering the priesthood seemed a last-ditch move, but soon he was desperate enough to make it. He continued to fall short of steady employment. In May 1614 his three-year-old daughter, Mary, died, followed by seven-year-old Francis in November. What was left of his family needed more than favors from his rich friends. Donne finally decided to become a priest, though to friends and enemies alike, he was still the poet of erotic love whose marriage was tainted by scandal.
Donne’s hopes for a new phase of family life would not last long. In August 1617, Ann died of a “raging fever” after giving birth. Like so many women of that era, she remains mute and nearly invisible to us—except as the object of Donne’s (often powerful and moving) tributes. She remains an off-stage figure, rather than a player in her own right.
As Donne became a prominent preacher, with a broad and heterogenous London congregation, he occasionally succumbed to orthodox formulas. “Every man is a little Church,” he once said, “and in every man, there are two sides, two armies, the flesh fights against the Spirit.” And on another occasion, he announced that “marriage is but a continual fornication sealed with an oath.” Since this utterance occurred at a wedding, one can only speculate on the ambivalence he had begun to feel toward sex, especially in his chosen celibate state.
Yet Donne was always drawn to melding flesh and spirit, erotic experience with intense religious feeling. One of his “Holy Sonnets” addresses the face of Christ crucified, remembering what “I said to all my profane mistresses … so I say to thee, To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assigned / This beauteous form assures a piteous mind.” And in another, addressed to the Trinity, he wrote: “Batter my heart, three-personed God … / Take me to you, imprison me, for I / Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” The conditions of chastity and ravishment are opposites and remain opposites even as they fuse together; Donne was a connoisseur of paradox, especially in religious matters. After he had joined the priesthood, he wrote less poetry but remained committed to the intimate merger of body and soul. In his Easter sermon of 1623, he declared, “All that the soule does, it does in, and with, and by the body.” His preaching, which one listener called a “sacred Art and Courtship,” was empowered by sublimated sexual energy. And to witness him preach, as Stubbs writes, was “to share in an ecstasy.” This was altogether appropriate for a man who believed that bodies and souls would be reunited on the last day, and that the physical universe was a miracle of divine creation.
Donne’s version of Christianity joined the physical and spiritual realms in a fluid, volatile cosmos. God was the blazing, boiling energy at the core of Donne’s universe, which was filled with fragments coming together in friction-filled unity. Key fusions were performed by animal spirits, which constituted “a kind of middle nature, between soul and body,” as Donne said. Everything was in a constant state of liquefaction, including our hearts when they responded to God’s mercy. Yearning and melting were bound together—a metaphorical convergence that recalled the transports of medieval mystics but also foreshadowed evangelical Protestants’ accounts of their own conversion experiences.
Donne wanted to describe not only what a flower looked like but how it felt. At the same time he defined spiritual vitality as participation in the perpetual motion that characterized the natural world. In the modernist aesthete Walter Pater’s admonition to “burn always with this hard, gem-like flame,” one hears echoes of Donne, for whom blood was always seething and sublimating into spirit.
Donne straddled two widely separated worlds: his outlook was rooted in the animated universe of the medieval church and foreshadowed the modernist vitalism of Bergson and Pater—as well as the yearnings for restored wholeness that gave rise to Eliot’s poetry. It is possible to trace a vitalist lineage between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. After Donne, one of the earliest examples of that tradition was John Milton. According to recent scholarship, his mature cosmology was an idiosyncratic version of “animist materialism.” He rejected the orthodox view that God had created the universe ex nihilo. Instead he embraced the notion that everything was a part of “one first substance”—a belief held by many of his contemporaries. This led to a vitalist account of creation:
Thus God the heav’n created, thus the earth,
Matter unformed and void: darkness profound
Covered th’ abyss: but on the wat’ry calm
His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread,
And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth
Throughout the fluid mass, but downward purged
The black tartareous cold infernal dregs
Adverse to life …
The theological consequences of this vision were profound, especially for Milton’s notion of body’s relationship to soul. “Instead of being trapped in an ontologically alien body,” the critic Stephen Fallon writes, for Milton the soul became “one with the body.” Spirit and matter were “two modes of the same substance: spirit is rarefied matter, and matter is dense spirit.” The corporeal world was neither inert nor mechanical, but “animate, self-active, and free.” We can detect the subsequent history of this vitalist vision, partly by tracing the fate of the crucial connectors between body and soul, animal spirits, through epochs conventionally labeled Enlightened, Romantic, and Modernist.
Yet through the centuries, vitalism never became a dominant current of thought. Its most successful rival was Christian dualism, often in traditional orthodox forms but also increasingly in some version derived from the ideas of René Descartes. He acknowledged the existence of animal spirits but denied them reason or will, treating them as subtle and elusive components of the bloodstream—what he called “extremely small bodies which move very quickly, like the jets of flame that come from a torch. They never stop in any place.” This formulation preserved Galen’s idea that animal spirits were an essential component of human physiology, but its emphasis on the constant motion, speed, and ephemerality of animal spirits left a spiritual aura hovering over these allegedly corporeal entities. Still, Descartes’s underlying dualist doctrines proved most decisive in shaping Western thought: his assumptions that only humans possessed a “rational soul,” that nonhuman animals were mere machines operating out of inner necessity, and that vivifying spirit was forever divorced from inert matter.
In his time, Descartes’s chief critics were mechanistic materialists such as Thomas Hobbes and Pierre LaPlace, who shared his emphasis on the inertness of matter but denied the existence of a rational soul and indeed of any invisible spirits of any kind. Human beings, from this view, which survived and resurfaced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were governed by the same material forces as the rest of nature. In the face of this challenge, Cartesian dualists protected traditional ideas about God by sequestering mind and soul from the physical workings of the universe. This boundary lay at the heart of Protestant and Catholic orthodoxy for centuries.
Yet as early as the late 1600s, a few defenders of the Christian faith were creating an intellectual hybrid—an animistic materialism, which (like Donne’s and Milton’s views) prefigured vitalism even while it resonated with surviving vernacular ideas of an animated cosmos. The French priest and philosopher Pierre Gassendi endowed matter with energy and direction by melding the dancing atoms of Lucretius and Epicurus with divine Providence. God, in Gassendi’s scheme, creates a world of mobile atoms whose nature He wills to “always include a force by which they can be moved.” The nature of this primal implant, this source of force at the atomic level, remained obscure—which is why other thinkers sometimes invoked animal spirits to embody it.
SOMETHING MORE: BEYOND INERT MATTER
During the late 1600s, even the most prominent men of science kept one foot planted in an animated universe. For Thomas Willis, the Anglican clergyman and Cambridge professor who coined the term “neurology,” the entire universe was a bodying-forth of a soul, alive and self-actualizing, not designed from without but generated from within by “moving animal spirits.” Willis’s colleague Ralph Cudworth postulated a teleological force, driving toward greater complexity and variety in an organized fashion, operating immanently in natural things and “Magically and Sympathetically” producing the diversity of forms that makes up the natural world. Isaac Newton himself combined precise observation and measurement with the postulation of mysterious invisible forces, notably gravity.
Throughout the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers in all areas of inquiry were beset by the growing suspicion that “there must be something more than dead matter,” as the historians Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman have shown—some vivifying principle that pervaded the cosmos, linking humans with other animals and the rest of creation. The nature of this vital force became a subject for free-ranging speculation. By the mid-eighteenth century the notion of animal spirits was losing scientific legitimacy, while in popular culture it was being refashioned into belief in a more diffuse and pervasive power that animated the material world as well as the individual person. The encompassing name for this power was animal magnetism, which merged in the vernacular with the practice of mesmerism and the awareness of electricity. As these ideas and practices multiplied, a ferment of vital force enveloped religious and financial affairs, sparking eruptions of emotional energy in evangelical revivals as well as stock market bubbles and panics.
Revivalistic religion provided a burgeoning new arena for frenzied entrancement. By the early 1700s, Protestant Dissenters had rejected ritual and declared the only legitimate prayer to be spontaneous; in subsequent decades, evangelical revivalists on both sides of the Atlantic upped the emotional ante. During the 1730s and ’40s, the evangelist George Whitefield became the first transatlantic celebrity, perfecting a theatrical preaching style that produced thousands of conversions and provoked the ire of conservative Anglicans.
Like Donne’s, Whitefield’s preaching style took strength from sublimated sexual energy. But to his critics, Whitefield evoked female sexuality, not male. “Hark! He talks of a Sensible New Birth—then belike he is in Labour, and the good Women around him are come to his assistance,” the Anglican Weekly Miscellany remarked. “He dilates himself, cries out, and is at last delivered.” Under patriarchal eyes, Whitefield’s histrionics embodied effeminate emotional excess—what the orthodox had long derided as “enthusiasm” and Jonathan Swift had mocked as mere manipulation of animal spirits, an emotional confidence game. Revivalist preachers evoked “tears, trembling, groans, loud outcries, agonies of body” among the assembled faithful, as Whitefield’s admirer Jonathan Edwards reported from Massachusetts; such transports culminated for the converted in “a kind of ecstasy.”
Meanwhile, in the City of London, other forms of excitement floated freely: coffeehouses proliferated in Exchange Alley, serving as betting parlors and stock exchanges, dealing in rumors, libels, and stray bits of military intelligence (battles could be bet upon). New financial practices—options trading, short selling—involved placing bets on whether certain asset values would rise or fall by a certain future date. Speculative “projectors” relied on an excited public imagination to endow their projects with dramatically increasing value; if the excitement subsided or grew fearful, the project’s value fell. The spread of speculative investment detached value from any material foundations and made it seem as much a product of imagination as of calculation.
Yet while religion and finance were awash in animal spirits, neither religious nor financial apologetics resorted to the concept, even though it could have captured the intense psychic energy that characterized both business and belief. To admit that energy openly, to give it a local habitation and a name, was a subversive gesture, revealing unwelcome possibilities: that the transcendent transports of religious conversion were rooted in mere emotional excitement, and that the apparent rationality of finance capitalism was a thin crust covering a bubbling mass of fantasy.
For Christians or capitalists to acknowledge the role of animal spirits in their enterprises would undermine their claims to legitimacy; they sought to contain surges of emotional energy with an overriding ethos of control. Evangelical moralists insisted that the proof of a true conversion was not only that it was accompanied by “a kind of ecstasy” but that, after the ecstasy subsided, the believer embraced a strict regimen of self-discipline. Apologists for commercial trade, led by Adam Smith, tended to ignore speculative investment as a means of wealth creation and instead constructed a business world powered by steady work and prudent habits, where animal spirits were absent. Still, the idea of animal spirits, despite its disappearance from religious and economic discourse, would persist in the vernacular and on the intellectual margins, in romantic literature and early evolutionary biology. The sense that “there must be something more than dead matter” survived. While the medical profession began to reject animal spirits as a physiological fact, the wild card was still available to be played.
Even the harshest medical critics of the concept of animal spirits wanted to preserve some connection, however mysterious, between body and soul. In The English Malady (1733), the physician George Cheyne aimed to trace the bodily sources of the malady in question, nervous debility—which turned out (in his telling) to be a disease of civilization, promoted by the intemperance and overindulgence of the fashionable classes of London.
Contrary to the claims of his predecessors, Cheyne wrote, animal spirits or their absence had nothing to with nervous disorders; indeed the very notion of animal spirits lacked any empirical base. Microscopic observation by Anton Leeuwenhoek (“the best Observer doubtless”) and other scientists had demonstrated that nerves were not hollow tubes that could contain either air or fluid (the two supposed vehicles for animal spirits): Nerves “appear solid, transparent, and with broken Reflexions, even when dry, like crack’s Glass-Wire, Horn, or any other solid Substance, without any apparent Cavity.” Cheyne could only conclude that the concept of animal spirits was outmoded nonsense, “of the same Leaven as the substantial Forms of Aristotle, and the celestial System of Ptolemy.”
Still, Cheyne was a devoted Newtonian, and like the Master he refused to reduce life itself to a mechanically interlocking system of material components. Cheyne believed that “in Substances of all Kinds, there may be Intermediates between pure, immaterial Spirit and gross Matter, and that this intermediate, material Substance, may make the Cement between the human Soul and Body.” Indeed, he concluded, this intermediary may be “the same (for ought I know)” as the “infinitely fine and elastic Fluid or Spirit” postulated by Sir Isaac himself in his Opticks (1705) as a force for energizing the “Aether” that sustains and surrounds all life. This was not a reversion to animism tout court but a new way of seeing, an animistic materialism that allowed room for indeterminacy and uncertainty, but not Providence, and certainly not a knowable one. Cheyne, like Newton, was willing to acknowledge that there were some things in his system that were inexplicable, and might well remain so.
Despite Cheyne’s dismissal of animal spirits, defenders of the concept as a physiological fact did not yield the field altogether. Cheyne’s contemporary Richard Mead, who was also his chief rival in ministering to the medical needs of London Society, argued in Medical Precepts and Cautions (1755) that an “extremely subtile fluid of the nerves, commonly called animal spirits” could be the instrument of madness, both melancholy and mania. Animal spirits “make that great engine of the blood’s motion, the heart, contract with greater or lesser force,” activating a circular, interactive relation between body and mind. The passions affected physical health, and physical health (or sickness) affected the passions—thus patients with dropsy, said Mead, became unaccountably sanguine about their economic affairs.
Overindulgence in rage or sadness could bring about mental disease, and “to asswage these swelling surges of the soul is the business of philosophy”—but alas, Mead noted, even the Stoics had proved unequal to the task of healing soul-sickness. It was up to the medical men to step in, he announced, concluding with a secular sermon on moderation in sensual pleasure, urging the cultivation of fortitude and self-command with the ultimate goal of achieving tranquility. This was not the first nor the last time self-command would be recommended as an antidote to unruly emotions and as a path to tranquility.
Such a strategy seemed especially necessary amid the economic conditions emerging in early eighteenth-century London, where animal spirits energized frenzied finance—though financiers were only occasionally willing to acknowledge the importance of unruly emotions in creating (or destroying) asset values. They sought reassurance, however faint and fitful, in numbers. The ubiquity of quantification made the irrational seem rational. Yet above the turmoil of the markets hovered the mysterious power of money and its even more mysterious instrument—invisible, odorless, tasteless credit. The capitalist religion of modernity was taking hold, promoting strange new ways of assessing human worth.
2The Madness and Mildness of Money
WHAT PROTESTANTS CALLED the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was a revolution in finance as well as political power. When William of Orange became King William III of Great Britain and Ireland, he brought Dutch financial innovations to England. The government increasingly financed its operations (mainly wars with France) by borrowing from private creditors—in particular the Bank of England, which was founded in 1694. Paper began to displace gold and silver as the chief medium of exchange—not only banknotes but shares in the capital stock of corporations that were themselves traded on what became known as the stock exchange. Signifiers of value were becoming less substantial, more susceptible to gusts of subjective feeling.
TRADING IN THE AIR: THE FANTASIES OF FINANCE
When it came to immaterial transactions, the Dutch showed the way: they were pioneers in short selling and options trading. In 1722, a commercial writer described conditions in Amsterdam, where “one very often trades several sorts of merchandise in the air, whether by selling what one does not possess, or buying what one has no intention to accept.” Trading “in the air”—betting on what one imagined an asset price would be at some future date—had by that time also become a way of life in the City of London. It was another way of detaching value from any solid foundation, actual or apparent, just as paper banknotes had done by displacing metal currency. And if one fell short of paper, observed an anonymous poet who called himself “a Money’d Man,” the indebted investor could “Some Project or another find, / Where Words may do, and Words are Wind.” The more insubstantial money became, the more exciting were the possibilities surrounding it, as the new profession of “stock jobbers” pumped up stock prices by spreading rumors and feeding fantasies.
Many dreams of instant wealth focused on the South Sea Company, which was founded in 1711. As the Victorian journalist Charles MacKay wrote in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), the company’s success depended on “visionary ideas” about “the immense riches of the eastern coast of South America.”
Everybody had heard of the gold and silver mines of Peru and Mexico; every one believed them to be inexhaustible, and that it was only necessary to send the manufactures of England to the coast, to be repaid a hundredfold in gold and silver ingots by the natives. A report, industriously spread, that Spain was willing to concede four ports, on the coasts of Chili [sic] and Peru, for the purposes of traffic, increased the general confidence; and for many years the South Sea Company’s stock was in high favour.
When these cheerful prospects all proved illusory, the speculative bubble finally burst in 1720. One of the investors was Isaac Newton, who had stood aghast as the company’s share prices soared. As the mathematician reportedly said, he could “calculate the movement of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” Rational calculation could not comprehend the emotions that animated speculative finance. The “Money’d Man” marveled at how completely wealth had become decoupled from familiar markers of worth:
How from all Corners of the Nation
The Wise, Fools, Cits, and Folk of Fashion
Repair promiscuous to the Alley
To lose or gain more Money daily:
Say how, and by what means, a Lord,
On sudden, turns out not worth a T__d;
While, from a Dunghill to a Coach,
A Rascal rises in a Touch.
One of the earliest and most acute observers of this chaotic scene was Daniel Defoe, the novelist and political pamphleteer who was also an avid and frequently feckless speculator in the financial markets. Defoe’s life reveals how a Protestant ethic of disciplined achievement could serve as a counterweight (though not always an effective one) to the undisciplined emotions that characterized the spirit of financial capitalism. He was born in London in 1660, the son of a pious Presbyterian tradesman: his father was a tallow chandler, a freeman of the City of London, and a member of an ancient livery company. From early youth, Defoe gradually became familiar with the latest fashions in finance, even as his commitments to fortitude and diligence were reinforced by adversity: the Plague, the Great Fire, and the persecution of Dissenters like himself by the Anglican establishment. Defoe’s earliest mentors were articulate and disciplined Dissenters—Samuel Annesley, the family pastor, who read twenty chapters of scripture a day; and Charles Morton, whose academy Defoe attended and who included the vitalist Catholic Gassendi on the curriculum. Both Annesley and Morton remained articulate defenders of their Presbyterian faith despite constant harassment from secular and religious authorities. According to Defoe’s biographer Paula Backscheider, they embodied virtues the novelist attributed to his own creation, Robinson Crusoe: “invincible patience recommended under the worst of misery, indefatigable application and undaunted resolution under the greatest and most discouraging circumstances.”
Yet despite being inspired by these characteristically Protestant virtues, when it came to finance Defoe was an undisciplined young rogue whose affairs were falling apart before he was thirty. He came of age at a time, the late 1600s, when wars with Spain and France obstructed English merchants’ access to European and American markets, and left them with idle capital. They began to put it into a flurry of joint-stock companies that were floated to buy some commercial privilege from the Crown, or into simple wagers, often on the outcomes of military operations. As Defoe recalled: “there was not less gaged [wagered] on the second siege of Limerick [August–October 1691] than two hundred thousand pound.” Defoe himself had an incurable propensity for speculative projects, which involved everything from diving bells to civet cats (for perfume) to a ship he bought from pirates that turned out to be “weake and Leakey.” Like many of his fictional characters, he kept engaging in schemes that failed, kept trying to reform, and kept backsliding. He was too willing to give people credit, too indifferent to collecting what was owed him, too careless about records, and too litigious. As he sank more deeply into debt, he continued to live beyond his means and kept borrowing money he could not repay. Finally, in October 1692, he was imprisoned for bankruptcy. He was thirty-two years old, with a young family, five servants, and debts of more than £17,000.
Defoe quickly managed to deal and write his way out of debtors’ prison, but his political pamphleteering soon got him charged with seditious libel. The libel in question was The Shortest Way with Dissenters (1702), a Swiftian satire of Anglican hostility toward nonconforming believers. Irony, it turned out, was no defense. Defoe was fined more than a hundred pounds, confined to Newgate prison until he could provide surety for seven years’ good behavior, and sentenced to stand three times in the pillory, where prisoners were usually pelted with garbage and insults.
But among neighborhood Dissenters Defoe became a local hero, pelted only with flowers. And he had no trouble securing surety. He was soon on the streets of London again. Still, his times in prison had intensified his feeling of isolation from respectable social life. He was no longer a convivial blade about the City; he was a professional writer, paid by the word. His method was straightforward: once he secured a contract with a publisher, within a few days he began to deliver pages to be set up in type. Plagiarism and repetition were constant temptations, and Defoe succumbed to both. He also continued to feel the allure of speculative “Projects and Undertakings,” which kept him in debt to the end of his days, in 1731.
Defoe was uniquely equipped to write about the subjective experience of speculative finance, from the inside. His writings provide a fragmented but compelling account of emotional life in the Vatican of early capitalism, the City of London. With compelling personal detail, he captures the visceral urges beneath transactions tricked out in the guise of quantitative rationality. In 1706, in one of the early numbers of Defoe’s Review, he described “the Infinite Mazes of a Bankrupt before he comes to the Crisis” with precision born of painful memory: “what Shifts, what Turnings, and what Windings in Trade, to support his dying Credit; what Buying of one, to raise Money to pay for another, What Discounting of Bills, Pledgings and Pawnings; what selling to Loss for present Supply; What Strange and Unaccountable Methods, to buoy up sinking Credit!” That same year, when Parliament was debating a bill “to Prevent Frauds Committed by Bankrupts,” he weighed in to urge leniency, arguing that “Men whose Affairs are declining, are not always the exactest People in their Books … Omissions, Mistakes, and forgotten Articles are never so frequent, as when men, knowing they are playing a losing game, grow desperate.” Two decades later, in The Complete English Tradesman (1727), he was still describing the prolonged desperation induced by the slide toward bankruptcy, recalling “the miserable, anxious, perplexed life, which the poor Tradesman lives under before he Breaks … how harass’d and tormented for money … how many little, mean, and even wicked things will even the most religious tradesman stoop to in his distress, to deliver himself even such things, as his very soul would abhor at another time; and for which he goes, perhaps, with a wounded conscience all his life after?” The last words may have captured the plight of Defoe himself, his conscience permanently wounded by his departures from the straight and narrow path in pursuit of ready money—the Protestant ethic repeatedly succumbing to the spirit of finance capitalism.
Yet when Defoe was not inhabiting the soul of a harassed debtor on the brink of bankruptcy, he could sound as sanguine as Adam Smith about the benign effects of trade on national health. “If the Pulse of the Trade beats true and strong, the Body is sound,” he wrote in The Complete English Tradesman (1727). His Essay upon Projects (1697) revealed an understanding of probability theory, which by then was becoming known in English intellectual life. Yet unlike many contemporary social scientists (who believe they can quantify subjective experience), Defoe separated the secret logic of the aggregate from the unpredictable vagaries of the individual. This move underwrote his vision of the investor (or “projector”) as a creator of wealth whose idiosyncratic imagination was the prime mover of economic growth. From Defoe’s view, banks had a responsibility to oil the workings of commerce by extending credit to visionary entrepreneurs (as twenty-first-century business ideologues have learned to call them). The fluid metaphors seemed inescapable: the oil of credit promoted other forms of liquidity.
In recognizing the centrality of credit to the emerging capitalist economy, Defoe had hit upon the most pervasive and elusive power in the early modern world. For him, in effect, credit was to the body economic as animal spirits were to the individual body: a mysterious but essential vital force, an evanescent liquid evaporating into thin air.
This substantial Non-Entity called CREDIT, seems to have a distinct Essence (if nothing can be said to exist), from all the Phaenomena in Nature; it is in itself the lightest and most volatile Body in the World, moveable beyond the Swiftness of Lightning; the greatest Alchymists could never fix its Mercury or find out its Quality; it is neither a Soul nor a Body; it is neither visible nor invisible; it is all Consequence, and yet not the Effect of a cause; it is a Being without Matter, a Substance without Form—a perfect free Agent acting by Wheels and Springs absolutely undiscover’d; it comes without Call, and goes away unsent; if it flies, the whole Nation cannot stay it; if it stays away, no Importunity can prevail for its Return … it has the effectual Power of Transmutation—for it can turn Paper into Money, and Money into Dross—While it lives with a Merchant, he can trade without a Stock, draw Bills where he has no Effects, and pay Bills without Money—; if it forsake him, his Trade dies, his Money won’t circulate, the Vitals of his Management stagnate … This is the Wheel within the Wheel of all our Commerce, and all our publick Transactions.
While Defoe’s hyperbole recalled traditional reflections on the elusiveness of Fortuna (and the turbulent powers of Potentia), he also captured the perversities and paradoxes at the heart of the emerging financial system. “Why do East India Company’s stock rise, when Ships are taken? Mine Adventures raise annuities, when Funds fall; loose their vein of Oar in the Mine, and yet find it in the Shares; let no Man wonder at these Paradoxes, since such strange things are practiced every day amongst us?” The decoupling of wealth from any material foundation was stunning and deeply puzzling. The only explanation Defoe could suggest was: “Great is the Power of Imagination!”
The centrality (and dangers) of imagination in finance were becoming apparent in the early 1700s on both sides of the English Channel. Consider the career of John Law. He was a Scottish adventurer who transformed the French financial system and created a vast real estate scheme centered on the Louisiana territory that became known as the Mississippi Bubble. It burst in March 1720, five months before the South Sea catastrophe. “It’s a shame really that he did not place limits on his boundless imagination for he has something great about him,” Eleanor de Mezieres, one of Law’s aristocratic patrons, said of him after his disgrace. “He has perished for too grand a conception of himself.” The focus on powerful, even boundless imagination illuminated the impulse behind “the spontaneous urge to action” that Keynes would associate with animal spirits two centuries later.
Most of the time Defoe could only step back and wonder at the consequences of the tradesman’s imagination. “Trade is a Mystery which will never be discover’d or understood,” he announced. “It has its Critical Junctions and Seasons, when acted by no visible Causes, it suffers Convulsive Fits, Hysterical Disorder, and most unaccountable Emotions … today it obeys the Course of things, and submits to Causes and Consequences; tomorrow it suffers Violence from the Storms and Vapours of Human Fancy, operated by exotick Projects, and then all runs counter, the Motions are eccentric, unnatural and unaccountable—a sort of Lunacy in Trade attends all its Circumstances, and no man can give a rational Account of it.”
The perception of “a sort of Lunacy in Trade” was what many generations of stock jobbers, economists, financiers, brokers, and business apologists would struggle to counteract. They sought to stabilize the inherent instability of capital markets in a template of numbers, formulas, and research—or at least to create the impression that they had done so. Law’s career was an early case in point. He was nothing if not a reckless gambler, with other people’s money to boot. But as the founder of the Royal Bank of France, the lender of first resort for a cash-strapped government, he projected a persona embodying mastery and poise. As a French observer noted, “The bank[er] is impressive, calm, and cold. He never fails in the smallest article of conduct. He may not lose his head, while the punters are free to do so and often do so.”
The City of London during the early 1700s was populated mostly by punters, many of whom lost their heads regularly. Efforts to stabilize finance had barely begun. But the need for them became apparent in August 1720, when the South Sea Bubble burst and angry, ruined investors filled the streets of London, thirsty for revenge against the men who had bilked them. “Sell” orders wiped out bankers’ cash reserves and spread ruin across fashionable London society. The Better Sort embraced the banner of sauve qui peut. “The madness of stock-jobbing is inconceivable. The wildness was beyond my thought,” said the son of Robert Harley, who was founder of the South Sea Company and (for a while) a patron of Defoe.
The novelist himself was untouched by the South Sea collapse. To defray his ever-present debts, and with uncharacteristic prescience, Defoe had signed his own South Sea stock over to creditors in 1719. When the crash came, the writer struck a disingenuous tone of moral disapproval toward the “City gamblers” who had brought this ruin on themselves and on many innocent credulous people besides. Resorting to familiar moral tropes, he declared himself for contentment and against ambition, denounced mob madness, and discerned providential justice in the sight of “Extravagant gamesters” brought low. Still, he also performed more substantive service to the polity: he did all he could as a journalist to restore investors’ confidence and reestablish public credit, including the credit of the South Sea Company. With this in mind, he refused to join the witch hunt against the company (and his sometime patron Harley). He also perceptively noted the role of newspapers in promoting the bubble, chiding his journalistic colleagues for their uncritical repetition of promoters’ claims.
During his last decade, Defoe tried to sustain this stance of detachment from the allure of the market. He embraced a role as dispenser of homely wisdom on the importance of prudent business habits, the comforts of family life, and the insidiously transformative powers of money. “What makes a homely woman fair?” he asked in a poem of 1720. “About five hundred pounds a year.” Yet he was still hounded by creditors, some seeking payment for debts more than thirty years old. Despite his celebration of simplicity and sincerity, the spirit of finance capitalism lingered on in his life like a guest who would not leave.
The divisions in Defoe’s mind reflected debates across a broad swath of Western intellectual life. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as the political theorist A. O. Hirschman argued, thinkers in Britain and on the Continent struggled to make sense of the emotions unleashed by early modern capitalism (though the word did not exist yet). The struggle was a preliminary effort to stabilize the sorcery embedded in emerging market societies—the apparently magical capacity of money, increasingly mere marks on a piece of paper, to transform the possessor’s condition from poverty to wealth, dowdiness to beauty, shame to respectability. Finance capital in particular carried a potentially magical charge: it was no accident that when King Louis XV of France hired John Law to manage his fiscal affairs, he fired all the court alchemists. Money could beget money more easily than gold could be made from dross. The ease with which money might accomplish its transformative alchemy fired the passion to possess it. But that passion could be tamed, at least rhetorically, into something more socially acceptable: economic interest.
STABILIZING FINANCIAL SORCERY: FROM PASSION TO INTEREST
How could society’s rulers maintain public order amid the manic pursuit of private gain? The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico inaugurated a new sort of intellectual alchemy when he argued that passions and vices could be transformed into civic happiness: ferocity could stimulate military defense; ambition could energize politics; avarice could animate commerce. The trick, said Vico’s countryman Niccolo Machiavelli, was “to set affection against affection and to master one by another”—to balance countervailing passions and fashion a stable social order where flesh and spirit could coexist in productive harmony.
The founders of the American republic, among other Enlightenment intellectuals, broadened the connotations of the word “interest” (already in wide commercial and legal use) to make it a generic term for those passions that were assigned the countervailing function. Gradually, during the latter decades of the eighteenth century, interest was conflated with economic advantage; avarice was divested of unsavory associations and promoted (as Hirschman observed) “to the position of the privileged passion given the job of taming the wild ones.” Alexander Hamilton, arguing against term limits for the U.S. presidency, claimed that desire for private wealth would counterbalance ambition for political power and encourage the president to leave office to pursue his financial interests, rather than running repeatedly for reelection. Traditional mistrust of unbridled accumulation melted away as avarice was sanitized into interest and interest became the new paradigm used to explain human action. Interest, it was assumed, partook of the best of both passion and reason: the passion of self-love was constrained by reason, and reason was given direction and force by passion.
The mob scenes in London and Paris after the bubbles burst were quickly forgotten by Enlightenment intellectuals seeking to legitimate the life of trade. A world governed by interest, they claimed, would be characterized by predictability and constancy, since avarice did not wax and wane like other passions. Commerce tied people together; it did not pull them apart. This stability was inherent, apologists for trade assumed, even in paper transactions based on the invisible power of credit. In this emerging economic discourse, value was becoming more subjective, a product of imagination rather than calculation; wealth was created not by accumulating precious metals but by satisfying human wants.
This was a benign vision, more humane and socially useful than merely piling up gold bars, but it depended on a sanitized vision of commerce. Operating within an interdependent web of consumer desires and commercial obligations, the tradesmen imagined by eighteenth-century intellectuals became steadfast, single-minded, methodical, and self-disciplined. In “the industrious professions,” David Hume observed, “love of gain prevails over love of pleasure.” The trader was a peaceful, inoffensive fellow, and moneymaking was a uniquely calm passion, innocent and doux—harmless, innocuous. The douceur of commerce became an article of faith among its Enlightenment apologists.
None was more influential than Adam Smith. He was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, probably in 1723. The son of a solicitor who died before his birth, Smith was baptized as an infant into the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland and retained a Protestant ethic of disciplined achievement (if not Protestant beliefs) all his life. His mother was determined that he be well educated, and after attending a local academy he entered the University of Glasgow at the age of fourteen. At Glasgow he encountered the charismatic presence of Francis Hutcheson, the philosopher who taught that human morality arose from an inner moral sense, which inclined its possessor to choose right over wrong. Smith later rejected the notion of a moral sense because he believed that morality was rooted in “immediate sense and feeling,” and a moral sense—unlike human sympathy—could not be felt, only postulated. But he remained powerfully influenced by Hutcheson’s earnest cast of mind.
Smith’s move from Glasgow to Balliol College, Oxford, proved a deep disappointment. Professors held lifetime sinecures and, with no incentive to attract students, made little pretense of bothering to teach. Yet they summoned enough energy to seize Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature from Smith and punish him for reading such a heretical book, which dismissed the conventional claims of both religion and rationality. Oxford professors were nothing if not conventional. Still, despite the mediocrity of its faculty, Oxford did offer the rich resources of the Bodleian Library, and Smith spent many hours roaming its stacks.
He also continued reading Hume, and developed heretical views of his own. All scientific theories, he wrote in a youthful essay, were “mere inventions of the imagination” designed to reassure us that the universe made sense by providing provisional explanations of otherwise baffling phenomena. Every theory was forever subject to revision—there was no last word. Like Hume, Smith was cultivating a skeptical attitude toward both reason and religion, concluding that both were human inventions designed to allay anxiety and uncertainty—and that dogmatic religion was the more dangerous of the two. By manipulating terror and cowardice, the young Smith charged, religious orthodoxy promoted “the lowest and most pusillanimous superstition” and retarded human impulses toward self-improvement. The intellectual kinship between Smith and Hume, who was ten years older, was already becoming apparent. The men did not meet until 1750, but they remained warm friends until Hume died in 1776. Smith wrote an account of Hume’s death that scandalized defenders of orthodoxy by praising the skeptic Hume for dying as bravely as any believer.
Hume and Smith, both lifelong bachelors, shared similar commitments to prudence and moderation in personal finance as well as a common faith in the douceur of commerce. Both challenged the emphasis on self-love in Bernard Mandeville’s description of social life, The Fable of the Bees (1714), which told the story of a great “grumbling hive” of bees whose commercial prosperity and imperial power was based on vanity, pretension, deception, and greed: “all trades and places knew some cheat, / no calling was without deceit.” When some morally sensitive bees persuaded Jove to make their great hive an honest one, the hive soon collapsed, as thousands of bees were left with no means of livelihood. For Mandeville, the lesson was plain:
Then leave complaints: fools only strive
to make a great an honest hive
to enjoy the world’s conveniencies,
be famed in war, yet live in ease,
without great vices, is a vain
Utopia seated in the brain.
Fraud, luxury and pride must live,
while we the benefits receive.
Hume and Smith, in contrast, focused on the centrality of sympathy rather than cupidity. Recoiling from Mandeville’s famous claim that “Private Vices” could yield “Public Benefits,” Smith argued that Mandeville reduced all virtue to disguised vice. For Mandeville, Smith wrote, virtue always “falls short of that complete self-denial which it pretends to, and instead of a conquest, is commonly no more than a concealed indulgence of our passions.” Hume was equally intent on presenting a view of human motives that resisted reduction to the vicious and transcended mere selfishness. As he wrote: “whatever other passions we may be actuated by … the soul or animating principle of all of them is sympathy”—by which he meant a kind of contagious fellow-feeling.
As Dennis Rasmussen observes in his account of the men’s friendship, Hume’s version of sympathy as contagion was passive and mechanistic compared with Smith’s fuller and more active notions of projection and identification. Smith described occurrences when “we feel emotions on behalf of others that they do not or cannot feel themselves,” such as the insane or the dead. He was a subtler psychologist than Hume, and a more important figure in the emotional history of capitalism.
He was also readier than Hume to acknowledge the potential drawbacks of commercial society. Smith deplored endless toil in pursuit of objects that provide only fleeting satisfaction. Though he celebrated the emerging nation of shopkeepers, Smith remained keenly aware of the emotional stress of commercial life, which he thought was exacerbated by the “impertinent jealousy,” “mean rapacity,” and “interested sophistry” of merchants.
Discerning the degrading effects of the division of labor, Smith even questioned the conventional history of humanity as an ascent from barbarism to civilization. Intelligent barbarians, he observed in The Wealth of Nations, had to perform varied occupations. “Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity, which, in a civilized society, seems to benumb the understanding of all the inferior ranks of people,” Smith wrote. “The man whose whole life is spent performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too, are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur … he becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” Smith began to glimpse what a later generation would learn to call the hidden injuries of class, which were emotional and rooted in social relations rather than simply in economic deprivation. He saw how inequality in commercial society encouraged emulation and admiration of the rich and feelings of invisibility and even shame among the poor. This was hardly an unembarrassed rhapsody to unfettered trade and its consequences.
Still, Smith, for all his sharp perceptions, ultimately provided an exceptionally bland view of everyday life under early modern capitalism, a view that was easily assimilable to free market apologetics in subsequent decades. It is no accident that this quotation from Wealth of Nations appears prominently on the Web page of the Liberty Fund, a libertarian think tank:
By preferring the support of domestick to that of foreign industry, [the individual] intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a matter as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.
By the time Smith published these words in 1776, the invocation of an invisible hand or its equivalent was a familiar rhetorical move in natural history as well as social, economic, and political thought. Enlightenment thinkers were keenly aware of the foundational (or anti-foundational) role of chance in the cosmos—the capacity of fortune to undermine rational order and systems. Still attracted to system-building, they had to abandon brittle taxonomy and find subtler ways to accommodate serendipity. One was probability theory, which refocused attention on (comparatively) predictable aggregates rather than wayward individuals. Another was the concept of self-organization—often more a rhetorical device than a coherent idea—a claim that, somehow, apparently chaotic conditions could give rise to flexible forms of order in organisms, governments, and indeed whole societies.
Smith was more precise than many devotees of self-organization, some of whom could only claim (as Ralph Cudworth had done) that biological order arose “Magically” out of the operations of vital force. Smith was no free-market fundamentalist; he acknowledged the need for taxation, bank regulation, and other government interventions in business life. Still, he argued that collective good came not from any public source but from the individual pursuit of self-interest—even while, against Mandeville, he assumed that self-interest lacked any taint of vice. Smith’s reasoning was that men employ capital as close to home as they can, so they can keep closer tabs on it; and they endeavor “to direct that industry, that its produce may be of the greatest possible value.” The last stage of the process, the transformation of private into public wealth, was left largely unarticulated—except by passages like this one from Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, which revealed a kind of invincible innocence:
The rich … divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interests of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.
While Smith’s invisible hand was one of many instruments of self-organization imagined by eighteenth-century thinkers, his particular version of the trope met a peculiarly urgent ideological need, at least for moral philosophers like himself—the need to provide moral legitimacy for the life of trade, to make commerce seem like more than an amoral scramble. To do that, one had to address the serendipitous swerves of investment capital that left gentlemen destitute and ruffians rich—unless one ignored them. Smith mostly chose the latter option. By the early 1770s periodic frenzies and panics were affecting more and more ordinary tradesmen, not just City investors. Yet Smith paid little attention to the role of finance capital in deflating or inflating asset values; he presented commerce as at bottom simply an expression of “the uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition.” When all else failed there was the anodyne of steady work—an impulse toward individual gain with desirable collective consequences.
Smith’s benign view of trade reflected his own isolated, insulated, and placid life. A beloved professor at Glasgow for many years, later tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch, eventually a bestselling author draped in academic honors, he never lacked for employment or patrons. He lived a life of steady work, recognition, and reward—protected enough from practical demands that he embodied the quintessential otherworldly professor. Smith was “the most Absent Man that ever was,” a friend recalled. Once he took a piece of bread and butter, rolled it in his hands, put it in the teapot and poured hot water on it; when he poured himself a cup a few minutes later, he said it was the worst tea he’d ever tasted. Smith did not cut too dashing a figure in London intellectual circles. Samuel Johnson’s biographer James Boswell called him “as dull a dog as he had ever met with,” while Johnson himself dismissed Smith as a “a professed infidel with a bag-wig.” Smith, for his part, recoiled from Johnson’s weird recitation of the Lord’s Prayer at inopportune moments.
Smith’s social insulation may have helped him to create a calm, bland picture of commercial society. But the absence of any real conflict, social or personal, in Smith’s vision also depended on his own intellectual assumptions—especially his conception of the human self as a being governed by sympathy. He presented a tamped-down version of emotional experience under early capitalism, oddly bereft of extremes. Compared with Defoe’s account of a desperate debtor’s life in the early 1700s, Smith’s vision of early capitalism is almost unrecognizable. While he was writing his Theory of Moral Sentiments in the 1750s, he was groping toward a conception of human nature that would definitively refute Mandeville’s Fable, which imagined a society of self-love and masked vices. By the time the Theory was published in 1759, Smith had fully elaborated his argument for the centrality of human sympathy in social relations. This would be his gentle, genuinely virtuous alternative to Mandeville’s faux-virtuous self. Smith’s alternative self inhabited a society where tranquility was the norm, where emotions oscillated across a narrow range between vexation and contentment. The Theory of Moral Sentiments proved a primer for emotional moderation and an introduction to a society where animal spirits were assumed to be no longer needed as either metaphor or physiological fact.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments depended on the assumption of a self divided between the observer—an “impartial spectator”—and the observed, whose conduct comes under the scrutiny of the impartial spectator. For Smith, the impartial spectator was an internalized conscience or superego that constituted the “Highest Tribunal” by which our actions could be judged. Despite this emphasis on an internal seat of judgment—“the man within the breast”—Smith understood the central role played by social relations in shoring up our sense of an independent moral self. A sociable man who valued the opinion of his peers, he produced a social construction of virtue, defining it as acting “so as to deserve applause” from the impartial spectator we imagine within us, but also from the non-imaginary others who exist in the world. The desire for praiseworthiness and the approval of others was the key source of virtue and a powerful force for moral progress, Smith believed. Yet the man within the breast remained a crucial figure, too. If others judged us harshly for no good reason—if they depended on false accusations, for example—we could still fall back on the judgments of “the man within” to secure Smith’s summum bonum: “tranquility of the mind.”
While Smith celebrated ambition, enterprise, spirit, and keenness rather than mere regularity in the performance of duty, he always elevated tranquility and contentment over vanity and striving; his Presbyterian temperament recoiled from anything that resembled the pursuit of fashion or social status. Though explicitly religious references faded from The Wealth of Nations, in Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith linked the cultivation of tranquility to our awareness of a higher law and our expectation of “a world to come.” Tranquility arose from obedience to God’s law, but obeying God’s law was not mere conformity to rule; the practice of decency to others had psychological as well as theological justifications. This was Smith’s breakthrough moment in the emotional history of capitalism. Moral sentiments, he recognized, were rooted in natural affections—the human capacity for sympathy, which in turn stemmed from our ability to imagine other people’s hardships and project ourselves into their pain.
Yet Smith’s account of social life was surprisingly pain-free. “By the constitution of human nature,” he wrote, “agony can never be permanent; and, if [the agonized person] survives the paroxysm, he soon comes, without effort, to enjoy his ordinary tranquility.” The assumption that tranquility is ordinary and agony extraordinary reminds one, again, of Smith’s insulated life. In the world he imagines, the worst feelings that befall a tradesman are “discouragement” and “vexation,” both states of mind that were likely caused by the “frequent visits and odious examination of the tax-gatherers.” Such conventional prejudices reveal why Smith is so easily appropriated by business apologists unfit to shine his boots.
Smith had no need or desire for animal spirits to animate his Scottish Presbyterian version of the Protestant ethic. The key to achieving his ultimate goal of “exact propriety and perfection” was ruling one’s passions through self-command. This was not a mere matter of prudence, which, unlike propriety, inflamed passions by suppressing them. What Smith had in mind was something subtler, akin to what Freud would call sublimation: anger, restrained by Smith’s impartial spectator, mellowed into indignation.
Yet Smith appreciated the fire of passion and its kinship to the concept of spirit, as he identified the desire for applause (or at least one version of it) to be the source of human virtue. Desire for moral approval could promote unselfish, even heroic conduct; just as anger, tempered by calm, could become measured indignation. Even while he recommended science as “the great antidote to the poison of superstition and enthusiasm,” Smith was no dour rationalist. He elevated sincerity over casuistry, feeling over rules. But that was partly because the rules were so fully embedded in everyday life that no proper bourgeois noticed them. Smith’s world was an ordered one where babies napped at two and tea was served at four. And all was securely anchored in an ethos of self-command.
It would be hard to find a sharper contrast than the one between Smith’s world and Laurence Sterne’s in Tristram Shandy—which, like The Theory of Moral Sentiments, was published in 1759. In Smith’s imagined society, animal spirits were unnecessary and altogether absent; in Sterne’s, animal spirits were essential to physical and mental health but only fitfully available and all too easily dispersed or dissipated. Smith imagined a world devoid of animal spirits and in no need of them, where a supple ethos of self-command kept everyone in benign equipoise; Sterne imagined a world deficient in animal spirits and in dire need of them, where a brittle ethos of self-command left his characters longing for vital experience even as they clung to collapsing frameworks of rational control.
Smith and Sterne offered rival visions of selfhood—or more precisely, manhood. Smith’s fusion of sympathy and self-command reflected the growing eighteenth-century respect for the “man of feeling” who possessed “the gift of tears.” It suggested a more capacious notion of manliness than the one embodied in traditional patriarchy, a softer male self, more open to conventionally feminine virtues. Sterne’s characters, in contrast, epitomized the lingering and lurching of the patriarchal ethos in a world where male authority was becoming detached from its traditional sources in dogmatic religion and landed wealth. Staking out the rivalrous claims of control and chaos, Smith and Sterne explored the antipodes of psychic life available in a modern commercial society.
THE DISPERSAL AND SURVIVAL OF ANIMAL SPIRITS
Laurence Sterne was an Anglican preacher, who comes across in his sermons as a tolerant and humane man, profoundly aware of the predominance of chance in human life and death. He urged charity as a bulwark against the vagaries of fate and the instabilities of fortune. He also invoked a traditional Christian vision of Divine Providence, by contrasting a life that seems perverse and nonsensical to us here on earth with a life that is actually governed by wisdom known only to God. He was an orthodox enough believer to embrace the latter option.
But Tristram Shandy was anything but orthodox. Sterne’s novel was a kind of summa of the developing vitalist worldview—or at least an explicitly masculine version of it. Animal spirits are practically characters in themselves; and the human characters embody a wayward vital force that suggests Sterne’s respect for unpredictable, unmediated experience over scientific, aesthetic, or religious forms. The book has long been a playground for critics celebrating its modernity and postmodernity. Sterne departs constantly from novelistic conventions (to the extent that novelistic conventions existed in 1759): there is no coherent narrative or plot, but rather a series of meandering and sometimes baffling digressions. And the book is peopled by figures who seem strange indeed by comparison with the characters created by Sterne’s contemporaries, the stout fellows of Henry Fielding or the imperiled maidens of Samuel Richardson. Sterne’s characters are fragmented, scattered, indecisive. They are also given to pompous intellectuality and absurd theorizing—particularly Tristram’s father, Walter, who displayed an “infinity of oddities” that “baffled, Sir, all calculation,” as his son says. Or they are gripped by “hobby-horses,” such as Tristram’s uncle Toby is by his obsession with fortifications—and the rebuilding of those in place at the Battle of Namur, where he was wounded in the groin.
The placement of the wound is significant. It puts Uncle Toby’s physical manhood in question, underscoring his position outside the patriarchal ethos that dominates the book. Unlike Walter and other blustering patriarchs, Uncle Toby is an appealing and even admirable man of feeling whose character gestures toward a masculinity more capacious than conventional criteria of manliness allow.
Uncle Toby’s wound also resonates with larger themes. Sterne is preoccupied by the fraught relations between flesh and spirit. Tristram Shandy is unabashedly sexual and scatological. Elaborate medical theories are unmasked to reveal they have little or no relation to the bodies they purport to describe. Exalted abstractions are always pulled down by physicality; things—rocks, window sashes, hot chestnuts—are always falling on (male) genitals. Like Donne’s “The Ecstasy,” Tristram Shandy is at pains to show that the most exalted expressions of the human mind and soul can be traced to bodily origins; there is no such thing as detached intellect. The characters’ intellectual ambitions are often absurd, but their absurdities animate individuality, resilience, exuberance.
Except, perhaps, for the eponymous hero. He attempts to tell his life story, but is constantly digressing; he does not even manage to get himself born for 200 pages. To be sure, he begins early, at the moment of his conception—which turns out to be a botched job when his father’s animal spirits prove unable to flow alongside the homunculus toward its destination in the womb. This is consistent with Sterne’s male perspective—the woman is the passive receptor of the animal spirits produced by the man—but he may also be playing a little subversively with common assumptions about procreation.
Tristram opens the subject on a note of intellectual camaraderie with the reader: “You have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are transfused from father to son, etc. etc.… nine parts in ten of a man’s sense of his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend on their motions and activity, and the different tracks and trains you put them into, so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, ’tis not a halfpenny matter—away they go clattering like hey-go mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and smooth as a garden-walk, which, when once they are used to, the Devil himself shall not be able to drive them off it.” Animal spirits, in this view, established what twenty-first-century neurologists might call neural pathways that allow for habitual, repetitive action—what the eighteenth century might have called manly resolution. Tristram lost his chance for such traits, and indeed for any sort of satisfying life, when his mother asked his father if he’d remembered to wind the clock. Or so his father believes. “My Tristram’s misfortunes began nine months before he ever came into the world,” Walter announces.
Tristram, sharing his father’s implicit misogyny, declares that his mother’s inquiry about the clock was “a very unseasonable question at least—because it scattered and dispersed the animal spirits, whose business it was to have escorted and gone hand in hand with the homunculus, and conducted him safe to the place destined for his reception.” The immediate consequences were catastrophic for Tristram as he developed in the womb, “his own animal spirits ruffled beyond description … a prey to sudden starts, or a series of melancholy dreams and fantasies, for nine long months together.” By the time he was born, “what a foundation had been laid for a thousand weaknesses both of body and mind, which no skill of the physician or the philosopher could ever afterward have thoroughly set to rights.”
The long-term results of the scattering of animal spirits were ontological as well as physical. “I have been the continual sport of what the world calls Fortune,” says Tristram, “the ungracious duchess has pelted me with a set of as pitiful misadventures and cross accidents as ever small Hero sustained.” The misogyny here is deep-dyed: before Tristram is even born, he has already been the victim of two capricious females, his mother and the “ungracious duchess,” Fortune. One of the prenatal “cross accidents” endured by the “small Hero” involves the many knots that had to be untied before the man-midwife’s bag could be opened at his mother’s delivery. Due to his mother’s ill-timed question, Tristram complains, “the few animal spirits I was worth in the world, and with which memory, fancy, and quick parts should have been conveyed—were all dispersed, confused, confounded, scattered, and sent to the devil.”
Much of Tristram Shandy is devoted to demonstrating the silliness of Walter Shandy’s ideas, but his idea of animal spirits is not included in the general indictment. On the contrary: the book’s central theme—the bodily origins of spiritual beliefs and aspirations—depends on the assumption that animal spirits are at work in the world in either metaphorical or physiological forms. Walter, speculating on the physical location of the soul, rules out the brain, because people can lose parts of their brain and still go about their business; he also eliminates “a puddle or a liquid of any kind” inside the body, because such an exalted being as the soul could not live like a mere tadpole.
But if Sterne’s characters shift their gaze from soul to mind, fluid metaphors become more acceptable. Dr. Slop, the man-midwife, thinks Mrs. Shandy’s difficulties in labor are God’s mercy, as they allow him time to undo the knots obstructing his access to his instrument bag. Sterne’s narrator (Tristam) observes that “the thought floated only in Dr. Slop’s mind, without sail or ballast to it, as a simple proposition, millions of which … are every day swimming quietly in the thin juice of a man’s understanding, without being carried backwards or forwards, till some little gusts of passion or interest drive them to one side.” It is a brilliant account of the way many minds work: maintaining a pond stocked with conventional assumptions (“simple propositions”), any of which might be blown into assertive consciousness by breezes of circumstance.
Fluid metaphors could also be pressed into more exalted service. “The Author’s Preface,” which occurs 150 pages into the novel, uses images of saturation and liquefaction (reminiscent of Donne) to characterize the process of poesis. The author imagines wit and judgment being “poured down warm as each of us could bear it—scum and sediment and all (for I would not have a drop lost) into the several receptacles, cells … and spare places of our brains” till the whole lot is saturated and filled to the brim—“Bless us!—What noble work we should make!—how should I tickle it off! And what spirits I should find myself in, to be writing for such readers!” He concludes by conjuring the utopia that would ensue from such a general flow of spirits: “What confusion!—what mistakes!—fiddlers and painters judging by their eyes and ears—admirable!—trusting to the passions excited—in an air sung, or a story painted to the heart—instead of measuring them by a quadrant.” This is the closest Sterne’s narrator comes to articulating an aesthetic of animal spirits; it combines empirical observation (“judging by their eyes and ears”) while elevating spontaneous composition or performance (“trusting to the passions excited”) over quantitative precision (“measuring them by a quadrant”).
Sterne’s distrust of quantitative measurement was especially keen with respect to time. Early on in the novel he imagines a “hypercritic” who insists that the passage of time in the novel does not make sense. The time it takes the reader to get from Uncle Toby’s ringing of the bell (to summon the servant Obadiah to fetch Dr. Slop) and Dr. Slop’s rap at the door is no more than two minutes, thirteen seconds and three fifths, says the hypercritic, and this is impossible since Dr. Slop lived at least a half an hour away. “I would remind him that the idea of duration, and of its simple modes, is got merely from the train and succession of our ideas,” says the narrator. Like Donne (and Bergson), Sterne insisted that time was a subjective experience of flow, not fully susceptible to measurement by numbers.
Tristram’s visit to Montreuil, whose cathedral was a major tourist attraction, gives Sterne an opportunity to enlarge his critique of quantification; the aesthetic of animal spirits pointed to a more satisfying way of being in the world. Tristram, sipping wine at a café, ponders the options for a tourist like himself. He has read much about the Montreuil cathedral—its history and dimensions, the width of its transept, the depth of its nave. It is all very stable and solid and quantifiable. Then he spots Janatone, the innkeeper’s beautiful daughter. He decides to observe her rather than tour the cathedral, choosing the fleeting experience of her immeasurable transient loveliness over the cathedral’s solidity and stability and precisely measured greatness.
Sterne’s aesthetic of animal spirits, despite its range and force, is limited by gender conventions. Janatone radiates vitality, but passively, as the object of male admiration rather than a character capable of her own subjective experience. Still, even though Tristram Shandy is hobbled by a crumbling patriarchal ethos whose absurdities the author recognizes and satirizes, the book remains an extraordinary exploration of animal spirits. Never again would the idea receive such extended and explicit attention in imaginative literature.
As British intellectual life migrated to North America in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, the notion of animal spirits remained part of the migrants’ cultural baggage. Animal spirits grew increasingly immaterial and emotional rather than physical, yet they continued to play a role as a link between body and soul. “People are said to be cured of the bite of the Tarantula by musick; which by quickening the animal spirits raises in the blood such a ferment as drives out the poison,” observed an anonymous author in the Springfield (Mass.) Federal Spy in 1794. Animal spirits were manipulatable emotions with unpredictable consequences: “I have seen a beggar gain an alms by a heavy and affecting groan, when a speech of Cicero’s composing, spoken without Cicero’s art, would not have gained it … The groan struck the animal spirits sympathetically, and being continued to the imagination, raised up a thousand sudden conjectures and pre-occupations in his favor, and a thousand circumstances of distress, which he who uttered it perhaps never felt nor thought of.” Acknowledging that the beggar’s groan may have been a genuine expression of misery, the Federal Spy also evoked a secular version of Swift’s sardonic remarks on religious enthusiasm. Beggars, like preachers, could play confidence games with the sympathetic emotions extolled by Adam Smith. It apparently never occurred to him that commercial society might systematically foster duplicity in the name of sympathy.
As commerce expanded on both sides of the Atlantic, some observers began to suspect that animal spirits might have some relation to the mysterious power of money. A British essay, reprinted in four American newspapers between 1785 and 1806, announced that “a wonderful connexion and sympathy have lately been observed between the breeches pocket and the animal spirits, which continually rise or fall as the contents of the former ebb and flow; insomuch that, from constant observation, I could venture to guess a man’s current cash by the degree of vivacity he has discovered in conversation. When this cutaneous reservoir is full in flesh, the spirits too are elate; when it is sunk and drained, how flat, dull and insipid is every word and action.” One could see this pattern in poets’ effusions and politicians’ pronouncements: “this barometer of state rose or fell” as “current silver contracted or expanded itself within its secret cell … It is impossible to record a tenth part of the wonderful effects this latent force of life and spirits has produced upon the animal economy.”
The force in question was money, which “has made youth and beauty fly into the arms of age and impotence; given charms to deformity and detestation; transformed Hymen into Mammon, and the god of love into a satyr: it has built bridges without foundations, libraries without books, hospitals without endowments, and churches without benefices.” What concluded as a conventional assault on the corrosive powers of cash had nevertheless captured the confusions of an emerging commercial society, where the increasing use of credit was beginning to transform money—even the mere expectation or imagination of it—into a powerful emotional and social force.
This attraction to invisible sources of energy spread from the financial world to scientific and philosophical circles, where thinkers began to imagine a universe animated by a single life force. A vernacular philosophy of vitalism began to emerge, a kind of intellectual working out of the impulses unleashed in evangelical revivals and frenzied stock trading. Vitalism endorsed a sensibility that connected Protestant churches in the wild with the City of London, and released animal spirits into a ferment of cosmic forces—mesmerism, electricity, and, most capacious of all, animal magnetism.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE VITALIST FRAME OF MIND
Amid the economic and political upheaval of the 1780s and ’90s, older ways of representing vitality persisted as newer versions appeared. Notions of a vital principle shifted their focus from internal to external sources that were still capable of animating subjective experience. This was consistent with many existing theories, which held that animal spirits flowed beyond the individual organism, mingled with the ether, and became a “gelatinous fluid”—less substantial than fire or even light—that linked all sentient life-forms.
By 1800, other vitalist idioms were proliferating. In Enlightened as well as Romantic minds, the universe was pervaded by mysterious invisible forces—Newton’s gravity, Benjamin Franklin’s electric fluid, Anton Mesmer’s animal magnetism (which was conveyed by “mesmeric fluid” and could transform human consciousness into a will-less trancelike state). This was the intellectual atmosphere that gave rise to the emergent new philosophy of vitalism, which incorporated animal spirits as one ingredient in a stew of ill-defined powers that sometimes took liquid form, but always remained invisible. They showed themselves only through their alleged effects on material objects as well as on human bodies and minds.
Among early popularizers of vitalist ideas, Mesmer was the most influential and controversial. His theoretical assumptions were sweeping and vague. “He maintained to all who would listen to him,” MacKay wrote, “that the magnetic matter, or fluid, pervaded all the universe—that every human body contained it, and could communicate the superabundance of it to another by an exertion of the will. Writing to a friend from Vienna, [Mesmer] said, ‘I have observed that the magnetic is almost the same thing as the electric fluid, and that it may be propagated in the same manner, by means of intermediate bodies. Steel is not the only substance adapted to this purpose. I have rendered paper, bread, wool, silk, stones, leather, glass, wood, men, and dogs—in short, everything I touched, magnetic to such a degree that these substances produced the same effects as the loadstone on diseased persons. I have charged jars with magnetic matter in the same way as is done with electricity.’” This mishmash of magnetic and electric fluids (which were invisible) with magnetized matter (which was not) was characteristic of the discourse surrounding animal magnetism. So was the universal availability of the invisible fluids and forces that constituted sources of vitality.
A sometime medical student, Mesmer claimed he could use animal magnetism to cure everything from arthritis to scrofula, to the mysterious headaches and lassitude that accompanied what we now call depression. A full-time rogue and committed social climber, he deployed animal magnetism in his sumptuous Paris salon to send aristocratic ladies into paroxysms of panting ecstasy, followed by calm recovery from their ailments. Sitting around a vessel that contained iron rods protruding from magnetized water, the patients held hands and pressed their knees together, and applied the rods to the afflicted parts of their bodies. But this was only the beginning, MacKay reported:
Then came in the assistant magnetisers, generally strong, handsome young men, to pour into the patient from their finger-tips fresh streams of the wondrous fluid. They embraced the patients between the knees, rubbed them gently down the spine and the course of the nerves, using gentle pressure upon the breasts of the ladies, and staring them out of countenance to magnetise them by the eye!… Gradually the cheeks of the ladies began to glow, their imaginations to become inflamed; and off they went, one after the other, in convulsive fits. Some of them sobbed and tore their hair, others laughed till the tears ran from their eyes, while others shrieked and screamed and yelled till they became insensible altogether.
Then Mesmer stepped into the midst of this delirium—richly robed and holding a white rod. He calmed those still conscious with an imperious glance and restored the insensible to consciousness by stroking them with his hands and tracing figures on their breasts and abdomen with his long white rod. They awoke calmly and acknowledged his power over them, reporting that they felt hot or cold vapors passing though their bodies, depending on how he waved his wand or fingers.
Such scenes would change dramatically in subsequent decades. As Mesmer fostered the movement that bore his name and it spread across the Atlantic to the New World, the rituals became less physical, a matter of manipulating mental powers rather than curing bodily ailments, with men as well as women submitting to the mesmerists’ power—though an erotically charged relationship persisted between male mesmerist and female client. The settings became less opulent, the clientele more democratic. American mesmerists dispensed with the ornate trappings, the iron rods, magnetized water, and handsome male assistants; they pared down the mesmeric ritual to a one-on-one encounter in a Victorian parlor. But like Mesmer himself, they continued to assert that they could manipulate the vital force at the heart of the universe. For decades mesmerism remained a key component of vernacular vitalism on both sides of the Atlantic.
Mesmer invoked scientific authority, while most of the transatlantic medical establishment dismissed him as a crank. The only genuine power at work in mesmerism, the doctors charged, was the power of the human imagination—the same power, they might have noted, that was igniting frenzied finance. Yet the medical profession could claim few therapeutic accomplishments on the basis of its own largely mechanistic assumptions, and belief in the objective existence of animal magnetism flourished, reinforced by confused but pervasive awareness of electrical and magnetic force.
These cosmic energies underwrote popular vitalism—melding the material and immaterial realms, posing challenges to dualistic orthodoxy. “Electricity defied the logic of Cartesian dualism,” the historian James Delbourgo writes, “by putting mind and body into startlingly direct communication.” Electric fluid created a kind of “spiritual fire,” according to some observers, while others believed mesmeric fluid was even stronger—it was “the medium of passion, the very stuff of life,” said the French poet Théophile Gautier. Such forces could provoke an awe bordering on the religious, and like animal spirits, they were often described in terms that merged the invisible and ethereal with the visible and palpable. As Archibald Spencer, who introduced Benjamin Franklin to electricity, said in 1743: “electric fire” was “a subtle fluid, a weightless but material entity that exerted a force on material bodies.” Decades later, Joseph Macrery expanded the claim for electricity, asserting that “all the phenomena of life and motion, are owing to the energy of a subtil, active fluid, called the electric fluid.” Like grace or credit, electricity was an invisible and apparently boundless power that could be harnessed to transform one’s life. Small wonder it flowed into vitalist currents that broadened the stream of scientific thought.
By the 1790s, animal spirits were receding from physiology but the language used to characterize what they embodied—spontaneous energy—remained similar to what it had been for centuries. In A Discourse on the Principle of Vitality (1790), Benjamin Waterhouse of the Harvard medical school noted that philosophers have long realized “that things change, and that nothing is truly lost; that the sum total of matter in the Universe remains perfectly the same.” The most poetic expression of this idea was Ariel’s song to Ferdinand in The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
But Waterhouse was less interested in poetry than philosophy. As he wrote, philosophers have reasoned that since “it was the work of OMNIPOTENCE to create something out of nothing, the same Omnipotence is required to reduce anything back to nothing.” Hence they postulated a “moving principle,” which “they called the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World.” What form did it take? Was it water (Thales), fire (Heraclitus), air (Anaximenes)? Magnetism, electricity, some chemical attraction?
Waterhouse’s answer ran something like this. An irritability or susceptibility to irritation within plants and animals combines with a “certain something,” a Vis Vitalis in animals and a Vis Actuosa in humans, and the combination is (crucially) affected by heat from without. Along with heat, vitality requires the respiration of atmospheric air, which contains a vivifying principle. This creates “an oscillation, a concussion, or excitement of the nervous energy” that gets the bodily fluids flowing again and is itself animated by “that portion of the subtil electric fluid, which pervades all bodies and animates every particle of matter.” No one, Waterhouse believed, could discount the sun as the origin of vital energy, especially when one took into account the many swallows, snakes, and even flies thawed out and restored to life after being frozen in ice.
But this was not merely a physiological matter, at least not for humans. The search for a vital principle involved “the union of soul with body,” which (Waterhouse believed) “is the most abstruse contemplation that can exercise the mind of man!” The ultimate question, which he attributed to Voltaire, bedeviled every thinker who sought to meld flesh and spirit: “What is that unknown fluid, which is quicker and more active than light, and flies in the twinkling of an eye, through all the channels of life, produces memory, sorrow, or joy, reason or frenzy, recalls with horror what one would wish to forget, and makes of a thinking being, an object of admiration, or a subject of pity and tears?” Only the “First, Divine Cause” knows, Waterhouse concluded, as he strained to distance himself from Voltaire’s atheism.
In some ways that struggle was beside the point; vitalism transcended conventional categories of belief and unbelief. Most vitalists tried to preserve a sharp distinction between religion and science, but as the psychiatrist George Makari writes, they “would often land between the two worlds, a wild, unmapped place where brain and soul, spirit and flesh, and Nature and God seemed to touch.” Gradually they moved away from a belief that animal spirits were the immaterial connectors between body and soul, and toward a notion of thinking matter, which defined animal spirits as a sentient principle underlying all nature.
These ideas persisted into the early nineteenth century, when vitalist tendencies linked scientists and poets, sustaining their common belief in an animated universe. Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather, advanced the notion of a vibrant cosmos where living organisms, including humans, could be the result of a gradual process; nature could be a kind of self-renewing machine; and humans had sentient self-development in common with the rest of brute creation. “Go, proud reasoner, and call the worm thy sister!” Darwin wrote in Zoonomia (1794).
Some Romantic poets embraced a similar animistic perspective. The Fairy who dictates Europe: A Prophecy to William Blake undertakes to show him “all alive / The world, where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.” And in Blake’s Milton, “even the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance & sport in summer / Upon the sunny brooks and meadows; every one the dance / Knows in its intricate mazes of delight artful to weave.” But such moments were idiosyncratic. More typical was a view of Nature animated by the vestigial presence of a God who was no longer believed in, at least not in any recognizably orthodox sense.
This was William Wordsworth’s perspective. To risk oversimplifying a rich and complex oeuvre, one might say that when Wordsworth celebrates nature as a realm of embodied Spirit, he restricts the ability to see that Spirit to poets. Not just famous poets like himself, but the mute inglorious ones among the lowly folk he encounters on his solitary rambles—such as the pedlar in “The Ruined Cottage”:
… he was a chosen son
To him was given an ear which deeply felt
The voice of Nature in the obscure wind
The sounding mountain and the running stream
… In all shapes
He found a secret and mysterious soul,
A fragrance and spirit of strange meaning.
While Wordsworth gestured toward a vitalist ontology, he confined the vitalist vision to a poetic elite and he usually invoked a more ethereal conception of meaning in Nature—one often more compatible with winds and breezes than rocks and trees:
Ye motions of delight, that through the fields,
Stir gently, breezes and soft airs that breathe
The breath of Paradise, and find your way
To the recesses of the soul!
Wordsworth epitomized a broad transatlantic movement with philosophical and scientific as well as literary significance. While he lamented the ravages of science on nonhuman nature—“we murder to dissect”—other Romantics confronted the impact of Cartesian rationalism on human ways of thinking and feeling. Samuel Taylor Coleridge challenged Descartes by insisting on subjective experience as the foundation of individual identity and displacing cogito ergo sum with sum qui sum—“I am that I am.” Like Erasmus Darwin (and, decades later, Henri Bergson), Coleridge envisioned a generative creative principle pervading existence at all levels from the cosmic to the individual.
Scientists shared such ideas. The most famous—now notorious—scientific vitalist was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who in 1802 appropriated the word biologie to describe the study of living beings and postulated an intrinsic pouvoir de vie that animated them. Plants and animals enacted this life force, composing themselves, elaborating and complicating their organization across generations. This process unfolded over an “incalculable series of centuries,” Lamarck wrote. All plants and animals developed and transformed as a result of the movements of fluids within them. The more complex animals added will to the mix, forming “habits” and “ways of life” in response to circumstance.
This was an essentially historical view of nature, in keeping with the broader sense of history emerging during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: material changes actuated by internal energies, rather than by God. History was a way of knowing the natural world, as well as apprehending the nature of past human societies—a focus on purposeful actions in a web of interdependent contingencies.
For Lamarck, the habits adopted by humans and higher animals led to changes in their bodies—including their brains, which, like any organ, differed according to the uses and exercise it got. “The brain of a man of labor, who spends his life building walls or carrying burdens,” was not “inferior in composition or perfection” to those of our greatest thinkers, said Lamarck: it simply had not been exercised in the same way. By the early nineteenth century, for Lamarck and his followers, any living being was an agent, capable of constant, self-generated motion and the transformation of its material parts.
For decades if not centuries, these ideas have been consigned to the dustbin of failed science. Yet as Jessica Riskin and other historians of science have begun to show, Lamarck and many of his colleagues in the faculty of the Jardin des Plantes shared a common conception of nature as fluid, dynamic, and constantly developing through the interaction between organism and its environment—a conception strikingly compatible with the recently emergent field of epigenetics. Charles Darwin himself, Riskin argues, was a good deal more of a Lamarckian than contemporary neo-Darwinians have acknowledged. He was torn between the mandate to banish agency from nature and the impulse to make agency synonymous with life. In key passages of his Origin of Species, Darwin postulated an innate power of self-transformation within organisms. Later in the same book he labeled this tendency “generative variability.” It could be seen, for example, in the wayward development of animal traits across generations, despite breeders’ attempts to control them. The tendency to vary could not be equated with development in a particular direction and still less with teleological schemes of progress. Adaptation was a haphazard process, dependent in part on contingent circumstances that changed over time—on history, in other words.
Yet animated naturalism remained a minority tradition. By the later eighteenth century, Anglo-American Protestants were turning toward another version of animal spirits, the one engendering the evangelical revival. Revivals played a major role in fashioning the blend of emotional intensity contained by ethical discipline that helped to create the emerging ideal of bourgeois selfhood. This project depended on achieving an equipoise between complementary impulses toward ardent feeling and systematic control. The figure embodying the bourgeois ideal—the self-controlled, self-made man—was entering intellectual history at about the same time Tristram Shandy was being conceived. The ideal’s reified manliness served as a willed cultural counterpoint to the effeminacy moralists feared as a consequence of commercial life, as well as to the centrifugal forces at the heart of market society. The notion of self-made manhood celebrated a character so perfectly formed that no financial quake could shake it, no seduction swerve it from its path of righteousness. This was how, as Max Weber said, a certain kind of Protestant ethic provided psychic sanctions for systematic accumulation.
Yet this was not the whole story. There were powerful vitalist countercurrents in the emerging Protestant sensibility, emanating from its molten emotional core. As M. H. Abrams demonstrated decades ago, literary Romantics like Wordsworth promoted a “natural supernaturalism” for Protestants who could no longer embrace the orthodox version of the spiritual world. But fervent believers revealed an even stronger attachment to a more volatile and palpable version of vitalism. The historian Brett Grainger has recently explored evangelical vitalism in early America, revealing it to be a blend of European philosophy, African American folk beliefs, Protestant piety, and Romantic nature worship. Its central tenet equated the living God with an immanent power that animated, directed, and gave meaning to everything in the universe. From the evangelical vitalist perspective, the soul could be likened to “a small drop in the vast sea”; trees could be personified as holy protectors; and God could be worshipped more sincerely in a budding grove than in a meetinghouse or church. African American Christians wove European vitalism and African animism together in distinctive fusion. They prized the magical powers of twisted roots and deformed creatures, cultivated reciprocal relations with the nonhuman creation, and treated animals as more than mere commodities. The free black woman (and Methodist preacher) Zilpha Elaw was visited by a vision of Jesus; she was afraid to believe it was happening until her cow “bowed her knees and cowered down on the ground” out of reverence for Christ. White Methodists were also powerfully affected by these impulses: Thomas Coke, John Wesley’s right hand, sought communion with God by “ingulphing” himself in the “quiet vegetable creation”; Hannah Syngh Bunting, a Philadelphia Sunday school teacher, equated birdsong with “the creation’s state of unceasing prayer.” The woods were where one went to experience the “sweet meltings” described by the peripatetic preacher Francis Asbury during his periods of solitary prayer in the forest. Donne would have recognized the melting metaphor if not the wooded setting.
What Donne would probably have found more puzzling was a pamphlet called Electricity, or Ethereal Fire, Considered (1802), written by an itinerant electrotherapist from upstate New York. It identified electricity as “the very soul of the universe … the accelerating, animating, and all-sustaining principle both of the animate and inanimate creation.” Evangelical Protestants found the soulful properties of electricity appealing. Throughout the eighteenth century, scientists and philosophers had entertained the idea of an animate ether, which became popular with Protestants fretting about the fraught relation between soul and body. Catholics had the Incarnation and the sacraments, especially the Eucharist; Protestants had the animate ether and—eventually—the “ethereal fire” of electricity. By the late eighteenth century, evangelicals began to speculate on its mystical agency, remembering the links between God and light in Genesis.
Some found more palpable connections between electricity and divinity. During the buildup to the revival near Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801, Colonel Robert Patterson reported that the spirit came upon the converted “like an electric shock, as if felt in the great arteries of the arms or thighs; [the spirit] closes quick into the heart, which swells, like to burst.” Charles Grandison Finney, who became the most popular revivalist of the antebellum era, remembered that during his own conversion, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit felt “like a wave of electricity going through and through me.” For decades, electricity remained a powerful metaphor for the emotional intensity of vital religion. Not until nearly mid-century did the carapace of moral precision contain the molten core of evangelical ardor.
Meanwhile, vitalist impulses periodically pushed Protestants in interesting theological directions. In 1806, a poem in an evangelical magazine described Christ as the “enkindler” of the “vital flame,” the secret force that sparks and sustains biological life and universal motion. For Protestants preoccupied with will and control, it must have been a profound challenge to believe in a dormant fire that existed in all things, waiting to be kindled. Like animal spirits, electricity, and mesmerism, the notion of the vital principle as a flame enkindled by Christ suggested powerful connections between the natural and supernatural worlds. Evangelical vitalism resonated with the metaphors of dissolution and liquefaction articulated by believers from Donne to Asbury. In this cosmic conjunction of the divine and the human, however fleeting, body and soul could become one.
Yet in the characteristic pattern that pervades Protestant history, revivalist fervor repeatedly cooled and congealed into listless conformity. The Protestant faith of the young American republic was no exception. A faith that was once on fire would become formal, cold, and dead, and would periodically have to be relit by another revival. This involved the rekindling of vital force.
The rekindling process was always understood as a renewed indwelling of divine grace—but that meant many things to many sects. Pentecostals and other socially marginal congregations sought to sustain the physical manifestations of charismatic spirit, to keep the fire burning constantly. But for more mainstream Protestants, the animal spirits excited by conversion were ultimately contained by a code of respectable conduct; the true Christian was characterized by sober cheerfulness rather than agitated enthusiasm. Even emotionally fervid evangelical Christianity could eventually sanctify the steady pursuit of self-interest. From this prudential moral universe, as Adam Smith implicitly recognized, animal spirits had to be banished. But they still flickered on the fringes of respectable society—and even, sometimes, flared up in the middle of it.
3Toward a Pulsating Universe
AFTER 1800, ANIMAL spirits began to flow outward from the self to the world. They seeped into the eddies and rivulets of vernacular philosophy, swelling a vitalist alternative to dualist orthodoxy, rationalist or religious. In this emerging way of thinking, spontaneous force continued to animate individual lives, linking body with soul; but it also came to seem to animate the cosmos, situating sentient beings in a pulsating universe. The world was beginning to look less static and hierarchical, less easily reduced to taxonomies. It was thrumming with invisible currents of energy, to which antebellum Americans attached various labels—animal magnetism, mesmeric fluid, electricity. Whatever they were called, these forces posed a vitalist challenge to the assumption that nature was stable, measurable, and predictable. They reopened the possibility of a universal animacy.
Yet vitalism never displaced dualism as a dominant mode of thought. Defenders of binary hierarchies dominated classrooms and pulpits, creating a consensus of conventional wisdom. They associated animal spirits, like animal instincts, with frivolity and exuberance but never with higher things. Orthodox Christians, like philosophical idealists, tended to be dualists who elevated spirit over matter; freethinkers and atheists tended to be monists who reduced spirit to matter. Neither believers nor unbelievers had much use for the vitalist notion that matter and spirit merged in a force animating all life.
The Protestant majority settled into a dualistic metaphysics composed of faith and facts, transcendent spirit and inert matter—leavened by Scottish moral philosophers’ emphasis on the importance of human sympathy in creating a basis for ethics. It was, in many ways, a more explicitly religious version of Adam Smith. Vitalist perspectives remained a marginal strain in popular philosophy, sometimes present in the places where ultimate questions were discussed, more often slipping through a crack in the door, an exotic stranger. The perspective that commanded the widest assent remained dualism. So before surveying the vitalist outliers, it will be helpful to explore the dualist consensus—which passed for common sense among most respectable Americans.
EVANGELICAL RATIONALITY: THE COMMON SENSE OF THE YOUNG REPUBLIC
As the American republic took shape in the early 1800s, most educated Protestants wanted to be anything but strange or exotic. They were eager to blend their religious beliefs with main currents of secular thought—the Enlightenment devotion to scientific rationality, the liberal commitment to individual autonomy. Melding biblical faith and modern progress, Protestant thinkers created a synthesis that lasted much of the nineteenth century, a worldview that could be called “evangelical rationality.” Since this is not a phrase that fits easily with contemporary assumptions, it is worth a brief explanation.
The label “evangelical” encompassed a much broader range of beliefs in the nineteenth century than it does today, when it is usually coupled with fundamentalist Protestantism. Nineteenth-century evangelicalism was a sensibility that existed in various denominations—Methodists and Baptists to be sure, but also Presbyterians and Low Church Episcopalians. It sanctioned believers’ ability to choose salvation by embracing Jesus, as well as their postconversion responsibility to cultivate individual moral responsibility and personal holiness; it fostered a spiritual atmosphere of missionary zeal, fired by millennial expectation. It encouraged emotional expression, but that took a variety of forms—ranging from the shouts of backcountry folk to the sedate sympathies of the urban man of feeling.
Barely literate people shared an evangelical sensibility with the better educated, who were more likely to become devotees of evangelical rationality. What was rational about evangelical rationality was its assumption that God had created an orderly, predictable universe, knowable through empirical methods. The evangelical rationalist outlook evaded philosophical subtleties and elided contradictory beliefs, allowing Americans to imagine a world—and more specifically a nation—ruled by an omnipotent God but populated by free people fashioning their own future.
The earliest evangelical rationalists were men who came of age amid the social hierarchies of the New England colonies—a deferential public life, governed by an alliance of political and religious elites. But they conducted their adult careers amid the democratic ferment of the new American nation—a fractious polity, characterized by increasingly open challenges to established authority in politics and religion. Their intellectual tasks were especially urgent in the religious realm: to remain true to their orthodox upbringing, evangelical rationalists had to beat back an assault from “French infidelity” and then face what amounted to a vitalist challenge from revivalists, who assailed the coldness and deadness of Calvinist orthodoxy. This involved creating a creed dedicated to reason but also willing to acknowledge the importance of feeling as an element of faith and morality. Among educated Protestants, evangelical rationality became the basis of informed belief—an ethos that blended piety, progress, and (ultimately) profit.
The evangelical rationalist consensus was the creation of many people, but among the most prominent was Timothy Dwight (1752–1817)—Congregational minister, conservative Federalist, co-founder of the Connecticut Wits, and president of Yale College. The grandson of Jonathan Edwards, Dwight clung throughout his life to remnants of Calvinist orthodoxy. But he did not deny humans’ ability to seek their own salvation. On the contrary, he urged Protestant seekers to take advantage of the “means of grace” that included reading the scriptures, discussing theological issues with other believers, and listening to sermons from ministers like himself.
Dwight was also a postmillennialist: he believed that the Second Coming of Christ would occur after human beings had established a thousand-year reign of peace and prosperity: the Kingdom of God on Earth. This belief emphasized the importance of human will in promoting progress toward the millennium; it reinforced an ethic of mastery that underwrote secular ideologies of success. Dwight combined his millennial expectations with a cosmology derived from the natural philosophy of the English minister William Paley—a clockwork universe, set in motion by a watchmaker God. Paley’s clockwork universe was thoroughly deanimated, devoid of mysterious signs and miraculous events, ultimately subject to human understanding through observation and measurement. Dwight, like other evangelical rationalists, wedded Paleyite cosmology to Protestant Christianity—unwittingly creating common ground between himself and men like Ethan Allan and Thomas Paine, the freethinkers and deists he despised.
The capacity to merge divergent streams of thought carried Dwight into prominence as a public figure, a man of the cloth who could make pronouncements on secular as well as religious matters. His synthesis of faith and reason made him an American clerical counterpart of Adam Smith—a precursor of later American college presidents who installed Scottish commonsense philosophy as the crown of the curriculum, and promoted evangelical rationality as the currency of educated opinion. “Common sense” became a phrase to conjure with in the early nineteenth century, the Scots’ comforting counterweight to the corrosive skepticism of George Berkeley and David Hume, as well as the colloquial definition of assumptions that came to represent reality itself—what Antonio Gramsci called the “common sense” of the entire society.
Dwight’s near-blindness prevented him from reading widely and engaging with the finer points of theological debate. The consequence was that his views were superficial, accessible, and popular. They became the basis of an outlook that dominated respectable thought for decades—a worldview with little room for vague ideas of vital force, and still less for animal spirits.
THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY: THE WORLDVIEW OF TIMOTHY DWIGHT
As president of Yale from 1795 until his death in 1817, Dwight established a reputation for vanquishing unbelievers, as his student Lyman Beecher recalled. “He preached incessantly for six months” against “the Tom Paine school,” on the theme “Is the Bible the word of God?” Eventually, Beecher said, “all infidelity skulked and hid its head.” Soon after that triumph, the college was swept up in the Second Great Awakening—the firestorms of revival that burned across the countryside during the first six decades of the nineteenth century, creating hundreds of righteous communities in an unsettled frontier society.
In contrast with most evangelical revivalists, Dwight’s preaching style was frosty and conservative. What he and his colleagues hailed as “revival” among Yale students was a model of decorum. Those who accepted Christ as their savior felt a quiet surge of elation and quickly bent a knee to acknowledge a power outside themselves. Dwight made revivalism acceptable to an educated, genteel population, unaccustomed to bending a knee before anyone.
Part of his appeal was nationalistic as well as religious. To Dwight the Second Great Awakening was a sign that the Kingdom of God on Earth was beginning here, now, in America. The fledging United States would become the Redeemer Nation of the world. The thought had crossed the minds of other prominent Protestants, including Edwards. But a belief that had earlier been fitful and indirect became explicit and triumphalist in Dwight. He was a founding father of American exceptionalism, the faith that America was divinely ordained to remake the world in its image.
Dwight’s ideas became foundational to a new, enlightened orthodoxy that lasted for decades, sustaining a hegemonic ethos with scant sympathy for animal spirits or vitalist philosophy. For many educated Protestants, this evangelical rationality successfully papered over fundamental cultural tensions, between belief and unbelief, piety and profit, individual freedom and omnipotent Providence. This precarious synthesis was short on intellectual consistency, long on moral duty. Dwight was one of its major architects.
This involved a fraught relationship with the memory of his grandfather. When Timothy was a boy, Edwards was revered in the Dwight household as an orthodox martyr to liberalizing forces in his congregation; no doubt less attention was paid to his more idiosyncratic intellectual positions. He was a radical conservative, or a conservative radical. Perhaps his most challenging ontological doctrine was his idea of continuous creation. Edwards believed that all humanity and indeed the entire universe rested on “the immediate continued creation of God.” God creates all things, he wrote, “out of nothing at each moment of their existence.” The obverse of this was that the universe depends “at each moment” on God’s willingness to keep creating it. Were He to withdraw His hand from beneath it, in effect, the entire world would collapse into nothingness. This was the notion behind Edwards’s notorious sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”—the precarity of all existence, the thinness of the crust separating everyday life from the chaos below. His text was “Their foot shall slide in due time” (Deuteronomy 32:35). An existentialist sensibility linked Edwards with Martin Heidegger, William James, and other twentieth-century thinkers. And Edwards’s notion of continuous creation, despite its Calvinist theological framework, resonated with later ideas of a scintillating, vibrating universe.
Young Timothy Dwight (the fourth) knew next to nothing of his grandfather’s theological innovations. What he did know was that he himself was the grandson of two of Northampton’s leading citizens, Edwards and his champion, Colonel Timothy Dwight (the second). It was a serious, bookish family. The boy Timothy began his formal preparation for college at eleven with Rev. Enoch Huntingdon of Middletown, Connecticut, and entered Yale at thirteen, the youngest member of the class of 1769. During his first two years, young Timothy’s discipline wavered, as he succumbed to the seductions of cards and dice. He became a reckless gambler, until a Yale tutor and family friend took him aside toward the end of his sophomore year and told him to shape up.
Timothy took the advice all too seriously. Lamenting lost opportunities for scholarly work, he struggled to make up squandered time by embarking on a rigorous course of independent study—arising earlier than necessary, parsing one hundred lines of Homer before breakfast. His asceticism paid off academically but put him on the road to physical and emotional collapse. By age twenty, after he was appointed a tutor at Yale, he had become a compulsively driven young scholar, adding a restrictive diet to his ascetic regime. Convinced that overeating caused sluggishness, which hampered his studies, Dwight restricted himself to twelve mouthfuls of vegetables at each meal. This, he believed, was how he would fulfill his highest aspiration: to vindicate and elaborate the theological doctrines of his grandfather. But problems soon arose. If he kept reading for an extended period, he found himself afflicted by severe headaches that forced him to rest. When these attacks become more frequent, his eyes became useless for days at a time; soon he suffered fits of nausea, too. Finally he collapsed altogether, a physical and mental wreck, and left academic life for a long recuperation in Northampton.
He emerged from invalidism with permanent eye damage, though he turned this handicap to professional advantage by developing an extemporaneous preaching style. One can only conjecture about the emotional work Dwight’s poor vision performed for him. Certainly his affliction allowed him to bypass theological conflict with his grandfather by becoming an eloquent preacher, providing the means of grace to anyone who cared to listen seriously.
Dwight was ordained in 1783. His first pulpit was the Congregational Church at Greenfield, Connecticut, and he took to the place immediately. It inspired him to write “Greenfield Hill,” a long poem celebrating life in a New England village as an ideal existence among virtuous citizens dwelling together in harmony, simplicity, and faith. These were people of “one blood, one kindred,” who shared “one faith, one worship, one praise”—they would eventually engulf the nation, perhaps even the world, with their benign universalism.
Early on he envisioned a broad Protestant consensus. In 1788, he preached the influential “Address to Ministers of Every Denomination,” making an ecumenical plea for a big Protestant tent. His version of Protestantism eschewed theological subtlety to promote morality: the best path to a moral life, in Dwight’s view, was Protestant Christianity, New England version; Christian truth rested on the revelations of the Bible and these could be plainly discerned by human reason. These convictions lay at the core of the emerging evangelical ethos, a superstructure of faith and morality that Dwight helped establish almost in spite of himself—even while he hesitated to abandon the Calvinism of his youth.
The biggest barrier between Dwight and the evangelical majority was the rampant emotion let loose at the typical revival—the barking, twitching, and rolling-about that took place when common folk were possessed by the spirit. Nothing could have been further from Dwight’s chill temperament. In May 1802, when the revivals occurred at Yale, Dwight was proud to report that “nothing enthusiastic, nothing superstitious, nothing gloomy, morose, or violent occurred.” The effects of the revivals proved their worth—converted students worked harder, tended to their duties with greater diligence, and conformed more precisely to the proper protocols of respect for their superiors. Such were the effects of Dwight’s doctrines of grace—an almost self-parodic conformity to conventional expectations.
Like a good postmillennialist, Dwight had faith that the march of moral progress was inevitable. Despite his fear of barbarians on the western prairies and in the southern swamps, Dwight believed they could be civilized over time, as New England preachers spread their values to the entire nation. He wanted to contain multitudes in an expansive orthodoxy. As Dwight’s son Ben later recalled, “it was impossible for him to enter the desk [pulpit] but as the herald of reconciliation.”
Still, the reconciliation had to be predicated on what Dwight believed were certain “common sense” assumptions that all educated believers could share. One of the authors of that consensus was William Paley, required reading in Dwight’s undergraduate courses. Paley envisioned a calm, predictable cosmos, a fit setting for everyday life in a climate of evangelical rationality, and a far cry from the uncertain cosmos of continuous creation—or indeed from any cosmos animated by pulsating, invisible currents of energy.
The other major contributors to the evangelical rationalist consensus were Scottish moral philosophers—Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and James Beattie, among others, along with Smith. But not Smith’s friend David Hume, who served as a straw man for the Scottish philosophers. Their dismissals of him resembled the commonsensical Samuel Johnson’s claim to refute Bishop Berkeley’s solipsism by kicking a stone. Reid attacked Hume’s skepticism by resorting to epistemological and ontological common sense. “If there are certain principles, as I think there are, which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without being able to give a reason for them—these are what we call the principles of common sense; and what is manifestly contrary to them, is what we call absurd,” Reid wrote. Hume’s questioning of causality fell into the latter category; the man, from the Scots’ view, was simply mad. Beattie derided him (unfairly) as “a man who thinks a horse running toward him at full gallop is an idea in his mind.” The alternative to skepticism, for most Scottish moral philosophers, was mainly to assert that what seemed real was real.
This was entirely congenial to Timothy Dwight. He became one of the chief ambassadors of Scottish moral philosophy to the young American republic. For Dwight, Christian faith was married to Christian duty; the presence of virtue was the surest sign of faith. Arid theological dispute was at best a waste of time. The impulse toward logic chopping, the taste for paradox, the quest for a metaphysics of everything were all grievously mistaken. Some mysteries, Dwight wrote, are “so high, and so vast, that we cannot attain to them.”
Dwight envisioned Americans Protestants choosing to participate in a vast moral consensus, creating a righteous national community. This millennial dream had powerful political implications. It reinforced Dwight’s faith that Americans were creating the Kingdom of God on Earth in their own new nation—and perhaps eventually throughout the world. His poem “America” captured this imperial vision:
Hail land of Light and Joy! Thy power shall grow
Far as the sea, which round thy regions flow
Through earth’s wide realm thy glory shall extend
And savage nations at thy sceptre bend.
This exceptionalist interpretation of Providence became a centerpiece of American nationalism and eventually of imperial apologetics as well. So did the corollary and implicitly racist notion that other “savage nations” would eventually bow to America’s moral superiority.
Dwight’s hatred and fear of North American “savages” surfaced in his Travels in New England and New York (4 vols., 1818). One of his major themes was the need to conquer superstition with knowledge—the intellectual progress that, he believed, must accompany moral progress. And in his view the most dangerous superstitions could be found among the Indians. He assumed that their worldview sanctioned cruelty, cannibalism, and nearly every other form of human depravity. Consider how the Indians tortured Robert Rogers (“a corpulent man”) by snacking on his flesh while he was still alive; compare this savagery, Dwight said, with the sentimental ideal of a “state of nature” envisioned by such “modern philosophers” as the English radical William Godwin.
The pathetic state of subjugated Indians, according to Dwight, proved the fatuity of Godwin’s ideal of a sexually promiscuous utopia, where sin does not exist and human depravity is allowed full rein. Indeed, Dwight wrote, “labor is the only source of those [material] enjoyments which make up what Godwin calls happiness, and … without the dominion of law, which alone secures to man the benefits of his efforts, no human being will labor.” So much for Godwin’s idea that the perfectibility of man could be achieved through the absence of restraint; “among civilized people,” disciplined achievement is the only path of ascent, Dwight announced, and “poverty is … another name for disgrace.” We must civilize the Indians, he concluded, by undermining “their love of glory” and substituting “the love of property.”
White people, too, needed civilizing. Moral and intellectual progress did not occur without sustained effort. The key to genuine advance was the primacy of individual character, molded by an ethic of self-command—the ethic recommended by Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Unregulated commerce, such as the sort embodied in itinerant peddlers, could undermine that ethic. “Mere wanderers, accustomed to no order, control, or worship,” peddlers focused entirely on gain. “No course of life tends more rapidly or more effectually to eradicate every moral feeling,” Dwight wrote.
The idle rich were a threat, as well. Dwight charged that “people of fashion” allowed their children to avoid mental discipline and instead gorge themselves on the overripe fruit of fiction: “A soft, luxurious, and sickly character is spread over both the understanding and the affections, which forbids their growth, prevents their vigor, and ruins every hope of future eminence and future worth.” For Dwight, “minds destitute of sound principle and defensive prudence” encouraged “the luscious indulgence of fancy.” As a consequence, “the mind, instead of being educated, is left to the care of accident and fashion.”
In contrast with such layabouts, Dwight exalted Rev. Habijah Weld of Attleboro, Massachusetts, a man who epitomized self-command. As Dwight marveled, “industry, regularity, and exactness in all his concerns” allowed him to support a large family on very little money. Nor were the Welds damaged by the discipline required to sustain themselves: “Every member of his family was courteous and well-bred. Nothing was seen among them but happiness and good will.” This was the New England family in its ideal form, a nursery of cheerful, genteel, and godly children.
The family writ large was the village, and Dwight’s favorite remained Northampton. He admitted that “the increase of wealth, the influx of strangers, and other causes of degeneracy” had corrupted some of its inhabitants, but “a general submission to laws and magistrates, a general regularity of life, a general harmony and good neighborhood, a sober industry and frugality, a general hospitality and charity” still prevailed among most Northamptonians. All of these traits underscored the superiority of New England village life over the society of “scattered plantations” that prevailed elsewhere in the republic, especially the South. (Dwight opposed slavery long before there was any hint of a public movement against it.) Not that New England was entirely civilized. Rhode Islanders, for instance, revealed a fondness for horse racing—“the gross amusement [that] turns men into clowns, and clowns into brutes.” But with the rise of manufacturing, Dwight reassured his readers, even Rhode Island would show an increase in wealth, education, and liberal views, and a contraction of brutish leisure.
Despite his provincial prejudices, Dwight popularized a worldview that acquired national scope and persisted into the mid-century decades—an outlook that elevated soul over body, transcendent Spirit over animal spirits. It was such a pervasive point of view that it did not often have to be formally articulated; rather it seeped into all manner of discourse as a tacit assumption. The Yale Literary Magazine provided an example in 1840, arguing that “good music … seldom produces a high flow of the animal spirits, but rather a sober cheerfulness favorable to serious thoughts and feelings.” Real religious emotions also had to be distinguished from animal spirits; “Christian Joy,” averred the New York Evangelist, was “unspeakable and full of glory … not a sudden glow of feeling, a transient emotion partaking more of passion than of sentiment … It was in fact a state of mind and not a mere exercise of animal spirits.” This was the standard evangelical rationalist dismissal of overly excitable revivalists. From this view, animal spirits were always “mere,” associated with sensual appetites and pleasures; the slope was slippery from animal spirits to animal instincts.
Through the antebellum era, animals continued to do a lot of psychic work as a collective negative identity for humans. Success in this life, as well as salvation in the next, required that mere animality be transcended. So The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review urged in 1854, contrasting a mighty shipping magnate with a lowly sand peddler. The magnate exercises “the all-powerful faculties of an immortal soul,” actuating ambition and imagination, and from an office in New York City sends fifty thousand dollars’ worth of goods around the world; the sand peddler trundles his cart up and down the streets, surviving “by a sort of animal instinct” and remaining little more than “a sort of living automaton.” Such assumptions affirmed the persistence of Cartesian assumptions in popular thought. For many antebellum Americans, the tacit belief survived: animals and automata could at least fitfully be twinned, while humans transcended both.
Dualist hierarchies reinforced respectable tastes; they could be deployed to put disreputable persons in their place, as in the New-York Daily Tribune’s criticism of Goethe’s biographer George Lewes in an 1856 review. Lewes was the life partner of Mary Ann Evans, better known as the novelist George Eliot. The couple could not marry for complicated legal reasons, and despite their loyalty to each other, respectable majority opinion viewed their relationship as scandalous. That disapproval colored the Tribune’s left-handed compliments to Lewes: “He touches no subject, however heavy in itself, which he does not kindle into momentary vivacity by the contagion of his exuberant animal spirits. His spirits are indeed intensely animal, with scarcely any vestige of celestial radiance upon their wings, he himself a capital instance of what a sunny natural disposition will do for a clever man, unaided by any of the profounder instincts.” Lewes’s limitations, according to the reviewer, allow him to indulge in “puerile twaddle” about the privileges of genius—in Goethe’s case, his avid pursuit of random sexual liaisons. No doubt, the Tribune conceded, Goethe was a “stupendous genius” of “astonishing personal magnetism,” but he was also “a very vulgar sensualist.” Since geniuses tend to have overdeveloped imaginative and underdeveloped rational faculties, they are likely to be “diseased men, or to lack harmonious and balanced endowments.” Unfit for ordinary social and personal life, the genius is likely to be an “unmitigated nuisance”—precisely because of his excess animal spirits.
Yet the association of animal spirits with vulgar sensuality was contested, as American thinkers imagined new ways to connect body with soul (or mind), and self with world. Nearly all involved some effort to expand the sense of human vitality to encompass the cosmos itself.
THE STIRRINGS OF ANIMAL MAGNETISM
Emerson and Whitman are the best-known promoters of a quintessentially Romantic (and American) intellectual project—the celebration of autonomous selfhood within a vibrant cosmos. Of the two, Whitman was the more consistent vitalist. He referred to “a visible or invisible intention, certainly under-lying all,” but his descriptions of this “intention” remained vague, as when he paid homage to a “vital, universal, giant force resist-less, sleepless, calm,” without exploring its nature. More enthusiastically than Emerson, Whitman veered toward the newer idioms in his exaltation of the “invisible magnetism, dissolving and embracing all,” and his tribute to the underlying vitality of the universe as “the joyous, electric all.”
Much of Whitman’s poetry depended on notions of a universal magnetic or electric power binding matter to mankind—and mankind to one another. In “I Am He That Aches with Love,” Whitman asks: “Does the earth gravitate? does not all matter, aching, attract all matter? So the body of me to all I meet or know.” This is the vitalist physical self that animates “I Sing the Body Electric” and surfaces in “Song of Myself” as a potent but painfully sensitive source of energy: “Mine is no callous shell, / I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop, / They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me. // I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy, / To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.” For Whitman, the quiverings of human desire resonated with the pulsations at the core of the cosmos. What seemed to conservatives to be vulgar sensuality was from Whitman’s view a profound relationship between the imperial self and the material world.
Not all Romantic writers embraced Whitman’s benign view of the pulsating universe. Poe, among others, explored its darker dimensions. He tracked the new forces unleashed by mesmerism and animal magnetism to explore the murky transition between life and death. Yet he was no idiosyncratic connoisseur of darkness. His preoccupations reflect those of his contemporaries: How did body relate to mind, and both to a cosmos pervaded by invisible currents of energy? How did life differ from death, and what was the dividing line between them? Vitalist thinking—diffuse and unsystematic though it may have been—provided Poe and his contemporaries with a way to perceive traditional dualities as a vibrant unity
Unlike Dwight, these vitalist thinkers paid little attention to the middle range of human institutions that mediated between the individual and the universe—families, communities, polities. Veering toward solipsism, they tended to imagine an autonomous self, adrift in an ocean of cosmic consciousness, even as they hoped to locate sources of union with other selves. This popular philosophy proved appropriate for a new nation with restless citizens, boundless frontiers, and an economic system that resembled “a vast lottery,” in Alexis de Tocqueville’s words.
Popular philosophers of a vitalist bent aimed to capture this sense of free-floating energy and possibility. They imagined animal spirits prowling the wider world in various aliases and disguises: animal magnetism, mesmeric fluid, electrical fluid, electromagnetic fluid, electricity. Attempts to define these concepts recalled older descriptions of animal spirits as well as Defoe’s account of credit; all postulated an invisible, odorless, tasteless source of energy, which was often imagined to take fluid form and create vibrating links between body and soul, individual and cosmos, one individual and another. The last sort of link was a scary one. What worried many nineteenth-century Americans was the possibility that certain (usually male) adepts could manipulate animal magnetism or some other mysterious force to win occult power over their (usually female) subjects. The ghost of Anton Mesmer hovered. Beneath this sexual anxiety lay a fear of the condition that seemed to characterize certain versions of mesmeric trance: a loss of will—the power of choice that kept chance at bay, the cornerstone of the ethic of mastery. Whether the mesmerized person became an automaton or a seer (or both) was an open question.
The vibrant new forces enveloping the universe were not only sexually charged; they also evoked a broader and more diffuse state of arousal—a release of control, a propensity to play. The notion of animal spirits in various forms helped some Americans imagine a more fluid way of being, beyond the static hierarchies produced by dualist thinking. What emerged was an alternative, vitalist ontology based on a recognition that even the most exalted ideas could arise from bodily sources, and that body and mind—or body and soul—were implicated in each other’s deepest secrets.
ANOTHER WAY OF BEING
Vitalism captured imaginations on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, Percy Bysshe Shelley and other Romantic poets mingled with such respected (if controversial) vitalist thinkers as the freethinking surgeon William Lawrence. In pursuit of the meaning of vitality, Lawrence had discarded the notion of a fluid or force supplied to the cosmos by God, replacing it with the spontaneous impulses toward self-organization that he called sensibility and irritability. Such views were subversive not only in their disavowal of divine agency, but also in their rejection of static structures, their fascination with organic growth, and their assertion that life was a process rather than a thing.
Lawrence’s worldview resembled those of many American vitalists who, like their British counterparts, claimed scientific legitimacy for their ideas. Through the early and mid-antebellum decades, medical societies and journals published lectures and articles documenting the search for a vital principle that united all life-forms. Desires for unity proliferated in a new nation where social relations often seemed fragmented, distended, and disorganized. Some authors used traditional language to characterize this unifying force. “The animal spirit is to be regarded as a general term for the vital principle, as it is diffused throughout the body, and as originating from the blood, and as giving, in connexion with organic structure, a general propensity to motion,” wrote Elisha North in The New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery in 1826. “That there is a hidden or invisible principle that moves the vital organs, and gives them sensibility and excitability … cannot be disputed. The old name of animal spirit is … a suitable one for the principle.”
Other more polemically inclined commentators took on dualism directly. The secretary of the Free Press Association, an organization of deists and freethinkers in New York City, told readers of its magazine, The Correspondent, in 1828, that most efforts to explain “the principle of Vitality” were “radically wrong, inasmuch as they assume the existence of a separate and substantive being, which they term the mind, in contradistinction to matter, as if man was composed of two natures, an etherial [sic] or spiritual one, and a material one. This I hold to be an illusion. The physiology of man, and the observation of daily experience, prove him to be a feeling, not a thinking animal.” Though the secretary did not know it, he shared this perception with evangelical Protestants. A new respect for feeling melded believers and freethinkers.
The question of vitality was at bottom a question about ontology—the metaphysics of being, the disputable ground of reality. Such ultimate matters were debated in the language of Protestant Christianity, which was increasingly influenced by revivalistic idioms. They shaped popular notions of selfhood, personal identity, and what it meant to be alive in the world.
From the outset, revivals came in many forms, from the staid affirmations of the existing order in New Haven, Connecticut, to the fits and groans in Cane Ridge, Kentucky. The Second Great Awakening, which began in Kentucky in 1802, culminated in New York City in 1857 amid a major Wall Street panic: more and more businessmen were falling on their knees during each pause in the frantic trading, finding Jesus where one might least expect him. Soon after the panic, the Civil War constituted a bloody coda to this evangelical epoch, an apocalyptic struggle between two sides who prayed “to the same God,” as Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural—two implacable foes fired by the same millennial expectancy and missionary zeal. During the post–Civil War decades, the revivalist sea would recede and become at least fitfully more channeled into the rhythms of an urban, industrial society—while the taming of the “Wild West” fulfilled Dwight’s dream of civilization triumphing over savagery.
But all through the antebellum decades, most revivals had been shaped by the experience of untamed nature. Most scenes of the Second Great Awakening were set in the American forest. Historians led by Grainger have shown how profoundly the natural settings reinforced a strain of evangelical vitalism—a conviction that one could feel God’s presence more intensely in the wilderness, among wild creatures, than anywhere else. And fortunately for revivalists, there was abundant wilderness in early nineteenth-century America.
The faith that nature was animated by God possessed traditional and even scriptural warrant. “In the estimation of the Psalmist,” John Harris wrote in the Millennial Harbinger (1840), “the creation is a vast temple and often did he summon the creatures and join them in a universal song of praise … Thus nature, with all her myriad voices, is ever making affirmation and oath of the divine existence, and filling the universe with the echo of his praise.” Animals could join people in praising the miracle of divine creation.
Besides regenerating traditional forms of worship, vitalist beliefs led toward new ways of healing body and soul. This regenerative vision animated a host of itinerant practitioners who combined mesmerism, clairvoyance, and medicine, led by the charismatic Andrew Jackson Davis, “the Poughkeepsie Seer.” Practical thinkers were drawn to more straightforward forms of healing. Among them was Catharine Beecher—daughter of the influential revivalist Lyman Beecher, sister of the liberal Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher, and author herself of bestselling domestic-advice literature. In 1849, Catharine urged a friend to take the Northampton Water Cure under the direction of the famous hydrotherapist David Ruggles. She embraced what Grainger identifies as a key vitalist assumption—“human bodies were surrounded by fields of invisible fluid or ether, which a skilled practitioner could manipulate and heal through the direction of his own superior magnetic field.” In Beecher’s view, Ruggles was just such a practitioner: he possessed, she said, “a power in the ends of his fingers in detecting the heat of diseased action—which no physician can approach.” Beecher combined belief in two somewhat conflicting entities: a sovereign, personal God and a universe throbbing with impersonal energy. This was not unusual for persons in pursuit of relief from mysterious lassitude.
By the 1830s and ’40s, evangelicals and other Americans were embracing hydrotherapy and electrotherapy, two emerging efforts to achieve personal, physical regeneration through direct contact with vital forces available to be tapped from the natural world—the healing medicinal waters produced by certain mineral springs, the electric current or fluid manipulated by adepts in animal magnetism. For decades, mesmerists claimed the regenerative power of animal magnetism. Only gradually did mesmerism become hypnotism—a completely mental procedure, with no mesmeric fluid, invisible or otherwise, required. Idioms and methods proliferated, creating a confusing landscape of “isms” and other labels—all purporting to characterize an invisible force that melded flesh and spirit, individuals and the cosmos. Animal magnetism was the most popular name for that force, and during the antebellum era it was acquiring both scientific and religious legitimacy.
One typical advocate was Edward Hitchcock, a geologist, Congregationalist minister, and eventually president of Amherst College who extolled the therapeutic benefits of both mesmerism and electricity. In his view, both had the capacity to unleash energies that linked nature and the supernatural—a release of primal force that could only enhance human life. And both carried the imprimatur of science. Recent scientific discoveries, Hitchcock asserted, made it “nearly certain that electricity, magnetism, galvanism, and electro-magnetism, are all but modifications of one great power of nature … the electric fluid”—which in turn possessed a “very intimate relation” with “the mysterious principle of life.” Discovering this vital principle, Hitchcock believed, was a key to experiencing the more abundant life that Jesus had promised through conversion.
The vitalist search for life force inspired a host of vernacular ontologies, speculative efforts to situate human beings in a universe abuzz with mysterious energies. Idioms varied widely, but common themes converged in the concept of animal magnetism. The “animal” in “animal magnetism” had little to do with actual animals, but instead referred, at least metaphorically, to the visceral, physical impact of apparently invisible powers. Animal magnetism was a force like the one Whitman imagined, binding human beings to the world and to one another. Mesmerists often rechristened themselves magnetizers and claimed comparable access to occult powers. For decades they displayed their capacity to summon and direct vital force, in parlors, auditoriums, and theaters throughout the country. Rituals varied but also fell into common patterns.
One of those patterns involved healing. The mesmerist sat facing his (usually female) subject, their hands and knees touching, then started moving his hands an inch or so above the subject’s body, producing glazed eyes, panting breath, tingling flesh, and other signs of (usually sexual) excitement. When the subject slipped into a trance, tranquility supplanted excitement. Assuming the breath carried a magnetic charge, the mesmerist blew on the afflicted part of the body. He might also magnetize a glass of water, passing his fingertips over it and letting their supposed electricity suffuse the liquid, while blowing on it to intensify the electric charge and create the magnetic state. Then he poured the water directly on the diseased area. If the subject was very ill, painful symptoms might assert themselves—feelings of suffocation, nervous spasms—until a crisis was reached and the symptoms subsided. Belief in the power of such healing rituals came easily to Protestant Christian Americans, some of whom attributed Christ’s miracles to the magnetism emanating from his hands.
The other major element of magnetic or mesmeric performance was clairvoyance—the ability to describe hidden objects or distant places one had never visited, to read a stranger’s mind or character, and to diagnose the illnesses of sick people one had never seen. The most common examples of clairvoyance were somnambulant travelers like Loraina Brackett, a blind woman of modest means who spent much of 1837 in Providence, Rhode Island, under the guidance of the physician-mesmerist George Capron, demonstrating her ability to “travel” to New York, Washington, and Saratoga Springs—where she spat out the mineral water, claiming to dislike it. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne dramatized this sort of performance in his Blithedale Romance, a satire of the utopian experiment at Brook Farm. The mesmerist Professor Westervelt has chosen the character Priscilla as his subject, presenting her to the assembled crowd at the nearby lyceum hall as the Veiled Lady. Though she cannot hear the voices of those in the same room, Westervelt says, if he willed it, “she could hear the desert wind sweeping over the sands as far off as Arabia; the icebergs grinding one against the other in the polar seas; the rustle of a leaf in an East-Indian forest; the lowest whispered breath of the bashfullest maiden in the world, uttering the first confession of her love.” These were the sort of performances typically staged to show the power of animal magnetism. They could be as simple as table-turning and hat-moving, but no matter how crude or elaborate, all such demonstrations were meant to show how immaterial forces could be harnessed to affect the physical experiences of healing, seeing, and hearing.
The intellectual rationale for animal magnetism was often vague and elusive. Hawthorne provides his own skeptical perspective by summarizing Westervelt’s prefatory remarks before introducing the Veiled Lady: “He spoke of a new era that was dawning upon the world; an era that would link soul to soul, and the present life to what we call futurity, with a closeness that should finally convert both worlds into one great, mutually conscious brotherhood. He described (in a strange philosophical guise, with terms of art, as if it were a matter of chemical discovery) the agency by which this mighty result was to be effected; nor would it have surprised me, had he pretended to hold up a portion of his universally pervasive fluid, as he affirmed it to be, in a glass phial.” Hawthorne aptly caught the blend of spirituality and science, immateriality and materiality, in the ontology underlying the practices accompanying animal magnetism.
A more extended version of that ontology was spelled out by “A Practical Magnetizer” in The History and Philosophy of Animal Magnetism, with Practical Instructions for the Exercise of This Power (1843). The principles of animal magnetism, in the Practical Magnetizer’s account, recalled the classic physiological accounts of animal spirits from the eighteenth century. Summarizing what was alleged to be professional medical opinion, the Magnetizer wrote that “there is an elastic, invisible ether pervading all nature, which, under different modifications, and in different bodies, assumes the character of the electric, the galvanic, and the magnetic fluid … a modification of this elastic ether is resident in the nerves of the human system, and is the connecting link between mind and matter … this ether, or fluid, is called the Magnetic Medium.” The human system included “a material body … a vital or animating principle … a mental power, and … a soul or spirit … the magnetic fluid is the vital principle, and the cause of all the strengths and animation of the body.”
When inducing a mesmeric trance, the Magnetizer manipulates “the vital or magnetic fluid” to exclude external sensations, freeing “the internal sense (or spirit) … from the ordinary influences of the body, (as it will be [freed] after death)” and allowing it to reveal its “spiritual power”—including the clairvoyant capacity to read people’s minds (or letters in sealed envelopes), and to see events in the geographic or temporal distance. Despite these spiritual (or mental) consequences, the Practical Magnetizer insisted that the magnetic fluid must be physical; if it were not a physical entity, how could it be “poured out and exhausted,” or “lost and regained,” or “diminished and increased”?
For its devotees, animal magnetism preserved the physical dimension that animal spirits had possessed in the eighteenth century. Table-moving and hat-turning became popular and entertaining ways to demonstrate “a very simple application of the nervous fluid, animal magnetism, or whatever be the agency, to brute matter,” as the New-York Daily Tribune reported of “experiments” conducted in 1852. Still, animal magnetism also sustained a spiritual aura, though not always a flattering one. Brigham Young said it was the source of his success in bringing converts to Mormonism, and that was precisely the problem for rationalists and skeptics, who claimed animal magnetism was at the core of religious enthusiasm, ready to be manipulated by Christian as well as Mormon preachers.
Some vitalist thinkers sought to transcend religion altogether. They addressed an audience of Americans weary of denominational conflict, longing for spiritual unity, and responsive to a vision of the universe as abuzz with energy as life in commercial society seemed to be. Andrew Jackson Davis (1826–1910) was one such figure. He disdained parlor tricks and sought larger spiritual truths through mesmerism. And he made a decent living doing it.
THE BEWILDERING MAGNETIC ELYSIUM OF ANDREW JACKSON DAVIS
Davis was born to a poor family in Blooming Grove, New York, near Poughkeepsie. When he was seventeen he heard a local lecture on animal magnetism and soon discovered he had remarkable clairvoyant powers, as well as a capacity for mesmeric healing. Early on he realized that publicizing his powers would be an exit strategy from his hardscrabble life. Like other mesmerists, he became an itinerant entrepreneur, selling his magical powers to credulous audiences on Greene Street in Manhattan and other public venues throughout the Northeast. (Poe was among the audience on Greene Street; he was unimpressed.) Davis may have been as much a humbug as P. T. Barnum or any patent medicine advertiser, but he concealed his duplicity (perhaps even from himself) in clouds of rapturous rhetoric—and some of his visions resonated with contemporary theories of holistic medicine. His confidence games, however fraudulent or sincere, played a major part in providing many Americans with an alternative sense of spirituality, not divorced from the material world but emanating from it—and a way to look beyond Christianity toward what they believed was a more scientific way of understanding the universe.
Davis produced a memoir, The Magic Staff, in 1857, when he was still a young man but after he had already established his reputation as the Poughkeepsie Seer. The Magic Staff seemed intended to vindicate Davis from charges of humbuggery, not to mention bigamy, adultery, and superstition. It presented his life as a poor boy’s stereotypical triumph over adversity, but with supernatural assistance rather than hard work as the key to his success.
Davis’s life began, he said, in “a certain isolated, unpainted, unfinished dwelling” surrounded by fields and woods full of copperheads. His father was a weaver turned cobbler turned journeyman shoemaker, with a weakness for strong drink; his mother, “upon whose form the weary weight of 33 years had left its mark,” was “simple and childlike,” Davis remembered. “The heavy chains of poverty, which her husband could and did wear with only ordinary fretting,” combined with his intemperance “to cut deep channels into the very substance of her soul.”
Young Jackson grew up in a world of mysterious signs and portents. Once when he and his siblings were playing on the edge of the woods, his brother Sylvanus saw a light in the forest that the others did not, and raced home to tell their mother. She received the news with “inward grief,” and when Jackson asked what was the matter, she said: “Sylvanus will soon leave us.” He died a few days later. Even after the boy’s death his skeptical father still said “Poh!” to his wife’s belief in her own clairvoyance.
As soon as the boy Jackson discovered there was such a thing as death, he began to fear it, trembling at the possibility that he might not reawaken when he went to sleep. His mother reassured him, but his father dismissed his anxiety as “nothin’ but worms ailin’ him.” This was a pivotal moment for the boy. “Now, though a very little child, I felt that I knew better, and so, for the first time, I found my mind rejecting my own father’s judgment,” Davis remembered. “Here was individual sovereignty in a trundle-bed.” The growth of his own personal autonomy—eventually in concert with invisible supernatural forces—was a major theme in Davis’s memoir. Still, the father won his son’s respect from time to time—as when he faced down the White Spook, a local apparition that turned out to be a scarecrow.
Demystification of ghosts and backwoods magic was a leitmotif in Davis’s account of his self-development. His fitful but growing respect for his father paralleled the moderation of his own “organ of marvellousness”—which phrenologists later confirmed to be “small and secondary.” In The Magic Staff, he was determined to separate his own experience of the spirit world from any taint of superstition or hocus-pocus. Even as a small child, he boasted, he discovered that his mother and big sister, not Santa Claus, filled his Christmas stocking with doughnuts; this, he wrote, produced a lifelong “vigilant incredulity regarding the existence of invisible personages.” Of course, the spiritual authorities he would encounter in his later trance states were “invisible personages” to anyone but himself, but they carried, he would claim, the authority of mesmeric science.
Even as he sought to distance himself from rural folk superstitions, Davis began to hear messages with no recognizable source. At times these utterances were sweepingly, if obscurely, theological. When he was singing a hymn with the line “In their graves laid low,” he heard a voice in his head saying “No!” Having tried the Episcopal church (too much catechism), and the Presbyterian (too many theological contradictions), he soon found himself equally unable to respond to a Methodist revival. “What alarmed me was, the more I desired the further I receded from conversion.” The Methodist pastor feared for Jackson’s soul, envisioning his eternal damnation in the biblical language of weeping and gnashing of teeth. At that phrase, Davis said, “A soft breathing passed over my face, and I heard in a voice like the gently whispering summer breeze—‘Be—calm!—The—pastor—is—wrong; you—shall—see!’” The voice suggested the astonishing possibility that “there existed some people who did not believe in a God of implacable wrath!” Davis’s voices were leading him from persistent orthodox habits of mind, which had kept the hell fires burning, to a vision of universal salvation in a spirit world to come. What brought this world and the next together, he would eventually assert, was the persistence of “vitalic force”—an invisible, immaterial source of eternal life.
Seeking to fling wide the doors of perception, Davis opened himself to offbeat mental experiences, including the popular craze of mesmerism. When an itinerant phrenologist, Professor J. Stanley Grimes, arrived in town to perform experiments in mesmerism, Davis submitted to his alleged powers and found himself unmoved by such “magnetic buffoonery.” (This, ironically, was what Grimes had wanted, as his aim was to debunk mesmerism.) But a few days later, Davis met a local tailor named William Levingston who offered to show Davis what mesmerism could really do. Davis agreed.
The result, for Davis, was the beginning of a career full of astonishing revelations, achieved through clairvoyant trances—induced at first by “operators” like Levingston, later by Davis on his own. Davis’s reputation for clairvoyance rested in part on evidence produced by standard mesmeric performances—reading books inside a chest of drawers across the room, or describing houses in distant cities he had never visited—feats that could apparently be confirmed by third parties. But at many crucial moments in his life, Davis also depended on clairvoyant visions that no one else could have seen—real to him, maybe, but not true in any conventionally verifiable sense. Still, they resonated with emerging vitalist notions of the universe and won Davis a wide following. He became a regional celebrity, making a career out of manipulating the credulity of his audience but also, perhaps, cultivating credulity in himself. Credulity, in effect, opened the door to what he was convinced was a revolutionary way of seeing, one that envisioned a spirit land over the horizon and ultimately beyond death itself.
His career began in Levingston’s parlor, where Davis submitted to the mesmerist’s powers amid a group of curious townspeople: “the mystic magnetic state was induced in less than thirty minutes.” As in Calvinism, the passive voice was significant: mesmerized human beings were dependent on a mysterious force more powerful than themselves. Contact with that force, Davis claimed, empowered him with supernatural insight. “I not only beheld the exteriors of the individuals in that room—clothed with light as it were—but I also as easily perceived their interiors, and then, too, the hidden sources of their luminous magnetical emanations,” Davis recalled. This was the beginning of Davis’s journey toward a vision of a pulsating universe.
Davis’s clairvoyance involved the ability to see the vital force that energized every facet of the universe, down to and including the bodies of the people in the room with him. “Thus I saw not only the real physical structures themselves, but also their indwelling structures and vitalic elements,” Davis remembered. “I knew the individuals had garments upon them, because I could see an element of vitality, more or less distinct, in every fiber of clothing upon their persons!” His vision ranged far beyond Poughkeepsie. “I saw the many and various forms of the forests, fields, and hills, all filled with life and vitality of different hues and degrees of refinement.” At such moments, he inhabited an “I” unbound by space and time, like Whitman’s in “Song of Myself”: “My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps, I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents, I am afoot with my vision.” Both men courted feelings of boundlessness.
For Davis, the ocean was an especially rich source of revelation: “The various salts in the sea sparkled like living gems; sea plants extended their broad arms, filled with hydrogenous life, and embraced the joy of existence; the deep valleys and dim-lit ravines, through which old ocean unceasingly flows, were peopled with countless minute animals—all permeated and pulsating with the spirits of Nature … Oh, the ocean is a magnificent cabinet of beauty and wealth immense, and, by virtue of more recent examinations I am impressed to say that man shall yet possess it!”
Davis’s last exclamation—the notion that man would one day “possess” the ocean—marked a further turn in Americans’ departure from pagans’ and indigenous peoples’ notions of an animated universe. Medieval and early modern Catholics as well as later Protestant revivalists had envisioned a universe animated by God, whose powers could be summoned by appropriate prayers or rituals. While Davis claimed clairvoyance reinforced his belief in God, saying it taught him “to revere, obey, and depend upon that Power which directs and controls the universe,” he was at heart a humanist. He capped off his vision of universal animacy by placing humans atop it all:
And—mark this fact!—in each mineral, vegetable, and animal I saw something of MAN! In truth, the whole system of creation seemed to me like fragments of future human beings! In the beaver I saw, in embryo, one faculty of the human mind; in the fox, another; in the wolf, another; in the horse, another; in the lion, another; yea, verily, throughout the vast concentric circles of mineral, vegetable, and animal life I could discern certain relationships to, and embryological indications of, Man!… all Nature was radiant with countless lights, with atmospheres, with colors, with breathings, and with emanations—all throbbing and pulsating with an indestructible life-essence—which seemed just ready to graduate and leap up into the human constitution! Everything apparently emulated to be Man!
This vision, strained and even a little pathetic in its stridency, pointed toward a progressive humanist form of vitalism that began to flourish decades later—though without the trailing clouds of glory Davis seemed unable to resist. Davis’s culminating crescendo reveals how, during the mid-nineteenth century, even vitalist believers in universal animacy were reluctant to relax their commitment to human supremacy. While indigenous peoples imagined a universe animated by mana, where human and nonhuman animals coexisted, Davis channeled his vitalist impulses toward a vision of human uniqueness, superiority, and perfectibility.
Still, there was something enchanted about the visions Davis claimed he saw while mesmerized. To move from the influence of his employer, the skeptical storekeeper Ira Armstrong, to that of the mesmerist Levingston was to move from the cut-and-dried realm of utilitarian business to the wondrous world of magnetism. It was hardly surprising, as Davis wrote, that “the unknown attraction [of mesmerism] predominated over my business obligation; and as the fish leaps joyously into its native element, so plunged I with delight into the bewildering magnetic Elysium!” Davis’s choice of “bewildering” was significant. The word’s original connotations were “being led into the wild.” Harnessing animal magnetism could allow a glimpse of spiritual or mental wildness.
Davis began to have visions—as well as continued to hear voices—on his own. In one especially compelling encounter Davis met “a man of ordinary stature but of a spiritual appearance” who said:
It was demonstrated to me that all the diversified external forces in this, as in other universes, are unfolded by virtue of an elemental or spiritual principle, contained in each, which is their life, or Soul; and this essence, by men, is called God … Accordingly I founded a system upon these principles and considerations, which may be called “a medical system of the trinity.” In this system I maintain that every particle in the human body possesses a close affinity to particular particles below in the subordinate kingdoms—and that these latter particles, if properly associated and applied, would cure any affected portion of the human frame.
In Davis’s account, he asks to become acquainted with the stranger and his system. The stranger says of course, that’s why we’ve met. He carries a cane that turns into “a staff, far exceeding in beauty any I had ever beheld.” The stranger says, “Take this”—it signifies “that the spirit is the creating, developing, perfecting, expanding, beautifying, organizing, healing, eternal essence in the possession of every being.” Davis gratefully accepts it, but when he sets the staff aside to climb over a fence, he gets his clothing caught in a rail, gets embarrassed and angry, scales the fence, and finally asks the stranger to return the staff. Not until you earn it, says he: “in a due season thou shalt return, and then this staff shall be thine; but thou must first learn not to be under any circumstances depressed, nor by any influences elated, for these are the extremes of an unguarded impulse, in minds not strong with pure wisdom.” There is something slightly absurd about a massive phallic Magic Staff serving as an emblem of self-command; still, for the rest of his memoir, Davis summons the staff mentally whenever he is tempted to violate his ethic of compulsory moderation. His refusal of depression and elation resembled the resolution of evangelical rationalists, who sought a stable self amid the confusions and temptations of commercial life.
Yet Davis was no devotee of commonsense empiricism. Early on he began to claim that his powers could be put in the service of medical healing through the restoring of the steady flow of vital force. “I soon ascertained Disease to be a want of equilibrium in the circulation of the vitalic principle,” he wrote, articulating an idea that resembles the non-Western vital principle of qi. Positive results quickly followed, according to his account. Davis cured a countryman’s deafness, he claimed, by placing the hot humid skin of a fresh-killed rat over each ear every night; he cooled a monstrous “felon” (inflammation) on a man’s hand by telling him to put a frog’s skin on it; and he discovered in a clairvoyant trance that he could cure another case of deafness by applying the oil of thirty-two weasels to the patient’s ears. But not enough weasels could be found—and even the credulous country folk began whispering that Davis and his “operator” Levingston might be humbugs.
As his practice of medical healing came under a cloud, Davis succumbed to feelings of depression, fears that he had somehow lost something important, a cane maybe. At that moment he had another vision, as if spelled out on a signboard: “Here is thy magic staff—UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES KEEP AN EVEN MIND.” The ethic of self-command stabilized the selfhood of a young man whose confidence games were concealed—probably even from himself—by a thick cloud of spirituality, roiling with vital forces.
Even as Davis hustled all over the Northeast, marketing his self-proclaimed mental powers, he conceived “an unconquerable repugnance to all Yankee speculation and money-getting operations generally,” while his Magic Staff endowed him with a “flippant levity” that never touched “that mysterious sub-current of noiseless energy, which ever flowed through my spiritual constitution.” This was the sort of “noiseless energy” that kept the universe pulsating; it maintained the resonance between self and world, animal spirits and animal magnetism. And always Davis preserved an “even mind” under the most challenging circumstances—or so The Magic Staff purported to show. Accosted by a hostile “ministerial-looking stranger,” he was on the verge of replying with heat when he remembered that “fortunately the Magic Staff was in my possession”—and he remained calm, relying on the staff under similar circumstances henceforth.
As his fame grew Davis became a familiar figure out and about in Poughkeepsie, accompanied by his small dog Dickie, a mutt with spirit. Indeed, Davis observed, “that morceau of the Spirit of Nature which animated his little body, did certainly perceive the presence of invisible beings—and that, too, sometimes in advance of my own far more exalted impressibility!” On one occasion Dickie directed him to the very spot where his invisible benefactor, the one who gave him the Magic Staff, sought to tell him to “Seek—the—mountain!—At four o’clock—delay not!”
Eventually Davis broke Levingston’s “magical spell” and, as he remembered, “the luxurious freedom of individual ownership rushed over me like a flood of heavenly joy.” Levingston had been a necessary mentor but had ultimately become an obstacle to Davis’s self-development. “Individual ownership”—by which he meant self-ownership—was Davis’s lodestar. For a while the young clairvoyant set up shop on Greene Street in downtown Manhattan with another operator and a scribe to record his visions—these would eventually become the basis of his magnum opus, a six-volume compendium of his lectures he called The Great Harmonia: A Revelation of the Seven Mental States, and of the Laws and Effects of Man’s Relation to the Spiritual Universe (1850–1861).
He began treating “physical indispositions” at a distance, healing by mail. Many of his correspondents were women, including one he identified as Katie D——, an affluent New Orleans woman who became his wife after successfully divorcing her bigamous husband. “The God of eternal destinies, the great Positive Mind, keeps your feet in the right path. Believe in him!” he wrote to her, foreshadowing a rhetoric that would become widespread among positive thinkers a half century later. Katie, whom a voice later told Davis to rename “Silona,” became a familiar figure at Davis’s performances—a lady of fashion amid the “unpolished mechanics and ungloved merchants” in his audience.
Critics continued to cry humbug. When he left Hartford after a stay of several months, the Courant published what Davis himself called a “witty burlesque” of his farewell address to his followers, satirizing him as a patent medicine hustler leaving town to devote himself to “selling his pills in other and less over-stocked markets.” Davis still insisted on striking a stance above mere moneymaking. When Wall Street traders asked: Do you have “the power to tell, for instance, the state of the flour market at any given time, if you desire to do so?” He said yes he could, but he would not because “all speculation is wrong … and the money, thus obtained, is seldom of any value to the world.” Instead of consorting with traders he dedicated himself to the general cause of reform—for freer divorce laws, for temperance and peace, against slavery, yet committed to the belief that “the things which are seen are temporal; but things which are not seen are eternal.” This became the motto of Brother Brittan, editor of the Univercoelum, the reform paper Davis founded. Davis’s belief in the reality of the unseen accelerated his steady drift toward his own idiosyncratic version of Spiritualism, one that transcended the effort to conjure communications from the beyond and blended with a broader philosophical outlook.
By this time, the 1850s, Davis was nearly thirty and ready for another career move. He announced that he now had a direct personal line to clairvoyance—no operator needed! “Oh, I am wholly awake! The sable curtain of mystery—so long hanging between my inner and outer world—is rent in twin and forever banished!” The most complete form of personal autonomy, for Davis, involved unassisted access to the unseen.
The Great Harmonia became the Summa of his Harmonial Philosophy, which he tried to integrate with Spiritualism—ultimately without success. From the outset of The Great Harmonia, Davis rejected dualism. “Matter and Mind have heretofore been supposed to constitute two distinct and independent substances … the latter having no material origin,” he wrote. “But it is coming to be seen that Truth is a unit, that Nature is everywhere consistent with herself, and that mind is the flower of matter, as man is the flower of creation … That which is grain to-day, may tomorrow form a portion of nerve and muscle, and the third day, it may become an element of life; on the fourth, a sparkling thought.”
What held everything in the cosmos together was “the fundamental principle of all Life, which is Attraction.” Decades later, at the dawn of the twentieth century, positive thinkers would redefine the Law of Attraction as a force that individuals could control to attract wealth to themselves, merely by visualizing it. But for Davis the law was a gravitational affinity that resembled animal magnetism—that made the cosmos and everything in it a universe rather than a multiverse. It also governed “the relations and dependencies between the Body and the Soul.” Spirit and Flesh melded amid universal animacy. “Every fiber of the wild flower, or atom of the mountain violet, was radiant with its own peculiar life,” Davis said, recalling his early clairvoyant trances.
By the 1870s, Davis was elevating his Harmonial Philosophy over kitchen-table Spiritualism, comparing most mediums’ claims to tales of “broom-riding witches; to the shallow doctrines of personal devils and sorcery; and to the fiction age of astrology and the small gods of superstition.” As always he insisted he was among the advance guard of scientific progress. Eventually he was forced to admit that the Spiritualist movement was incompatible with the Harmonial Philosophy. He continued to practice what was still called “magnetic healing,” even as the orthodox medical profession began to organize more effectively against it. He diagnosed patients by placing his fingertips on the palms of their hands and “sensing” their physical condition. In 1880, when the New York State Assembly passed legislation barring magnetic healers from practicing medicine, Davis encouraged them to follow his example and enroll in the United States College of Medicine in New York City, which encouraged eclectic practices and would allow magnetic healers to acquire medical legitimacy. Under pressure from the medical profession, the state assembly revoked the school’s charter in 1883, but still confirmed the degrees it granted that year, including Davis’s.
Still a controversial figure in New York spiritualist circles, Davis soon decamped to Boston, where he gradually regained some status as an elder statesman from the spirit world and continued to practice clairvoyant medicine until his death in 1910. Though Davis never lost his faith in the connections between mind and body, his career as an influential exponent of vitalism was over with the coming of the Civil War. Later generations would speak in more secular accents, abandoning all claims to see a land beyond death.
The popularity of Davis’s vitalist visions reveals their resonance with main currents in American vernacular thought. Since the early decades of the nineteenth century, most commentators had begun gradually to acknowledge that animal spirits—like animal instincts—were a necessary part of what it meant to be human. Just as God’s “Almighty Power” mixes sunshine and shadow in the natural world, many writers observed, so also He allows glumness and glee to alternate in our emotional lives. And neither could survive without the other: “The animal spirits cannot long sustain a tempest of happiness; our most rapturous sensations must weary with enjoyment, and sink, like the overloaded ocean, to languor and to peace. The asperity of sorrow must at last be worn down by time and reflection,” as the Connecticut Spectator put it in 1814. This notion enlarged the range of acceptable emotions beyond the narrow boundaries set by the utilitarian self, acknowledging oscillations of rapture and languor but assuming they would be tempered by time. As vitalist impulses proliferated in popular philosophy, animal spirits began to seem a crucial component of health and success.
THE CONFLATION OF ENERGY AND CHARACTER
Though animal spirits had ultimately to be tamed or transcended, one could hardly imagine a successful enterprise without them. This included the Christian ministry, one observer noted in 1834, which required the would-be minister to overcome timidity and cultivate “holy boldness.” Boldness was widely assumed to be a masculine trait, and invocations of the need for animal spirits (whether or not that exact phrase was used) often seemed primarily directed at a male audience.
This orientation shaped discussions of the role played by animal spirits in maintaining healthy psychic life, as an essential counterpoint to the paralyzing inner turmoil variously known as “the Blue Devils,” “the Horrors,” and “the Hypo”—a mental state that, judging by contemporaneous descriptions, sounds like what later generations would call manic depressive tendencies or bipolar disorder. This condition was apparently widespread in antebellum America, at least according to some observers. The Rutland (Vt.) Herald urged sympathy for its victims, whose ailments were medical, not moral: “When from some inexplicable cause, a mountain’s weight is pressing down the animal energies and almost stagnating the blood in their channels [free-flowing circulation remained central to vitalist notions of health], when imagination is quickened into the wildest and most painful activity and involuntarily conjures up the belief that he is being pursued by a legion of little individual Beelzebubs, driving one half of him mad with distraction, chilling the other half into stupid indifference and despondency,” the Herald opined that the sufferer doesn’t need homilies, sarcasm, or ridicule. His pain was “a state of the ‘inner man’ (either mentally, physically, or both united) over which he has no control,” and it could no more be joked or argued away than a toothache.
Yet the man oscillating between mania and depression could be well-suited to life amid the restless uncertainties of a commercial society. As the Herald observed, he might be a “man of energy and ambition,” embarrassed by the “unavoidable casualties” of commercial life, brought low through no fault of his own. When other tradesmen fail in their financial obligations to him, he is haunted by his sense of loss and harassed by his knowledge of wrongs done to him. Yet “men of this stamp (who are invariably of an impetuous, sanguine temperament) are of the greatest value to society and the world. They are the projectors and accomplishers of the most mighty undertakings—pioneers in every difficult enterprise … and in them is displayed that indomitable energy of character so universally admired.”
The conflation of energy and character was a telling rhetorical move; it implicitly acknowledged the values of an activist, achieving culture where contentment was an excuse for stasis and risk-taking was a necessary condition for success. Increasingly during the mid-nineteenth century, one finds similar arguments made for “the gambling spirit” as a force for great accomplishments—though seldom arguments for gambling itself. Moralists gradually reshaped ideal conceptions of male character: by incorporating concepts like vitality and force, they recognized the increasing necessity of risk-taking in a restless, unregulated market society.
Yet the survival of animal spirits in antebellum thought revealed more than merely masculine concerns; the concept crossed gender lines, reflecting broadly accepted ideas about personal well-being. Through the 1860s, moralists discussed the importance of animal spirits as a source of discipline, determination, and even domestic harmony. As The New York Times reported, animal spirits buoyed up Mrs. Myra Gaines during thirty years of trying to get the inheritance she deserved from the wealthy libertine who had fathered her; they combined with “high principle and extraordinary force of will” to sustain the discipline William Hickling Prescott needed to finish his History of Ferdinand and Isabella (1837); their absence at home kept “the clubbable man” from his familial duties, as he “lets off at the club all the effervescence of his animal spirits, and keeps for his wife and family the stale, flat, and unprofitable remnant”—hardly a promising prescription for domestic harmony. Clearly these energizing forces provoked mixed feelings, ranging from admiration to anxiety. In the unfolding discussion of them, some elusive but essential principle of vitality was at stake. The pursuit of this principle began animating ministers, mothers, and practical men of affairs. Vitality, it appeared, was necessary for the well-being of both body and soul.
Nothing better shows the pervasiveness of this idea than patent medicine advertising. Throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the revival of animal spirits remained a key component in the regeneration promised by all manner of magic elixirs. In 1839, “Moffat’s Life Medicines” offered readers of the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press nothing less than new life: “When the spark of life begins to grow dim, the circulation languid, and the faculties paralyzed, these medicines are found to give a tone to the nerves, exhilarate the animal spirits, invigorate the body, and reanimate the man.” Sometimes the vendor claimed to harness “the strengthening, life-giving, vitalizing influence of Galvanism,” as Dr. Christie’s Galvanic Belt, Bracelets, Necklace, and Magnetic Fluid did in 1851. But more often the remedy was ingested. Holloway’s Pills combatted dyspepsia, as the company announced in the Stroudsburg (Pa.) Jeffersonian in 1858; and dyspepsia was the key to most other bodily maladies: “The stomach being disordered, the whole vital machinery to which it furnishes sustenance and strength will be weakened, and the animal spirits, sympathizing with the bodily debility, will become greatly depressed.” Well into the post–Civil War era, advertisers for patent medicines from Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters to Tarrant’s Seltzer Aperient offered renovation, refreshment, and purification for torpid, run-down systems. And for most, the return of animal spirits was an aim of their therapy and a sign of its success.
Animal spirits, despite their disappearance from physiology texts, remained a key component in the vernacular discourse of health: nurturing them was a way of keeping body and soul in trim. Good humor arose from the gut, as the Christian Reflector implied in reflecting on the merits of “Ripe Bread,” which has one fifth more nutriment than newly cooked “unripe bread” and “imparts a much greater degree of cheerfulness. He that eats old ripe bread will have much greater flow of animal spirits than he would were he to eat unripe bread.” Influences flowed from mind to body as well as vice versa. “The mind is like the appetite—when healthy, well-toned, receiving pleasure from the commonest food; but becoming diseased, when pampered and neglected,” announced the Somerset (Pa.) Herald in 1847. “Give it time to turn in upon itself, satisfy its restless search for knowledge, and it will give birth to health, to animal spirits, to everything which invigorates the body while it’s advancing by every step the capacities of the soul.” Through the 1860s, self-help writers argued that intellectual labors provided excitement and ambition “of a nature calculated to cheer the mind, and to give the animal spirits a salutary impulse” as the critic Lindley Murray wrote in the Clarksville (Tenn.) Chronicle. No less a sage than Ralph Waldo Emerson saw animal spirits as the key to persuasive power: “A cold, sluggish blood thinks it has not facts enough to the purpose, and must decline its turn in the conversation,” Emerson wrote. “But they who speak have no more,—have less. ’T is not new facts that avail, but the heat to dissolve everybody’s facts. Heat puts you in right relation with magazines of facts. The capital defect of cold, arid natures is the want of animal spirits. They seem a power incredible, as if God should raise the dead.” Well into the nineteenth century, animal spirits preserved—at least in some minds—a miraculous aura.
Emerson’s vision of animal spirits as “a power incredible” reflected their long association with the aesthetic dimension of poesis, or creative making, as well as with the realm of the sacred—where through ritual play, as Johan Huizinga writes, “something invisible and inactual takes beautiful, actual, holy form.” Nineteenth-century liberal Protestants may have raised an eyebrow at ritual play in religion but not in theater, dance, or humor—arenas where performers were often praised for the animal spirits they brought to their role. Audiences and critics recognized that animal spirits lay at the source of aesthetic playfulness; and play was about, among other things, the transcendence of everyday life—which in a utilitarian society was increasingly hemmed in by vigilant self-scrutiny, the prerequisite for self-command.
Perhaps the most direct way to break through the reign of utility was through laughter. “I am too old for laughter, they tell me,” the critic Horace Smith wrote in Evergreen magazine in 1840, “but it is by laughing that I have lived to grow old.” In Smith’s formulation, “animal laughter” was produced by a “healthy and hearty organization [of body and mind]” from which it flowed in copious streams. Less healthy organisms laughed less. Mental and physical health arose in tandem from a certain kind of laughter, not wit or satire but the spontaneous, boisterous hilarity produced by “high animal spirits.”
But the links between animal spirits and amoral animality—sheer, unbridled energy—meant that the meanings of animal spirits would remain enveloped in moral ambiguity. Animal spirits were a force for health and well-being, for entertainment, pleasure, and beauty—but they were sometimes just a force, one that needed to be tamed. This view reflected growing concerns with hooliganism and mob violence in cities. The mushrooming of urban populations, the proliferation of (actual or imagined) hard-drinking immigrants in street-corner saloons, the rise of mass politics, the lurches and shudders of a business cycle increasingly based on “trading in the air”—all these developments intensified the ambiguous potential of animal spirits, as both threat and promise. Animal spirits fostered essential vitality but also hovered behind the visions that increasingly haunted the respectable American’s imagination—in politics, a mobocracy manipulated by demagogic animal magnetizers; in commerce, a swarm of traders enveloped in oscillations of elation and panic. A universe pulsating with invisible forces manifested itself in the volatility of public life. Wherever one looked, the potential for collective madness loomed. And whatever one’s theory of the universe, the immediate source of public unrest was the private anxiety of individuals, rooted in the everyday uncertainties of a paper-money economy.
4Feverish Finance, Revival Religion, and War
SURVEYING THE NEWSPAPERS of the antebellum decades, one finds scattered but growing complaints about the excessive seriousness of the young republic, the inability of Americans to let go, to have fun. A deficiency of animal spirits led to the absence of play. Men especially seemed to channel all their available energies into moneymaking, though sometimes with a dash of moral ambivalence. The flood of emotional force drained away into trade was intensified by the ubiquity, uncertainty, and invisibility of forces promoting rise or ruin. As the Wall Street wag Frederick Jackson put it, panics called to mind the old riddle about smoke—“a houseful, a hole full, and you cannot gather a bowlful.” For good or ill, there was no such thing as an economics profession, and no understanding or expectations of a business cycle. Yet by the 1830s, it was beginning to be clear that lurches from boom to bust were accompanied by comparable swerves in the public mood from overweening confidence to crippling anxiety. A few observers suspected that the economic developments were preceded, even triggered, by the emotional developments.
Such suspicions were reinforced by emerging popular wisdom regarding the role of confidence in economic affairs. It was beginning to be recognized as a crucial invisible force animating the new world of buying and selling—where appearances, apparently, were everything. Self-confidence reinforced one’s capacity to inspire confidence in others, and this was increasingly a key to success in commercial life. In 1843, the New York New Mirror mused on the importance of timely eating during the day to maintain animal spirits, which helped M. Toutavous, a French importer, to “keep his system alert and lively.” He “impresses everyone whom he sees with the idea that he is born to good fortune and has the look of it, and is a good fellow with no distrust of his credit or of himself.” The apparently hard realities of competitive commerce were dependent on the vagaries of an evanescent collective mood, which in turn shaped the availability, indeed the very possibility, of that vital force called credit.
During the early 1800s, like more developed capitalist societies on both sides of the Atlantic, the United States became a society where business transactions required engagement with invisible, immaterial entities. The first step down this road was the growing tendency to use paper banknotes rather than metal coins. The banknotes were issued by the Bank of the United States as well as increasingly by state and local banks (especially after Andrew Jackson vetoed the renewal of the bank’s charter in 1832); they were easily altered or counterfeited promissory notes that the holder might or might not be able to redeem in hard currency; and their value fluctuated wildly depending on how much confidence the issuing bank could inspire by reputation and actual practice. Banknotes epitomized the immateriality and uncertainty at the heart of the emerging market society.
In 1815, the Intellectual Regale, or Ladies’ TEA Tray caught the new mutability of money in a first-person jeu d’esprit called “Adventures of a Bank Note” named Change Buck. His chief quality, Change said, was an inclination toward “blowing—this swelling of the cheeks and distortion of the countenance is undoubtedly very graceful, there is sublimity in it, suitable to the union of riches and ignorance, and it is as necessary to an overgrown trader, or stock jobber, as a chaise and country-house are to him who has been in business six months.” Paper money was part of the package of manipulated surfaces proving essential to commercial success. Yet the package kept changing. The volatility of paper-credit instruments meant they could ride, or be blown about by, the winds of opinion. No wonder old-school republicans like John Adams and James Madison, who idealized a deferential society characterized by virtuous community and implicit hierarchy, fretted about paper money “destroying that confidence between man and man, by which resources one may be commanded by another,” as Madison told the Virginia Assembly early in his career. Paper money portended a world in constant flux, where no one knew where he stood, socially or economically. It was also a world where even the most substantial commodities—a carload of cotton, say—could gain or lose value in accordance with mysterious changes in public emotional temperature.
When stock prices soared to dizzying heights and then collapsed as suddenly, the population’s sense of bafflement amid madness was nearly universal. Americans had next to no experience with market volatility, and economic thought was largely the province of clerical economists—the Baptist president of Brown, Francis Wayland; the Unitarian Rev. Orville Dewey, and others. All of these men were heirs of Dwight, defenders of evangelical rationality. Their orderly worldview was less compatible with life under finance capitalism than was the vitalist vision of a pulsating universe.
Amid the feverish fluctuations of the market, the clerical economists produced warmed-over versions of Adam Smith, with the same emphasis on steady work leading to gradual betterment and the same inattention to finance capital. To the extent they acknowledged the possibility of investing in the stock market, they implicitly advised buying and holding sound assets and waiting for dividend checks. But mostly they papered over the vagaries of the market with the rhetoric of Protestant morality. And when panic struck, they contented themselves with conventional denunciations of speculators.
The brittleness of clerical economic thought portended moral and intellectual fault lines in the evangelical rationalist consensus. The dualist hierarchy of spirit over flesh sanctioned an ethic of mastery that reached beyond the self to the wider world. But more than a few men and women found the ethic of mastery oppressive and sought release from it—in drugs, alcohol, and, increasingly, invalidism. What the neurologist George Miller Beard would call “neurasthenia” in American Nervousness (1881) was already making inroads among educated and affluent Protestants. Neurasthenics suffered from many ailments, but their common theme was a mysterious passivity, a loss of will. One way out was to seek liberating communion with the currents of vitality that animal magnetizers, mesmerists, electrotherapists, and other healers seemed to be discovering everywhere in the cosmos. All these forces were invisible, odorless, tasteless, and powerful. And they had these characteristics in common with credit, the energy that kept capital flowing, or failed to, that transformed the investor’s feelings into instruments of prosperity or panic. Traders and investors, like invalids in search of regeneration, inhabited a pulsating universe—where they could experience jolts of enlivening or exhausting force.
COTTON FEVER
Through the 1810s, land speculation in the West, intensified in the Southwest by a cotton boom, kept American economic expansion at white heat. Dreams of sudden wealth fired the imaginations of planters in the old tobacco states—Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina—where land was leached out and crops weren’t bringing what they once had. Even though U.S. participation in the international slave trade had ended in 1808, within U.S. borders the trade began to intensify, as tobacco planters sold off slaves at top dollar to cotton planters in the Mississippi Valley. A commodity futures market did not officially appear until mid-century, but from the outset the cotton prices rose and fell in expectation of future gain.
For eastern planters, selling slaves, no matter how lucratively, could not scratch the speculative itch the way heading west to the Cotton Kingdom could. In eastern North Carolina in 1817, the planter James Graham wrote to his friend Thomas Ruffin: “The Alabama Feaver rages here with great violence and carries off vast numbers of our Citizens.” At about the same time, James Henry Hammond of South Carolina confessed, “I have been trying to get over my desire for a western plantation, but every time I see a man who has been there it puts me in a fever … I must go West and plant.”
The language of “fever” revealed the presence of what Keynes would later call animal spirits—not merely a willingness but an eagerness to plunge into an unpredictable investment, leveraging the move by taking on debt. Fever was a bodily, physiological condition, yet it was also emotional, immaterial. Animal spirits revealed the same ambiguous blend of mind and matter. The collapse of cotton prices in 1819 forced heavily indebted planters into desperate straits—selling off land and slaves, facing foreclosure. Yet what became known as the Panic of 1819 was not a single event or even a series of events, and it was not just about cotton; it developed over several years and involved widespread but interrelated events—an industrial downturn spreading from northeast to northwest in 1815–1817; a banking crisis in 1818, when local and state banks discovered they had inadequate reserves to cover depositors’ demands; and finally the cotton bust of 1819.
Most people, even the major players, had no conception of these vast interrelationships, this big picture. Their lives were being transformed by decisions made in distant cities, under circumstances they could not control nor even imagine. No wonder they referred to economic troubles in terms borrowed from physical illness—the “fevers” of migration and land investment, the “dropsical fulness” of inflated paper currency, the financial “disease” (as John Quincy Adams called it) for which the only cure was “time and patience.” In September the Boston Patriot recorded the disappearance of animal spirits from that city, which “presents a dull and uncheery spectacle—silence reigns in the streets and gloom and despondency in every countenance.” The departure of animal spirits allowed the triumph of fear, mistrust, immobility.
The land and cotton bubbles began haltingly and gradually to reinflate by the early 1830s, yet a mood of uncertainty persisted—about prices, which could never be predicted accurately, and about motives, which could rarely be ascertained in a commercial world where social encounters were fleeting and anonymous. Antebellum Americans were increasingly wary of confidence men. An emerging advice literature purported to show (in the words of one guide) how to distinguish legitimate tradesmen from sharpers and shavers with their “keen sharp features, rapid eye, and general attitude of the gamester intent on his play.” Yet the decision to invest was often based on trust in distant trade partners whom the investor might never see. As the historian Jessica Lepler has observed, by the 1830s confidence was more than trust of individuals; it had become, she writes, “that mysterious invisible energy that keeps all financial bodies snug in their proper orbits.” In this it resembled animal magnetism: as the pulsating power at the heart of the commercial universe, confidence generated credit—the capacity to use money without actually possessing it.
As British textile manufacturers began to pay unprecedently high prices for cotton, they created renewed incentives for westward migration, for planting more cotton, for buying more slaves on credit. Under these circumstances, banks performed the classic conjuring trick at the core of commercial society: by extending credit, they could multiply the amount of currency in circulation, at least as long as the people who held the banknotes trusted the promise to pay the amount printed on them. Since nationally bounded banknotes could not be used to pay debts to British companies and banks, American banks supplemented banknotes with foreign bills of exchange—promises to pay pounds sterling in specie. What was called the discount rate covered the cost of shipping the bills, reflected demand for them in various local money markets, and assessed the likelihood that the bill would be paid. The last issue revealed the centrality of confidence to the maintenance of prosperity.
When President Jackson rejected the rechartering of the Bank of the United States in 1832, he called it a “monster,” asserting it held “titanic and unnatural power” over commerce. His attack anticipated post–Civil War denunciations of monopoly corporations, but its most immediate effect was to accelerate the spread of state-chartered banks with lower reserve requirements and looser lending policies. Paper banknotes proliferated across the land as never before, and as Lepler writes, “confidence performed the alchemy of transforming paper into gold.” Faith in paper fostered the animal spirits of feverish investors.
The problem was that no one could be certain how long the paper would remain golden—just as no one could tell how long commodity prices would continue rising. And uncertainty bred anxiety. In his novel The Perils of Pearl Street (1834), Asa Greene described a young clerk who saved enough from his wages to join two partners in a speculation on cotton. In Liverpool, its price was high, and going higher. But the Americans would not know the selling price until the deal was consummated and word came from Liverpool to confirm the sale. Word was that prices were still rising, and when the partners were offered “a very considerable advance” on their cotton, they turned it down, expecting the prices to keep rising. Winds were contrary, and the packet from Liverpool was delayed for a month. “In that time,” said the clerk/speculator, “what a mighty change on the cotton market might take place. How prodigiously the article might rise! Or again, how shockingly it might fall! Ah, there was the rub. Had we been certain of its rising, we might have gone to bed and slept comfortably. But the uncertainty kept us awake.” In the event, the price of cotton fell “shockingly,” and the boys were left berating themselves for not selling when they had the chance.
The sleepless nights and self-blame of speculators were part of a broader pattern of mental unrest that enveloped the emerging world of finance capital. By 1834, the phrenologist Andrew Combe could announce that “sudden changes of fortune, whether good or bad, are known to excite cerebral disease and insanity.” Yet two years later, as western land prices continued to soar, the dark side of the boom remained concealed, and in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, among other places, local observers reported that “speculators went to bed at night hugging themselves with delight over the prospect that the succeeding morning would double their wealth.” Still, Jackson was worried about the prospect of bank failures arising from inadequate reserves. In July 1836, he issued the Specie Circular, which required that federal lands must be purchased in gold or silver. This was a draconian restriction of credit. At about the same time, the Bank of England tightened credit too; it had furnished loans for U.S. westward expansion, but its directors had grown concerned about their own dwindling specie reserves. New York banks followed suit. Meanwhile, the overexpansion of the cotton market led to stagnation, decline, and the eventual collapse of cotton prices.
In December 1836, amid gathering gloom, a protracted calm over the Atlantic made the Liverpool packets two weeks late, creating a pause in the frenetic money markets. While investors waited for wind, Nicholas Biddle, who headed the institution still called the Bank of the United States, though it was much reduced in power, wrote a letter to John Quincy Adams—the previous president and now U.S. congressman from Massachusetts, with a reputation for probity and prudence. Biddle endorsed the Bank of England and the soundness of British finance generally. When Adams released the letter to the New York papers, it “infused a species of confidence into the public mind, that operates exactly like a strike of galvanism,” as the New York Herald reported. Galvanism was frequently associated with animal magnetism, and both were used in efforts to regenerate failing bodies and minds. But the regeneration bred by the Biddle letter was short-lived. Fluctuating news from Great Britain created corresponding market fluctuations in the United States, and by New Year’s Eve 1836, the Herald lamented the ubiquitous sight of “people losing their senses.”
The next day, the Unitarian Rev. Jason Whitman confirmed from his pulpit in Portland, Maine, what everyone in his congregation already knew. “The care-clouded countenance and the anxiously hurried step, of almost any man of business you may meet, proclaim, in language that, if not audible, is perfectly intelligible, that times are hard, that money is scarce.” The scarcity of money, for Whitman, stemmed from psychic rather than economic sources. The current anxiety displayed by men of business was the contrapuntal mode of the reckless euphoria that preceded it. The hard times stemmed from the unhinged discontent and desire of the speculator: “He begins to grow dissatisfied with his moderate but regular gains, to feel the first faint promptings of a restless haste to be rich … Young merchants and merchants, who for years have pursued the even tenor of their way, gradually amassing wealth; have caught the spirit, have felt the restless haste to be rich, have plunged into the current, and have fallen prostrate before the pressure of the times.” What was striking about Whitman’s account was the central role it assigned to the human imagination—to fantasies of sudden wealth and their calamitous consequences. Smith’s ideal tradesman, in patient pursuit of betterment, had somehow become a maniac rushing pointlessly from pillar to post.
By the spring of 1837, fantasy had failed and uncertainty prevailed. No one knew who was solvent and who was not—not even (sometimes) with respect to one’s own affairs, let alone those of one’s fellow investors. Every transaction was clouded with suspicion. As the political economist Condy Raguet observed: in a panic, “everybody is afraid to trust his neighbor.” Fearfulness undermines trust, the basis of credit—the oil that keeps the mechanisms of money production humming. Without oil, the mechanisms seize up, or fly apart.
Again, the crisis unfolded slowly over time, in various rates at various places. No one knew what to call it. “In one word, excitement, anxiety, terror, panic, pervades all classes and ranks,” the National Intelligencer announced in April 1837. Amid emotional turmoil, “one word” quickly generated four: “excitement, anxiety, terror, panic”—the situation would not sit still. Anxiety spread as rumors of bank and other business failures were printed uncritically in the penny press. The Panic of 1837 was not a single event but a cascading collapse that seemed beyond human control—thus the resort, as in 1819, to biological and meteorological metaphors. One failing businessman, Joseph Shipley, described the panic as a “general wreck,” an unpredictable disaster, as he noted the centrality of chance in keeping Baring’s and other major financial houses afloat. What most observers shared was a sense of the invisibility, even unreality of the forces at work in unraveling the social fabric. As the Unitarian Rev. Andrew Preston Peabody noted with some bafflement in May 1837, solid goods—specie, real estate, merchandise—have not disappeared; but “credit, a mere creature of public faith and general good will, is undermined and crushed.” It was easy for some ministers to revert from something as evanescent as credit to the familiar language of individual sin, and greedy speculators were an easy target. But many clergymen moved from moral to psychological grounds, warning their congregations against spreading uncorroborated rumors and free-flowing hysteria. “Increase not a general panic by unreal terrors,” said Peabody.
Terrors, real and unreal, swept through masses of people, and mass panic sometimes had dramatic individual consequences. Solomon Andrews, a cotton speculator in flight from bankruptcy, absconded from Mobile in the middle of the night and was captured on a steamboat headed north, where he was charged with defrauding his creditors. His lack of a poker face, his open, abject fear, suggested to witnesses that he was not all right in the head—“Andrews is a very timid man and his fear [of a violent mob of creditors] very easily alarmed,” said one. Even if they managed to escape vengeful creditors, absconding debtors were often overcome with a “load of disappointment and remorse,” as a judge put it, summarizing a deathbed letter from one of them. Another, Theodore Nicolet of New Orleans, descended into “a mire of debt and fear” before committing suicide.
Despite newspapers’ claims that the panic was universal, some groups were more susceptible than others. “The merchants are the most excitable class of men in the world,” observed the New York patrician Philip Hone: emotionally they were either “in the garret or in the cellar.” The stock market merely reflected these mercurial mood swings; indeed it was “the mercury in the thermometer of public opinion”—and public opinion, as Hone and other elite Americans agreed, was perversely unpredictable. On May 6, 1837, a delegation of New York merchants returned from Washington after a failed plea for help to President Martin Van Buren. As Hone recorded, “under strong excitement,” they organized a meeting to plan their next move. Hone worried: “It is a dangerous time for such a meeting—combustibles enough are collected to cause an awful conflagration. Men’s minds are bent upon mischief; ruin and rashness. Distress and despair generally go together, and a spark may blow us up.” Yet it would be a mistake to take such fretfulness as precise empirical description. Hone’s language often betrayed his class blinders, as Lepler observes. Describing a run on a New York savings bank, Hone labeled depositors’ behavior “madness” when in fact it was perfectly reasonable from the point of view of individual self-protection. These sorts of assumptions afflicted elite assessments of economic crises throughout the nineteenth century, when “the madness of crowds” was too easily invoked to dismiss understandable desperation among ordinary people.
In June 1837, panic began to subside in London. Investors moved beyond “despondency” toward “a much more tranquil feeling,” The Times of London reported. Traders began to bestir themselves, asset prices to increase. But The Times warned that this surface recovery did not mean that hard times were over.
And indeed they were not. For years, real estate prices continued to stagnate; overextended individuals and institutions continued to fail. In 1842, when the state of Illinois defaulted on its debts, the novelist James Kirke Paulding invoked what had become the conventional narrative of emotional rise and fall. The people of Illinois, he said, “had been precipitated from the summit of hope to the lowest abyss of debt and depression. It was the feverish anxiety, the headlong haste, the insatiable passion for growing rich in a hurry, that brought them and other states where they are now shivering on the verge of bankruptcy.” When Charles Dickens visited the United States in spring 1842, he found gloom, despondency, and desolation everywhere. Five years earlier, the Philadelphia lawyer Sidney George Fisher had dismissed fears of panic: “The Capitalist is the most easily frightened of beings,” he scoffed. By 1842, Fisher was forced to agree with Dickens. Economic and psychological conceptions of depression remained tightly intertwined. Amid widespread confusion, a growing sense of collective guilt and punishment for greed began to afflict the population.
Clerical economists—the closest antebellum Americans could get to professional economists—offered little explanation and no relief. Indeed they exacerbated public anxiety by resorting to formulaic moralism. They were at pains to distinguish speculation from legitimate commerce. Words like “mania” and “delirium” surfaced frequently in their discourse, as did “magic.” They knew a rival religion when they saw one. Orville Dewey marveled that some credulous people came to look toward “speculation itself … as if it were a god, or some wonder-working magician” who drew their minds away from “sober industry” and fostered overweening passion.
For the clerical economists, speculation posed a direct threat to the human sympathy that Adam Smith had declared to be the very basis of commerce. The Princeton Presbyterian Henry Boardman charged that the speculator “must necessarily regard everyone around him with a jealous eye … They are his opposers, almost his enemies. What they gain, he loses; and he must lay his plans so as to make them lose, that he may pocket their losses.” Playing a zero-sum game, he becomes a “shrewd, cold-blooded operator”—the very opposite of a man of feeling. The consequences could be public as well as personal. Yielding to “the delirium of speculation,” said Boardman, “is like withdrawing the balance wheel from a massive piece of machinery. Its movements, before harmonious and regular, become spasmodic and untractable, until in the end it may destroy itself and everything within its reach.” Here again, the machine of material prosperity seemed dependent on immaterial forces—fantasies, longings, fears.
But the critique of speculation did nothing to raise the spirits of a population mired in depression. What finally did the trick was war. To judge by newspaper accounts and the general tone of public discourse, the war against Mexico of 1846–1848 restored a sense of national pride and revived the spirits of a dispirited populace. Perhaps equally important, as the historian Alasdair Roberts observes, the war reintegrated the United States into international financial markets. Worrying about another outbreak of speculative fever, a Whig journal warned Easterners that the West was full of “bold and restless spirits … ready for any movement that can minister to their reckless manner of life and love of danger and change.” Yet the East was full of these sentiments as well, and the trick to sustaining them, as newspapermen like James Gordon Bennett realized, was to turn them toward war as well as commerce. Here was something new: war in the service of emotional regeneration.
American motives for war differed from those of Europeans, Bennett’s New York Herald observed in August 1845. While the European masses were ready to turn to violence to claim rights denied them by corrupt aristocratic governments, American enthusiasm for war “springs from directly opposite causes,” the Herald claimed. “We are restless, fidgety, discontented—anxious for excitement—eager for war, not because we are starving, but because we are too well fed, not because we are ground into the dust by the iron hoof of the oppressor, but because we are perfectly free, and call no man master.” Whether “we” were all that well-fed after years of depression was open to question, as was the assumption that “we” were “perfectly free.” But Bennett’s larger point was worth considering: a society that had not been attacked, the majority of whose population was not in desperate rebellion against autocracy, had to come up with novel reasons for fighting. Apart from territorial conquest, which was plainly on elite agendas, popular pro-war sentiment was kindled by desires to escape boredom.
The notion of war as entertainment was indeed novel. It was also disturbing, at least to a few observers, who subjected war mania to criticism and parody. The New York Journal of Commerce took the latter option in summer 1845 in an editorial titled “LET US GO TO WAR” that claimed to be advocating war with Britain. “The world has become stale and insipid, the ships ought to be all captured, and the cities battered down, and the world burned up, so that we can start again. There would be fun in that. Some interest—something to talk about.” At least to a few observers, waging war merely for fun and excitement seemed a contemptible enterprise for a nation that claimed to be a beacon of hope to all mankind.
Yet all through the fall and winter, war fever spread. By the end of April 1846, Congress was poised to declare war (it happened two weeks later), and Herman Melville reported from Lansingburgh, New York, that “people here are all in a state of delirium about the Mexican War. A military ardor pervades all ranks. Militia Colonels wax red in their coat facings, and ’prentice boys are running off to the war by scores.” Despite the New York city newspapers’ assumption that Americans were well-fed and eager only for excitement, times were still hard. Especially in the rural districts, young men had few prospects and no outlets for energy. War met both those needs. Not for the last time in U.S. history, military adventure promised relief from lassitude—economic and psychological.
By the time the U.S. Army had defeated the Mexican forces a couple of years later, celebrants of American nationality were agreed on the meaning of victory: it showed that Americans were not a mere nation of shopkeepers, but rather a people of “indomitable energy,” hardihood, and manifest destiny. Antiwar sentiments had survived outside the South and West, especially among antislavery Whigs and abolitionists who worried that the war would whet southern planters’ appetite for a slaveholders’ empire. This sentiment resonated with Christian distrust of war, even among military men. General Caleb Cushing, quoted in the Anti-Slavery Bugle, asked a pertinent question about the nearly universal and centuries-old ritual of regeneration through violence: “Are we not also, in the sanguinary wars which from time to time convulse the world, the self-immolated victims of our own headlong passions and unreasoning animal instincts?” But in general, enthusiasm for the sheer vitality—the animal spirits—unleashed by war won out over the fear of unreasoning animal instincts.
Like war, politics became a way for men to satisfy their yearnings for release from depression and anxiety, as well as for spontaneous excitement amid the repetitive rhythms of an emerging capitalist society. Beginning in the late 1820s, the franchise spread beyond the property-owning class to include a broad population of white males. Public life became increasingly charged with furious popular energies, elections became the scene of drunken riots, and conviviality became a component of political success. But commerce was still the main arena for the flow of animal spirits. And the arena was becoming more capacious than ever.
CAPITALISM AS A WAY OF LIFE
By mid-century, market metaphors were seeping into descriptions of body and society. In 1848, for example, an advertisement for Wright’s Indian Vegetable Pills in the Tarboro (N.C.) Press compared freely circulating (undepreciated) money to freely circulating (uncorrupted) blood—one was necessary for economic health, the other for physical health. In 1850 the Water-Cure Journal was describing human physiology in monetary metaphors. “Now, every human being has a given amount of capital put into his possession by his Maker; that capital is his vital energy—his life-force,” the Journal announced. “This life capital may be wisely or foolishly expended … It requires years of labor and toil, as well as rigid economy, to replace the capital soon expended in rioting and drunkenness. So it is with the life-force. If by any process of self-indulgence or over-exertion this power is too rapidly expended, pain and distress result: and often years of time will be required to regain what has been lost, even if the most strict obedience be paid to the laws of life and health.” The emphasis on conservation of energy complemented metaphors of flow and circulation: one needed to preserve energy to move it. The larger warning was clear: improvident wastrels could exhaust their biological as well as financial resources.
Bodily metaphors reflected bodily reality. In the emerging world of industrial capitalism, various kinds of labor affected the flow of animal spirits and vitality generally, in various ways. Romantic vitalism influenced the young Karl Marx, who reshaped it to suit his developing critique of political economy. As the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty observes, Marx often turned to vitalist idioms—when he said, “Labor is the yeast thrown into it [capital] which starts it fermenting”; or when he described labor power as a “commodity that exists in [the laborer’s] vitality,” which the capitalist purchases and deploys for profit. When the worker receives his wages, “capital has paid him the amount of objectified labor contained in his vital forces.” Capital feasted on life; no wonder Marxists and later antimonopolists would rail against capitalist vampires, sucking the lifeblood from individuals and communities. At the same time, Marx—like Keynes—understood that capitalists required their own fund of animal spirits, not just what they could suck from workers. “It is precisely the genius of capitalism that relies upon the instincts, enterprise, and sometimes crazy ideas (the animal spirits invoked by both Marx and Keynes) of individual entrepreneurs operating in particular times and places,” David Harvey writes in The Enigma of Capital. Animal spirits animated risk-taking, for labor as well as capital. From the Marxist perspective, the worker’s “vital forces” were never entirely domesticated to the needs of capital; they remained a source of unpredictable, perhaps revolutionary energy.
Few respectable Americans paid much attention to the animal spirits of the working class, except as a source of disruption to be managed. But by the 1850s one begins to see glimmers of a more humane approach. As the proliferation of industrial sweatshops caught affluent observers’ attention, a few noticed steep variations in the quality of the workers’ experience. Some skilled trades enhanced the worker’s vitality; others sapped it. This drain on animal spirits, The New York Times thought, should be acknowledged on payday. The paper argued that “the effect of his labor upon the animal spirits and the physical and mental development of the laborer must be considered in connection with his pecuniary rewards. This consideration should measure the wages of the employee”—but it did not.
Consider the plight of the tailor, the Times suggested, compared with the blacksmith or shoemaker. “All active occupations offer some vent of the animal spirit,” but the tailor’s sedentary work is “dull and monotonous,” provoking him to protracted bouts of dissipation. For the blacksmith, “the ringing rivalry of muscles at the anvil keeps the nervous system in a glowing state of excitement”; but for the tailor, “labor with the needle is weary, close and depressing.” The needle trades contrasted with the shoemakers’ lot as well. The tailor’s work “is a constant drain on his fixed capital of life and vigor, while the shoemaker’s daily toils tend rather to the increase than the diminution of his stock in trade; yet the tailor receives no larger wages, no extra compensation for the wear and tear of his working powers.” An oversupply of unemployed tailors allowed sweatshop owners to ignore such humane considerations, the Times concluded, in a burst of unwittingly Marxian analysis.
By mid-nineteenth century, most Americans—black and white, enslaved and free—were becoming caught in the coils of a full-blown market society. Slave owners, especially those in the rapidly expanding cotton belt, devoured their enslaved workers’ vitality in pursuit of profit, even more relentlessly than northern factory owners squeezed the vital force from their own employees. Workplaces, northern and southern, revealed an emerging capitalist agenda: managing workers, enslaved and free, to maximize productivity and profit. This was as true on the plantation as in the factory. Industrial and agricultural capitalists invested in palpable products—guns, wheat, cotton, locomotives—but to get started and eventually succeed they needed the impalpable power of finance capital. Bankers were at the center of the developing market society—extending credit to planters, merchants, industrialists; oiling the mechanisms of commerce.
In the project of getting and securing credit, a free flow of animal spirits proved to be essential, though dangerous. The danger arose from the madness induced by dreams of overnight wealth. As Kit Kelvin wrote in The Knickerbocker in 1849: “In the inordinate hope of success our vision is blinded; our ear deaf to the voice that would warn us … A fearful leprosy permeates our organism. It is madness! Shudder at the idea as we may, we all have it, a mental element innate.” This “mental element” produced the Mississippi scheme, the South Sea scheme—and now, Kelvin sighed, we confront the consequences of the California gold rush: “Mania’s haggard face is staring at us through our windows—we meet it in the streets. While it tempts the rich man to an increment of wealth, it lures the poor laborer from his spade … throws the golden apple in the path of the husband, and robs the wife of a protector and supporter. Seriously, what is to be the result of the vast Gold Mania of 1848?” For every “bird of passage” who succeeds, “a score meet with indescribable anxiety, disappointment, sickness and death. And yet this untamable spirit … is one of our essentials. It is the parent of all our noble and formidable projects and executed designs, those massive battlements of our country which frown upon all inaction … I would not deprecate it; rather would I cherish it.” The Gold Mania, from this view, was another example of the “gambling spirit” that produced heroic achievement and great deeds in general; this became a familiar threnody in odes to risk. Kelvin merged risk and caution by endorsing “an intermediate state of feeling,” a path of moderation. “Shall we follow it,” he asked, “or shall we plunge headlong into that gurgling flood that knows neither a master nor a friend?” The alternative to moderation was engulfment in indifferent chaos.
The emotionally charged atmosphere of nineteenth-century commercial life threatened the possibility of slippage from mania or even mere excitement to insanity—which was implicitly defined as a complete inability to engage with everyday reality. As early as 1851, Edward Jarvis, M.D., was attributing this malady to the emotional turmoil induced by the proliferation of new ways of doing business: “There are many new trades and new employments; there are new schemes of increasing wealth, new articles of merchandise, and speculations in many things of new and multiplying kinds. All these increase the activity of the commercial world … The consequent inflation or expansion of prices … makes many kinds of business more uncertain, and many men’s fortunes more precarious. This increases the doubts and perplexities of business, the necessity of more labor and watchfulness, greater fear and anxiety; and the end is more frequently in loss, and failure of plans, and mental disturbance.” Prolonged self-surveillance took a heavy emotional toll—one that was nevertheless unavoidable, the price we pay for civilization. Jarvis’s argument is in outline the one Freud would make eighty years later in Civilization and Its Discontents: the benefits of modernity required a mounting burden of instinctual renunciation.
“Are We a Happy People?” Harper’s Monthly asked in January 1857, concluding that the answer was no. “We exhaust our energies in the hard drudgery of our daily labor, and when we seek pleasure, which we rarely do, it must be highly spiced to arouse our jaded appetites. Like the dull German baron, who took to jumping over the chairs to get up his vivacity, the American is forced into equally eccentric efforts to stir his animal spirits. When he takes to pleasure it is violent, spasmodic, exciting, and exhausting. We do not know that we have any sport that can truly be called national, unless it be that of heating ourselves into excitement, and cheering our animal spirits by the burning embers of a neighbor’s house.” From this view, drudgery in office or factory dampened workers’ inner spark and left them frantic to reignite it.
This kind of pattern may have characterized flush times, when the verve of investors and traders—if not exhausted workers—was in copious supply, but in hard times verve was running short for everyone. And by summer 1857, hard times were just around the corner. Railroad stocks peaked in July. On August 11, the failure of N. H. Wolfe Company, the largest and oldest flour company in New York, frightened investors into a long sell-off. Selling accelerated on August 24 when the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, a bank with large mortgage holdings, went belly-up, revealing not only the corrupt practices of its directors but also the dependence of the railroad industry and western land markets on bad loans, overextended credit, and poor management. By the end of September, all the banks in Philadelphia suspended specie payment, provoking bank runs across the nation.
Through the fall, investors’ confidence plummeted. By early October, the historian James Huston writes, “men, especially in banking circles, seemed utterly possessed by some demonic force.” Since British and French capital had invested heavily in American land and railroads, the crisis soon spread across the Atlantic. The emperor of France, Napoleon III, published a letter observing that “without either real or apparent cause, the public credit is injured by chimerical fears, and by the propagation of soi-disant remedies for an evil which only exists in the imagination.” He pleaded with his prime minister to “[g]ive heart to those [who] vainly frighten themselves.” In New York, the patrician gentleman George Templeton Strong agreed with Napoleon: “The remedy for this crisis must be psychological rather than financial. It is an epidemic of fear and distrust that everyone admits to be without real ground except the very sufficient ground that everyone is known to share them.” Newspaper editors advised depositors and investors to fight “FEAR” and “unreasoning panic,” to keep their heads cool.
That was easier said than done. In a familiar cycle, fearful depositors withdrew funds in specie, and banks consequently had less credit available to extend to would-be borrowers. On October 12, a note-holding mob in lower Manhattan stormed banks, which survived until the next day, when 20,000 to 30,000 New Yorkers swarmed through Wall Street, demanding metal currency in exchange for their banknotes. Eighteen banks failed, and the rest suspended specie payment the next day. Reflecting on the consequences of the crash for working people, Mayor Fernando Wood observed: “Truly it may be said that in New-York those who produce everything get nothing, and those who produce nothing get everything.” This would be a major theme in post–Civil War polemics against finance capital, appearing for the first time at this antebellum moment.
The interpretation of the crisis anticipated future developments in other ways as well, especially as panic began to subside, for reasons as mysterious—to most people—as those that had initially provoked it. Explanations fell into existing channels but sometimes broke new ground. Moralists fixated on familiar targets: the “ravenous intensity” of men in pursuit of money, the indulgence in “fast living,” and in some quarters the behavior of the banks themselves, as a group of southern Democrats reviled “these vampyres [who] ply their trade of drawing aliment from the pores of the business community—in which they generate moral pestilence with its accompaniment of horrors.” Yet sometimes moralism was mixed with psychology. This struck a new note, however confused. Senator Louis T. Wigfall of Texas, for example, announced that “poverty is a crime. A man who is poor has sinned … there is a screw loose in his head somewhere.” This was aimless, contradictory drift.
More skillful orators avoided it. Rev. Henry Ward Beecher was one. In A Discourse on the Present Fearful Commercial Pressure, a sermon he delivered at the end of 1857, he merged psychology and morality with apparent ease. He began by marveling that our strapping young nation, in the flush of young manhood, now “trembles and staggers, as if it would lie down in faintness. What is the matter? It is want the [sic] of air. The city cannot breathe. What then is this commercial air which is so needful to life and activity. It is the faith of man in man. It is natural trust. It is confidence.” Like Strong and Napoleon, Beecher believed that the problems were mental and emotional rather than material—crippling fear, “wanton cowardice.” Even the worldly pastor felt the need to swivel from a medical to a moral idiom when confronted with a Wall Street panic. Perhaps he was influenced by the religious atmosphere in New York City—perhaps the most marked novel feature of the Panic of 1857, which coincided with the first great urban revival in U.S. history.
REVIVALISM, WAR, AND THE DRAINING OF ANIMAL SPIRITS
By the 1850s, evangelical Protestants—led by Methodists—had embraced a creed expansive in contrast with orthodox Calvinism’s. It foregrounded a doctrine of free will—one could choose conversion and did not have to wait for it—along with free grace and the pursuit of perfection. An appropriate creed for an activist society, Methodism sustained the vitalist strain of feeling that had animated revivals in the North American forest, even as its churches began to appear in cities. “The Evangel of Christ is the all-embracing theme. It is the vital force in earth and in heaven,” Rev. Gilbert Haven said. “The Cross is the center of the spiritual, and therefore of the material universe.” Spirituality and materiality could interpenetrate in the Methodist cast of mind.
By the 1850s, Methodism was at the center of an interdenominational evangelical ethos, which had become regnant in areas of American culture where religion had barely been present a half century earlier. Ecumenical, undogmatic evangelicalism made its presence felt in cities by promoting the YMCA and other civic organizations and by focusing the responsibility of churches for taming the barely civilized masses in the West, not to mention assorted ruffians and urchins in eastern slums. The task was made more urgent by the rising tide of immigration, which flooded major cities with unchurched and Catholic newcomers. For evangelical Protestants, urban America was becoming missionary territory.
Nowhere was this clearer than in New York. By the 1850s, established Protestant churches in lower Manhattan found themselves casting about for new members as their congregations moved uptown. One strategy was hiring lay ministers to attract businessmen who otherwise had no time for religion. But how? Jeremiah Lanphier would answer that question. An intermittently successful cloth merchant who found Jesus at Finney’s Broadway Tabernacle, Lanphier closed his business and embraced missionary work when the North Dutch Reformed Church on Fulton Street hired him as a lay minister. He did his best to promote the church with local businesses, hotels, and schools, but nothing really worked until he hit on the tactic that suited his own desire for peaceful opportunities to talk with God.
On September 23, 1857, he started a weekly noon prayer meeting that coincided with the lunch hour, when businesses were closed. Knowing his harried audience, he passed out handbills that read: “[Wednesday] prayer meeting from 12 to 1 o’clock. Stop 5, 10 or 20 minutes, or the whole time, as your time admits.” For the first half hour, no one showed; Lanphier prayed alone. Another man appeared at 12:30, four more by 1:00. Lanphier kept advertising. A week later, there were twenty participants; and two weeks later, forty. They asked to meet daily. That was October 7; on October 10, the stock market crashed, and attendance at the prayer meetings soared. In January 1858, Lanphier had to add another room to hold the swelling crowd, and in February another. By the end of March, every church, theater, and auditorium in lower Manhattan was filled during the lunch hour with businessmen on their knees. Savvy churchmen knew how to use the penny press to spread the Word; the Herald and the Tribune vied with each other in presenting sensational news of the great Wall Street Revival. But the financial crisis kept the fires burning. As the Presbyterian Rev. James Waddell Alexander (one of Lanphier’s mentors) announced, God had been pleased “by the ploughshare of his judgments to furrow the ground for the precious seed of salvation.” The crash, from this revivalist’s view, was a heaven-sent opportunity.
The revivals themselves were hardly the raucous outbreaks that had occurred in the backcountry. A “still, solemn, and tender” atmosphere usually prevailed; it was “more like a communion than a prayer meeting,” said Alexander. In April 1858, the Christian Register praised the absence of emotional excitement and sectarian strife in the revival, yet also celebrated the tearful testimony of a Unitarian Universalist woman in response to the question “What Shall I Do to Be Saved?” Intense emotion remained a key part of the evangelical appeal: “heart earnestness” was the key to salvation; the believer accepted Christ through the affections, not the intellect.
The joyous affirmation of direct religious experience linked evangelical revivalists with idiosyncratic believers from Mary Baker Eddy to William James. The emphasis on personal experience as the basis of faith democratized religious authority and encouraged women to take leadership roles. Most notable among them was Phoebe Palmer, who soon became famous for holding prayer meetings in her New York parlor, where Christians could feel the thrill of “immediate sanctification by faith.” Yet Palmer warned converts against “selfishly seeking ‘ecstatic enjoyment’”; an invisible but crucial boundary remained between genuine religious experience and mere excitement. Animal spirits alone were insufficient for true religion. Part of the problem was their volatility: conversion was for life, salvation for eternity. Animal spirits were of the moment, and difficult to sustain over time, especially under challenging circumstances.
This became apparent with the rise and fall of animal spirits during the Civil War. Before men actually started to kill one another, white southerners and white northerners alike gave the impression that they were brimming over with enthusiasm for battle. In May 1861, a Confederate soldier reported from a Gulf Coast encampment to his hometown newspaper in Fayetteville, Tennessee: “Ten days have passed since our arrival and no perceptible diminution in animal spirits—All of us enjoy the novelty of our position and go through the routine prescribed as if to the manner born.”
Union recruits were equally game. The Firemen Zouaves of New York City provided a stylish example. Zouaves were regiments (most Union, a few Confederate) that adopted the distinctive uniform and drilling practices of the French soldiers serving in the North African colonies. When the 11th New York Regiment, locally known as the Firemen Zouaves, marched from Devlin’s Store to embark on a troop ship moored at the foot of Canal Street, The New York Times reported, “the men were in the highest animal spirits, and all seemed happy at the prospect of soon having a set-to with the Secessionists.” Boarding to the tune of “The Red, White, and Blue,” many sang along and “all seemed elated at the prospect of a speedy departure. Hurried adieus were made; women were weeping, and strong men were embracing each other with an affection absolutely touching.” Such scenes occurred often, north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line, during the early weeks and months of the war.
Yet the actual experience of combat must have made it hard to sustain high spirits; within weeks of their rollicking departure, the Firemen Zouaves took horrific casualties at Bull Run, where they were tasked with protecting the retreating Union army’s rear. One can only imagine the range of emotional expressions such an experience would evoke, but it would exclude the naïve bravado of untried troops. The troops were no longer untried.
The political ambiguities surrounding the war further undermined many participants’ capacity to sustain fervor. As several generations of historians have made clear, the war was not reducible to the kinds of clear-cut oppositions that fire up raw recruits. It was not simply a conflict between unionists and secessionists, nor even between pro-slavery and anti-slavery ideologues. Elite policymakers held confused and contradictory goals, and many common soldiers’ motives became or remained muddled over time.
Planter elites’ desire to protect and even expand slavery lay at the root of war. But a deeper source was the persistent resistance to slavery by enslaved people themselves, who constantly challenged the slaveholders’ regime by running away, refusing unfair demands from overseers, and sabotaging the productive apparatus. They also sometimes rose in open rebellion.
The specter of slave insurrection provoked the southern ruling class to adopt authoritarian measures—to suppress open debate about slavery throughout the South and even within the U.S. Congress, to demand strict fugitive slave laws and a territorial slave code. Since slaveholders had the power to use federal law to advance their own class interests, white northerners feared that a monolithic, authoritarian Slave Power ultimately posed a threat to northern white men’s liberties. “Most Yankees hardly embraced blacks or abolitionists,” writes William Freehling. “Yet racist Northerners would fight the Slave Power to the death to preserve their white men’s majoritarian rights.” To be sure, many white northerners (including Lincoln) came to abhor slavery and demand its abolition. But sectional conflict was not primarily about ending racial injustice. As Eric Foner observes, most debates about slavery “were only marginally related to race.”
Nor were most ordinary white southerners, despite their own racism, enlisting in a war to defend slavery—or even the racial caste system that supported it. Though some were no doubt influenced by white supremacist ideology to identify with the planter elite, few were keen on fighting for its interests. As Edward Ayers shows with respect to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, as the war wore on, few white southerners mentioned slavery or secession; they were defending their farms against “yankee marauders,” not protecting slavery or the right to secede. “What are you fighting for anyhow?” Union soldiers asked a Confederate prisoner, a ragged Virginian private who obviously owned no slaves and knew little about states’ rights. “I’m fighting because you’re down here,” he said.
The war, as wars do, took on a life of its own. Ideological clarity faded amid reports of carnage from the front, except among political and intellectual elites. North and South alike were drained by mass death. When the corpses piled up at Shiloh and Fredericksburg, Cold Harbor and Petersburg, both sides found it hard to sustain animal spirits. Grim determination was a more appropriate mood.
Enslaved black people, in contrast, seized the opportunity to embrace emancipation—by running away and eventually by enlisting in the Union army. They were fighting quite literally for freedom, as well as for their own dignity. Both aims no doubt inspired sustained commitment; neither was easily attained. Assumptions of white superiority were deeply embedded, north and south. In 1855, for example, “Thirty Thousand Disenfranchised Citizens of Philadelphia” presented a memorial to the U.S. Congress. They were “colored citizens” who were denied the vote but who claimed to possess $2,685,623 of real and personal estate, to have paid $9,776.42 for taxes during the past year, and $896,782.27 for house, water, and ground rents. “Here, then, is an addition to the wealth of the state, which requires something more than brute instinct to produce.” The poignancy of the last line is striking; the “colored citizens” wanted recognition of their full humanity, which required ascension above “brute instinct.” Yet most white people, north and south, were unwilling to grant it. As one self-described “yankee” reported on the “Southern Rebellion” to the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press in 1862, “the negroes of the South are a very inferior race—of ready animal instincts, but feeble mental and moral power.” Full humanity for black people merely fluttered at the edges of the Union cause. As the war dragged on, only one thing was clear: this was not the kind of quick and easy conflict that could sustain a burst of animal spirits beyond its initial explosion.
A NEW ASCENDANCY OF SPIRIT
When the war finally ended, animal spirits returned to the discourse of mental and physical health, associated with the possession of a certain kind of temperament. Those who “are said to have a fine ‘flow of animal spirits,’” the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer noted in 1869, “have an exalted degree of sensibility; their whole organism seems elastic and buoyant, they enjoy almost everything and life itself is a perpetual pleasure. To exist is to be happy.” It would be hard to find a better description of the personality type William James would later characterize as “once born”—at ease in what seems (to the once-born) to be a benign, harmonious cosmos. This temperament would characterize the devotees of positive thinking who followed in the footsteps of the Poughkeepsie Seer.
The war had introduced subtle changes on the fringes of respectable thought. The claims of spirit began to be reasserted more forcefully in the wake of bodily carnage. Movements that had sought to link matter and spirit before the war—phrenology, spiritualism, mesmerism—began increasingly to ascend into the realm of pure spirit after the war was over.
Mesmerists discarded fluids and other material manifestations of the forces they conjured, transforming their trade into the purely mental practice of hypnotism. Some hypnotists still claimed to assert their own will to induce trance in a patient, but many followed the Englishman James Braid, who coined the term “hypnotism” and introduced the practice. Braid claimed only to be setting the stage for subjects to induce their own trance states, through concentrating on a candle, a dripping faucet, or (what became most familiar) a watch fob or pendulum. Thus was mesmerism etherealized, deprived of its magnetic fluids, its sexual charge, and its dependence on submission to another’s will. Similar moves toward respectability characterized the later history of other mid-nineteenth-century popular sciences. Spiritualists sought scientific legitimacy, forming the Society for Psychical Research (of which William James was a member). Phrenologists challenged binaries but still subordinated body to soul. While they were materialists in their insistence on tracing thoughts and sentiments to specific “organs” in the brain, they remained committed to raising the human gaze upward and transcending animal instinct.
This sort of strategy distanced its devotees from the sweaty prurience surrounding animal magnetizers and other mesmeric healers. Consider the career of Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), the founder of the Christian Science church. A chronic invalid for years, after she turned forty Eddy sought help from Phineas Quimby of Portland, Maine, a “mesmeric healer, who had assumed the title of doctor,” as Eddy’s New-York Tribune obituary reported. Quimby was the son of a blacksmith and had trained to be a clockmaker but was swept away from that path when a French mesmerist named Charles Poyen came to town. By the time Eddy (then Mrs. Patterson) visited him, the Tribune noted, Quimby “had passed from the mere mesmeric treatment to conversing with his patients and persuading them their sickness was a delusion … he not only helped [Mrs. Patterson] but convinced her he was a mediator between her and God. She asked him to teach her the principles of [his] philosophy and he gave her his notes.”
Quimby was a regional celebrity, whose ideas can be pieced together from those notes and local newspapers. “His theory is that the mind gives immediate form to the animal spirit, and that the animal spirit gives form to the body as soon as the less plastic elements of the body are able to assume that form,” according to the Bangor Jeffersonian in 1857. “He says that in every disease the animal spirit or spiritual form, is somewhat disconnected from the body, and that it imparts to him all its grief and the cause of it, which may have been mental trouble or shock to the body, as over fatigue, excessive cold or heat. This impresses the mind on the body, and the mind, reacting on the body, produces disease. With this spirit form Dr. Quimby converses and endeavors to win it away from its grief and when he has succeeded in doing so it disappears and reunites with the body.” Mrs. Patterson became an acolyte of Quimby’s, pronouncing herself cured in numerous newspaper articles, eventually taking his ideas and running with them as she became Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.
En route to respectability as a religious leader in the post–Civil War years, Eddy distanced herself from Quimby and the increasingly disreputable practice of animal magnetism—which still depended on the magnetizer touching and stroking the patient, inducing “crisis” followed by calm. The practice sustained an erotic charge throughout. “I denounced it after a few of my first students rubbed the heads of their patients and the immorality of one student opened my eyes to the horrors possible in animal magnetism,” she said. Eddy herself was accused of employing “malicious animal magnetism” by assembling her pupils to direct “evil thoughts” against discontented former followers. Meanwhile, a follower of Eddy’s sued the malcontents for using malicious animal magnetism against the founder herself. Apparently animal magnetism, like animal spirits, embodied morally neutral energy that could be used for good or evil. Eddy ultimately found that she was better off deploying the vaguer language of Spirit or God.
Part of the pattern of post–Civil War intellectual life was the emergence of challenges to vitalism in new monistic forms. While Eddy eventually claimed there was nothing but mind, some scientists began to assert that there was nothing but body. They challenged the very notion of a vital principle. “Is Vitality Vital?” Scientific American asked in 1874. Surveying various failed attempts to locate a physical source for vitality, the author concluded, “As indicating a force inherent to and wholly peculiar to living matter, something sui generis, so to speak, [the term ‘vitality’] is evidently doomed.” This assertion marked the beginning of a positivist turn, toward the insistence that vitality was immeasurable and therefore no longer deserved any status as a scientific term.
The positivist view acquired legitimacy in many scientific circles after the Civil War, but the vernacular philosophy of vitalism persisted. Animal spirits continued to flow in new and sometimes surprising directions. Though no one could have known it in the 1870s, times were coming when fundamental moral values would be reconfigured and familiar hierarchies overturned. And animal spirits would play a crucial role in that transformation.
5The Reconfiguration of Value
DURING THE POST–CIVIL WAR decades, the idea of animal spirits floated in a sea of contradictory cultural currents. One of the strongest was the increasing authority of rationalist and dualist hierarchies, often underwritten by positivist science. What were considered enlightened views of human nature shifted away from a Christian emphasis on a common soul of man, made in the image and likeness of God—to rigid taxonomies based on supposedly inherent physical traits, above all, race. This was the pattern identified by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno as the dialectic of Enlightenment: rational methods could be put in the service of irrational ideologies and prejudices; separation from inherited tradition could create new forms of coercion. Scientific racism reinforced hierarchical distinctions between animality and humanity, wildness and civilization, by assuming they were rooted in irrefutable observation and measurement. Positivist certainty reasserted a mechanistic vision of the nonhuman world and an explicit rejection of vitalism.
The rise of positivism was evident in the transformation of biological thought. By the beginning of the twentieth century, biologists had turned their science into a mechanistic, antihistorical enterprise. Evolution was compatible with vitalism, but natural selection as a mechanism for evolution was not—at least not the way it was conceived in the early twentieth century, when biologists generally accepted the popularizers’ conflation of natural selection with “survival of the fittest,” defining “fitness” as the organism’s ability to pass on its genes to the next generation.
As Charles Darwin was remade into a mechanist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck became a joke: a romantic vitalist strawman to contrast with a real scientist. The German biologist August Weismann epitomized the new attitude. He attacked a caricature of Lamarck by ridiculing the inheritance of accidental deformations (severed tails, twisted limbs, etc.) and ignoring the fundamental point of agreement between Lamarck and Darwin: that the habits and circumstances of species reshape their organisms over time. Weismann debunked purposefulness in nature even as he insisted that variations were not random but directed by utility and movement toward greater fitness. This is the Providentialist version of Darwinism that has persisted to our own time.
Thus were the ideas of Providence and progress married to the strict adaptationist program, which became the core of the twentieth-century neo-Darwinian synthesis. Weismann helped shape that synthesis by creating the “Weismann Barrier” between inheritable traits in what he called the genetic “germ plasm” and non-inheritable characteristics acquired by the body during the course of its life—a muscular physique, for example. This was an idea that appealed to modern geneticists like James Watson and Francis Crick: for them, it meant that bodily changes could not inscribe themselves in DNA. This anti-Lamarckian version of heredity became conventional wisdom, based on the (allegedly) complete inability of the organism to influence genetic material passed on to the next generation. The positivist version of Darwinian evolution offered a potent argument for pushing the vitalist tradition toward the margins of biological thought—which in fact is what happened during the twentieth century, though recent developments suggest that a more complex and dynamic understanding of genetics is beginning to emerge.
Despite the triumph of positivism among professional biologists, in broader vernacular discourse vitalist assumptions survived and flourished. Explaining their resilience requires surveying the intellectual landscape that lay outside the laboratory, especially a new and widespread fascination with the human body and how it worked. The positivist focus on the physical basis of identity had unintended subversive consequences. Pop-science body-talk (“The Body as an Engine,” etc.) reinforced a wider and more self-conscious awareness of physical existence among urban populations, for whom the flesh became something to be tended to as carefully as the spirit had once been. Within the respectable bourgeoisie in general as well as a growing army of clerks and “typewriters,” bodily experience, direct engagement with the natural world, became less of a taken-for-granted part of everyday life. Sedentary occupations spread. The swivel away from the body at work provoked an embrace of it at play. Among the white-collar classes in particular, the decades following the Civil War were characterized by a growing awareness of bodily needs, desires, and pleasures—as well as a greater emphasis on the sheer physicality of health, beauty, masculinity, and femininity.
This secular resurrection of the body underwrote a reassertion of its claims against those of soul or mind. Devotees of bodily health implicitly but increasingly challenged hierarchical dualities of body and soul, spirit and matter. In Europe, body-worship blended with imperial and eventually fascist agendas for revitalization; in the United States, it reinforced a belated bid for overseas empire and a cult of the strenuous life. On both sides of the Atlantic, the new respect for the body altered personal as well as political life. Middle-class men and women, freed from farmwork but often tied to office routine six days a week, began to hop on bicycles by day and go dancing by night; their more privileged contemporaries donned tennis togs, football uniforms, or boxing gloves. A mania for sport swept the middle and upper classes.
Yet this insistent physicality had a paradoxical side effect: it helped sustain and refashion the claims of spirit. Behind the fascination with the body and what it could do lay a deeper fascination with the invisible force that enabled it to do anything at all—the vital principle at the core of human life, and indeed all life. The sources of bodily vigor were physical, to be sure (diet, exercise, temperance), but they retained a mental dimension as well. Alongside the new fascination with the strengths of the body there was a new fascination with the strengths of the mind, or at least an intensifying focus on certain mental forces that could influence physical life—“positive thinking,” as it came to be called.
THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY
As early as 1868, journalists were congratulating Americans for pursuing a healthy way of life. The Philadelphia Telegraph observed that for twenty-five years “a gradual and sure revival of the physical and sensuous, and demolition of the ascetic, the coarse, and the vulgar” had been occurring. The lumping of the ascetic with the coarse and vulgar was a characteristic Protestant rhetorical move, a disdaining of Catholic extremes of ascetic self-denial and aesthetic self-indulgence in favor of physical and spiritual moderation. These assumptions were symptomatic: the secular resurrection of the body was very much a product of changes in urban Protestant practice. In the cities, the Telegraph noted, churches had not only learned to tolerate the fine arts; they had transformed themselves “from theological barns into reformatory parlors” that encouraged well-being in this world as well as salvation in the next. Churches added reading groups but also gyms: medicine balls, dumbbells, and “Indian clubs” became standard equipment for urban pastorates eager to become centers of muscular Christianity.
The new attention to this-worldly wellness had benefited both sexes, but especially “American ladies,” who had learned “that waspish intellectuality and a swelling forehead pale with an overload of knowledge, cannot compensate for the absence of a healthy bust, a fine flow of animal spirits, lungs that can sing, and limbs that can walk.” As Calvinism loosened its demands on the mind, the body could break free from endless self-scrutiny to unselfconscious exuberance.
Still, there were threats to this healthy program, no longer from churches but from everyday business life. No assessment of “the way we live now” in the post–Civil War era was complete without a gesture toward the pervasiveness of the commercial spirit—which was frequently assumed to be at odds with bodily health, especially for businessmen themselves. In the midst of another Wall Street panic in October 1873, the Troy (Mo.) Herald quoted a local lecturer, Professor W. T. Thurmond: “The American people are great utilitarians. The question ‘will it pay?’ is ever uppermost,” he said. “A monomania seems to exist on the subject of money.” The result was frenetic activity everywhere: “The animal spirits of our people are constantly effervescing, running over. There is abundant action. Perhaps deeper study, more thought, would give greater consistency and permanency to our free institutions.” Precious animal spirits were effervescing into thin air, the mere exhaust from the perpetual-motion machine of Americans’ monomaniacal money lust.
The consequence was a joyless way of life, some charged, as they sharpened the antebellum critique of commerce to suit the intensified pace of industrial and financial life after the war. “Fun, mirth, real animal spirits are dead amongst us,” the English writer Henry Barton Baker complained in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly in 1878 (after five years of economic depression), “no brightness remains in us, and we are a mere agglomeration of negatives.” This nullity was epitomized in “the old-young man of the present day, with his cynicism, his intense realism which strips the very flesh off humanity and gloats on its skeleton, who believes in nothing save himself, and that the whole duty of man is summed up in Iago’s creed: ‘put money in thy purse.’” Such callow striplings “have not the vices of their great-grandfathers, but nor have they their virtues; they do not publicly sin against the proprieties, but neither do they ever sin against their own interests.” The benign liberal notion of self-interest had shrunk to fit a narrow utilitarian creed focused entirely on individual gain; bonds of sympathy loosened as tradesmen took to “trading in the air.” Or so some observers feared.
Educators, clergymen, and other moralists increasingly came to believe that the soul sickness induced by money mania was accompanied by bodily sickness as well. The furtive, bloodshot eyes and sallow skin of the speculator were outward and visible signs of the moral malady within. Body and soul, in this emerging view, were interdependent—though over time, body became more immediate and insistent in its claims. Protestant ministers democratized and Americanized the muscular Christianity of the Anglican clergyman Charles Kingsley, spreading it from the playing fields of Eton to the backstreets of the Lower East Side in organizations like the Young Men’s (and eventually Young Women’s) Christian Association. The celebration of physical energy brought renewed recognition of the role of animal spirits in business success; bodily vigor could animate entrepreneurial as well as military adventures. A vitalist strain could be absorbed into the emerging America of imperial ambition, periodic panic, and unprecedented concentration of wealth. Body and mind could be merged, as body and soul had been.
A key result of that emerging cultural synthesis would be the revitalization of elite white men. Whether its idiom was religious or secular, the resurrection of the body focused at first on the character formation of the male upper class. Football, baseball, and other team sports blossomed on campus, as did calisthenics and other exercise regimens. In 1890, the Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton told readers of Harper’s: “The dependence of health and vigor of mind upon health and vigor of body is now the fundamental proposition in every rational scheme of education.” There was no greater difference between the student life of today and that of the preceding generation, Norton said, than the attention given to care of the body—most dramatically revealed in the centrality of sports and the “strong feelings” aroused by them. Five years later, Harvard’s president Charles William Eliot was celebrating “the pleasures of animal existence” for the Independent magazine: “It must be admitted that men are, in this life, animals through and through, whatever else they may be.” This was certainly evident in the young men of Harvard. Yet there was still the necessity of maturation beyond the strictly animal stage, Eliot later observed: “It is a happy thing to have in youth what are called animal spirits—a very descriptive phrase; but animal spirits do not last even in animals; they belong to the kitten or puppy stage.”
What became the prevailing wisdom was articulated by Henry Wade Rogers, the president of Northwestern University, in 1893. The decades since the war, he said, had seen the transformation of American students from young hooligans and loutish pranksters into “well-behaved men and women”; this was in part because “students work off their excess of animal spirits on the athletic field and in the gymnasium.” Despite the argument that college sports promoted campus rowdyism, the collegiate athletic scene was generally held to be as benignly transformative as the bicycle, which, as The San Francisco Call predicted in 1896, might even “cure our American nervousness”—the mysterious lassitude and “lack of nerve force” that the neurologist George Miller Beard had christened “neurasthenia” in 1880 and that had plagued “brain workers” for decades. Physical regeneration might well breed psychic and even moral regeneration, promoting “a desirable step in the evolution and dignity of our National temperament,” the Call concluded.
The most effective instruments of regeneration were the Protestant voluntary associations, led by the YMCA. Spurning denominational controversy and didactic entreaties, they met the malleable youth on his own turf: his pagan joy in his own bodily energy. As a writer in The Outlook observed in 1905: “The ordinary youth exhibits his paganism most obviously by his animal spirits. The association, instead of trying to suppress his paganism, “sets to work to direct it” in the gymnasium. That building “writes in stone and wood, brick and steel, an article of [the association’s] distinctive creed: ‘we believe in the body.’” The consequence of this belief was nothing less than “a new interpretation of Christianity … which concerns not merely what a man calls his soul, but his whole life.” Muscular Christianity, it turned out, was far more than just another effort to reform errant boys—girls soon became part of its agenda too—and far more than merely a shrewd adaptation of Protestant values to a secular, urban environment. It involved a fundamental reordering of priorities and beliefs.
The resurrection of the body was part of a broad challenge to hierarchical binaries in general: civilization and wildness, work and play. In these stirrings we see the beginnings of a reconfiguration of value (if not quite the kind of seismic shift Nietzsche referred to as a transvaluation of value). It involved a half-conscious, fitfully articulated revaluation of those “others” outside the fraternity of respectable white males: animals, children, women, dark-skinned people, even (sometimes) criminals. This did not mean admission to full equality, but rather admiration for what respectable white males feared they lacked: animal spirits.
At bottom the reconfiguration of value involved a revaluation of animal life—and particularly wild animal life, the kind civilized people were supposed to tame. It is not coincidental that the “wild card” was introduced into poker by Americans at about the same time—the 1870s and after—that wildness in nature was being systematically tamed and paradoxically revalued as something precious that was about to disappear. In poker, the wild card could be whatever the player who was dealt it wanted it to be to strengthen his hand; it was not a disruptive force to be controlled (like other forms of wildness) but an escape hatch from the constraints posed by the regular rules—a portal of entry into a realm of pure potential, where anything could happen. It would be hard to find a more appropriate symbol for an era when Americans were beginning to feel their sense of boundlessness constrained by new forms of organization, even as they glimpsed new vistas of limitless possibility.
In revaluing wildness, the wild card recast the qualities traditionally associated with brute creation—animal passion, animal instinct, animality in general. Before the late nineteenth century, British Victorians and their American contemporaries used the animal world as a screen for projecting conventional values—against wildness, for domesticity, for obedience. But by the 1880s and ’90s, the meanings of animality became significantly more complex, portending what ultimately became a decisive shift in cultural values. This required the dismantling of what, for a long time, had seemed to be common sense.
THE COMPLICATION OF ANIMALITY
The mid-Victorian world picture was deceptively simple. As the historian Harriet Ritvo observed some years ago, the notion of an animal kingdom created an imaginary domestic commonwealth where the best animals were industrious and docile, and the worst declined to serve or even challenged human supremacy. The impact of Darwin on this scheme was minimal. In The Descent of Man (1871), he made what one might have thought a subversive claim: “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties.” Yet Anglo-Americans, even those who considered themselves Darwinians, continued to assume human superiority. Indeed, in the wake of Darwin’s discoveries, nonbelievers found themselves embracing human centrality even more tightly. With God gone, the source of human preeminence lay within. As Ritvo writes: “Ironically, by becoming animals, humans appropriated some attributes formerly reserved for the deity”—the capacity, for example, to become the unmoved mover, the sole source of development in the universe. The divinization of the human fired the Promethean vision of technological progress as expanding mastery over the earth and its creatures. There was little room in this scheme for an unpredictable, animated universe. Positivistic science demanded a predictable, mechanistic one, where wildness was firmly under the control of human beings with the requisite expertise.
At about the same time that Scientific American was declaring the idea of an autonomous vital principle “doomed,” Thomas Henry Huxley, the positivist apostle of Darwinism, was reasserting the Cartesian view of the “lower animals” on an American lecture tour. “Are Animals Automatons?” was the question at issue. Huxley acknowledged the changes in terminology between Cartesian philosophy and modern neurology: “Descartes said that the animal spirits were stored up in the brain, and flowed out from the motor nerve. We say that a molecular change takes place in the brain that is propagated along the motor nerve.” But the fundamental Cartesian assumptions of automaticity, he believed, remained sound with respect to animals. As Huxley said: “though they feel as we do, yet their actions are the results of their physical organization … they are machines, one part of which (the nervous system) not only sets the rest in motion, and co-ordinates its movements in relation with changes in surrounding bodies, but is provided with special apparatus, the function of which is the calling into existence of those states of consciousness which are termed sensations, emotions, and ideas.” This “generally accepted view,” Huxley summed up, “is the best expression of the facts at present known.”
Yet he refused to grant humans an absolute separation from the rest of the animal kingdom. Our consciousness is just as mechanically based as theirs, Huxley insisted, and “our mental conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness of the changes which take place automatically in the organism; and that, to take an extreme illustration, the feeling we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of that act. We are conscious automata.” So in the end, Huxley affirmed both wide separation and deep attachment between animals and humans: “the brutes, though they may not possess our intensity of consciousness, and though, from the absence of language, they can have no trains of thoughts, but only trains of feelings, yet have a consciousness which, more or less distinctly, foreshadows our own.”
Huxley’s admission that “they feel as we do” suggested the emergence of an inchoate challenge to human-centered hierarchy. Rising concern about cruelty to animals was rooted not only in Victorian sentiment but also in empirical observation that suggested animals’ behavior was not as easily explained as Huxley thought. Among the observers was Charles Darwin himself, who wrote “never use the words higher or lower” in the margins of his copy of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and who resisted efforts to reduce all animal behavior to a reductive scheme of natural selection. In 1883, he noted that some animal instincts “one can hardly avoid looking at as mere tricks, and sometimes as play: an Abyssinian pigeon when fired at, plunges down so as to almost touch the sportsman, then mounts to an immoderate height; the bizcacha (Lagostumus) [a South American rodent] almost invariably collects all sorts of rubbish, bones, stones, dry dung &c, near its burrow.” Darwin admitted that there were many self-destructive or apparently pointless “instincts,” which could be explained by natural selection only if they were reduced to “the grossest utilitarianism.” But from Darwin’s time down to the present, most of his popularizers have proven to be gross utilitarians. Darwin could have retranslated Marx’s statement “Je ne suis pas un Marxiste” to say: “I am not a Darwinist.”
Darwin and some of his contemporaries were less formulaic and more circumspect about explaining animal behavior than most of their successors have been, down to the present. As early as 1869, in the North American Review, George Cary satirized a mechanistic understanding of “the mental faculties of brutes” by reducing it to absurdity. A dog cannot wag its own tail to show satisfaction when his master holds up a piece of meat, he wrote, “for satisfaction is an attribute of mind, and if a dog may experience this emotion, where is there any limit to his possible emotions? Neither can the dog really know that it is meat which his master is offering him, or that his master is offering him anything at all, or in fact that he has any master, or that there is any such thing as a man or a dog; for to know is to have a mind, and who shall fix the possible limits of human development?” The tone of impatience would persist into subsequent decades, as thoughtful people remained unconvinced by positivism’s parsimonious view of mental life.
Those who took appearances seriously, and looked carefully at animals, were often astonished at what they saw. Alongside the positivist insistence on the automaticity of animal behavior, a newer tendency emerged to see animals as an idealized Other—a spontaneous, vital counterpoint to humans’ neurotic anxieties, petty rivalries, and thoughtless cruelty. “The pride and beauty of a brute are never based on the enduring misery of another brute,” wrote the English artist and essayist Philip Gilbert Hamerton in Chapters on Animals (1877). “The brute creation has its diseases, but on the whole it is astonishingly healthy. It is full of an amazing vitality” that humans might well ponder. “The gladness that we seek, how often vainly, in all artificial stimulants … the brute finds in the free coursing of his own uncontaminated blood. Our nervous miseries, our brain-exhaustion, are unknown to him … Human happiness may be deeper, but it is never, after earliest infancy, so free from all shadow of sadness or regret.” Animals’ unshadowed happiness was of a piece with “their absolute incapacity for sharing our higher intellectual vitality.” They were unlike us in fundamental ways, Hamerton insisted, and he drove the point home by further insisting that “none of us can imagine the feelings of a tiger when his jaws are bathed in blood and he tears the quivering flesh.”
To dismiss such creatures as automata was arrogant, but it was equally arrogant to assume that we could get inside their heads and experience the world as they did. “This impossibility of knowing the real sensations of animals—and the sensations are the life—stands like an inaccessible and immovable rock right in the pathway of our studies,” Hamerton wrote, admitting that “it is much easier to imagine the sensations of a farmer than those of his horse. The main difficulty in conceiving the mental states of animals is, that the moment we think of them as human we are lost.” We could not pretend to cross the unbridgeable gulf between species.
Still humans kept making the effort. As the Westminster Review observed in 1880, the discoveries of Darwin raised the question “Do the lower animals, in sharing with man vitality and all its accompaniments pain, disease, and death, share with him also that indefinable unknown quality or essence denominated mind?” To be sure, animals’ mental presence was elusive by comparison with their physical presence—especially the big ones. The French explorer Paul Du Chaillu said there was “no grander sight in nature than an infuriated or mischievous elephant dashing through the forest,” The Salt Lake Herald reported in 1883, then paused to ponder: “Compared with such mountains of flesh, how utterly helpless we would be, but for the superior intelligence which makes us monarchs of all we survey!” The last phrase was almost self-parodically strained and unconvincing. It was not at all clear why puny man deserved the monarchical authority with which he had crowned himself.
Smaller animals also raised questions of kinship, if not kingship. Their appeal was largely but not entirely physical—they were energetic, playful, and full of animal spirits. As the Wichita Daily Eagle observed in 1887, just as the fox terrier was always readier for a walk than his master, “throughout the animal world we notice that delight in the use of muscle and limb, which in man scarcely survives his majority, which in them lasts far into maturity.” This was why “we apply the phrase ‘animal spirits’ to a boy who is full of life and energy and who enjoys a run over the hills.” Animals and children were thought to share the same spontaneous joy in physical existence; and observations of their play could be used to challenge positivist assumptions. Few qualities—one would think—could have been further from automaticity than spontaneity.
Spontaneity was kin to unpredictability and incongruity, and the consensus view held that all were components of good humor. This was a big reason that humans kept pets, who had long provided companionship (and entertainment) for people, on farms and in cities. By the 1890s the neurasthenia epidemic made them even more valuable as a tonic for nervous invalids. So Olive Thorne Miller, an author and lecturer on birds, wrote in Our Home Pets. Antic monkeys, saucy parrots, frisky squirrels were all skillful entertainers, dispellers of depression. “Keep the doctor and the drugs in the background,” Miller advised, “abolish sighs and long faces, bring in the pets, and make trial of the cheerful thought cure.”
While invalids were adapting pets to new therapeutic purposes, zoologists, ethnologists, and their popularizers continued to dismantle the barrier between human and animal intelligence. “The more exact and extended our knowledge of animal intelligence becomes, the more remarkable does its resemblance to human intelligence appear,” wrote Edward Payson Evans in 1898. (Evans was a professor of German literature and journalist who wrote frequently on popular science.) “The attempt to discriminate between them by referring all operations of the former to instinct and all operations of the latter to reason is now generally abandoned,” he acknowledged. But while old dualities of mind and matter were crumbling, one side or the other still seemed to be granted causal priority. Those with positivist inclinations, including Evans, came down on the side of mechanical determinism—the tyranny of biological and economic circumstances over conscious agency. “If we could trace all the complex incitements and impulses which lead the assassin to lift his arm and strike the fatal blow, we should doubtless find the necessity of the action as absolute and inevitable as the movement by which the decapitated frog raises its leg to scratch an irritative drop of nitric acid from its side,” Evans wrote. Prenatal influences and hereditary tendencies, social and moral environment, and early education combine to form a secular doctrine of predestination “that loses nothing of the awful character by being transferred from the province of theology to that of physiology.” From this view, humans and animals alike were caught in the same net.
While Evans’s determinism avoided the Cartesian fetish of human uniqueness, it reduced humans and animals alike to mere automata. This was too bleak for most Americans, who either clung to religious or secular claims of human superiority, or became convinced that animal consciousness—like the human version—was more than a matter of mere brain chemistry. Among those who held that conviction, popular nature writers took the lead. Along with a lot of precise observation they sometimes embraced anthropomorphism, provoking the ire of John Burroughs (perhaps the most popular nature writer of all) and his friend Theodore Roosevelt. That manly pair maintained an ethos of mastery, dismissing the devotees of animal consciousness as mere sentimental “nature fakers” who falsely projected human traits onto nonhuman creatures.
Recent developments have superseded their hard-nosed stance. Among contemporary scientists studying animal behavior, anthropomorphism is making a modest comeback, as research reveals the complexity of nonhuman consciousness. No serious researcher wants to project human traits onto animals, but it is no longer taboo to use human experience as a guide to what animal experience might be. The “nature fakers” now look as scientific as the manly men.
Yet not all nature writers were given to anthropomorphic habits of mind. On the contrary: some embraced the trope of the idealized Other. For them, animals were fascinating and admirable precisely in the ways that they differed from humans.
The classic statement of this perspective was Whitman’s:
I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals … they are so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied … not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago.…
Despite the all-embracing humanism in so much of his work, in this passage Whitman was the consummate anti-humanist outsider, anticipating Modernists like Robinson Jeffers. Other critics of humanity included themselves in their critique. In School of the Woods (1902), the Congregational minister William Long—one of Burroughs’s and Roosevelt’s chief targets—noticed “a splendid thing about all great creatures, even the fiercest of them: they are never cruel … When their needs are satisfied there is truce which they never break. They live at peace with all things, small and great, and in their dumb unconscious way, answer to the deep harmony of the world, which underlies all its superficial discords, as the music of the sea is never heard till one moves far away from the uproar along the shore.” At some point in his youthful wanderings he realized, Long wrote, “I had never yet met an unhappy bird or animal. Nor have I ever met one, before or since, in whom the dominant note was not gladness of living … never a one, great or small … to whom life did not seem to offer a brimming cup, and who did not, even in times of danger and want, rejoice in his powers and live gladly, with an utter absence of that worry and anxiety which make a wreck of our human life.”
Like Hamerton, decades before, Long was a nervous Anglo-American imagining animal consciousness as a worry-free alternative to an anxious way of life. Yet it was only a short step from a mind full of “gladness of living” to a nearly empty vessel. As Long wrote, “the animal has no great mentality … and no imagination whatever to bother him. Your Christian Science friend would find him a slippery subject, smooth and difficult as the dome of the statehouse to get a grip upon.” Long’s imaginary animal felt no emotional pain because he could not, and rejoiced in his powers because he could not do otherwise. Humans could envy his worry-free existence, but not emulate it.
Projecting too much happiness (or anything else) into an animal’s consciousness was a risky business. Far safer, perhaps, to stay with observation and inference—though even here the specter of nature fakery loomed. As Charles Cornish, a classics teacher at St. Paul’s School in London, wrote in Animals at Work and Play (1904), “they do, in fact, share with ourselves many of the pleasant emotions excited by sweet smells and sounds, not for what they may suggest but for their own sake, and enjoy amusements, exercise, and emulation, imagination, love of beauty, pride in accomplishments, ‘hobbies’—such as the mania for collecting art treasures, love of society, family pride, and personal affection.” Burroughs and Roosevelt would no doubt be rolling their eyes, but one thinks of the social rituals of dolphins and whales and elephants, or the playfulness of Darwin’s bizcacha and Abyssinian pigeon, and the many other sorts of animal behavior that elude reduction to strict adaptationist explanations.
Long himself returned to “the question of animal reason” in Harper’s in 1905, and this time he directly challenged the Cartesian breach between human and animal consciousness. He began by referring to his own recurring experience, wrapping it in Romantic conventions. On awakening to the sound of the robin’s sweet song, he feels “the simple gladness of being alive.” “That first moment is like a little child’s whole life”—thoughts and sense impressions appear, disappear, vanish again. Amid these fitful currents of thought and feeling, “it would be a very wise man—and he has not yet appeared—who would draw the line and say: ‘This is thought, and that is no thought. This belongs to man alone, and that to the man and the robin.’” But Long wanted to do more than merely blur the boundaries between man and robin. He had a larger argument to make, and it pivoted on the recognition that consciousness was neither as straightforward nor as unified as reductionist psychology taught.
The key to this claim was the emergence of the concept of the unconscious mind, and of psychoanalysis as an accepted part of American public discourse. The Americanization of the unconscious turned it from a roiling cauldron of aggressive and erotic impulses to a benign reservoir of high-minded energy. The key thinkers in this transformation, apart from popularizing positive thinkers, were psychoanalysts such as James Jackson Putnam, who sought to build a bridge between religion and psychic science with secular idealism.
This was where Long was coming from, but he took the Americanized unconscious (which Americans often called the subconscious) in unfamiliar directions, toward the forging of another link between human and animal minds. “If the subconscious self be indeed a subtle and mysterious manifestation of mind on its highest levels, then [we] are not moved far away but brought nearer to the animal mind, which seems at times to have knowledge outside the realm of senses, which receives warnings and premonitions of danger, and which communicates with its fellows by silent, telepathic impulses.” The existence of a “subconscious self” in humans opened up connections of hitherto unexplored complexity between human and animal minds. One conclusion was clear: “instinct is not the animal, and reason not the man.” The inherited dualities no longer held; nor did the dismissal of animals as mere machines. “With the animal’s instinct are other things that we must consider—something which looks like will, and emotions of love, fear, courage, and self-denial, which are undeniably like those in our own hearts, however much they differ in degree. Since we share so much in common of the physical and emotional life, it is hardly more than to be expected that the animal himself, apart from his instinct, should share something of our rational faculties.”
The phrase “looks like” was critical. It anticipated the current revival of anthropomorphism as a stance for perceiving animals—one that recognizes the distance between us and them even as it tries to understand certain kinds of behavior with a sympathetic imagination. The perspective is provisional; we know what the behavior looks like but not necessarily what it actually is. And we may never know. This point of view was one that many Americans found reasonable by the early twentieth century.
The revaluation of animal consciousness betokened the spread of dawning doubts into a reconfiguration of value. The Anglophone imperial gaze had depended on conventional assumptions of hierarchy, often ratified by scientific racism, to maintain the gazer’s sense of mastery over various subaltern groups. But by the 1880s and ’90s, even as white domination was being consolidated in the extermination of Native Americans, the establishment of Jim Crow, and the acquisition of overseas empire, the imperial gaze had begun to turn back in on itself, revealing troubling truths about the gazer. He was soft, effete, morbidly self-conscious, perhaps in need of the very qualities possessed by the allegedly inferior subaltern—energy and spontaneity, physical grace and force. As Americans moved from the nineteenth century toward the twentieth, conventional hierarchies of value were shaken and familiar boundaries blurred, as supposedly primitive humans were assumed to share traits with children and animals. What they all had most in common was an abundance of animal spirits, which the “overcivilized” imperialist often lacked. Elite white men sought to extract the imaginary secrets of subaltern vitality, without ever relaxing their rule. Primitivist fantasy served the purposes of imperial domination. “Imperial primitivism” can serve as a shorthand term for this cultural mind-set.
Behind imperial primitivism lay a muddle of reconfigured hierarchies. The rise of respect for animal consciousness combined with widespread racist assumptions to place beasts on a par with “primitive” humans. “It is an arbitrary line which separates the intellect of animals from that of men,” the prominent Boston surgeon Henry Jacob Bigelow announced in 1900. “There can be little doubt that an intelligent dog has at least the same thoughts, emotions, and suffering under vivisection as a Bushman or a Digger Indian would experience, and if the humanity which would shudder at the vivisection of a being with human speech and human features is callous to the vivisection of an animal without them, the friend of the animal should go to his assistance.” Kindness to animals was more than mere sentiment, Bigelow suggested; it was rooted in the recognition that pain was experienced by all sentient creatures, whatever their race or species.
Besides their overflowing vitality and their capacity to feel pain, animals and subaltern races were alleged to have other qualities in common as well. “Bird music” resembled “the music of primitive man,” wrote E. P. Evans in Popular Science Monthly in 1893, in that both lacked harmony. “If the harmony or concord of sweet sounds, as distinguished from melody or the simple suggestion of sweet sounds, does not enter into bird music, the same may be said of the music of primitive man and of all early nations. Savages, like feathered songsters, sing in unison, but not in accord.” The similarities extended beyond aesthetic matters into what might even be called religious sentiments. “The terror of the dog hurt by the stick was out of all proportion to the pain inflicted, and arose solely from the fact that it was produced by a mysterious cause [the stick]; it was fear intensified by the intervention of a ghostly element, and thus working on the imagination it assumed the nature of religious awe. The case is analogous to that of a big, burly, brutal savage trembling before a rude stock or stone, or a Neapolitan bandit cowering before an image of the Virgin or kissing devoutly the feet of a crucifix,” Evans wrote. From the modern perspective, animals and primitives shared the same sort of superstitious fears.
References to animal spirits defined but also complicated familiar boundaries—between humans and animals, adults and children, boys and girls, blacks and whites, street urchins and college boys. In keeping with the popular notion that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (the development of the individual recapitulates the development of the human race), children increasingly were seen as little savages whose primitive impulses needed to be tolerated and even encouraged in order for them to achieve full adulthood. Erstwhile savages, meanwhile, were increasingly admired for their childlike spontaneity and exuberance. Primitivist currents flowed in multiple directions, disturbing the dualist hierarchies though not destroying them. And beneath the flurry of primitivism lay a primal fascination with force, channeled and contained by economic, cultural, and political structures—the shifting institutional contours of public life.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FORCE
During the immediate post–Civil War years, the Republican Party quickly began transforming itself from the party of emancipation to the party of big business. Abandoning freed blacks to the mercy of their former masters, they joined their white southern counterparts in promoting the exclusion of African Americans from U.S. public life. The white male electorate that remained in northern cities was increasingly composed of working-class immigrants exposed to the wiles of urban machines run by barely literate, corrupt bosses. Established Anglo-Saxon cultural elites fretted about the future of democracy, and proposed restricting the franchise to the literate minority (as white disenfranchisers had claimed to do in the South).
Meanwhile, electoral mass politics came into its own as an arena for animal spirits. Audiences could vent them in riotous demonstrations; politicians could embody, evoke, and manipulate them in their audiences. Partisan fury unleashed mob scenes that might well terrify contemporary Americans. In June 1880 the Washington Star published “Chicago! The Great Convention.” The convention in question was the Republican Party’s national quadrennial meeting; its task was to nominate presidential and vice-presidential candidates. The party was torn by factional disputes between supporters of President Grant, war hero and two-term chief executive, and backers of James G. Blaine, a loyal party regular who was known as the “Continental Liar from the State of Maine” to his detractors. One might not think that mere intraparty factional disputes could arouse such fury, but (the Star reported): “The adherents of both the renowned candidates vied with each other in roaring like wild bulls, or … an immense band of wild Indians sounding their ferocious war whoops at a gigantic scalp dance … It was bedlam, and beyond bedlam.”
The specter of mob madness was intensified by lurches in the business cycle, which persisted with broader and deeper social consequences. The Gilded Age was bracketed by the Panics of 1873 and 1893; years of depression followed each. As in the past, observers resorted to meteorological and medical metaphors to characterize conditions they really could not understand. Traders, investors, ordinary citizens with a little money in the bank—all gave in, as in the past, to frenzied behavior, mania, and fear. Yet there were new conditions, too. Gilded Age economic expansion depended heavily on the rapidly growing high-tech sector—the railroads. Since this was industrial capital, the contraction of credit for railroads meant reduced wages or layoffs for industrial workers, who began to form unions to protect themselves. From now on, for decades, downturns in the business cycle would renew class conflict. Capital brought state-sponsored violence to its aid; brute force became a regular tactic for the preservation of privilege.
Yet this political economy of force involved more than the assertion of superior power. The railroading of America, as Richard White has called it, was not simply about raw strength; a subtler kind of force was at play as well. The dramatic expansion of the railroads across the continent, as White shows in Railroaded, was a classic expression of trading in the air—financing railroads that had no equipment, that had laid down no tracks, that had no existence except on paper. As White describes it, the railroads’ influence on settled ways of doing business was profound—comparable to the influence of high-tech companies today. In issuing bonds and persuading investors to buy them, the railroads created a “new virtual world” that was “temptingly easy to manipulate. Numbers and words that were supposed to stand in for things could be changed and still retain their influence; news could be altered or withheld; reports could claim assets that didn’t exist and deny trouble that did exist. Altering the numbers and changing the words of this virtual world could prompt actions in the parallel universe where people paid money for bonds.” Down to and during the Civil War, most Americans extended or received credit through a system of face-to-face promissory notes, endorsed by the borrower and often by cosigner, too. But by the 1860s and ’70s the market in corporate bonds was overwhelming this world of face-to-face transactions by flooding commercial life with “millions of pieces of printed paper” that represented agreements between strangers who might be hundreds of miles apart.
This was how men who posed as captains of industry—Jay Cooke, Daniel Drew, et al.—financed the railroads’ advance across the continent. They were captains of finance, not industry. They knew how to raise money by selling bonds: Cooke’s brilliantly orchestrated campaigns financed the Union victory in the Civil War; within a few years after the Confederate surrender, Cooke and his contemporaries were deploying similar strategies to build transcontinental railroads. The difference was that war bond buyers were supporting the survival of the Union, a cause with visceral, palpable meaning to them, while railroad bond buyers were speculating on the future prospects of enterprises that barely existed, except on paper. The bonded debt of American railroads rose from $416 million in 1867 to $2.23 billion in 1874—with a pause for the Panic of 1873—to $5.055 billion in 1890. Debt was the other side of credit, and credit was as essential (and as ephemeral) as air.
Cooke’s high reputation as savior of the Union helped him attract the capital to create the Northern Pacific Railroad. The Northern Pacific purported eventually to connect Chicago with the Pacific Northwest but during its brief paper existence it ran “from nowhere to nowhere,” as Cornelius Vanderbilt acidly observed when Cooke’s venture finally crashed on September 18, 1873. This high-profile disaster could hardly have come at a worse time. Ominous clouds had been gathering over Wall Street for days.
The classic pattern of the business cycle was beginning to repeat itself. Banks had overextended credit to reckless borrowers who were unable to meet their obligations to the banks; the banks in turn, having exceeded their reserves, were unable to meet their obligations to their depositors. In what had become (at least to some perceptive observers) a familiar chain reaction, banks and major businesses fell like dominoes as mobs of angry and disappointed depositors milled helplessly in the streets. The nerve center, the originator of the mania, was the New York Stock Exchange. The day Cooke’s bank failed, stock traders had already dived into full panic mode, as an anonymous journalist recalled in his History of the Terrible Panic of 1873:
Gradually fevered blood commenced to fire the very brains of those who screamed and howled as though Pandemonium and Babel had formed an alliance, as though a bond of union had been perfected, and high carnival was to be held in their honor. Men grasped one another wildly by the arms; opposing elements jostled and screamed; white hats and memoranda books were slashed through the air by muscles not accountable for their actions; burning brains were cheered by the momentary soother of worldly ills—liquor, and as stocks fell so fell, the drooping, wearied spirits of those who had bulled and struggled in vain.
Shortly after twelve, the presiding officer arose, holding aloft a small slip of paper, and, bringing down his gavel with a vehement jerk, made this announcement: “The Firm of Jay Cooke & Co. Have Suspended!” The wrinkles on many a brow grew deeper; there was a sullen groan, then a prolonged yelling, mixed with cheers; there was whispering of white lips, and a sorrowful, frightened shaking of heads, whilst a score of panic-stricken brokers started towards the once famous banking establishment. In their mad hurry, these stumbled over grimy looking shoe-blacks and persistent news boys, who were announcing, in terms more truthful than grammatical or elegant, “The Cooke’s bank are busted!”
Cooke’s failure was one of hundreds, but his had special symbolic significance. In many minds, at least, the financial savior of the Union had turned out to be just another confidence man. This was the kind of revelation that could induce real ontological doubt. That was the nature of panics: they ripped the veils of respectability and even reality from the ordinary financial practices of the day; they showed how fortunes based on rumor and fantasy could be brought down by rumor and fear—how insubstantial the whole business could be, how founded on ephemeral emotions. The mob scene on Wall Street on September 19, 1873, made it seem as if a crowd-mind was willing itself into sustained hysteria, imagination run amuck: “Thus, while men rushed wildly from point to point—first to the Fourth National, retailing something that occurred at the Union Trust, then to the Stock Exchange, bulging with what had occurred at both banks, and back again to the banks to empty a budget of romance as to matters transpiring at the exchange—the excitement was steadily maintained,” the History reported. While ordinary depositors hovered outside banks in uncertainty and anxiety, stock traders were “rendered doubly wild by the announcement of still further failures.” In the Gold Room of the Stock Exchange building, men “danced and skipped as though practicing for a prize ballet scene”—a convulsive mirror image of the spontaneous animal spirits that animated risk-taking and underwrote prosperity.
Apart from idiosyncrasies like the ballet in the Gold Room, the Panic of 1873 reenacted many scenes resembling those in previous panics: it provoked similar frenzies and ended in a comparable long-term depression, which lasted until nearly the end of the decade. What was different this time was that the impact of the depression was hardest on industrial workers. These were mostly employees of the railroads and other industries that had been conjured into existence (albeit fitfully and imperfectly) by financiers and industrialists who created a vast web of credit—strong enough to get railroads started and sometimes even completed, but delicate as gossamer and liable to get ripped apart by rumor. When credit contracted, employers cut wages and laid off workers.
The result was that the depression of the 1870s witnessed the outbreak of full-blown class war between labor and capital. In 1877, striking railroad workers challenged the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s attempt to replace them; they burned boxcars and confronted the men armed by the company to defend scabs and destroy the union. Violence erupted from Baltimore to St. Louis, all along the line. These scenes would be repeated frequently in subsequent decades. Business downturns increasingly had catastrophic social consequences: pitched battles between workers and corporate hired guns or local police, later the national guard or state militia. Federal and state governments put themselves in the service of capital. When the invisible force of credit failed and class conflict intensified, capital had recourse to the more palpable force of state violence.
The cruder uses of force pointed to moral ambiguities at the core of vitalism. Vitality, like animal spirits, was a source of energy that could be channeled in various directions or left to flow. It was not by itself either divine or demonic. When it merged with the celebration of raw power, as it easily could, vitalist thinking acquired a Nietzschean cast. The consequences corroded familiar Christian assumptions—such as the tendency to disapprove the exploitation of the weak by the strong. As Nietzsche wrote, “life itself is essentially appropriation, harm, the overpowering of that which is foreign and weak, suppression, cruelty, the imposition of one’s own forms, annexation, and at the very least, at the very mildest, exploitation.” What Christians condemned, Nietzsche said, was simply “a consequence of the actual will to power, which is precisely the will of life.” Exploitation, on this view, was merely a mild expression of the vital principle at work in an unequal world. This sort of thinking exalted a new, amoral sense of self.
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
The amorality of vital force surfaced in the discourse surrounding certain public figures. Some were products of the emergent mass politics—“good-natured scoundrels,” as the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press called Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall in 1871. Tweed, the paper speculated, was Falstaff without the “wonderful wit and versatile intellect” of Shakespeare’s character. “Tweed has all that captivating old thief’s vulgar qualities, his dishonesty, his lechery, his obesity, his coarse animal spirits, the same disposition to laugh hoarsely as he fattened on the spoils his robber hand has won.” Yet he also possessed the “imperturbable good nature” that “seems so characteristic of all the great corrupt in history.” These were “men whose countenances always beam with magnetic jollity, whose lips are full of jests, whose hands are as open as they would wish every man’s strong box to be.” Despite their crimes, they possessed an undeniable appeal peculiar to the new landscape of urban mass politics.
And they were certainly preferable to the clerks in “That Awful State Department,” as an Ohio newspaper observed, who cultivated a vaguely mysterious manner, speaking between a whisper and what they imagined was a manly tone, and ended up failing to behave like human beings, still less men. One wanted to ask, “‘why in the name of God don’t you act like men and be yourselves?’ But that would not be diplomatic according to their pedantic notion of the way men should treat men.” Given a choice between good-natured scoundrels and tight-lipped bureaucrats, many preferred the scoundrels.
The ultimate good-natured scoundrel was Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887), pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn from the 1850s into the 1880s. By the 1920s he had become the posthumous target of Broadway wits. That was not a typical fate for a clergyman, but Beecher was not a typical clergyman. His career was ultimately clouded by scandal in the 1870s, but for decades before then he was a major public figure, an antislavery activist before the Civil War who was chosen to give the oration at Fort Sumter when the fort was recaptured and the U.S. flag raised over it at the war’s end.
The choice was not surprising: Beecher was a magnetic preacher, the supreme embodiment of animal spirits in the American ministry—and the leading Protestant vitalist. Though he never used the term “vitalism,” his temperament, ideas, and actions all embodied a vernacular version of that philosophy. His career illuminates its impact on conventional Protestant values in the mid-nineteenth century, and foreshadows its continuing influence well into the twentieth.
Beecher grew up in New England in the long shadow of his father, the dour Calvinist Lyman Beecher. Still, Henry was an ebullient boy, full of mischief and a delight to his adoring sisters. Given the chasm in temperament between him and his father, the ministry seemed a fraught career path for Henry, but he chose it. His first assignment was a Presbyterian church in the malarial swamps of Indianapolis, where he and his pregnant wife, Eunice, moved in 1839. The couple had next to no money and few possessions; Eunice and their babies were often sick; she lost most of her teeth and became prematurely gray. But Henry quickly established a regional reputation as a brilliant orator and prolific writer. Eventually word of him reached the East, and Plymouth Church offered him its prestigious pastorate.
In the fall of 1847, Beecher arrived in Brooklyn. In the emerging media market of New York City, where penny newspapers were on the rise and public lecturers increasingly in demand, he became an instant celebrity—mostly as a result of his arresting preaching style. It involved “emotional soul baring” and “‘mental dishabille,’” but nonetheless gave an overall impression of “such manliness” that more than a few in his congregation (especially the ladies) were swept away by his powerful presence.
Beecher was corpulent and tall, with long flowing hair turning to silver and heavy-lidded eyes that suggested sensuality. In most photographs his shape suggests an eggplant. Still, many women apparently found him irresistible. Autre temps, autre moeurs. His manly affect was paradoxically intensified by his rampant emotionality. “The slightest pathos will make his soul run over with tears,” observed an early admirer. In everyday conversation, the Unitarian minister Henry Bellows marveled, Beecher “boils with earnestness” and “bubbles with playfulness.” Men like Bellows, chafing under Victorian emotional constraints, found Beecher irresistible, too. He combined male and female attributes in a new version of manliness. Yet while his appeal crossed gender lines, Beecher was nothing if not a ladies’ man. Ultimately his amours (and one in particular) left him tainted with scandal.
To the extent that he had a theology, Beecher’s was liberal. For him, picayune theological debate, false proprieties, and subtle hypocrisies all obstructed the path of Jesus’s love—which was the heart of the matter, in his view, for any true Christian. A family friend, Susan Howe, reported to her brother on the new pastor’s startling success: “The Unitarians like him because he preaches good works, and calls no doctrine by its name.” When he preached at Williams College, the Brooklyn Eagle summarized his message: it was all about “the doing of good rather than the being of good.”
All of this was boilerplate liberal Protestantism, but Beecher gave it a new spin when he delivered his first paid public lecture at the Boston Mercantile Library in 1848. His title was “Amusements” and his thesis was “man was made for enjoyment.” One could see this truth, he said, in the catastrophic outcomes of attempts to suppress the human search for pleasure: “You accumulate the pent-up stream only to see it break over the dam with still more sweeping violence … You check the flow for a time, but you do not decease the fountain or divert the current to any useful purpose.” Beecher’s gushing metaphors reflected the vitalist preoccupation with free circulation—of blood, of animal spirits, of energy.
He was also acutely aware of the magnetic power he was able to exert over his audiences. Beecher on stage—he used no pulpit—inhabited a pulsating universe. As he grew more celebrated, even adored by his public, his wife, Eunice, increasingly felt a sense of bereavement when he left home every morning. “The public began to take Henry away from me,” she recalled. Soon “Beecher Boats” were crossing the East River from Manhattan every Sunday, ferrying throngs of New Yorkers to hear the young minister preach. A new Plymouth Church, enlarged by Beecher’s celebrity, opened its doors in 1850. It was designed according to its pastor’s specifications: “It is perfect,” Beecher said, “because it was built on a principle—the principle of social and personal magnetism which emanates reciprocally from a speaker and from a close throng of hearers.” A wide stage thrust out into the audience; Beecher was surrounded on three sides by his rapt congregation.
This was not just happening in church; Beecher carried his stage presence with him wherever he went. He became used to holding forth, in private conversations and in rooms full of people. On one such occasion, at the home of Chloe Beach (one of Beecher’s inamoratas), a Beecher family friend named Mary Hallock Foote got up quietly to slip away. Mrs. Beach turned and said, “Mary Hallock, sit still!” Mary was astonished. “Mr. Beecher was in and out of the house every day,” she said, “and still he was sacrosanct. To leave the room where he was in full tide of speech was incredible offense against that homage everyone was supposed to pay him.”
Beecher’s authority derived from his charismatic leadership of an affluent congregation, his articulation of longings for vitality that were shared by many Americans, and his forceful public stand against slavery. By the Civil War, he was probably better known and more admired than most politicians or other public figures. He was making at least $12,000 a year in salary paid by his congregation (around $400,000 in 2021 dollars), and significantly more than that in lecture fees and book advances. In 1850, Emerson (himself no slouch at collecting lecture fees) bestowed the ultimate compliment on Beecher by labeling him a Transcendentalist, along with the publisher Horace Greeley, the abolitionist Theodore Parker, and the educator Horace Mann—all “men who are self-trusting, self-relying, earnest,” and hence (presumably) Transcendentalists.
But Beecher was in a class by himself. Like Parker and other abolitionists, he invoked a higher law to oppose slavery; but unlike them, he also invoked it to push the envelope of Victorian sexual morality. His gospel of love was accompanied by a sanctification of desire—all conveyed in a vitalist vocabulary of psychic abundance and perpetual growth. By the Civil War’s end, he was using botanical and evolutionary metaphors for self-development. “The greatest part of a seed is mere bulk, whose office to wrap up the vital principle, or germ. It also is food for the earliest life of that germ,” he said in 1865. “So the body carries a vital principle which is hereafter to be developed; and the body is a mere vehicle and protection of this vital principle. The seed cannot give forth the new plant within it except by undergoing a chemical decomposition and absorption. Our savior teaches that this is the law of the evolution of spiritual life in man. Our physical life must expend itself, not necessarily in the immediate act of death, but by ministering to the spiritual element in us.” Even if the body was “the mere vehicle and protection of this vital principle,” it was also the necessary condition for spiritual growth. It was only a short step from this spiritualized vitalism to a more capacious version.
In 1877, Beecher summed up his vitalist views in a sermon reprinted in The Christian Union, the journal he founded and edited. He celebrated “the life force in men,” insisting that “this vitality of a Christian soul” was “a force of judgment and discretion” and that “there is no other regulating force like it … Nothing is so curative as life-power … in all Christian communities there is nothing which makes men so safe as having a life-force in them.” The association of life force with safety was a novel rhetorical move, as was Beecher’s claim that “if men need regulation it is probably because … they have been made artificial, unnatural, by too many rules. Let men have that liberty with which Christ makes the soul free.” The liberation offered by Christ released the secular, pagan power of a life force. The marriage of flesh and spirit, denied by centuries of dualists, was once again consummated by the pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn.
Beecher’s achievement reached far beyond the confines of his congregation. To audiences throughout the nation, he presented himself as a spokesman for modernity and progress, science and self-improvement, for the accumulation of wealth and the enjoyment of it. And for the status quo in power relations. During the railroad strikes of 1877, Beecher denounced the workers’ demands: “It is said that a dollar a day is not enough to live on. No, not if a man smokes and drinks beer. Water costs nothing, and a man who cannot live on bread is not fit to live.” The congregation at Plymouth, which included many members of the New York business elite, was no doubt reassured by this moral confidence game.
But even in the early days of Beecher’s celebrity, Herman Melville had his number. In The Confidence Man, Melville’s eponymous antihero (“the cosmopolitan”) assumes the persona of Frank Goodman and gets into a conversation over a bottle of wine with a saturnine Alabaman named Charlie Noble. Like Beecher, Frank Goodman surveys human nature with mild approval and dispenses upbeat aphorisms at every opportunity. People are inherently good, and established institutions reflect that goodness. He is especially annoyed by critics of the press (the instrument of Beecher’s fame). “In a word, Charlie,” Frank exclaims, “what the sovereign of England is titularly, I hold the press to be actually—Defender of the Faith!—defender of the faith in the final triumph of truth over error, metaphysics over superstition, theory over falsehood, machinery over nature, and the good man over the bad.” Confronted with the question of temperance, Frank characteristically waffles: “Conviviality is one good thing, and sobriety is another good thing. So don’t be one-sided.”
The conversation touches on the geniality induced by alcohol and good fellowship, which prompts Charlie to ask: “By the way, talking of geniality, it is much on the increase in these days, ain’t it?” “It is, and I hail the fact,” Frank replies, launching another paean to progress: “Nothing better attests the advance of the humanitarian spirit. In former and less humanitarian ages—the ages of amphitheatres and gladiators—geniality was mostly confined to the fireside and table. But in our age—the age of joint-stock companies and free-and-easies—it is with this precious quality as with precious gold in old Peru, which Pizarro found making up the scullion’s sauce-pot as the Inca’s crown. Yes, we golden boys, the moderns, have geniality everywhere—a bounty broadcast like noonlight.” All of this celebratory patter is a prelude to Frank’s hitting up Charlie for money, which Charlie refuses. Frank, undaunted, continues his wheedling ways until he manages to drive Charlie away.
Melville caught the evasions and omissions in Beecher’s creed. A Christian minister who made affluent and powerful people feel at ease with their privilege might well have some explaining to do. But no one demanded any explanation from Beecher until he was publicly accused of committing adultery with a member of his congregation. As the scandal deepened, the Congregational Rev. Joseph Twichell asked Beecher how he could stand the strain. According to Twichell, Beecher said that when he was preaching “he felt strong and dauntless,” but that when he was not “he felt—as he expressed it—‘like a humbug.’” His critics would have said this was a rare moment of self-awareness.
The scandal had been in the making for years. In 1867, according to two accounts, Beecher either raped or had consensual sex with Edna Dean Procter, a nineteen-year-old editorial assistant at The Christian Union. His intimacy with Chloe Beach, a member of his congregation and Eunice’s supposed friend, was long-standing and widely known. And his most recent and thorough biographer, Debby Applegate, explores suggestive evidence of his affairs with other women, beginning in Indianapolis. But his affair with Elizabeth Tilton was a thing unto itself. Her husband, Theodore, was Beecher’s confidant, protégé, colleague (at The Christian Union), and friend. He was also a forthright advocate of secular currents of thought for which the minister could only insinuate his support. Theodore even kept company (and eventually had sex) with Victoria Woodhull, the notorious advocate of “free love.” Lacking the legitimacy that clung to Beecher, Theodore devoted himself to speaking and writing in behalf of what he believed was cultural revolution—the end of Victorian sexual and emotional repression.
In the winter of 1866–1867, Theodore left for a four-month lecture tour, asking Henry to look out for Elizabeth; Henry of course complied. Everyone involved (except, perhaps, Henry) seemed committed to what in the twentieth century would become known as a therapeutic ethic of honesty. Elizabeth and Theodore wrote each other extravagant love letters with grandiose expressions of feeling. Elizabeth, meanwhile, vowed to be “perfectly transparent” with Theodore about her feelings for Henry, which were becoming erotically charged. At the mere mention of his name, “my cheek would flush with pleasure,” she confided. Theodore kept reading, becoming more and more suspicious and ultimately enraged. The ethic of honesty did not prove therapeutic for him.
Amid charges and countercharges, confessions and retractions of confessions, we will never know definitively what happened between Henry and Elizabeth when they were alone. But Beecher’s track record with other women, his furtive (if evasive) admissions, and his unconvincing attempts to claim that his love for Elizabeth was entirely spiritual and therefore blameless—not to mention her confessions, whatever second thoughts she may have had about them—all suggest to Applegate and other scholars that the pair almost certainly had sex. Theodore was convinced, and began to prepare a suit against Beecher for “alienation of affection.” Woodhull had caught wind of Beecher’s peccadilloes and published a tell-all series in her weekly magazine. By early spring 1874, proliferating rumors, the articles in Woodhull’s, and the prospect of a trial had begun to tell on Beecher. As Moses Coit Tyler, one of his editors at The Christian Union, reported: “I found him a gray, haggard old man … I had seldom seen eyes and a face expressing greater wretchedness. It was indeed the countenance of a great soul in desolation.”
But in the later spring and summer Beecher’s friends in the Protestant elite and more particularly in Plymouth Church began to rally around him. In April, Rev. Leonard Bacon denounced Theodore Tilton as a “knave” and a “dog” from the pulpit of the First Congregational Church in New Haven. The Plymouth congregation voted Beecher a substantial increase in salary to provide for his upcoming legal expenses, and did its best to help restore his spirits.
By late summer, Beecher was a changed man. In August 1874, Theodore Tilton sued Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn City Court, charging Beecher with willfully alienating his wife’s affection and demanding $100,000 in damages. The New York Times reported that while Tilton had brought suit against Beecher and would also sue several papers for libel, “Mr. Beecher, so say his friends, laughs at the whole affair, and is in ‘better health and spirits than ever.’ ‘He is laughing and talking all day,’ says one correspondent, ‘on the piazzas and in the parlors.’” The Times was not impressed: “We should be sorry to check this flow of animal spirits, but we are afraid Mr. Beecher may live many years without being able to undo the mischief caused in almost every circle of society by the mass of indecencies poured out by the public in recent weeks.” In December, the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer provided a follow-up on what had become a national event. Though Beecher claimed he had suffered “the torments of the damned,” the paper reported, “he has been able to preserve not only his healthful physical appearance but buoyancy of animal spirits, his equanimity in social life, his capacity for abstract and abstruse thought and research, and his ability to go through with as much work as ever and to perform it just as promptly and as well.” Such was the conduct of a “great soul,” according to Beecher’s admirers, a vital man under duress.
When the trial began, Beecher still looked great. The newspapers, in New York and elsewhere, were puzzled and censorious. Beecher’s friend Frank Moulton, who was not religious but who knew the Plymouth Church scene well, had several months before been prompted to perceptive observation by sympathy for Elizabeth Tilton: “We respected her even after her fall,” Moulton said, “because we had studied Beecher out and knew him to have a fine mind, a powerful animal nature, and between the two he has got his power. He never could have preached the sermons he has, addressing the weakness of the flesh, but for the animality which drew him into libertinism and was followed by self-reproach. The fact is he has been sifted out of the little principle that he possessed by the flattery of mankind.” The last sentence offered the crucial explanation for Beecher’s indomitable animal spirits: the sycophancy of his friends. But the focus on Beecher alone, even by someone as sympathetic to Elizabeth as Moulton, underscored her invisibility in the shadow of the Great Man.
As the trial progressed, the Tribune reported, Beecher’s “great animal spirits, which no amount of work and trouble seem to affect, except momentarily, break out more frequently of late in pleasant and sometimes facetious remarks to friends or court officers than at the beginning of the trial.” Finally the verdict—or non-verdict—was announced: the jury could not agree and after three days of deliberation was dismissed. Beecher was neither convicted nor vindicated. The Nation, whose editor E. L. Godkin had long found Beecher repellent, announced that Beecher’s inappropriate behavior could only be ascribed to a want of moral sensitiveness, which was traceable to the influence of his congregation. “That an excess of animal spirits should at certain crises injure a man in the estimation of right-minded people will probably be somewhat incredible to many of the noisy brethren of Plymouth Church, but they must make up their minds to accept the fact that their modes of expression are repulsive to a very large and respectable portion of the Christian world.”
Those “modes of expression” had been revealed during the trial through testimony from various witnesses. Observing it all was George Templeton Strong, himself a conservative Episcopalian who concluded that Plymouth Church offered glimpses of “psychological phenomena” he found difficult to understand. “Verily they are a peculiar people. They all call each other by their first names and perpetually kiss one another.” Godkin took the high road, viewing the Plymouth congregation as dupes of Beecher’s “purely emotional theology, made up, not of opinions, but of sighs and tears and aspirations and unlimited good-nature.” What neither Strong nor Godkin saw was how Beecher’s belief in a higher law blended his own need for vindication with the popular belief that humankind was evolving from a lower to a higher state of being—which Darwin himself denied. As Applegate says, Beecher and his congregation might well have believed that ordinary Americans had simply not yet evolved to their own higher plane of consciousness—one that allowed them to endow extramarital affairs with spiritual significance.
Some months after the verdict, in November 1875, the Iola (Kans.) Register summed up what might be called the vitalist case for Beecher: “Nothing seems to be able to daunt or check his animal spirits … This may be a fault, perhaps, but to this invincible animal force he owes his greatness. He is one of the best poised men in the country—i.e., his body and mind are perfectly fitted to each other … Altogether the miracle of the generation is that he could go into such an ordeal and come out of it apparently as young as ever.” So the way had been cleared for a new source of human greatness: “invincible animal force.” The other criteria were the poised fit of mind with body and the appearance of youthfulness under adversity.
These physical notions of leadership would prove increasingly influential in the decades ahead, as mass politics became more institutionalized and organized, and vigorous young men such as Williams Jennings Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt took center stage. Behind the enthusiasm for youth and vigor was a broader fascination with power for its own sake, with its sources in the cosmos and the polity but also in the individual psyche. In everyday life if not in Sunday sermons, the sacred space once filled by God alone began to include a new, even more abstract entity—sheer energy, impalpable and apparently infinite.
Epilogue: A Fierce Green Fire
SOON AFTER HE graduated from the Yale Forestry School in 1909, Aldo Leopold headed for Arizona to take a job with the U.S. Forest Service—the new federal agency charged with the (equally new) task of “wildlife management.” Theodore Roosevelt had just left the White House and embarked on a big-game hunt in Africa, but his presence could still be felt in government policies toward wild nature.
For Leopold and his contemporaries in the Forest Service, managing wildlife meant, among other things, killing creatures deemed undesirable by ranchers, farmers, and hunters. Few were deemed more undesirable than wolves, or were more exciting targets for young men with guns. “In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf,” Leopold remembered some decades later in A Sand County Almanac. This was an exterminationist ethic in action, folded into the dictates of official policy.
So when Leopold and his companion spotted an old she-wolf and her six grown pups tangling playfully on a steep hillside, the men quickly started “pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy … When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.” As the men moved closer to size up what they had done, something unexpected and arresting happened. As Leopold recalled:
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
This gaze into the eyes of the other, this glimpse of an animal’s spirit, became an archetypal moment in the history of ecological consciousness. Leopold’s account of the dying wolf went on to describe the calamitous consequences of exterminating the entire species—mountains denuded of every edible tree and bush by proliferating deer, rangeland turned into a dust bowl by overgrazing cattle. The eradication of the wolf upset the balance of nature, which the mountain embodied before it was ravaged by deer (and men). The rancher, like the wolf exterminator, “has not learned to think like a mountain,” Leopold concluded.
The attribution of sentience and thought to wolves and even mountains—the reanimation of the world—was a portal of discovery for Leopold. It led him eventually to leave the Forest Service and conduct his own experiment in conservation on a farm situated among the agriculturally unpromising “sand counties” of south-central Wisconsin. It also made A Sand County Almanac a bible for American environmentalists.
But that did not start to happen until the late 1960s, when visions of a reanimated universe began appearing amid countercultural ferment. The critique of technocratic domination; the rejection of an ethos of human mastery over manipulatable nature; the recovery of respect for nonhuman creatures—all the countercultural impulses celebrated by Roszak (and Mailer) found a home in the emerging environmental movement. Not many environmentalists were genuine animists in any strict sense. They did not believe in either a single spirit animating nature or a multitude of lesser spirits animating living creatures. Yet the movement revalued animistic traditions, recognizing their resonance with ecological notions of the earth as a living organism composed of countless smaller interdependent organisms. This was the cultural moment when A Sand County Almanac, first published in 1949, was reissued—in 1970. The time was temporarily ripe for Leopold’s vision of a sentient natural world, full of creatures who could feel and think in ways comparable if not identical to human ways.
Rising respect for nonhuman nature fostered renewed interest in the deeper meanings of animal spirits, though the term itself was seldom used. Yearnings to reconnect body and mind resurfaced—as fervent as Donne’s need to connect body and soul, and often as imbued with spiritual longing. Many of these impulses animated holistic medicine, flowing from Groddeck’s postulate of the It to contemporary explorations of qi—which resonate strikingly with Andrew Jackson Davis’s vision of a vital spiritual force that needs to flow freely to maintain a healthy organism. Holistic conceptions of the self melded with ecological awareness to spawn a strain of vitalist feminism—prominent in the early novels of Margaret Atwood and the eco-feminist histories of Carolyn Merchant, among other significant works. Eco-feminism made its critique of patriarchy part of a broader challenge to human domination of the nonhuman world.
But all this occurred within a brief historical moment. To be sure, holistic medicine has thrived and Leopold’s book has continued to sell well; his vision of universal animacy has influenced many people’s personal commitments, swelling the ranks of vegetarians and vegans and advocates of animal rights. While the yearning to feel some political efficacy has led many people to focus on areas of experience they can actually control, such as diet, mainstream politics has remained beyond popular control or even influence—stuck in stale debates, impervious to pervasive needs, with both sides subservient to corporate interests that are at best indifferent to environmental concerns.
What is happening as I write may alter or even transform this situation. Out-of-control wildfires, smoke-filled skies, melting icecaps, and rising sea levels—these signs of global warming have become impossible to ignore, and may be reigniting a politically effective ecological consciousness, a recognition that humans share the earth with other inspirited species, which depend on one another and on a habitable, living earth.
The resurgence of environmentalist thought is accompanied by a parallel resurgence of vitalist tendencies in geology, physics, botany, and epigenetics. These intellectual developments pose a potential challenge to the technocratic assumption that nature is merely an inert “resource” to be plundered for human use; indeed, they point to a renewed and widening vision of universal animacy—a growing awareness that not only living organisms but even apparently solid materials such as lumber, steel, and granite are a ferment of microscopic motion.
We are beginning to learn a great deal about the vibrancy of matter. More than a decade ago, in Vibrant Matter, the philosopher Jane Bennett posed the ontological questions raised by the concept: “Does life only make sense as one side of a life-matter binary, or is there such a thing as a mineral or metallic life, or a life of the it in ‘it rains’?” she wondered. Offering her “vital materialism” as an alternative to teleological visions of a purposive Nature and mechanistic visions of blind fate, she challenged the notion of a human self that can somehow be set apart from nonhuman nature. As she wrote, the recognition that “we are made up of its”—the countless bacteria that populate our bodies—ought to be a key to “the newish self that needs to emerge” in an “onto-tale” where “everything is, in a sense, alive.”
Since Vibrant Matter was published, scientists have been creating a broader foundation for Bennett’s speculation. Robert Macfarlane converses with some of them in his remarkable book Underland. One is a physicist studying the collisions of dark matter. During a lull in their conversation, “he pauses. I wait,” Macfarlane writes. “Trillions of neutrinos pass through our bodies and on through the earth’s bedrock, its mantle, its liquid innards, its solid core.” Then the physicist says, “as if the phrase has just entered his head without warning, scoring a trace as it passes through—‘Everything causes a scintillation.’” “Scintillation” becomes a key word for Macfarlane as he comes to understand the constant movement within apparently solid organisms and objects.
The question is: How do human thoughts and feelings apprehend this world? “Does it change the way the world feels,” Macfarlane asks the physicist, “knowing that 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second, that countless such particles perforate our brains and hearts? Does it change the way you feel about matter—about what matters? Are you surprised we don’t fall through each surface of our world at every step, push through it with every touch?’” His interlocutor pauses to ponder, then says: “‘I know our bodies are wide-meshed nets, and the cliffs we’re walking on are nets too, and sometimes it seems, yes, as miraculous as if in our everyday world we suddenly found ourselves walking on water, or air.”
Everywhere he looks, Macfarlane finds evidence of vibrant matter. With the botanist Merlin Sheldrake in Epping Forest, he discovers, “Living wood, left long enough, behaves as a slow-moving fluid like the halite down in the darkness of Boulby mine, like the calcite I had seen beneath the Mendips, like glacial ice drawing itself over topsoil and bedrock, living wood flows, given time.” From another botanist, Lynn Margulis, he learns about holobionts—“collaborative compound organisms, ecological units ‘consisting of millions of bacteria, viruses, and fungi that collaborate in the task of living together and sharing a common life,’ in the philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s words.” None of this would be news, Macfarlane notes, to indigenous peoples, whose animistic traditions postulate a conversational relationship with the jungle or woodland they inhabit.
A big part of our problem in the industrialized West, Macfarlane observes, is that (unlike Native Americans or other indigenous peoples) we have neither the grammar nor the vocabulary to represent animacy. Consider the Potawatomi word puhpowee—“the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight”—or wikwegamaa—“to be a bay.” We have no language to express these ways of seeing and being.
But maybe we could develop one. The recovery of a “grammar of animacy” would challenge the reductionist imperative at the heart of technocratic rationality, which requires its devotees to reject any vestiges of vitalism they can sniff in the cultural atmosphere. As Steven Pinker says, “Intelligence … has often been attributed to some kind of energy flow or force field”—a point of view he derides as little more than “spiritualism, pseudo-science, and sci-fi kitsch.” Pinker is here playing the classic custodian of conventional wisdom, policing the boundaries of responsible opinion with any ideological weapons available, including the rhetoric of scientific expertise.
But among scientists themselves, there is more controversy than Pinker acknowledges. One reason he disdains the vitalist view may be that it violates the taken-for-granted reluctance to acknowledge that organisms help make their environments, as opposed to merely adapting to them. The idea that organisms can participate in their own evolution has been developed by a number of influential biologists, including Richard Lewontin. It has come to be known as “niche construction” and it challenges the strict adaptationist view with a revived and implicitly Lamarckian emphasis on the ways that ancestral organisms’ modifications of their environment can affect subsequent generations.
The Viennese physicist Erwin Schrodinger pointed the way toward “niche construction” in 1944 by asking, “What is life?” He proposed a quantum theory of evolution, and speculated that mutations were “quantum jumps in the gene molecule,” rather than the millions of tiny accidents imagined by conventional neo-Darwinians. In this version of evolution, natural selection worked in collaboration with the behavior of individual organisms, which would reinforce and enhance the usefulness of the mutation, leading to further physical change. Natural selection was “aided all along by the organism’s making appropriate use” of the mutation, Schrodinger insisted. Selection and use “go quite parallel and are … fixed genetically as one thing: a used organ—as if Lamarck were right.” For Schrodinger, genetic mutations interacted with the organism’s own tendency to use what it had—its capacity to shape its own surroundings, creating its own ecological niche rather than simply adapting to an existing one. The consequences, some theorists subsequently claimed, could shape the development of the organism’s descendants. From this view there are two kinds of inheritances, genetic and environmental.
Schrodinger’s phrase “as if Lamarck were right” has acquired more palpable meaning in recent decades, with the rise of epigenetics. This field makes more ambitious claims than niche construction theory, suggesting that changes in an organism’s environment may actually change its DNA. Epigeneticists emphasize the whole context in which genetic material functions, from the cell to the organism and its environment. Several decades ago, the biologist Barbara McClintock discovered what she called “transposons”: mobile elements in a cell’s genome that respond to stress such as starvation or sudden temperature changes by rearranging the cell’s DNA. McClintock first found transposition in maize, but it has turned out to be important in other organisms as well. Current research suggests that bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics, “not through a purely random process of mutation followed by natural selection, but in important part by moving their DNA around,” as Jessica Riskin writes. James Shapiro, a bacterial geneticist at the University of Chicago, has extended McClintock’s work by showing that nearly all cells possess the biochemical tools for changing their DNA, and they use them “responsively, not purely randomly,” in Riskin’s words.
Other examples of epigenetic research offer a compelling variety of evidence. The British geneticist Marcus Pembrey found that the malnutrition of Swedish villagers in one generation could lower life expectancy in a following generation that was itself better nourished. Michael Skinner studied exposure to fungicide in one generation of rats and its continuing effects on several subsequent unexposed generations. No gene, it has begun to appear, is an island; it is part of a multidimensional main. The boundaries of our genetic identity are beginning to seem more porous than strict adaptationist Darwinism would allow.
Nothing has been settled, and none of this theoretical controversy means a new evolutionary synthesis is on the horizon. But what has been the conventional Darwinian view for more than a century is being called into question. From this established perspective, genetic change occurs through random mutations, some of which survive the process of natural selection and are passed along to subsequent generations as species adapt to their environments. In the newer view, whether articulated in the idiom of niche construction or epigenetics, an organism can respond to environmental challenges in ways that permanently alter the inheritance—ecological or genetic—that it passes along to future generations. The epigenetic version of this idea violates the orthodox assumption that changes in the body cannot influence the genes. This heresy, in Richard Dawkins’s view, will open the floodgates of “fanaticism” and “zealotry”—by which he means Lamarckism. Somewhere, Lamarck is smiling.
The philosophical implications of this scientific ferment are fundamental. Emphasizing what humans have in common with the rest of the natural world allows for our participation alongside other creatures in an interdependent, animated universe. And a clearer understanding of our relationship to nature demands a sensitivity to the ways that organisms engage with the contingent circumstances of their environment in historical time. For humans, that environment includes religions and ideologies and economic systems as well as air and soil and water. Who knows? Maybe scientists will have something to learn from historians, as well as the other way around.
The consequences of a more capacious “grammar of animacy” might be political and moral as well as intellectual. A full recognition of an animated material world could well trigger a deeper mode of environmental reform, a more sane and equitable model of economic growth, even religious precepts that challenge the ethos of market utility and mastery over nature. Schrodinger’s question—what is life?—leads us to reconsider what it means to be in the world with other beings, like but also unlike ourselves.
The task could not be more timely or more urgent. This book has highlighted two great vitalist thinkers in Anglo-American cultural history, William James and John Maynard Keynes. Though they never used the term “vitalism,” they embodied the tradition’s most humane meanings and possibilities. Both men celebrated spontaneous vitality while recognizing its darker possibilities, above all the delusion of regenerative war. We now live in a very dark time, when that delusion has once again been unleashed upon the world.
Remembering James and Keynes offers a way to reassert the benign and necessary claims of animal spirits on the conduct of our lives—a capacity for spontaneous feeling and sheer exuberance, but also a tolerance for uncertainty and an awareness of the ubiquity of caprice, for good or ill. All these qualities of mind foster resistance to militarist rant, which begins its ideological work by manipulating the more sinister potential of animal spirits. The opening rhetorical moves are all too familiar: incite rage and fear to a fever pitch, evoke the excitement of chaos on the assumption it can be managed—or at least can generate unforeseen possibilities. Whatever happens, from the militarist view, decisive action will bring relief from uncertainty and drift.
The ultimate expression of this fantasy is the dream of a winnable nuclear exchange, which has now resurfaced in certain circles of public discourse. As policy elites reshape the world into hostile blocs, bristling with sophisticated weaponry, the unthinkable has once again become thinkable. James and Keynes would be appalled. For the sake of planetary survival, the hubris of militarism requires the kind of counterweight their sensibility embodies—a reverence for life itself, a respect for the centrality of chance in human affairs, a reminder that every new deal contains the possibility of a wild card.
* * *
In 1929, a year after Aldo Leopold left the Forest Service, Ludwig Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge—the first time he had been there since before the war. Keynes was tense but glad. To Lydia, he wrote: “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.” Wittgenstein proceeded to complete his degree (the Tractatus) and join the philosophy faculty. But what is most interesting to me about Wittgenstein’s return is that in November 1929 he gave a lecture on ethics that marked a decisive turn in his own thought and may have decisively influenced Keynes’s thinking as well.
Wittgenstein began by dismissing the idea that there could ever be a science of ethics, because “no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value.” This was familiar enough territory; Hume had made a similar claim nearly two centuries before. Yet Wittgenstein pushed forward to a paradox, observing that we all have certain experiences that are undeniably facts (“they have taken place then and there, lasted a certain definite time, and consequently are describable”)—and that these experiences seem to us to embody absolute value. He was not sure how to describe his own most insistent version of such an experience except to say, “when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as ‘how extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘how extraordinary that the world should exist.’”
The sentiments recall Jonathan Edwards, seeing “images or shadows of divine things” in the meadows and woods outside Northampton, marveling at the continuous creation of the deity. Wittgenstein himself realized that what he was trying to describe was an experience of the sacred. Ethics was entangled with some form of religious belief, however heterodox or idiosyncratic, and that entanglement made it impossible to talk about ethics in the familiar idioms of sense and nonsense. “My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language,” he said. “This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless,” though the Sisyphean impulse (he thought) is an admirable “tendency of the human mind.” Despite Wittgenstein’s efforts to describe it, his own experience of absolute value remains ineffable: “It is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle.”
We are back with the core of the vitalist tradition—the dearest freshness deep-down things, the miraculous aliveness of the world. In this fraught and fateful historical moment, there is no more compelling affirmative vision.
Notes
The page numbers for the notes that appear in the print version of this title are not in your ebook. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.
INTRODUCTION
“the spontaneous urge to action”: John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money [1936] (reprint, 1964), 161.
“a pantheon of animal spirits”: Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (1996), 206.
“What shall happen”: E. Benton-Benai, The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway (1979), cited in Raymond Pierotti and Brandy R. Fogg, The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Co-evolved (2017), 156.
“When a bowl”: Hopi informant, cited by Mark Tomas Bahti, “Animals in Hopi Duality,” in Signifying Animals: Human Meaning in the Natural World, ed. R. G. Willis (1990), 135. Italics in original.
“the unseen people”: Ibid.
“just the same”: Ibid.
“snake people”: Ibid., 137–38.
“spirits that can help us” … “sent home”: Ibid., 138.
“the reality of the unseen”: William James, title of lecture 3 in his The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).
“that, beneath the masks”: Shepard, Others, 240.
“wild men”: Michael Palencia-Roth, “Enemies of God: Monsters and the Theology of Conquest,” in Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities, ed. A. James Arnold (1996), 23–24.
the differences were more important than the similarities: This theme is ably developed by Virginia DeJohn Anderson in Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (2004).
“the meretricious ontology”: Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (2019), 5–6.
“His intellect is not replenished”: William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598), IV.ii.27.
“subtil, aiery substance”: Bartolomeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum (1240), trans. as On the Properties of Things by John Trevisa (1397), cited in Simon Kemp, Medieval Psychology (1990), 20.
1. BETWEEN BODY AND SOUL
“He which at one o’clock”: F. J. Snell, The Chronicles of Twyford (c. 1893), cited in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), 20–21.
“Whence it cometh”: H. Holland, Spiritual Preservatives Against the Pestilence (1603), 20, cited in ibid., 11.
“A plague o’ both”: William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597), III.i, 111–12.
“doth comfort”: John Taylor, quoted in W. T. Marchant, In Praise of Ale (1888), 57, cited in Thomas, Religion, 23.
The common practice of baptizing puppies: Thomas, ibid., 41, and on “the magic of the medieval church” in general see his chap. 2.
The most popular repetitive ritual: On the history of the rosary, see Garry Wills, The Rosary: Prayer Come Round (2006), chap. 1.
“mare will make”: Wells Diocesan Records, A22, cited in Thomas, Religion, 86.
“altered the intrinsic value”: John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690), cited in McCarraher, Enchantments, 38.
Weber’s ideal type: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [1904], trans. Talcott Parsons (1958).
“as immediately as the colour”: T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in his Selected Essays (1999), 287–88.
“hydroptique immoderate desire”: John Donne, Letters to Certain Persons of Honour (1651), 51, cited in John Stubbs, John Donne: The Reformed Soul (2006), 17. I am deeply indebted to Stubbs’s thorough and penetrating scholarship.
“Though like the Pestilence”: John Donne, “Satyre II,” 7–8, cited in Stubbs, ibid., 28.
“matters of the heart”: Stubbs, ibid., 30.
“years, since yesterday”: “The Computation,” line 1, in John Donne: The Complete English Poems (Penguin Books ed., 1996), 49.
“Full nakedness, all joys”: “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” lines 34–36, in ibid., 124.
“cherishing fyre”: “To Mr. R. W.,” lines 5–6, cited in Stubbs, Donne, 43.
“a rotten state”: “The Calme,” line 7, cited in ibid., 72.
“England, to whome”: “The Storme,” line 9, cited in ibid., 72.
“When my grave”: “The Relic,” lines 1–11, in Donne, Poems, 75–76.
“For love, all love”: “The Good Morrow,” lines 9–10, cited in Stubbs, Donne, 185.
“Pregnante Bank”: “The Extasie,” line 2, in Donne, Poems, 53.
“As our blood labours to beget”: “The Extasie,” lines 61–72, in ibid., 55.
“In the constitution and making”: Sermons, II, 161, cited in John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (1981), 267.
“idolatrous” … “profane mistresses”: “Holy Sonnet XIII,” lines 9–10, cited in Stubbs, Donne, 263.
“Our two souls, therefore”: “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” lines 21–25, in Donne, Poems, 85.
“She of whose soul”: “Of the Progress of the Soul: The Second Anniversary,” lines 241–46, 451–55, in ibid., 293–94, 299.
“raging fever”: Stubbs, Donne, 318.
“Every man is a little Church”: Sermons, IV, 7, cited in Stubbs, Donne, 323.
“marriage is but a continual fornication”: Sermons, II, 17, cited in ibid., 350.
“I said to all”: “Holy Sonnet XIII,” lines 10, 12–14, in Donne, Poems, 314.
“Batter my heart”: “Holy Sonnet XIV,” lines 1, 12–14, in ibid., 314–15.
“All that the soule does”: Sermons, IV, 358 (Easter 1623), cited in David L. Edwards, John Donne: Man of Flesh and Spirit (2001), 289.
“sacred Art and Courtship”: Izaak Walton, cited in Edwards, ibid., 306.
“to share in an ecstasy”: Stubbs, Donne, 431.
“burn always”: Walter Pater, The Renaissance (1873), “Conclusion,” 236.
“animist materialism”: Stephen Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (2007), 79–110.
“one first substance”: Ibid.
“Thus God the heav’n created”: John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), bk. 7, lines 232–39.
“Instead of being”: Fallon, Milton, 79–110.
“extremely small bodies”: René Descartes, cited in John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (1998), 103.
“always include a force”: Pierre Gassendi, cited in Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman, Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century (2015), 28.
“moving animal spirits”: Thomas Willis, The Practice of Physick (1684), 36.
“Magically and Sympathetically”: Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), 162.
“there must be something more”: Sheehan and Wahrman, Invisible Hands, 168.
declared the only legitimate prayer to be spontaneous: Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth (2006), chap. 1.
“Hark! He talks of a Sensible New Birth”: Anglican Weekly Miscellany, cited in Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (1991), 40.
“tears, trembling, groans”: Jonathan Edwards, “The Marks of a Work of the True Spirit,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, A. M. (1835), 261.
“a kind of ecstasy”: Ibid., 263.
“the best Observer doubtless”: George Cheyne, The English Malady (1733), 79.
“appear solid, transparent”: Ibid.
“of the same Leaven”: Ibid., 85.
“in Substances of all Kinds”: Ibid., 87.
“the same (for ought I know)”: Ibid.
“extremely subtile fluid”: Richard Mead, Medical Precepts and Cautions (1755), 2.
“make that great engine”: Ibid., 272–73.
“to asswage these swelling surges”: Ibid., 273–74.
2. THE MADNESS AND MILDNESS OF MONEY
“one very often trades”: Commercial writer, cited in James Buchan, John Law: A Scottish Adventurer of the Eighteenth Century (2018), 58.
“a Money’d Man”: A Familiar Epistle to Mr. Mitchell Containing a Seasonable SATIRE, Written in the Style of Modern Poetic Beggars (1720), 8.
“visionary ideas”: Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), 46–47.
“calculate the movement”: Isaac Newton, cited in Andrew Odlyzko, “Newton’s Financial Misadventures in the South Sea Bubble,” Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science (2018), doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2018.0018.
“How from all Corners”: A Familiar Epistle, 4–5.
“invincible patience”: Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (1989), 11.
“there was not less gaged”: Daniel Defoe, An Essay on Projects (1697), 60.
“weake and Leakey”: Defoe, cited in Backscheider, Defoe, 51.
“Projects and Undertakings”: Defoe, cited in ibid., 496.
“the Infinite Mazes”: Defoe’s Review 3 (1706), 85. Italics in original.
“Men whose Affairs are declining”: Daniel Defoe, Remarks on the Bill to Prevent Frauds Committed by Bankrupts (1706), cited in Backscheider, Defoe, 202. Italics in original.
“the miserable, anxious, perplexed life”: Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman 1 (1727), 79.
“If the Pulse of the Trade”: Defoe, cited in Backscheider, Defoe, 69.
“This substantial Non-Entity called CREDIT”: Defoe’s Review 9 (1709), 122.
“Why do East India Company’s stocks rise”: Defoe’s Review 3 (1706), 502–3.
“It’s a shame really”: Epigraph in Buchan, Law, n.p.
“Trade is a Mystery”: Defoe’s Review 3 (1706), 645.
“The bank[er] is impressive”: Fortia de Piles, cited in Buchan, Law, 221.
“The madness of stock-jobbing”: Robert Harley’s son, cited in Sheehan and Wahrman, Invisible Hands, 102.
“City gamblers”: Defoe, cited in Backscheider, Defoe, 452.
“Extravagant gamesters”: Defoe, cited in ibid., 454.
“What makes a homely woman fair?”: Defoe, cited in ibid., 473.
thinkers in Britain and on the Continent: A. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments Over Capitalism Before Its Triumph (1977).
“to set affection against affection”: Machiavelli, cited in ibid., 22.
“to the position of the privileged passion”: Ibid., 38.
“the industrious professions”: David Hume, cited in ibid., 66.
“immediate sense and feeling”: Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), part 7, section 3, chap. 2, 285.
“mere inventions of the imagination”: Adam Smith, cited in Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought (2017), 41.
“the lowest and most pusillanimous superstition”: Ibid.
“all trades and places”: Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits [1714] (reprint, 2017), 5.
“Then leave complaints”: Ibid., 12.
“falls short of that complete self-denial”: Smith, Theory, 277.
“whatever other passions”: Hume, cited in Rasmussen, Infidel, 90–91.
“we feel emotions”: Smith, cited in ibid., 92.
“impertinent jealousy”: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (2000), 646.
“mean rapacity”: Ibid., 647.
“interested sophistry”: Ibid.
“Invention is kept alive”: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Modern Library ed., 1994), 840.
“By preferring the support”: Smith, Wealth of Nations, 593–94.
“The rich … divide with the poor”: Smith, Theory, 164.
“the uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort”: Smith, Wealth of Nations, 373.
“the most Absent Man that ever was”: Rasmussen, Infidel, 147.
“as dull a dog”: James Boswell, cited in ibid., 156.
“a professed infidel”: Samuel Johnson, cited in ibid.
“impartial spectator” … “Highest Tribunal” … “the man within the breast”: Smith, Theory, 115.
“so as to deserve applause”: Ibid., 170.
“tranquility of the mind”: Ibid., 116.
“a world to come”: Ibid., 117.
“agony can never be permanent”: Ibid., 130.
“frequent visits and odious examination”: Smith, Wealth of Nations, 889–90.
“exact propriety and perfection”: Smith, Theory, 221.
“the great antidote to the poison”: Smith, Wealth of Nations, 855.
“infinity of oddities”: Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy [1759] (Dover Thrift ed., 2007) V, xxiv, 382.
“You have all, I dare say”: Ibid., 1.
“My Tristram’s misfortunes”: Ibid., 3.
“a very unseasonable question”: Ibid., 2.
“his own animal spirits”: Ibid., 3.
“I have been the continual sport”: Ibid., 6.
“the few animal spirits I was worth”: Ibid., 236.
“the thought floated”: Ibid., 132.
“poured down warm as each of us could bear it”: Ibid., 154.
“What confusion!—what mistakes!”: Ibid., 157.
“I would remind him”: Ibid., 80.
“People are said”: Federal Spy, Oct. 2, 1794, 4.
“a wonderful connexion”: “On the Sympathy Between the Breeches Pocket and the Animal Spirits,” New York Magazine; or, Literary Repository (Nov. 1, 1792), 646.
“latent force of life”: Ibid., 647.
“He maintained to all”: MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, 321–22.
“Then came in the assistant magnetisers”: Ibid., 324.
“Electricity defied”: James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (2006), 8.
“spiritual fire”: Ibid., 214.
“the medium of passion”: Théophile Gautier, cited in Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (1968), 152.
“electric fire”: Archibald Spencer, cited in Delbourgo, Amazing Scene, 29.
“all the phenomena”: Joseph Macrery, cited in ibid., 255.
“that things change, and that nothing”: Benjamin Waterhouse, A Discourse on the Principle of Vitality (1790), 2–3.
“Full fathom five thy father lies”: William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I:ii.
“the union of soul with body”: Waterhouse, Discourse, 18–19.
“would often land”: George Makari, Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind (2015), 63.
“Go, proud reasoner”: Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia (1801 ed.), 141.
“all alive / The world”: William Blake, Europe: A Prophecy, cited in M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1969), 435.
“even the gorgeous”: William Blake, Milton (1810), cited in ibid.
“he was a chosen son”: William Wordsworth, “The Ruined Cottage,” cited in ibid., 103.
“Ye motions of delight”: William Wordsworth, The Prelude: The Four Texts, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (2004), 464.
“we murder to dissect”: William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned” (1798), line 28, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45557/the-tables-turned.
“I am that I am”: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, cited in Jack H. Haeger, “Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Romantic Background to Bergson,” in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (1992), 99.
“incalculable series of centuries”: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, The Crisis in Modernism cited in Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (2016), 199.
“The brain of a man of labor”: Lamarck, cited in ibid., 177–78.
“generative variability”: Charles Darwin, cited in ibid., 231. Italics in original.
“a small drop”: Joshua Smith, Divine Hymns (1803), cited in Brett Malcolm Grainger, Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America (2019), 81.
“bowed her knees and cowered down on the ground”: Zilpha Elaw, “Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels, and Labors of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw,” in Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century, ed. William Andrews (1986), 56–57.
“quiet vegetable creation”: Thomas Coke, Journals, 170, cited in Grainger, Church, 121.
“the creation’s state of unceasing prayer”: Ibid., 129.
“sweet meltings”: Francis Asbury, Journal, I, 460, cited in ibid., 121.
“the very soul of the universe”: T. Gale, Electricity, or Ethereal Fire, Considered (1802), 7. Delbourgo, Amazing Scene, chap. 6, contains an illuminating discussion of this text.
“like an electric shock”: Robert Patterson, “Extract from a letter from Col. Robert Patterson, of Lexington, Ky., to the Rev. Dr. John King, of Chambersburgh, Penn., dated Nov. 18, 1801,” Zion’s Herald 3, no. 26 (1825), 1.
“like a wave of electricity”: Charles Grandison Finney, Memoirs of the Rev. Charles G. Finney, Written by Himself (1876), 20, cited in Grainger, Church, 179.
“enkindler” … “vital flame”: “God in Christ,” Massachusetts Missionary Magazine 4 (1806), 79.
3. TOWARD A PULSATING UNIVERSE
“common sense of the entire society”: Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings, trans. Louis Marks (1972), 58–75.
“He preached incessantly”: Lyman Beecher, The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher (1961), ed. Barbara Cross, I, 27.
“the immediate continued creation”: Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 3, Original Sin (1972), 401.
“one blood, one kindred”: Timothy Dwight, “Greenfield Hill” (1788), cited in John R. Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator: Timothy Dwight, 1752–1817 (1998), 43.
“Address to Ministers of Every Denomination”: Timothy Dwight, cited in ibid., 51.
“nothing enthusiastic”: Timothy Dwight, cited in ibid., 100.
“it was impossible for him”: Benjamin Dwight, cited in ibid., 102.
“If there are certain principles”: Terence Cuneo and Rene von Woudenberg, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid (2004), 85.
“a man who thinks a horse running”: James Beattie, cited in Fitzmier, Dwight, 86.
“so high, and so vast”: Timothy Dwight, cited in ibid., 117.
“Hail land of Light and Joy!”: Timothy Dwight, “America” (1780), cited in ibid., 144.
“a corpulent man”: Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York (1818), 4 vols., I, 308.
“state of nature”: Ibid.
“labor is the only source”: Ibid., III, 17.
“Mere wanderers”: Ibid., II, 34.
“people of fashion”: Ibid., I, 370ff.
“industry, regularity, and exactness”: Ibid., II, 13.
“the increase of wealth, the influx of strangers”: Ibid., I, 240.
“scattered plantations”: Ibid., 244.
“the gross amusement”: Ibid., III, 42.
“good music”: “Music,” Yale Literary Magazine 5 (Jan. 1840), 132.
“Christian Joy”: Wm. Jones, “Christian Joy,” New York Evangelist 11 (March 14, 1840), 44.
“the all-powerful faculties”: “Elements of Success in Business,” Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 30 (June 1, 1854), 778.
“He touches no subject”: H. J., “Goethe and His Morality,” New-York Daily Tribune, Jan. 15, 1856, 3.
“a visible or invisible intention”: This and other quotations in this paragraph cited in Edmund Reiss, “Whitman’s Debt to Animal Magnetism,” PMLA (1963), 80–88.
“Does the earth gravitate?”: Walt Whitman, “I Am He That Aches with Love,” in Leaves of Grass (Norton ed., 1965), eds. Harold Blodgett and Sculley Bradley, 109.
“Mine is no callous shell”: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in ibid., 57.
“a vast lottery”: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [1835], 2 vols., ed. and trans. Phillips Bradley (1945), II, 168.
“That there is a hidden”: Elisha North, M.D., “Desultory Outlines of Animal Life,” New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery 15 (Jan. 1826), 2–3.
“the principle of Vitality”: The Secretary, “Lecture Delivered at the Free Press Association: On the Vital Principle,” Correspondent 3 (May 19, 1828), 247. Italics in original.
“In the estimation of the Psalmist”: John Harris, “Testimony of the Material World,” Millennial Harbinger 4, no. 12 (1840).
“human bodies were surrounded”: Grainger, Church, 161.
“a power in the ends of his fingers”: Catharine Beecher, cited in ibid.
“nearly certain that electricity”: Edward Hitchcock, Religious Truth Illustrated from Science (1857), 152.
“she could hear the desert wind”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance [1842] (Oxford World’s Classics ed., 2009), 202.
“He spoke of a new era”: Ibid., 200.
“there is an elastic”: “A Practical Magnetizer,” The History and Philosophy of Animal Magnetism, with Practical Instructions for the Exercise of This Power (1843), 15.
“poured out and exhausted”: Ibid., 17.
“a very simple application”: Cited in S. B. Brittan and B. W. Richmond, A Discussion of the Facts and Philosophy of Ancient and Modern Spiritualism (1853), 132.
“a certain isolated, unpainted, unfinished dwelling”: Andrew Jackson Davis, The Magic Staff; An Autobiography [1857], 24.
“The heavy chains of poverty”: Ibid., 25.
“Sylvanus will soon leave us”: Ibid., 35.
“nothin’ but worms”: Ibid., 49.
“organ of marvellousness”: Ibid., 59.
“vigilant incredulity”: Ibid., 65.
“In their graves laid low”: Ibid., 191.
“A soft breathing”: Ibid., 199.
“vitalic force”: Andrew Jackson Davis, Arabula; or, The Divine Guest (1867), 386.
“magnetic buffoonery”: Davis, Magic Staff, 201.
“the mystic magnetic state”: Ibid., 214.
“I not only beheld”: Ibid., 215.
“Thus I saw not only”: Ibid., 217.
“I saw the many and various forms”: Ibid., 219.
“My ties and ballasts leave me”: Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass, book 3, section 33.
“The various salts in the sea”: Davis, Magic Staff, 220.
“to revere, obey, and depend”: Ibid., 233.
“And—mark this fact!”: Ibid., 221, 223.
“the unknown attraction”: Ibid., 226.
“a man of ordinary stature”: Ibid., 238–39.
“a staff, far exceeding in beauty”: Ibid., 240.
“in a due season thou shalt return”: Ibid., 245.
“I soon ascertained Disease”: Ibid., 252.
“Here is thy magic staff”: Ibid., 263.
“an unconquerable repugnance”: Ibid., 266.
“flippant levity”: Ibid., 270.
“ministerial-looking stranger”: Ibid.
“that morceau of the Spirit of Nature”: Ibid., 288–90.
“magical spell”: Ibid., 297.
“physical indispositions”: Ibid., 327.
“The God of eternal destinies”: Ibid., 328.
“unpolished mechanics and ungloved merchants”: Ibid., 440.
“witty burlesque”: Ibid., 523–27.
“all speculation is wrong”: Ibid., 352.
“the things which are seen”: Ibid., 360.
“Oh, I am wholly awake!”: Ibid., 366.
“Matter and Mind have heretofore”: Andrew Jackson Davis, The Great Harmonia [1850–1861], 6 vols. (1890), III, 15.
“the fundamental principle of all Life”: Ibid., IV, 280.
“the relations and dependencies”: Ibid., III, 86.
“Every fiber of the wild flower”: Ibid., 117.
“broom-riding witches”: Davis, cited in Robert Delp, “Andrew Jackson Davis: Prophet of American Spiritualism,” Journal of American History (1967), 51.
“magnetic healing”: Ibid., 54.
“The animal spirits cannot”: “Moral,” Connecticut Spectator 8 (June 8, 1814), 4.
“holy boldness”: “A Call to the Christian Ministry,” Religious Intelligencer 19, no. 29 (Dec. 13, 1834), 457.
“When from some inexplicable cause”: “The ‘Blue Devils,’” Rutland Herald, April 27, 1841, 2.
animal spirits buoyed up: “The Victory of Mrs. Gaines,” New York Times, March 15, 1861, 4.
“high principle and extraordinary force of will”: “William Hickling Prescott,” New York Times, Feb. 20, 1864, 4.
“the clubbable man”: “Clubbable Men,” Harper’s Bazaar 2 (Feb. 13, 1869), 98.
“When the spark of life”: “Moffat’s Life Medicines,” Burlington Free Press, Jan. 18, 1839, 3.
“the strengthening, life-giving”: “Dr. Christie’s Galvanic Belt, Bracelets, Necklace and Magnetic Fluid,” Staunton Spectator, March 19, 1851, 4.
“The stomach being disordered”: “Much Truth in a Small Compass,” Jeffersonian, Aug. 5, 1858, 2.
Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters: See, e.g., New Orleans Daily Crescent, March 8, 1858, 3.
Tarrant’s Seltzer Aperient: See, e.g., Memphis Daily Appeal, July 12, 1871, 4.
“imparts a much greater degree”: “Ripe Bread,” Christian Reflector 10 (May 13, 1847), 76.
“The mind is like”: Willis, Somerset Herald and Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Register, Oct. 12, 1847, 3.
“of a nature calculated”: Lindley Murray, “Employment Essential to Health,” Clarksville Chronicle, March 9, 1860, 1.
“A cold, sluggish blood”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters (1870), 11.
“something invisible”: Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Beacon Press, ed. 1955), 14.
“I am too old”: Horace Smith, “The Wisdom of Laughter,” Evergreen 1 (Jan. 1, 1840), 24.
4. FEVERISH FINANCE, REVIVAL RELIGION, AND WAR
“a houseful, a hole full”: Frederick Jackson, cited in Ann Fabian, “Speculation on Distress: The Popular Discourse of the Panics of 1837 and 1857,” Yale Journal of Criticism (1989), 135.
“keep his system”: “Confidential,” New Mirror 1 (July 22, 1843), 256.
“Adventures of a Bank Note”: Cited in Jose R. Torre, The Political Economy of Sentiment (2007), 59.
“destroying that confidence”: James Madison, cited in Andrew H. Browning, The Panic of 1819: The First Great Depression (2019), 128.
“The Alabama Feaver”: James Graham, cited in ibid., 103.
“I have been trying”: James Henry Hammond, cited in ibid., 104.
the “fevers” of migration and land investment: John Quincy Adams, cited in ibid., 187.
“presents a dull and uncheery spectacle”: Boston Patriot, cited in ibid., 189.
“keen sharp features”: Andrew Combe, The Principles of Physiology Applied to the Preservation of Health, and to the Improvement of Physical and Mental Education (1834), 163.
“that mysterious invisible energy”: Jessica Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (2013), 9.
“titanic and unnatural power”: Andrew Jackson, cited in ibid., 19.
“confidence performed”: Ibid., 28.
“a very considerable advance”: Asa Greene, The Perils of Pearl Street, Including a Taste of the Dangers of Wall Street (1834), 162–63.
“sudden changes of fortune”: Andrew Combe, cited in Lepler, Many Panics, 81.
“speculators went to bed”: Alastair Roberts, America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder After the Panic of 1837 (2012), 33.
“infused a species of confidence” … “people losing their senses”: New York Herald, cited in Lepler, Many Panics, 64.
“The care-clouded countenance”: Jason Whitman, The Hard Times: A Discourse Delivered to the Second Unitarian Church, and also to the First Parish Church, Portland, Maine, January 1, 1837, cited in ibid., 71.
“everybody is afraid”: Condy Raguet, cited in Roberts, America’s First Great Depression, 85.
“In one word, excitement”: “Correspondence of the Courier and Enquirer, New Orleans, 26 April, 1837,” National Intelligencer, April 27, 1837, cited in Lepler, Many Panics, 3.
“general wreck”: Joseph Shipley, cited in ibid., 205.
“credit, a mere creature”: Rev. Andrew Preston Peabody, cited in ibid., 148.
“Increase not a general panic by unreal terrors”: Ibid., 147.
“Andrews is a very timid man”: Testimony of Joseph Wood, in Andrews vs. His Creditors, 11 Louisana 464 (1838), cited in ibid., 127.
“load of disappointment and remorse”: Gravillon vs. Richard’s Executor, et al., 13 Louisiana 293 (1839), cited in ibid., 139.
“a mire of debt and fear”: Ibid., 140.
“The merchants are the most excitable class”: Diary of Philip Hone, May 11, 1837, cited in ibid., 209.
“It is a dangerous time”: Diary of Philip Hone, May 6, 1837, cited in ibid., 188.
class blinders: Ibid., 197.
“a much more tranquil feeling”: “Money Market and City Intelligence,” Times (London), June 7, 1837.
“from the summit of hope to the lowest abyss”: James Kirke Paulding, cited in Mentor Williams, “A Tour of Illinois in 1842,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1949), 292–312.
“The Capitalist is the most easily frightened”: Sidney George Fisher, “The Diaries of Sidney George Fisher,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (1952), 215.
“speculation itself”: Orville Dewey, “The Moral Ends of Business,” in Works of Orville Dewey, 196–97, cited in Stewart Davenport, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon: Northern Christians and Market Capitalism, 1815–1860 (2008), 199.
“must necessarily regard everyone around him with a jealous eye”: Henry Boardman, The Bible in the Counting House: A Course of Lectures to Merchants (1853), 138–39.
“bold and restless spirits”: American Review (1845), cited in Roberts, America’s First Great Depression, 189.
“springs from directly opposite”: “The Present Crisis,” New York Herald, Aug. 25, 1845, 2.
“The world has become stale”: Reprinted as “Let Us Go to War,” Portland Daily Advertiser, May 27, 1845, 2.
“people here are all in a state of delirium”: Herman Melville, quoted in Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819–1851 (1996), 421.
“Are we not also”: Caleb Cushing, quoted in “General Caleb Cushing,” Anti-Slavery Bugle, Nov. 12, 1847, 1.
Wright’s Indian Vegetable Pills: “Relief Notes,” Tarboro Press, Feb. 19, 1848, 2.
“Now, every human being”: S. O. Gleason, “Who Kills Us?,” Water-Cure Journal 10 (Dec. 1850), 223.
“Labor is the yeast”: Karl Marx, cited in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000), 60.
“It is precisely the genius”: David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (2010), 160.
“the effect of his labor”: “Brain and Muscle Market: Journeymen Shoemakers,” New York Times, Sept. 18, 1857, 3.
“All active occupations”: “Brain and Muscle Market: Tailors and Tailoresses,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 1857, 2.
“is a constant drain”: “Brain and Muscle Market: Journeymen Shoemakers,” New York Times, Sept. 18, 1857, 3.
“In the inordinate hope”: Kit Kelvin, “Mania: Its Progress,” Knickerbocker 34 (July 1849), 22.
“Mania’s haggard face”: Ibid., 24.
“bird of passage”: Ibid., 25.
“There are many new trades”: Edward Jarvis, “Causes of Insanity,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 45, no. 15 (Nov. 12, 1851), 304.
“We exhaust our energies”: “Are We a Happy People?,” Harper’s New Monthly 14 (Jan. 1857), 208.
“men, especially in banking circles”: James L. Huston, The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War (1987), 19–20.
“without either real or apparent cause”: Napoleon III, cited in “Foreign Intelligence,” Reynolds’s Newspaper (London), Nov. 15, 1857. Italics in original.
“The remedy for this crisis must be psychological”: Allan Nevins and Milton Harvey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong (1952), II, 359.
“Truly it may be said”: Fernando Wood, quoted in New York Times, Oct. 23, 1857.
“ravenous intensity”: Harper’s Monthly 16 (Dec. 1858), 694.
“fast living”: Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oct. 24, 1857.
“these vampyres”: Mississippi Free Trader, cited in Huston, Panic, 39.
“poverty is a crime”: Louis Wigfall in Southern Planter (1859), cited in Huston, Panic, 89.
“trembles and staggers”: Henry Ward Beecher, A Discourse on the Present Fearful Commercial Pressure (1857), 4–7. Italics in original.
“The Evangel of Christ”: Gilbert Haven, National Sermons (1869), 144.
“[Wednesday] prayer meeting”: Samuel Prime, The Power of Prayer Illustrated in the Wonderful Displays of Divine Grace at the Fulton Street and Other Meetings in New York and Elsewhere, in 1857 and 1858 (1859), 7–8.
“by the ploughshare of his judgments”: James Waddell Alexander, The Revival and Its Lessons (1858), 6.
“still, solemn, and tender”: James Waddell Alexander, Letters II (1860), 275–277, cited in Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform (2004), 69.
“What Shall I Do to Be Saved?”: Christian Register, April 3, 1858, cited in Smith, ibid., 71.
“‘ecstatic enjoyment’”: Phoebe Palmer, cited in Smith, ibid., 158.
“Ten days have passed”: “Life in the Camp: No. XXX,” Fayetteville Observer, May 2, 1861, 2.
“the men were in the highest”: “Our Citizen Military: Departure of the Firemen Zouaves,” New York Times, April 30, 1861, 1.
“The Red, White, and Blue”: Ibid., 8.
“Most Yankees”: William Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. 2, Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861 (2007), xii–xiii.
“only marginally related to race”: Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2007), 120.
“yankee marauders”: Edward Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies (2003), 390.
“What are you fighting for anyhow?”: Union soldiers, cited in Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, vol. 1, Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958), 65.
“Thirty Thousand”: Memorial of Thirty Thousand Disfranchised Citizens of Philadelphia to the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives (1855), 13.
“the negroes of the South”: “By One Who Has Seen It,” “The Southern Rebellion,” Burlington Free Press, May 9, 1862, 1.
“are said to have a fine”: “By a well-known Medical Author in the Phrenological Journal,” “Sudden Death: An Interesting Treatise on Apoplexy,” Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, Aug. 24, 1869, 3.
“mesmeric healer, who had assumed”: “Mrs. Eddy Descended from Puritan Stock,” New-York Tribune, Dec. 5, 1910, 2.
“His theory is”: “A New Doctrine of Health and Disease,” Bangor Jeffersonian (1857), quoted in Annetta Dresser, The Philosophy of P. P. Quimby (1895), 22–25.
“As indicating a force”: “Is Vitality Vital?,” Scientific American 30 (Feb. 7, 1874), 80.
5. THE RECONFIGURATION OF VALUE
Thus were the ideas of Providence: I am indebted to Jessica Riskin’s lucid discussion of these issues in The Restless Clock.
“a gradual and sure revival”: “Physical Amusement and Culture,” Evening Telegraph, July 28, 1868, 2.
“from theological barns”: Ibid., 2.
“American ladies”: Ibid., 2.
“The American people”: “Address of Prof. W. T. Thurmond,” Troy Herald, Oct. 9, 1873, 1.
“The animal spirits”: Ibid., 1.
“Fun, mirth, real animal spirits”: Henry Barton Baker, “Theodore Hook,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 5 (May 1878), 610. Italics in original.
“The dependence of health”: Charles Eliot Norton, “Harvard University in 1890,” Harper’s Monthly 31 (Sept. 1890), 586.
“the pleasures of animal existence”: Charles W. Eliot, “The Happy Life,” Independent 47 (Dec. 19, 1895), 5.
“It is a happy thing”: Charles W. Eliot, “The Durable Satisfactions of Life,” an address to new students at Harvard, Oct. 3, 1905, McClure’s Magazine 26 (Jan. 1906), 339.
“students work off their excess”: Henry Wade Rogers, “Athletics as a Factor in College Education,” Belford’s Monthly 11 (June 1893), 22.
“cure our American nervousness”: “Ethics of the Wheel,” San Francisco Call, June 22, 1896, 11.
“neurasthenia”: George Miller Beard, A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia): Its Symptoms, Nature, Sequences, Treatment (1880).
“a desirable step”: “Ethics of the Wheel,” 11.
“The ordinary youth”: Ernest Hamlin Abbott, “Christian Pagans,” Outlook 81 (Dec. 16, 1905), 919.
“a new interpretation”: Ibid., 911.
“there is no fundamental difference”: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man [1871] (reprint, 1981), 34–35.
“Ironically, by becoming animals”: Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987), 40.
“Descartes said”: T. H. Huxley, “Are Animals Automatons?,” Popular Science Monthly 5 (Oct. 1, 1874), 726.
“though they feel as we do”: T. H. Huxley, “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata, and Its History,” Eclectic Magazine (1875), 61.
“our mental conditions”: Ibid., 63.
“the brutes”: Ibid., 61.
“never use the words”: Charles Darwin (c. 1845), note written on the margin of his copy of Robert Chambers’s 1844 Vestiges of The Natural History of Creation, www.eoht.info/page/Darwin%20on%20higher%20and%20lower. Italics in original.
“one can hardly avoid”: Charles Darwin, “Appendix,” in George John Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals (1883), 379.
“the grossest utilitarianism”: Ibid., 383.
“for satisfaction is an attribute”: George Cary, “The Mental Faculties of Brutes,” North American Review 108 (Jan. 1869), 41.
“The pride and beauty”: Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Chapters on Animals (1877), 2.
“The brute creation”: Ibid., 2–3.
“The gladness that we seek”: Ibid., 3.
“none of us”: Ibid., 11.
“This impossibility of knowing”: Ibid., 12.
“Do the lower animals”: “Animal Intelligence,” Westminster Review 57 (April 1880), 449.
“no grander sight in nature”: Paul Du Chaillu, quoted in “A Sign of the Times,” Salt Lake Herald, Feb. 25, 1883, 12.
“throughout the animal world”: “Animal Spirits,” Wichita Daily Eagle, May 8, 1887, 9.
“Keep the doctor”: Olive Thorne Miller, Our Home Pets: How to Keep Them Well and Happy (1894), 196.
“The more exact”: E. P. Evans, Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology (1898), 167.
“If we could trace”: Ibid., 167–68.
“that loses nothing”: Ibid., 168.
“I think I could turn and live awhile”: Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass, 60.
“a splendid thing”: William J. Long, School of the Woods: Some Life Studies of Animal Instincts and Animal Training (1902), 314.
“I had never yet met”: Ibid., 316.
“never a one”: Ibid., 317.
“the animal has no great mentality”: Ibid., 329.
“they do, in fact, share”: C. J. Cornish, Animals at Work and Play: Their Activities and Emotions (1904), 85–86.
“the simple gladness”: William J. Long, “The Question of Animal Reason,” Harper’s Monthly, Sept. 1905, 588.
“If the subconscious self”: Ibid., 588.
“With the animal’s instinct”: Ibid., 593.
“It is an arbitrary line”: Henry Jacob Bigelow, Surgical Anaesthesia: Addresses and Other Papers (1900), 374.
“If the harmony or concord”: E. P. Evans, “The Aesthetic Sense and Religious Sentiment in Animals,” Popular Science Monthly 42 (Feb. 1893), 475.
“The terror of the dog”: Ibid., 478.
“The adherents of both”: “Chicago! The Great Convention,” Evening Star, June 5, 1880, 9.
“new virtual world”: Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011), 68.
“from nowhere to nowhere”: Cornelius Vanderbilt, cited in M. John Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble: The Northern Pacific Railroad, the Sioux, and the Panic of 1873 (2006), 287.
“Gradually fevered blood commenced”: A journalist, History of the Terrible Panic of 1873 (1873), 5.
“Thus, while men rushed wildly”: Ibid., 14.
“life itself is essentially appropriation”: Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, cited and translated in Frederick Amrine, “‘The Triumph of Life’: Nietzsche’s Verbicide,” in Burwick and Douglass, The Crisis in Modernism, 146. For a brilliant overview of Nietzsche’s importance in late nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century American culture, see Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (2011).
“wonderful wit”: “Good Natured Scoundrels,” Burlington Free Press, Dec. 22, 1871, 2.
“why in the name of God’”: “That Awful State Department,” Stark County Democrat, July 24, 1879, 4.
“emotional soul baring”: Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, 212.
“mental dishabille”: Thomas Knox, Life and Work of Henry Ward Beecher (1887), cited in ibid. Italics in original.
“such manliness”: Undated clipping in Beecher Family Papers, Yale University, cited in ibid. Italics in original.
“The slightest pathos”: Ibid.
“boils with earnestness” and “bubbles with playfulness”: Henry Bellows to Eliza T. Bellows, Oct. 10, 1855, Bellows Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, cited in ibid., 212–13.
“The Unitarians like him”: Susan Howe, in John Raymond Howard, Remembrance of Things Past (1925), cited in ibid., 215.
“the doing of good”: Brooklyn Eagle, Aug. 22, 1848, cited in ibid., 217.
“man was made for enjoyment”: Brooklyn Eagle, Dec. 27, 1848, cited in ibid.
“The public began to take”: Eunice Beecher, quoted in Ladies’ Home Journal (1891), cited in ibid., 217.
“It is perfect”: Henry Ward Beecher, Yale Lectures on Preaching (1872), I, 73–74.
“Mary Hallock, sit still!”: Mary Hallock Foote, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West (1972), cited in Applegate, Beecher, 366.
“men who are self-trusting”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, cited by Rutherford B. Hayes, Diary and Letters, I, 301–3, cited in ibid.
“The greatest part of a seed”: Henry Ward Beecher, “The Life of Christ:—Within,” preached Oct. 8, 1865, in Sermons, vol. 1 (1869), 141.
“this vitality of a Christian soul”: Henry Ward Beecher, “Sermon: The Life Force in Men,” Christian Union 15 (April 4, 1877), 305.
“It is said that a dollar a day”: Henry Ward Beecher, cited in Henry May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (1949), 94.
“In a word, Charlie”: Herman Melville, The Confidence Man [1857] (Signet Classics ed., 1964), 174.
“Conviviality is one good thing”: Ibid., 184.
“By the way, talking of geniality”: Ibid.
“‘like a humbug’”: Joseph Twichell’s Journal, Feb. 23, 1876, cited in Applegate, Beecher, 453.
“perfectly transparent”: Elizabeth Tilton to Theodore Tilton, Dec. 1866, cited in Applegate, Beecher, 366–67.
“I found him”: Moses Coit Tyler, Moses Coit Tyler, 1835–1900: Selections from His Letters and Diaries, ed. Jessica Tyler Austen (1911), 77.
“I had seldom seen”: Ibid., 78.
Rev. Leonard Bacon denounced Theodore Tilton: Hugh Davis, Leonard Bacon: New England Reformer and Antislavery Moderate (1998), 235.
“Mr. Beecher, so say his friends”: “Editorial Article,” New York Times, Aug. 25, 1874, 4.
“the torments of the damned”: Henry Ward Beecher, cited in “The Psychology of Beecher’s Case,” Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, Dec. 5, 1874, 1.
“We respected her”: Frank Moulton in Chicago Tribune, Aug. 23, 1874, cited in Applegate, Beecher, 445.
“great animal spirits”: “The Beecher-Tilton Trial,” New-York Tribune, March 8, 1875, 2.
“That an excess of animal spirits”: “Tilton Against Beecher,” Nation 21 (July 8, 1875), 23.
“psychological phenomena”: Nevins and Thomas, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, IV, 422.
“Nothing seems to be able”: “Beecher,” Iola Register 9 (Nov. 27, 1875), 1.
6. THE APOTHEOSIS OF ENERGY
“the dynamo became a symbol”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, in Henry Adams: Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education (1983), 1067.
“the child of incalculable”: Ibid., 1174.
“As he grew accustomed”: Ibid., 1067.
“the automatic genius”: “The Savior of Florida,” Washington Times, May 30, 1895, 4.
“He is composed”: Ibid., 4.
“a new efflorescence”: Henry Tyrrell, “Edison,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 39 (March 1895), 2.
“As a perambulating”: Ibid., 6.
“sparks of sanity”: Ibid., 11.
“It is energy of will”: “Energy of Will,” Vermont Watchman and State Journal, Sept. 27, 1871, 1.
“What looks like self-conceit”: “Self-Praise,” Staunton Spectator, Jan. 29, 1884, 1.
“the first was high animal spirits”: “The Bar as a Profession I,” Saturday Review, Feb. 9, 1889, 159.
“the sustaining of a thought”: William James Diary I, April 30, 1870, quoted in Robert D. Richardson, William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006), 120.
“The Right to Believe”: William James, The Correspondence of William James, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, 12 vols. (1992–2004; electronic ed., 2008), 10:449.
“matter and mind were interdependent”: Beryl Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875–1920 (1999), 254.
“To succeed in any undertaking”: Prentice Mulford, Thoughts Are Things [1889] (reprint, 1908), 97.
“thought structure”: Ibid., 108.
“In time to come”: Prentice Mulford, Your Forces and How to Use Them (1904), IV, 182.
“by the very force”: Ralph Waldo Trine, In Tune with the Infinite (1897), 154.
“take the attitude of mind”: Ibid., 180. Italics in original.
“Never give a moment”: Ibid., 181.
“is just so much”: Ibid., 184.
“desire, matter, and the animal will”: Satter, Kingdom, 152.
“And oh! a wonderful thing”: Helen Wilmans, A Search for Freedom (1898), 9.
“When an ‘I’ shall stand”: Ibid., 202.
“complete control”: Ibid., 28.
“There was always the pressure”: Ibid., 32.
“The aptest word”: Ibid., 88.
“Mother was decidedly”: Ibid., 147.
“Mother soon manifested”: Ibid., 89.
“I did not fully comprehend”: Ibid., 142.
“damn the devil”: Ibid., 41.
“sheer force of animal will”: Ibid., 206.
“I felt sure I had something”: Ibid., 210.
“intentness of purpose”: Ibid., 35ff.
“I did not know”: Ibid., 44.
“The very moment”: Ibid., 285.
“but there was an undercurrent”: Ibid., 236.
“Upon being put to bed”: Ibid., 92.
“a machine for photographing thought”: Ibid., 97.
Louis Darget: www.bbc.com/future/article/20170116-the-man-who-tried-to-photograph-thoughts-and-dreams.
“there is no real happiness”: Wilmans, Search for Freedom, 183.
“the ordinary animal marriage”: Ibid.
“soul [was] ground into the dust daily”: Ibid., 293.
“a veritable product of earth”: Ibid., 347.
In 1877: Satter, Kingdom, 154–62, provides a detailed account of Wilmans’s marriage and early career in journalism, which Wilmans glides over in her autobiography in the interest of creating a forward-thrusting narrative of self-development.
“The slaves of capital”: Helen Wilmans, The Conquest of Poverty (1899), 39.
“were dead to any sense of power”: Ibid., 42.
“On the road to progress”: Ibid., 46.
“declaration of individuality”: Ibid., 50.
“universal reaching out for money”: Ibid., 85.
“The supply of money”: Ibid., 106.
“these positive thought currents”: Ibid., 111.
“The man who mentally”: Ibid., 123.
“Fear is the only thing”: Ibid., 65.
“Every thought a man can have”: Ibid., 82.
“thought is an actual substance”: Ibid., 112.
“all substance is, fundamentally”: Ibid., 114.
“correlation of forces”: Ibid., 50.
“thought was a force”: Ibid., 56.
“disease is simply”: Ibid., 126.
“for hope and faith do project”: Ibid., 151.
“I am not sick”: Wilmans quoted by Elizabeth, “Editorials: ‘Vale et Ave,’” Nautilus 10 (Nov. 1907), 11.
“It is one thing”: G. Stanley Hall, “Boys Who Should Not Go to College,” Youth’s Companion, March 15, 1894, 119.
“The pure animal spirits”: “Theodosia Burr,” Harper’s Monthly 29 (Aug. 1864), 297.
“from sheer excess”: “Wild Girls,” Memphis Daily Appeal, Aug. 23, 1868, 1.
“precocious girls”: “Precocious Girls,” Youth’s Companion (July 19, 1883), 294.
“There are nations”: “Animal Spirits,” St. Johnsbury Caledonian, April 16, 1885, 2.
“quick, springy”: “New Feminine Style in Gait,” Evening Star, Nov. 3, 1885, 6.
“The metropolitan girl”: “An Artistic Conclusion,” Salt Lake Herald, Feb. 28, 1886, 11.
“Give the girls exercises”: “In Woman’s Behalf,” Maryville Times, June 3, 1891, 7.
“She never calculates”: “Keyed to Happiness,” Arizona Republican, Aug. 23, 1892, 4.
“They are brown”: “Woman’s Beauty,” Evening Star, May 4, 1895, 16.
“overflowing with animal spirits”: Katherine Morton, “The Quest of Beauty,” Evening Star, July 12, 1902, 20.
“The athletic summer girl”: “The Athletic Summer Girl and What She Wears,” Minneapolis Journal, August 2, 1902, 17.
“as pretty a collection of girls”: “The Cowgirl,” Palestine (Texas) Daily Herald, November 18, 1908, 3.
“aggressive, fun-loving pluck”: Samuel Osgood, “Boys, Read This,” Highland Weekly News, Jan. 30, 1868, 1.
“In the first place”: “The Ideal Boy,” Vermont Phoenix, Oct. 2, 1891, 2.
“Without any hesitancy”: “A Boy’s Surplus Energy,” Wichita Daily Eagle, Feb. 6, 1898, 11.
“In short, in life”: Theodore Roosevelt, “What We Can Expect of the American Boy,” St. Nicholas 27 (May 1900), 583.
“the floor might have passed”: An unidentified observer, cited in Jack White, The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America (2018), 13.
“a strange and curious magnetism”: “Bryan in the Field: Scenes of Crazy Enthusiasm,” Washington Post, July 10, 1896, 1.
“A Wild, Raging”: “The Silver Fanatics Are Invincible,” New York Times, July 7, 1896, 1.
“Virile, strong, healthy”: “Wonderful Californians,” Wichita Daily Eagle, Oct. 5, 1892, 3.
“Do these savage views”: Edward B. Tylor, “The Philosophy of Religion Among the Lower Races of Mankind,” Journal of the Ethnological Society of London 2 (1870), 379.
“the difference between”: Ibid., 371.
“who scarcely distinguishes”: Ibid., 372.
“has its roots in”: Theodore Achelis, “Animal Worship from the Standpoint of Ethnic Psychology,” Open Court 11 (Dec. 1897), 716.
“The two criminals”: “Six Traps Sprung,” Memphis Daily Appeal, June 22, 1878, 1.
“every face wore a look”: Fannie B. Ward, “In Yucatan,” Sacramento Record-Union, May 19, 1888, 2.
“was a wild beast caged”: “Dies with a Devisive [sic] Laugh,” Daily Telegraph, April 19, 1886, 1.
“He is a negro”: “Local News: Tom,” Evening Star, Dec. 12, 1860, 3.
“no boisterous fun”: “Men in Better Spirits,” Sun, Aug. 26, 1898, 2.
“negro regiments”: “Rough Riders at Play,” Sun, Aug. 28, 1898, 2.
“The young negro”: “The Negro Soldier,” Kinsley Graphic, Oct. 13, 1899, 7.
“When the Indian goes”: “The Indian Religious Outbreak,” Pittsburg Dispatch, Nov. 23, 1890, 4.
“to undergo the tortures”: “Mooney to Report on Sun Dance Incident,” Washington Times, Aug. 6, 1903, 3.
“The average church-going”: William James, “A Strong Note of Warning Regarding the Lynching Epidemic,” Springfield Republican, July 23, 1903, 11.
“the water-tight compartment”: Ibid., 11.
“moral equivalent of war”: William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War” [1910], in William James, Writings 1902–1910 (1987), 1281–93.
7. ANOTHER CIVILIZATION
“The fiddles are tuning up”: John Butler Yeats, cited in John Lukacs, A New Republic: A History of the United States in the 20th Century (2004), 23n.
“The present age is a critical one”: George Santayana, “The Intellectual Temper of the Age,” in his Winds of Doctrine (1913), 1.
“For fifty years”: Charles Moore, “The Return of the Gods,” Dial 53 (Nov. 16, 1912), 371.
“blooming, buzzing confusion”: William James, Psychology: Briefer Course in William James; Writings 1878–1899 (1992), 24.
“Certainty is the root”: Benjamin Paul Blood, quoted in William James, “A Pluralistic Mystic,” Hibbert Journal 8 (July 1910), 758.
“the lyrical left”: This useful phrase was introduced by John Patrick Diggins in The American Left in the Twentieth Century (1973).
“the subjective necessity of social settlements”: Jane Addams, title of essay in Twenty Years at Hull House (1910).
“Empty ‘being’ but not full and green ‘life’”: Friedrich Nietzsche, cited and translated in Amrine, “‘The Triumph of Life,’” 135.
“One only acts perfectly when one acts instinctively”: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Books I and II [1914] (Project Gutenberg, 2016), 364.
“In the sex relation”: George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903), act 3.
“Why are you trying to fascinate me”: Ibid., act 4.
“to explain some”: John Haldane, “Vitalism,” Eclectic Magazine 68 (Oct. 1898), 509.
“whatever is the result”: Wilhelm Ostwald, quoted in John Grier Hibben, “The Theory of Energetics and Its Philosophical Bearings,” Open Court 13 (April 1903), 2.
“said that science”: “Old Argument Still Valid,” Independent 55 (May 7, 1903), 1109.
“Man is ceasing”: D. B. Potter, “The Life Force,” Health 61 (Dec. 1911), 267.
“We need to recognize”: William E. Ritter, “The Controversy Between Materialism and Vitalism: Can It Be Ended?,” Science 33 (March 21, 1911), 439.
“the sophisticated thinker”: Ibid., 440.
“how futile is”: Ibid., 441.
“There is something”: John Burroughs, “The Problem of Living Things,” Independent 76 (Oct. 2, 1913), 21.
“The world of complex”: Ibid., 22.
“In all ages”: Herbert Quick, “‘On Board the Good Ship Earth’: The Only Thing Worth Worshiping—Force,” Tacoma Times, Jan. 23, 1913, 8.
Bergson was the consummate: My discussion of Bergson is indebted to Thomas Quirk’s pathbreaking “Bergson in America,” Prospects (1986), 453–80, especially his account and examples of Bergson’s aphoristic style.
“Real duration”: Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (1911), 46.
“idea of regulating life”: Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesly Brereton and Fred Rothwell (2008), 29.
“The role of life”: Bergson, Creative Evolution, 126. Italics Bergson’s.
“There are things that intelligence”: Ibid., 151. Italics Bergson’s.
“The intellect is characterized”: Ibid., 165. Italics Bergson’s.
“You must take things”: Ibid., 193.
“transcends finality”: Ibid., 265.
“I believe electricity”: “Ophelia,” McCook Weekly Tribune, July 3, 1884, 6.
“the animal spirits of Galen”: “Animal Spirits—Nervous Impulses,” Journal of the American Medical Association 62 (Feb. 14, 1914), 542.
“The human body”: John Francis Byrnes, “The Secret of Success Is Nervous Energy,” Los Angeles Herald, March 11, 1906, 10.
“Look around you”: William Walker Atkinson, Thought-Force in Business and Everyday Life (1901), 13.
“nothing is a happier”: “The Sense of Humor,” Crittenden Press, April 24, 1902, 3.
“The sick look”: George F. Shears, “Making a Choice of a Profession. IV. Medicine,” Cosmopolitan 34 (April 1903), 655.
“A single successful effort”: William James, “The Energies of Men,” Philosophical Review 16 (Jan. 1907), 9.
“The need of feeling responsible”: William James, “The Gospel of Relaxation,” in Talks to Teachers and Students (1900), 227.
“a right royal rough housing”: Frank Waugh, “Rough-Housing,” Independent 72 (Jan. 25, 1912), 183.
“The whole essence”: Ibid., 184.
“should have a bright, cheerful”: M. M. K., “The Ideal Lady Typewriter,” Stenographer 9 (March 1896), 84.
“Law stenographers”: Caroline A. Huling, Letters of a Business Woman to Her Niece (1906), 96.
“Remember that you”: Ibid., 97.
“The sensible girl”: Ibid., 102–3.
“Your face is constantly clouded”: Quoted in William Thomas McElroy, “The Value of Cheerfulness,” New York Observer and Chronicle 89 (Nov. 9, 1911), 589.
“I became accustomed”: “A Business Woman,” “How Love Passed Me By: The Confessions of a Business Woman,” Harper’s Bazaar 46 (June 1912), 277.
“I allowed myself”: Ibid.
“Of vital force”: John James Ingalls, “The Extinction of Leisure,” Forum, Aug. 1889, 685.
“the great American idol”: “An American Idol,” Pittsburg Dispatch, March 21, 1891, 10.
“the typical American”: H. D. Sedgwick, Jr., “Certain Aspects of America,” Atlantic Monthly 90 (July 1908), 7.
“This neglect betrays”: Ibid., 8.
“either to make up”: Ibid.
“In nature, of course”: C. G. Jung, Jung Contra Freud: The 1912 New York Lectures on the Theory of Psychoanalysis [1961] (reprint, 2012), 47.
“is not only not concrete”: Ibid., 48.
“almost entirely on his business”: Jung, quoted in “‘America Facing Its Most Tragic Moment’—Dr. Carl Jung,” New York Times, Sept. 29, 1912, SM2.
“It takes much”: Ibid.
holds you [Americans] together: Ibid.
“cautioned his hearers”: “How to Train the Young,” Kansas City Journal, Oct. 24, 1899, 4.
“the president was”: “Merry Chase at Sight of a Herd,” Butte Inter Mountain, April 9, 1903, 3.
“He is full of electricity”: “Home Again,” New York Sun, June 7, 1903, 8.
“Familiar only with”: “Achates Abroad,” St. Paul Globe, June 19, 1904, 32.
“President Roosevelt has”: “The President’s Peculiarities,” Indianapolis Journal, Aug. 23, 1903, 2.
“A few years ago”: Annie Russell Marble, “The Gospel of Vitality in Current Literature,” Congregationalist, Dec. 7, 1899, 864.
“this last decade”: Ibid., 865.
“the animal spirits”: Rev. Calvin W. Laufer, “Watchwords for the Fireside: Buoyancy—That’s It!,” New York Observer and Chronicle 88 (April 21, 1910), 495.
“the messenger and missionary”: Edwin Björkman, “Art, Life and Criticism,” Forum, Dec. 1911, 686.
“submit to no other”: Ibid., 687.
“which demands that”: Ibid., 689.
“She swaggers”: Octavius Cohen, “Ta-Ra-Ra Boom-De-Ay,” Times, Oct. 2, 1892, 13.
“Animal spirits, and not to be”: Katherine Pope, “Youth in the City,” Virginia (Minnesota) Enterprise, Feb. 10, 1905, 7.
“We moderns like”: “Tango Is Inherited from the Savages,” Anaconda Standard, Feb. 15, 1914, 13.
“Any locomotive boiler”: Parkhurst, cited in “Dr. Parkhurst Discusses the Giving of Dances by a Church,” El Paso Herald, Jan. 29, 1912, 8.
“I never could see”: Eis, cited in “‘Crude and Vulgar’ Says Miss Eis of Tango as Danced Here,” Sun, June 8, 1913, 8.
“the universal human expression”: Harold J. Howland, “What Shall We Do with the Turkey Trot?,” Suburban Life 17 (Oct. 1913), 199.
8. THE VITALIST MOMENT: 1913 AND AFTER
“agnostic-and-water”: Cornelia Comer, “A Letter to the Rising Generation,” Atlantic Monthly 107 (1911), 145–54.
“It is the glory”: Randolph Bourne, Youth and Life (1911), 25.
“The secret of life”: Ibid., 26–27.
“Most of these professors”: Ibid., 24.
“a vivid and intense feeling”: Ibid., 103.
“The ironist is the only man”: Ibid., 111.
“There is but one”: Ibid., 130.
“For Margaret Sanger to attempt”: Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan (1999), ed. Louise Palken Rudnick, 119–20.
“One must just let life”: Ibid., 122.
“They have only invited”: Mabel Dodge to Gertrude Stein, Jan. 24, 1913, in A History of Having a Great Many Times Not Continued to Be Friends: The Correspondence Between Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein, 1911–1934 (1996), ed. Patricia R. Everett, 158.
“Many roads are being broken”: Dodge to Stein, quoting Art and Decoration, March 1913, in ibid., 273.
“the sound of breaking”: Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” [1926], in her The Captain’s Deathbed and Other Essays (1956), 115–17.
“And out of the shattering”: Dodge to Stein, in A History, 273.
“creative destruction”: Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [1942] (third ed., 1950), 81.
“I felt as though”: Luhan, Intimate Memories, 112.
“Imagine suddenly”: Ibid., 134.
“He is the most natural”: John Reed, “With Villa in Mexico,” Metropolitan 39 (Feb. 1914) 72.
“Darktown Follies drew space”: James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (1930), 192.
“Nine out of ten”: Carl Van Vechten, In the Garret (1920), 316–17.
“there has been a spiritual expansion”: Bourne, Youth and Life, 179.
“Five hundred”: “Bergson Fills Hall at First Lecture,” Sun, Feb. 4, 1913, 7.
“two thousand students”: “Professor Bergson at the City College,” Outlook, March 1, 1913, 467.
“M. Bergson has”: Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Metaphysician of the Life-force,” Nation 89 (Sept. 30, 1909), 301.
“He offers men again”: Louise Collier Willcox, “Impressions of M. Bergson,” Harper’s Weekly 57 (March 8, 1913), 6.
“There is nothing conservative”: “Henri Bergson, ‘Intellectual Bottle of Smelling Salts,’” New-York Tribune, March 23, 1913, 5.
“The world was”: Walter Lippmann, “The Most Dangerous Man in the World,” Everybody’s Magazine 26 (July 1912), 100.
“And if I were interested”: Ibid., 101.
“Imagine a Broadway”: “5,000 Women March, Beset by Crowds,” New York Times, March 4, 1913, 5.
“the greatest event”: Louise Collier Wilcox, “Impressions of M. Bergson,” Harper’s Weekly, March 8, 1913, 6. Italics in original.
“his insistent demand”: Marian Cox, “Bergson’s Message to Feminism,” Forum, May 1913, 548. Italics Cox’s.
“the subconsciousness of every”: Edwin E. Slosson, introduction to Henri Bergson, Dreams (1914), 7.
“Americans have discovered”: “Rudolf Eucken,” Outlook, March 22, 1913, 601.
“To fight hard”: “A Philosopher of the Modern Spirit,” Evening Post, Feb. 4, 1913, 8.
“Because the microscope”: Ibid., 8.
“the sentiment of rationality”: William James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in William James: Writings 1878–1899 (Library of America ed., 1992), 950–85.
“I believe the tendency”: William Thomson, Thomson Collection, University of Cambridge Library, quoted in Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (1998), 111.
“One evening Roelker”: A. R. Macdonough, “The Century Club,” Century Magazine 41 (March 1891), 682–83.
“running down like a clock”: Edwin E. Slosson, “This Changing World III: Man and His Mill-Race,” Independent 105 (March 19, 1921), 285.
“a world of order”: Charles Nordmann, “The Death of the Universe,” El Paso Herald, March 2, 1912, 3.
“Reasons for Believing”: “Reasons for Believing in the Eternal Duration of the Universe,” Current Literature 39 (Aug. 1905), 183–84.
“It is very strange”: Charles Nordmann, “The Death of the Universe,” El Paso Herald, March 2, 1912, 3.
“a great historical date”: Robert Kennedy Duncan, “Some Unsolved Problems in Science,” Harper’s Monthly 125 (June 1, 1912), 31.
“the transcendent energies”: Ibid., 32.
“God made it”: Robert Kennedy Duncan, The New Knowledge (1905), 245.
“The need for a new”: Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Practical Tendencies of Bergsonism I,” International Journal of Ethics 23 (April 1913), 254–55.
“a resemblance to features”: Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Metaphysician of the Life-Force,” Nation 89 (Sept. 30, 1909), 299.
“The ancient tradition”: Irving Babbitt, “Bergson and Rousseau,” Nation 95 (Nov. 14, 1912), 455.
“if life is better”: George Santayana, “The Intellectual Temper of the Age,” in his Winds of Doctrine (1913), 13–14. Italics in original.
“Only when vitality is low”: Ibid., 14.
“A man, we are to believe”: Babbitt, 455.
“for what might be”: Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics (1913), 135. Italics in original.
“With an explosion”: “Canal Is Opened by Wilson’s Finger,” New York Times, Oct. 11, 1913, 9.
“Until we went”: Ray Stannard Baker, “The Glory of Panama,” American Magazine 76 (Nov. 1913), 33.
“We suddenly realize”: Randolph Bourne, “A Moral Equivalent for Universal Military Service” [1916], in his War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915–1919 (1964), 142, 146.
“gently guiding a nation”: Randolph Bourne, “War and the Intellectuals” [1917], in ibid., 3, 4, 6, 8.
“the itch to be”: Ibid., 10, 11.
“The pacifist is roundly scolded”: Ibid., 12, 13.
“If William James were alive”: Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of Idols” [1917], in ibid., 33, 54.
“Malcontentedness may be”: Ibid., 64.
“it took the awful”: G. Stanley Hall, quoted in “The Supreme Standard of Life,” New-York Tribune, Aug. 29, 1920, 11.
“Radioactivity and related phenomena”: Albert Gallatin, “The Range of Reason,” Sun 83 (March 9, 1916), 6.
“fancies of our too easily”: “Unreality of All Things in the Light of Modern Knowledge,” Current Opinion 63 (Nov. 1917), 325.
Our days became numbered: Eli Cook, The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life (2017); Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (2007); Dan Bouk, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (2015).
“ticking off on his stopwatch”: Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities [1930–1943], trans. Sophie Wilkens (Picador ed., 2017), 6–7, 168–69.
“he simply left”: Ibid., 16.
“have resorted to”: Parke Godwin, “What Is This Association?” New-York Daily Tribune, March 16, 1844, 2.
“The only kind”: R. B. Wolf, “Making Men Like Their Jobs,” in Practical Psychology for Business Executives, ed. Lionel D. Eddie (1922), 110–13.
“An eight-pound baby”: “What the Baby Is Worth as a National Asset,” New York Times, Jan. 30, 1910, 1.
“Human life”: Irving Fisher, “The Money Value of Human Beings,” New York Times, March 19, 1916.
As Eli Cook has argued: Eli Cook, “The Neoclassical Club: Irving Fisher and the Progressive Origins of Neoliberalism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15 (2016), 255.
“have been taunted”: Fisher, cited in Cook, “Neoclassical Club,” 251.
“To spread the gospel”: Irving Norton Fisher, My Father Irving Fisher (1956), 82.
“we are the trustees”: Irving Fisher and Eugene Lyman Fisk, How to Live (1917), 165, 300, 322.
“to include every practical procedure”: Fisher and Fisk, How to Live, x, 5.
“So far as science can reveal”: Ibid., 142, 114.
“There aren’t going to be”: Fisher, My Father, 181–82. On Cotton’s treatment, see Andrew Scull, Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine (2005).
“As you say”: Irving Fisher to Margaret Hazard Fisher, from Dresden, 1911, in Fisher, My Father, 151–52.
“of one thing”: Irving Fisher to Margaret Hazard Fisher, from Peacedale, R.I., 1903, in ibid., 86.
“‘ever not quite’”: William James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909), 321–24.
“I’ve been reading”: Irving Fisher to Margaret Hazard Fisher, from Minneapolis, Sept. 27, 1924, in Fisher, My Father, 214.
“the naughty boy”: Irving Fisher, “Humanizing Industry,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 82 (March 1919), 85.
“animal spirits index”: Wells Fargo Securities Economics Group, “The Roar of the Animal Spirits: A New Index,” Jan. 18, 2018. I am indebted to Joe Davis of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture for this reference.
“To understand God’s thoughts”: Eileen Magnello, “Florence Nightingale: The Compassionate Statistician,” Plus, plus.maths.org/content/florence-nightingale-compassionate-statistician.
“surveillance capitalism”: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019).
9. RACE, SEX, AND POWER
“a wild ‘goat dance’”: “Pavlowa in ‘Goat Dance,’” Washington Post, Nov. 2, 1921, 26.
“a smooth son of a bitch”: Sherwood Anderson to Floyd Dell, cited in Malcolm Cowley, introduction to Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio [1919] (Viking Press ed., 1964), 3.
“to see beneath the surface of lives”: Anderson, Winesburg, frontispiece.
“Sure, boys”: Sherwood Anderson, Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs (1969), 263–64.
“one of the children”: Ibid., 265–66.
“the time of the wise-crackers”: Ibid., 387.
“I am myself”: Anderson to Finley, June 14, 1922, in William A. Sutton, ed., Letters to Bab: Sherwood Anderson to Marietta D. Finley, 1916–1933 (1985), 183.
“The niggers were something”: Sherwood Anderson, Dark Laughter (1924), 77.
“What does it matter?”: Ibid., 80–81.
“Word-lovers, sound-lovers”: Ibid., 106–7.
“[in] disposition the Negro”: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (1915), cited in Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People, 1830–1925 (2000), 200.
“semi-military, machine-like”: Claude McKay, “Claude McKay Describes His Own Life,” Manoa 31, no. 2 (2019), 105.
“Why this obscene”: McKay, cited in Robert Reindeers, “Racialism on the Left: E. D. Morel and the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine,’” International Review of Social History (1968), 17.
“You don’t know”: Claude McKay, Banjo: A Story Without a Plot [1929] (reprint, 1957), 182.
“strategic essentialism”: Sara Danius, Stefan Jonsson, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Interview with Gayatri Spivak,” boundary 2 (Summer 1993), esp. 45–50.
“the real controlling force”: Claude McKay, Home to Harlem [1928] (reprint, 1987), 70.
“The wild, shrieking”: Ibid., 328.
“moved down on him”: Ibid., 118.
“a bouncing little chestnut-brown”: Ibid., 141.
“The piano-player”: Ibid., 196.
“Brown bodies”: Ibid., 94.
“The women, carried away”: Ibid., 108.
“when I have the blues”: Ibid., 139.
“Intermittently the cooks”: Ibid., 153.
“Ray felt”: Ibid., 154.
“This is a new age”: Ibid., 206.
“that long red steel cage”: Ibid., 264.
“If the railroad had not been”: Ibid.
“He was of course aware”: McKay, Banjo, 323.
“Peace and forgetfulness”: Ibid., 283.
“not raw animal”: McKay, Home to Harlem, 311.
“now, like a jungle mask”: Ibid., 337.
“sense of partial invisibility”: George Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (2006), 25.
“That second marriage”: Nella Larsen, Quicksand [1928], in The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen (2001), 56.
“tangled feelings”: Hutchinson, Larsen, 25.
“that faint hint”: Larsen, Quicksand.
“extravagant and expensive”: Hutchinson, Larsen, 63.
“Something intuitive”: Larsen, Quicksand, 51. Italics in original.
“it wasn’t, she was suddenly”: Ibid., 44.
“We talk his dialect”: William Houghton, “Color Notes,” March 18, 1927, cited in Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Woman Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (2008), 218.
“boring beyond endurance”: Larsen, Quicksand, 83.
“You are the first white man”: Harold Jackman, cited in Hutchinson, Larsen, 179.
“It don’t matter”: Anecdote from unpublished “Reminiscences of Carl Van Vechten,” Columbia University, cited in ibid., 190.
“pansy”: Hubert Harrison, cited in ibid., 214.
“Life to [Van Vechten]”: W. E. B. Du Bois, cited in ibid., 220.
“individuality and beauty”: Larsen, Quicksand, 53.
“Helga Crane was silent”: Ibid., 54.
“an elusive something”: Ibid.
“piercing gray eyes”: Ibid., 55.
“almost too good”: Ibid., 76.
“that strange transforming experience”: Ibid., 75.
“while the continuously gorgeous”: Ibid., 77.
“As the days multiplied”: Ibid., 78.
“underneath the exchange of small talk”: Ibid., 82.
“harrowing irritation” … “smoldering hatred”: Ibid., 86.
“the inscrutability of the dozen”: Ibid., 85–86.
“thick, furry night”: Ibid., 88.
“For the while Helga”: Ibid., 89.
“with grace and abandon”: Ibid., 92.
“she loved color”: Ibid., 99.
“felt like nothing so much”: Ibid., 100.
“She began to feel”: Ibid., 103–104.
“She felt shamed”: Ibid., 112–13.
“I couldn’t marry”: Ibid., 118.
“I’m homesick”: Ibid., 122.
“a vagrant primitive”: Ibid., 124.
“She fought against”: Ibid., 133.
“acting such a swine”: Ibid., 135.
“an endless stretch”: Ibid., 137.
“scarlet’oman”: Ibid., 141.
“There crept upon her”: Ibid., 141–42.
“in the confusion”: Ibid., 145.
“labor in the vineyard”: Ibid., 146.
“in some strange way”: Ibid., 149–50.
“The children used her up”: Ibid., 150.
“Her religion was to her”: Ibid. 153.
“the white man’s God”: Ibid., 160.
“this feeling of dissatisfaction”: Ibid.
“subtle comprehension”: W. E. B. Du Bois, cited in Hutchinson, Larsen, 284.
“to tell the story”: Eda Lou Walton, cited in ibid., 285.
“twaddle concerning”: Nella Larsen, review of T. Bowyer Campbell, Black Sadie, Opportunity (1929), cited in ibid., 311.
“I entertained them”: Nella Larsen to Carl Van Vechten, June 1929, cited in ibid., 352.
“crazy about”: Larsen to Van Vechten, June 4, 1931, cited in ibid., 388.
“white book”: Larsen to Henry Allen Moe, Oct. 1930, cited in ibid., 367.
“it was rotten”: Larsen to Van Vechten, April 7, 1931, cited in ibid., 377. Italics in original.
“an eye for the stock market reports”: J. Saunders Redding, “Playing the Numbers,” North American Review (1934), 534–35. For useful background, see Shane White, Stephen Carton, Stephen Robertson, and Graham White, Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars (2020).
10. NUMBERS AND FLOW
“For many years”: William H. Howell, cited in “Wireless Treatment at Home for Obesity and Nerves?,” Washington Times, May 14, 1922, 6.
“great unconscious force”: Anne Harrington, The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (2008), 82.
“I hold the view”: George Groddeck, The Book of the It: Psychoanalytic Letters to a Friend, trans. by the author (1927), 9.
“we are ‘lived’”: L. Pierce Clark, citing Freud in introduction to ibid.
“The Es is always”: Ibid., 115.
“the repeal of reticence”: Rochelle Gurstein, The Repeal of Reticence (1996).
“quite certainly”: Groddeck, The Book, 149.
“During his mother’s”: Ibid., 104.
“literary rather than scientific”: Herman Adler, review of William Healy and Mary Healy, Pathological Lying, in Harvard Law Review (1915), 347, cited in Michael Pettit, The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America (2013).
“scientific detective” … “psychometers”: Arthur Reeve, cited in ibid., 177.
“the embodied fear”: Ibid., 180.
who’s more emotional: Ibid., 184.
“had a passion”: Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: I, Hopes Betrayed, 1883–1920 (1983), 83–84.
“I lie in bed”: Keynes to his father (1908), cited in ibid., 208.
“will be affected”: Keynes, 1910, cited in ibid.
“a flexible field”: Zachary Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (2021), 18.
Keynes was as indifferent: The anecdote is told by Skidelsky, Hopes Betrayed, 296.
“The danger confronting us”: John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire [1926] and The Economic Consequences of the Peace [1919] (reprint, 2012), 241.
“Lenin was certainly right”: Ibid., 247.
“To their minds”: Ibid., 250.
“If we aim deliberately”: Ibid., 273.
“the miseries of life”: Ibid., 258.
“Physical efficiency”: Ibid., 258–60.
“the Jew-hating ruffians”: Lobel Taubes, “The Pogroms in Vienna,” Jewish Monitor (June 4, 1920), 7, 9.
“adoration for the contingent”: Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals [1927], trans. Richard Aldington (Transaction Books ed., 2007), 61.
“thirst for immediate results”: Ibid., 29.
“glorifying of national particularism”: Ibid., 52.
“habit of energy and boldness”: Filippo Marinetti, “Futurist Manifesto,” cited in Alastair Hamilton, The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and Fascism, 1919–1945 (1971), 3.
“despot with a dimple”: Ida Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work (1939), 380–84.
“Duce knows how to get”: Alice Rohe, cited in “Mussolini, Lady Killer,” Literary Digest (July 31, 1937), 37.
“mental perverts”: Kenneth Roberts, “The Ambush of Italy,” Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 24, 1923, 34–38.
“built like a steel spring”: John Gunther, Inside Europe (1938), 194.
“punch to his eyes”: Clarence Streit in New York Evening Post, Nov. 22, 1922.
“Direct action”: Anne O’Hare McCormick in New York Times, July 15, 1923.
“Do you know, your excellency”: Irvin S. Cobb, “A Big Little Man,” Cosmopolitan (Jan. 1927), 145–46.
“a man of sheer will power” and an “anti-intellectual intellectual”: John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (1970), 63, 62.
“He is usually happy”: W. A. Evans, “How to Keep Well: Latest U.S. Bulletin on Malnutrition,” Washington Post, May 25, 1927, 10.
“the energy and push”: “Bad Boys Wanted,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 22, 1928, 112.
“The address to the jury”: W. E. Hill, “The Public Speaker,” Washington Sunday Star (April 10, 1927), Gravure Section.
“to rally youth”: C. Patrick Thompson, “Britain’s Call to Youth,” Sunday Star Magazine (Feb. 14, 1932), 1–2.
“fun and mild excitement”: John Maynard Keynes, cited in Carter, Price of Peace, 116.
“It is agreeable”: Keynes, cited in ibid., 117.
“kid gloves and tiara set”: Keynes, cited in ibid., 119.
“excludes a great number”: Keynes, cited in Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: II, The Economist as Savior, 1920–1937 (1992), 59.
“it will be an arbitrary”: Keynes, cited in ibid.
“A measurable uncertainty”: Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921), 20. Italics in original.
“the weight of argument” … “moral risk”: Keynes, cited in Skidelsky, Savior, 60.
“exquisite plebian beauty,” and “Lydia dolls”: Carter, Price of Peace, 119.
“I gobble you”: Lydia Lopokova to Keynes, cited in ibid., 121.
“I want to be”: Keynes to Lopokova, cited in ibid.
“uneducated; their reactions”: Skidelsky, Savior, 101.
“the long run”: Keynes, cited in ibid., 62, 153–54.
“The proper object”: Keynes, cited in ibid., 203.
“There is no reason”: Keynes, cited in Carter, Price of Peace, 173.
“to the great majority”: John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash: 1929 (1955), 77.
“At luncheon in downtown”: Ibid., 77.
“the rise of a new national literature”: Charles Merz, “Bull Market,” Harper’s, April 1929, 644.
“has fitted perfectly”: Ibid., 645.
“even the person”: Galbraith, Great Crash, 80.
“‘The [ticker] tape doesn’t lie’”: John Brooks, Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920–1938 (1968), 60.
“carefully planted rumor”: Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (2005), 307. I am indebted to Fraser’s shrewd and searching account of the bull market and the crash.
“gentlemen of high moral”: Joseph Stagg Lawrence, Wall Street and Washington (1929), 14, 3, 7.
“fringe of fraud”: Ibid., 133, 151.
“Christ himself”: Ibid., 139, 142.
“ultimate end”: Ibid., 144–45.
“Sex has become”: John B. Watson, cited in Fraser, Every Man, 395.
“financial success”: English visitor, cited in Brooks, Golconda, 107.
“Seas of regret”: Bernie Winkelman, cited in ibid., 84.
“the market had surrendered”: Galbraith, Great Crash, 99.
“not so much”: Edwin Lefevre, “The Little Fellow in Wall Street,” Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 4, 1930, cited in ibid., 100.
“a little distress”: Thomas Lamont, cited in ibid., 101.
“The feeling of those present”: Richard Whitney, The Work of the Stock Exchange in the Panic of 1929, an address before the Boston Association of Stock Exchange Firms (1930), 16–17ff.
“hollered and screamed”: Eyewitness, cited in Fraser, Every Man, 416.
“eerie roar”: Eyewitness, cited in Brooks, Golconda, 119.
“to show pictures”: Mayor Jimmy Walker, cited in Galbraith, Great Crash, 115.
“Never was there a time”: Ibid., 123.
“the stock market”: Edmund Wilson, The Thirties (1980), 65–66.
“an epoch of cheap money”: Keynes to New York Post, cited in Carter, Price of Peace, 163.
“voluntary abstinence”: John Maynard Keynes, Treatise on Money (1930), vol. 2, 148–50.
“the anxiety of many banks”: Keynes, cited in Carter, Price of Peace, 208.
11. THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FEAR
“In small towns”: Ed Paulsen, quoted in Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970), 30.
“We were a gentle crowd”: Ibid., 31.
“Have you heard a hungry child”: Lillian Wald, cited in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 (1957), 171.
“The Collapse of the Romance”: John Dewey, cited in Fraser, Every Man, 423.
“No power so effectually”: Edmund Burke, cited in Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2013), 29.
“dreadful apathy”: Edmund Wilson, “An Appeal to Progressives,” New Republic (Jan. 14, 1931), 235–36.
“the look of pain”: Richard Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (1973), 196.
“The amazing thing”: Sherwood Anderson, Puzzled America (1935), ix.
“did not even know”: James Rorty, Where Life Is Better (1936), 117.
“In Lowell I saw”: Louis Adamic, “Tragic Towns of New England,” Harper’s 162 (May 1931), 752.
“Few of the unemployed”: Ibid., 755.
“the breaking down”: Anderson, Puzzled America, 161–62.
“When [the children] see me”: Quoted in Mirra Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family (1940), 98.
“hardest thing”: Quoted in ibid., 27.
“I simply had”: Engineer, quoted in Lorena Hickock to Harry Hopkins, April 2, 1934, in Hickock, One Third of a Nation (1981), 206.
“We’d lived on bread”: Insurance agent, quoted in ibid.
“No economist doubts”: Gerald W. Johnson, “Bryan, Thou Shouldst Be Living,” Harper’s, Sept. 1931, 388.
“constitutionally gloomy”: William Allen White, cited in John Kasson, The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (2014), 15.
“if you put a rose”: Gutzon Borglum, cited in ibid.
“appeals for good cheer”: Ibid., 17.
“the reparations problem”: Keynes, cited in Carter, Price of Peace, 217.
“Fascism in Action”: Mussolini, cited in Katznelson, Fear, 112–13.
“crisis of democratic confidence”: Katznelson paraphrasing Niebuhr in ibid., 115.
“comprehending the tides of history”: Ibid., 116.
“his capacity to charm”: Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life (2017), 20.
“Never let the left”: FDR, cited in ibid., 35.
“frictionless command”: Harvard Crimson managing editor, cited in ibid., 32.
“an aristocrat at odds with the bosses”: Ibid., 44.
his immune system: Ibid., chap. 3.
“You know that he has never”: Eleanor Roosevelt, cited in Kasson, Little Girl, 24.
“an invalid on crutches”: A “typical newspaper assessment,” cited in Dallek, Roosevelt, 91.
“Yes, we could smell”: Harold Clurman, Fervent Years (1957), 107, 112.
“Fine! Fine! Fine!”: FDR, cited in Dallek, Roosevelt, 128.
“Orson, you and I”: FDR, cited in ibid., 129.
“I am certain”: FDR inaugural address: avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos1.asp.
“The new president’s recurrent smile”: “500,000 in Streets Cheer Roosevelt,” New York Times, March 5, 1933, 1.
“dipped in phosphorous”: Lillian Gish, cited in Kasson, Little Girl, 31.
“Today sitting”: Cleveland man, cited in ibid., 35.
“tears of peaceful happiness”: Des Moines woman, cited in ibid.
“You are bringing back”: Chicagoan, cited in ibid., 37.
“We are saved”: Syracuse judge, cited in ibid., 38.
“new deal”: FDR, acceptance speech to Democratic Convention, July 2, 1932, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-accepting-the-presidential-nomination-the-democratic-national-convention-chicago-1.
“President Roosevelt has”: Time, April 3, 1933, 43.
“strangely reminiscent”: Anne O’Hare McCormick, “Vast Tides That Stir the Capital,” New York Times Magazine, May 7, 1993, 1–3.
“A system based upon”: Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 225.
“the social whole”: Katznelson, Fear, 478.
“Uncle Sam”: Vera Connolly, “Uncle Sam Wants Your Mark,” Good Housekeeping, Dec. 1935, 24–25.
“Life is safer”: Social Security Board, “Why Social Security?” (1937), cited in Bouk, How Our Days Became Numbered, 216.
“Unemployed lumber worker”: Ibid., 209–11.
“the modern conception of death”: Irving Fisher, cited in ibid., 115.
“What chance do you”: “Dorothy Dix’s Letter Box,” Washington Evening Star, March 19, 1931, C-10.
“folk play”: J. Brooks Atkinson, “A-Hollerin’: ‘Green Grow the Lilacs’ with Cowboys and Farmers and Animal Spirits,” New York Times, Feb. 8, 1931, 106.
“truckin’ on down”: “Shirley Goes Harlem—Learns to Truck,” Chicago Defender, Jan. 11, 1936, 8.
“‘Sailor Beware!’ is a bawdy”: Brooks Atkinson, “Limitations of the United States Navy in a Comedy Entitled ‘Sailor, Beware!’” New York Times, Sept. 29, 1933, 24.
“He is young”: Bill McCormick, “Around the Ring…” Washington Post, June 17, 1934: 17.
“Grandpa watched them”: W. Boyce Morgan, “Grandpa Jenkins’ Gold: A Story of Two Young Prospectors. Installment V,” Sunday Star, March 18, 1934, 14.
“Although a good many”: “The Theatre: Succeeding Burlesque,” Wall Street Journal, July 14, 1937, 13.
“made to order for the movie fans”: “Sonja Henie Is Skating Again at the Palace,” Washington Post, March 5, 1938, X10.
“Bette Davis, the Duse of Warner’s”: T.S., “Bette Davis Tries Comedy in ‘The Bride Came C.O.D.’ at the Strand,” New York Times, July 26, 1941: 18.
“widespread confusion”: Howard Odum, cited in Katznelson, Fear, 43.
“Today, my friends”: FDR, cited in ibid., 35.
“seized by deep”: Walter Lippmann, cited in ibid., 298.
“the dominant mood”: Frederick Schumann, cited in ibid.
“Why has it happened?”: “Sloan Finds Recession Influenced by Fear, ‘Political-Economic’ Ills Halting Recovery,” New York Times, Jan. 3, 1938, 34.
“I saw your friend”: FDR to Frances Perkins, May 1934, cited in Dallek, Roosevelt, ibid.
“supposed the President”: Keynes to Perkins, cited in ibid.
“‘I guess things’”: Cited in Rorty, Where Life Is Better, 31.
“Lying in bed”: Keynes to Kingsley Martin, July 1, 1937, cited in Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: III, Fighting for Britain, 1937–1946 (2000), 7.
“It is our duty”: Keynes, cited in ibid., 33. Italics in original.
“a very packed”: Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. A. G. Bell, v, 128–29.
“Cambridge rationalism”: Keynes, “My Early Beliefs,” in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, X, 434.
“We were at an age”: Ibid., 435.
“Nothing mattered”: Ibid., 436, 438, 442.
“the life of passionate”: Ibid., 445, 446. Italics in original.
“continuing moral progress”: Ibid., 447.
“We repudiated all versions”: Ibid.
“the attribution of rationality”: Ibid., 448.
“water-spiders”: Ibid., 450.
“the abstinence theory of progress”: Skidelsky, Savior, 541.
“If you want to be rich”: Watch Your Dreams with Harlem Pete Dream Book (1949), 2, in University of Michigan Library, Special Collections.
“If the Treasury”: Keynes, General Theory, 129.
“Keynes did not want”: Joan Robinson to American Economic Association, cited in Carter, Price of Peace, 456. Italics in original.
“When the capital”: Keynes, General Theory, 159.
“How then are these”: Ibid., 151–52.
“risks … were supposed”: Keynes, “The General Theory of Employment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (1937), 213.
“Actually, we have”: Ibid. Italics in original.
“By ‘uncertain’ knowledge”: Ibid., 213–14.
“a result of animal spirits”: Keynes, General Theory, 161.
“The actual, private object”: Ibid., 155.
“science and compound interest”: Keynes, “Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren” (1930), in his Essays in Persuasion (reprint, 2010), 321–32.
a capitalist version of Providence: See the probing remarks in White, Railroaded, xxv.
“second flood”: Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 [1931] (reprint, 1969), 2.
“little daily miracles”: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. David Bradshaw (2006), 133.
“will flame out”: Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur” [1877, first pub. 1918], lines 2, 10, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur.
as Jon Levy observes: My thinking on these matters has been freshened and sharpened by Jon Levy’s brilliant essay “Primal Capital,” Critical Historical Studies 6, no. 2 (Fall 2019), 161–93.
12. THE TRIUMPH AND FAILURE OF MANAGEMENT
“reactionary Keynesianism”: Carter, Price of Peace, passim.
“the hardboiled youth”: H. R. Baukhage, “Washington Digest: Status of Fascism in Spain,” Midland Journal, Jan. 14, 1944, 2.
“Without qualification”: Don Goddard, cited in Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (1994), 4, 5.
“a creeping feeling of apprehension”: A. Garcia Diaz to New York Times, Aug. 9, 1945, 20.
“We have sowed the whirlwind”: Hanson Baldwin, “The Atomic Weapon,” New York Times, Aug. 7, 1945, 10.
an iconic journalistic form: “News of the Week in Review,” Milwaukee Journal, Aug. 8, 1945, 12.
“as one senses the foundations”: “The Atomic Bomb,” New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 7, 1945, 22.
“We thank God”: Truman, cited in Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light, 6.
“Prometheus, the subtle artificer”: “The Atomic Age,” Life, Aug. 20, 1945, 32.
“Seldom, if ever”: In Search of Light: The Broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow, 1938–1961 (1967), 102.
“every major city”: J. W. Campbell, interview in The New Yorker, Aug. 25, 1945, 16.
“a barren waste”: Chicago Tribune, cited in Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light, 15.
“paralyzing fear”: W. F. Ogburn, “Sociology and the Atom,” American Journal of Sociology 31 (Jan. 1946), 269.
“a kind of vast jelly”: Hermann Hagedorn, cited in Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light, 280.
“a revolutionary change”: Henry Stimson, cited in Katznelson, Fear, 349.
“fear became permanent”: Ibid.
“public thinking”: David Lilienthal, cited in ibid., 416.
“emotions of fear”: Government review of congressional debate, cited in ibid., 432.
“There is much to fear”: Clinton Rossiter, “Constitutional Dictatorship in an Atomic Age,” Review of Politics 2 (1949), 418.
“scare the pants off”: Cited in Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light, 70.
“to preserve our civilization”: Eugene Rabinowitch, “Five Years After,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 7, no. 1 (Jan. 1951), 3.
“Gentlemen, you are mad!”: Lewis Mumford, “Gentlemen, You Are Mad!” Saturday Review of Literature, March 2, 1946, 5, 6.
“scare hell out of the American people”: Arthur Vandenberg, cited in Greg Herken, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (1977), 282–84.
“The atom bomb”: Wyndham Lewis, America and Cosmic Man (1949), 244.
“I know the bomb”: Survey respondent, cited in Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light, 23.
“Through God’s help”: Norman Vincent Peale, A Guide to Confident Living (1948), 146.
“the journalist must write”: Telford Taylor, “The Trouble Is Fear,” The Nation, May 20, 1950, 507.
“permissive effect”: Lionel Trilling, “The Kinsey Report,” Partisan Review, April 1948.
“the end of ideology”: Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (1960).
“a Detroit pet monkey”: Paul Steiner, “Animal Spirits,” New York Times, April 2, 1950, 172.
“The real test will come”: M. J. Rossant, “Crisis of Confidence: A View of the Spirits of Businessmen and How They May Affect the Economy,” New York Times, April 15, 1963, 46.
“that a limitation”: “Tightening Up on Margins,” Washington Post, Nov. 8, 1963, A22.
“the uncertainty which has”: Harvey H. Segal, “Investment View: The Incest Impact on Forecast Crop,” Washington Post, Dec. 23, 1963, A22.
“A single superbomb”: Ralph Lapp, “Civil Defenses Outmoded by New H-bomb,” Time, Feb. 21, 1955, content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,892974,00.html.
“Why make the rubble bounce?”: Churchill, quoted in James Reston, “‘Why Make the Rubble Bounce?,’” New York Times, March 31, 1976.
“strategists widened”: Paul Erickson, Judy Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordon, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (2013), 6.
“Stone Age mentality”: Ibid., 16.
“The rule that such a device”: Jerome Weizenbaum, cited in ibid., 29.
“a new priesthood”: Theodore White, “The Action Intellectuals,” Life (June 9, 1967), 3.
“the delicate balance of terror”: Albert Wohlstetter, cited in Erickson et al., How Reason, 13.
“stochastic universe”: Oskar Morgenstern, cited in Erickson et al., How Reason, 48.
“a cool and clear-headed”: Sidney Verba, cited in ibid., 83.
“in almost total disagreement”: Norman Mailer, contribution to “Our Country and Our Culture,” Partisan Review (May–June 1952), 298–301.
“there is slowly emerging”: Dwight Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (1957), 59–73.
“the life where a man must go”: Mailer, “The White Negro” [1957], in his Advertisements for Myself (1959), 313.
“The Decline of Greatness”: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Decline of Greatness” [1958], Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 1, 1958, reprinted in his Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference? (1960).
“It was a hero”: Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Esquire, Nov. 1960.
Kennedy’s aggressive nuclear policy: My interpretation of the Cuban Missile Crisis is based on Sheldon M. Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory (2012), which is ably summarized by Benjamin Schwarz, “The Real Cuban Missile Crisis,” The Atlantic (2013), www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-real-cuban-missile-crisis/309190/.
“would learn just”: Khrushchev to Strobe Talbott, cited in Schwarz, “Real Cuban Missile Crisis,” 3.
“the peace and security”: Kennedy, television address to the nation, Oct. 22, 1962, cited in ibid.
“The furnishings are functional”: Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (Signet Books ed., 1968), 25–26, 27.
“If the republic was now”: Mailer, Armies, 110, 103.
“a purely negative”: Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on a Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition [1969] (reprint, 1994), 53, 9, 198.
“There is but one way”: Ibid., 208, 218, 120.
“the living experience”: Ibid., 228, 140, 227.
“an evil which is not”: Ibid., 47, 55.
“cultivation of a feminine”: Ibid., 74–75, 82, 149–50.
Soon enough the ferment would subside: The best interpretation of this subsidence is Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006).
“recapturing the flag”: George Packer, “Recapturing the Flag,” New York Times Magazine, Sept. 30, 2001, www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-9–30–01-recapturing-the-flag.html.
“exterminate all the brutes”: Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness [1899] (Penguin ed., 2017), 57.
“Not in our lifetime”: Cheney, cited in Bob Woodward, “CIA Told to Do ‘Whatever Necessary’ to Kill Bin Laden,” Washington Post, October 21, 2001, www .washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/10/21/cia-told-to-do-whatevernecessary-to-kill-bin-laden/19d0e8f1-dbe5–4b07–9c47–44c5b4328f1f/.
“irrational exuberance”: Alan Greenspan, “The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society,” speech to American Enterprise Institute, Dec. 5, 1996, www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1996/19961205.htm.
EPILOGUE: A FIERCE GREEN FIRE
“We reached the old wolf”: Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac [1949] (reprint, 2020), 121–22.
“Does life only make sense”: Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (2010), 53, 113, 119.
“he pauses. I wait”: Robert McFarlane, Underland (2019), 65, 67.
“Does it change the way”: Ibid., 69.
“Living wood, left long”: Ibid., 92, 104.
“the force which causes”: Ibid., 112.
“grammar of animacy”: Ibid.
“Intelligence … has often been”: Steven Pinker, cited in Riskin, The Restless Clock, 347.
“niche construction”: Kevin Laland, Blake Matthews, and Marcus Feldman, “An Introduction to Niche Construction Theory,” Evolutionary Ecology 30 (2016), 191–202.
“quantum jumps”: Erwin Schrodinger, What Is Life? [1944] (Canto Classics ed., 2012), 34, 113.
“not through a purely random”: Riskin, The Restless Clock, 357.
“fanaticism” and “zealotry”: Richard Dawkins, cited in ibid., 364.
“Well, God has arrived”: Keynes to Lopokova, cited in Skidelsky, Savior, 291.
“no statement of fact”: Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics” [1929], 2, 3, 5, 6, sackett.net/WittgensteinEthics.pdf.
Acknowledgments
AT THE END of a long slog of writing a book, it’s always a pleasure to recall the generosity and support that made it happen. Once again, I have been lucky.
Rutgers University provided a crucial institutional foundation for my work, as it has for nearly forty years. The staff at Alexander Library was top-notch and reliable as always. The staff at Raritan—Donna Green, Michael Van Unen, Julie Meidlinger, and Stephanie Volmer—held down the fort, even during the trying times of the Covid pandemic. My colleagues in history engaged intelligently with this project as it took shape. In particular, James Delbourgo, Jamie Pietruska, Seth Koven, Johan Mathew, Camilla Townsend, David Greenberg, Tom Figueira, and Toby Craig Jones helped me clarify larger concepts in ways they may not have realized at the time. Pat McGrath provided stellar research and playful intellect. The students in my undergraduate seminar “Humans and Animals in the Western Imagination” offered fresh insights into large issues—especially Giuseppe Lazzarotti, in his passionate and incisive work on wolves.
I have also depended heavily on the work of other historians, biographers, and critics, with admiration and gratitude—as I trust my endnotes indicate. David Bromwich and Richard Moser are not mentioned in the endnotes, but they have provided crucial intellectual companionship in dark times. Invitations to speak at Virginia Tech, Cornell, Northwestern, the University of Tel Aviv, the University of Liverpool in London, the Italian Institute of American Studies in Rome, the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, and the University of California at Santa Barbara gave me opportunities to sharpen my ideas and extend their reach. Among many lively interlocutors, Giles Gunn, Nelson Lichtenstein, Eileen Boris, Ed Gitre, Jon Levy, Michael Kramer, Amy Dru Stanley, Michael Zakim, and Dror Wahrman offered especially shrewd insights that helped me realize I was writing (among other things) a history of capitalism and emotional life.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, where I wrote the first draft of this book. Its founder and executive director, James Davison Hunter, and its director, Ryan Olson, provided solid material support; James also offered a model of creative involvement with broad cultural issues—not to mention his friendship. Matt Crawford, Joe Davis, Tal Brewer, Rachel Wahl, Andrew Lynn, Kyle Williams, James Mumford, Paul Nedelisky, Chris Yates, Garnette Cadogan, Jennifer Geddes, Isaac Reed, Olivier Zunz, and many other Institute Fellows created a challenging and rewarding intellectual community. Jay Tolson was in a class by himself, encouraging me at every turn, nudging my research in fruitful directions, reading the entire manuscript with a critical but sympathetic eye.
My dear daughters, Rachel and Adin, provided stirring inspiration in their own creative work, Rachel as a documentary filmmaker and Adin as a scholar of medieval literature. Both of them, in very different ways, have kept me mindful of the need to address urgent contemporary concerns. Adin was engaged with Animal Spirits from the start; she generously shared her understanding of medieval bodies and souls, how they interacted, and how they resurfaced in modernist guise.
A number of generous, competent people provided assistance at critical moments. Jackie Ko of the Wylie Agency and Ian Van Wye of FSG deserve particular mention in this regard.
As in the past, Virginia Gilmartin provided superb research assistance. She found mountains of newspaper and magazine articles, located the most important quotations in them, and deftly paraphrased the rest. She is an energetic, conscientious, and imaginative reader—not to mention an eagle-eyed fact-checker. I could not have written this book without her.
Nor could I have written it without Alex Star, my editor at FSG. Long before I ever signed a contract, he was deeply enough immersed in this project to write extended, searching critiques of grant proposals and other summaries I had written. When I started work on the manuscript, he encouraged me to think ambitiously and range widely, and when he started to read it, he gave me just the kind of encouragement I needed, even while he cautioned me not to enter blind alleys and pointed me toward promising topics, based on his own wide learning and his grounded knowledge of literature and history. Alex has been truly indispensable.
My largest debt is acknowledged, however inadequately, in the dedication. Karen Parker Lears took essential time from her own artistic work to read the manuscript with the sharp perception and exceptional care that she is uniquely capable of providing. Crucial as that reading was, her contributions to my writing and thinking are even deeper and wider. For decades, she has been engaged in much of her own work (albeit in very different forms and idioms) with many of the concerns that drive this book—above all with the conviction that we inhabit an animated, scintillating cosmos. During our innumerable discussions about Animal Spirits (and the books that preceded it), Karen constantly articulated the most significant questions and urged me to explore them. She has always been there, seeing through to the heart of the matter. I have been lucky in many things, but most of all in having this extraordinary person for my life companion.
Furman’s Corner, New Jersey
Starr Hill, Virginia
November 6, 2022
Index
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
abolitionistsAbrams, M. H.Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner)Adamic, LouisAdams, Henry; on entropy; veneration of force byAdams, JohnAdams, John QuincyAddams, JaneAdler, HermanAdorno, Theodoradvertising; for health productsAfghanistan, war inAfrican Americans: animal spirits ascribed to, see primitivism; Christianity of; enslavement of, see slavery; as entertainers; gambling by; labeling of; literature by; mixed-race; oppression of, see white supremacyAfrican Blood Brotherhoodagricultural worldviewAkerlof, GeorgeAlbrecht, GlennAlexander, James Waddellalgorithms, see under quantitative thinkingAllan, Ethanalternative medicine, see health and healingAmeche, DonAmerica: Bergsonian vogue in; Civil War in; colonization of; cotton fever in; economics in, see capitalism; electoral politics in; energy use in; entertainment in; evangelical rationality in; evangelical revivalism in; exceptionalism in; first traffic jam in; Forest Service in; international politics in; manhood in, see masculinity; militarism in; as neurotic; propaganda in; psychoanalysis in; public interest in; radicalism in; secrecy of; technocratic rationality in, see technocratic rationality; urbanization of; white supremacy in, see white supremacy“America” (Dwight)Anderson, SherwoodAndrews, Solomonanimal magnetism; see also mesmerismanimals; advocacy for; anthropomorphism of; consciousness of; dominance over; humans attempting to transcend; humans changing into; idealization of; as messengers; others seen as, see primitivism; as pets; reciprocity with; sacrifice of; wildness andAnimals at Work and Play (Cornish)animal spirits; amorality of; contemporary use of; in dance, see dancing; as dated; in entertainment; harnessing of; health and, see health and healing; managed release of; in others, see primitivism; physiology of; quantification and; religion vs.; as rural; sensuality and; in Tristram Shandy; violence and; youth and; see also vitalismAnimal Spirits (Akerlof and Shiller)animism; in contemporary science; ecologicalantibiotics, resistance toanti-SemitismApplegate, DebbyArendt, HannahAristophanesAristotleArmies of the Night, The (Mailer)Armory Show (1913)Armstrong, Louisart; see also poetry; theaterArtificial IntelligenceAsbury, FrancisAtkinson, BrooksAtkinson, William Walkeratomic energy; scientists’ concerns about; see also nuclear warAtomic Energy CommissionAtwood, MargaretAustria passimAyers, EdwardBabbitt, IrvingBackscheider, PaulaBacon, LeonardBaer, MaxBahti, MarkBaker, Henry BartonBaker, Ray StannardBaldwin, HansonBalfour DeclarationBall, LucilleBallets RussesBanjo (McKay)Bank of the United Statesbanks: after crash of 1929; currency issued by; failures of; numbers game and; see also capitalismBaukhage, H. R.Beach, ChloeBeard, George MillerBeattie, JamesBeecher, CatharineBeecher, EuniceBeecher, Henry WardBeecher, LymanbehaviorismBell, DanielBellows, HenryBenda, JulienBennett, James GordonBennett, JaneBentham, JeremyBergson, Henri; celebrity of; critique of; on duration; foreshadowing ofBerkeley, George “Bishop”Biddle, NicholasBigelow, Henry JacobBikini Atollbirth controlbisexualsBjörkman, EdwinBlackfoot (tribe)Blaine, James G.Blake, WilliamBlithedale Romance (Hawthorne)Blood, Benjamin PaulBloomsbury set; Keynes and passimBoardman, HenryBoas, Franzbohemiansbonds trading; see also stock marketBook of It, The (Groddeck)Book-of-the-Month Clubboom and bust cycles:; cotton fever; Great Crash of 1929; Mississippi Bubble; Panic of 1819; Panic of 1837; Panic of 1857; Panic of 1873; Panic of 1893; South Sea Bubble; see also capitalism; stock marketBorglum, GutzonBoswell, JamesBouk, DanBourne, RandolphboxingBoy ScoutsBrackett, LorainaBraid, JamesBrand, StewartBride Came C.O.D., The (movie)British economy: in 17th century; in 18th century; in 19th century; in 20th century; see also EnglandBrittan, BrotherBrooks, JohnBrown, Norman O.Brown UniversityBryan, William JenningsBuddhismBulletin of the Atomic ScientistsBunting, Hannah SynghBurke, EdmundburlesqueBurr, AaronBurr, TheodosiaBurroughs, JohnBush, George W., administration ofCagney, JamesCambridge passimCampbell, J. W., Jr.Can Lloyd George Do It? (Keynes)Cannon, Waltercapitalism; advertising and; banknotes and; character and; corporate; corruption in; Defoe on; deregulation of; Dutch innovation in; evangelical rationality and; industrial; inequality under, see also labor; inflation in; international; invisible hand in; “lifestyles” created by; as market society; masculinity and; mental health under; metaphors of; money as life-force of; nature under; pleasure of; positive thinking in; public spending in; real estate under; regulation of; as religion; saving vs. consumption under; self-interest in; Smith on; as social good; speculative, see stock market; success in; surveillance; time under; value under; vice and; see also boom and bust cycles; quantitative thinking; stock market; technocratic rationalityCapra, FrankCapron, GeorgeCarnegie, AndrewCarnera, PrimoCarter, JimmyCarter, ZacharyCary, GeorgeCastle, Vernon and IreneCastro, FidelCatholicism; animistic aspects of; of Donne; Protestant disdain for; vitalistCave, Thomas and VivianCentury ClubChakrabarty, DipeshChambers, RobertChapters on Animals (Hamerton)charisma; persuasion andcheerfulnessCheney, DickCheyenne (tribe)Cheyne, GeorgeChicago Board of TradeChinaChristianity; African American; animism in; Catholic/Protestant divide in; dualism of; early imagery in; holy boldness in; replaced by industrialization; science and; self-deprecation in; weakening of; see also Catholicism; ProtestantismChristian ScientistsChristian Union (journal)Churchill, WinstonCIACity CollegeCivil Warclairvoyance passimClemenceau, Georgesclerical economistsclimate changeClurman, HaroldCobb, Irvin S.Coke, ThomasCold War; Cuban Missile Crisis in; current status of; normalization of; publishing duringCole, Wade B.Coleridge, Samuel Taylorcollective unconsciousCollins, LottieColumbia UniversityCombe, AndrewComer, Corneliacommon sensecommunism; as American bogeyman andComplete English Tradesman, The (Defoe)computersConfidence Man, The (Melville)Connolly, VeraConquest of Poverty, The (Wilmans)consciousness; countercultural exploration of; quantification of; see also psychologyCook, EliCooke, JayCoolidge, CalvinCornish, CharlesCotton, Henrycotton fevercountercultureCOVID pandemicCox, MarianCrane, Frankcredit; see also capitalism; stock marketCrick, FrancisCrisis, The (magazine)Cromwell, OliverCuba; Missile Crisis inCudworth, Ralphcultural criticismCurie, MarieCushing, CalebDaily HeraldDallek, Robertdancing; by animals; in ballets; by Native Americans; primitivists onDante AlighieriDarget, LouisDark Laughter (Anderson)Darktown Follies (musical show)Darwin, Charles; as not a DarwinistDarwin, ErasmusDarwinism; human superiority in; questioning of; SocialDaston, LorraineDavis, Andrew Jackson; childhood of; healing by; Law of Attraction and; Levingston as “operator” forDavis, BetteDawes Plan; Keynes’s advocacy forDawkins, Richarddeath: in Elizabethan England; overcoming; as penalty for crime; quantification of“Decline of Greatness, The” (Schlesinger)Defoe, DanielDelbourgo, Jamesde Mezieres, Eleanordemocracy: elitist restrictions on; fascism and; imperialism and; interest groups in; neoliberalism andDemocratic Party; conventions of; see also specific presidentsDescartes, RéneDescent of Man, The (Darwin)De Spiritu (Aristotle)determinism; free will vs.; mechanicalDewey, JohnDewey, OrvilleDiaghilev, SergeiDickens, CharlesDiggins, John PatrickDiscourse on the Present Fearful Commercial Pressure, A (Beecher)Disston, HamiltonDix, DorothyDonne, JohnDoors, The (band)dreams, interpretation ofDreiser, TheodoreDrew, DanielDrury, Elizabeth, elegy forDrury, RobertdualismDu Bois, W. E. B.Du Chaillu, PaulDuchamp, MarcelDuncan, RobertDurant, WilliamDuryea, OscarDwight, TimothyEastman, Maxeco-feminismEconomic Consequences of Peace, The (Keynes)Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren (Keynes)economists, behavioral; classical; clerical; neoclassical; see also capitalism; Fisher, Irving; Keynes, John Maynard; Smith, AdamEddy, Mary BakerEdison, CharlesEdison, ThomasEducation (Adams)Edwards, JonathanEgerton, ThomasEis, AliceEisenhower, Dwightélan vital; critique of; entropy vs.; id vs.Elaw, Zilphaelectricity; curative power of; divinity of; as fluid; masculinity andEliot, Charles WilliamEliot, GeorgeEliot, T. S.Ellison, RalphEmerson, Ralph WaldoEnd of Laissez-Faire, The (Keynes)energy; atomic; deification of; dissipation of; health andEngland: America colonized by; capitalism in, see British economy; Christianity in; Elizabethan; Enlightenment in; political factions inEnglish Malady, The (Cheyne)Enigma of Capital, The (Harvey)EnlightenmententropyenvironmentalismEpicurusepigeneticsEssay upon Projects (Defoe)Ethiopian Art TheaterEtonEucken, RudolfeugenicsEurope: America colonized by; body worship in; Catholicism in; folktales in; in interwar years; militarism in; TR in; see also specific countriesEurope: A Prophecy (Blake)evangelicals; rationality of; revivalism ofEvans, Edward Payson (E. P.)evolution; Bergsonian; epigenetics and; self-development asEvolution créatrice, L’ (Bergson)exerciseexperimental psychology“Extasie, The” (Donne)Extraordinary Popular Delusions (MacKay)Fable of the Bees, The (Mandeville)Fallon, StephenfascismFaulkner, WilliamFauset, JessieFDR, see Roosevelt, Franklinfear; blood pressure as measure of; capitalism and; as civilizing; of conformity; effect on reasoning of; FDR on; experienced by elites; of nuclear war; positive thinking as antidote to; as primitive; of trances; in War on TerrorFederal Reservefeminismfever, as term in economics; see also boom and bust cyclesFielding, HenryfingerprintingFinley, HarrietFinney, Charles GrandisonFisher, IrvingFisher, MargaretFisher, Sidney GeorgeFisk, Eugene LymanFisk UniversityFitzgerald, F. ScottFoner, EricFoote, Mary Hallockforce; see also energyfossil fuelsFoster, StephenFrance; economics in; mesmerism in; writers from; in WWIFrance, AnatoleFranklin, BenjaminFraser, SteveFreehling, Williamfree will; mechanical determinism vs.Freud, Sigmund passim; antecedents of; libido inFuturist ManifestoGaines, MyraGalbraith, John KennethGalenGallup, Georgegalvanismgamblinggame theoryGarland, HamlinGassendi, PierreGauguin, PaulGautier, Théophilegay peoplegender; see also masculinity; sex; womenGeneral MotorsGeneral Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (Keynes)genetics; contemporarygeniusGeorge, LloydGermany, in interwar years passim; Nazis inGilbert, EthelGish, LillianGlass, Carterglobal warmingGoddard, DonGodkin, E. L.Godwin, ParkeGodwin, WilliamGoethe, Johann Wolfgang vonGonzales, CamilloGoodman, PaulGorbachev, MikhailGraham, JamesGrainger, BrettGramsci, AntonioGrant, DuncanGrant, Ulysses S.Great Depression; crash leading to; effect on speculation of; as emotional crisis; entertainment during; Hoover and; Keynes on; New Deal during; Roosevelt and; unemployment duringGreat Harmonia, The (Davis)Greeks, ancientGreeley, HoraceGreene, AsaGreen Grow the Lilacs (play)Greenspan, AlanGrimes, J. StanleyGroddeck, GeorgeGrotonGuadalcanal Diary (Hersey)Gulf WarGurstein, RochelleHagedorn, HermannHaldane, JohnHall, G. StanleyHall, SamuelHamerton, Philip GilbertHamilton, AlexanderHammond, James HenryHappy Landing (movie)Harding, Warren G.Hardy, ThomasHarlem: cabarets in; gambling in; theater inHarlem Pete (author)Harlem Renaissance; Larsen in; McKay in; Van Vechten inHarley, RobertHarrington, AnneHarris, JohnHarrison, HubertHarvard University: professors at; students atHarvey, DavidHaven, GilbertHawthorne, NathanielHaywood, Jasperhealth and healing; animal spirits and; circulation and; electricity and; Elizabethan; eugenics and; exercise and; gender and; mental, see mental health; mesmerism and; as overcoming death; war as good forHealy, WilliamHefner, HughHegel, Georg Wilhelm FriedrichHeidegger, MartinHenie, SonjaHenslow, GeorgeHersey, JohnHickock, LorenahippieshipstersHiroshimaHiroshima (Hersey)Hirschman, A. O.History of the Terrible Panic of 1873 (Anonymous)Hitchcock, EdwardHitler, AdolfHobbes, Thomasholistic healing, see health and healingholobiontsHolstein, Casper“Holy Sonnets” (Donne)Home to Harlem (McKay)homosexual experiences, see bisexualsHone, PhilipHoover, HerbertHoover, J. EdgarHopi (tribe)Hopkins, Gerard ManleyHorkheimer, MaxHoughton, WilliamHowe, LouisHowe, SusanHowell, William H.How to Live (Fisher)Huizinga, JohanHuling, CarolineHume, DavidhumorHungary, post-WWIhuntingHuntingdon, EnochHuston, JamesHutcheson, FrancisHutchinson, GeorgeHuxley, Thomas Henryhypnotism, see trances“I Am He That Aches with Love” (Whitman)Igo, SarahImes, Elmerimperial primitivism, see primitivismIndian Currency and Finance (Keynes)indigenous peoples; of the Americas; objectification of, see primitivism; subjugation ofindustrializationIndustrial Workers of the World (IWW)inflation; regulation ofIngalls, John JamesInsull, Samuelintelligence, see consciousnessinterest, as terminterest groupsInterpretation of Dreams (Freud)In Tune with the Infinite (Trine)Iraq, U.S. invasion ofironyIsraelItaly, fascism inJackson, AndrewJackson, FrederickJames, William; as anti-violence; on gender; as pragmatist; as radical empiricistJapan, bombing ofJarvis, EdwardJekyll, WalterJesus; Incarnation ofJewsJohns HopkinsJohnson, GeraldJohnson, Grace NailJohnson, James WeldonJohnson, LyndonJohnson, SamuelJoyce, JamesJ. P. Morgan (company)Jung, CarlJungle Ways (Seabrook)J. Walter Thompson (advertising firm)Kahn, HermanKallen, HoraceKansas State UniversityKasson, JohnKatznelson, IraKelvin, KitKelvin, LordKennedy, John F.; in Cuban Missile CrisisKeynes, John Maynard; as advisor to UK; on animal spirits; books by; on consumption; contemporary revival of; on ethics; FDR and; on fear; finances of; General Theory of; influences on; personal life of; politics of; reactionary use of; on statisticsKhrushchev, NikitaKidder, TracyKingsley, CharlesKinsey ReportKiowa (tribe)Knight, FranklinKnopf, Alfred and BlancheKovacs, ErnieKoyukon (tribe)Kurtz, Conradlabor; balancing leisure with; positive thinking and; unionizing by; utopian future for; see also capitalism: inequality under; unemploymentLaborde, AlbertLaFollette, RobertLaing, R. D.Lakota (tribe)Lamarck, Jean-BaptisteLamont, ThomasLange, DorotheaLanphier, JeremiahLaPlace, PierreLapp, RalphLarsen, Mary HansenLarsen, NellaLarsen, PeterLatinosLaufer, CalvinLaw, JohnLaw of Attraction; see also positive thinkingLawrence, D. H.; Keynes andLawrence, Joseph StaggLawrence, WilliamLeague of NationsLeeuwenhoek, AntonLeftists; as technocrats; see also feminism; labor: unionizing bylegal profession, psychology andLeopold, AldoLepler, JessicaLetters of a Business Woman to Her Niece (Huling)Levingston, WilliamLevy, JonLewars, EulalieLewes, GeorgeLewis, WyndhamLewontin, RichardLiberator, The (magazine)libertarianslibidolie detectorsLife, capitalization of; matter vs.; monetizing of; worship oflife force, various names for; non-western; (pseudo)scientific; see also animal spirits; vitalismLilienthal, DavidLincoln, AbrahamLinthecum, SallyLippmann, WalterLittle RichardLittlest Rebel, The (movie)Locke, AlainLocke, JohnLong, HueyLong, WilliamLopokova, LydiaLouis XV (King of France)Lovejoy, ArthurLucretiusLuhan, Mabel Dodgelyrical leftMacdonald, DwightMacdonough, A. R.Machiavelli, NiccoloMacKay, CharlesMacrery, JosephMadison, JamesMadison Square GardenMagic Staff, The (Davis)magnetism; see also animal magnetismMailer, NormanMakari, GeorgeMaking of a Counterculture, A (Roszak)manamanagement, see technocratic rationalityMan and Superman (Shaw)Mandeville, BernardManhattan Projectmanhood, see masculinitymanitouMann, HoraceMan RayMan Without Qualities, The (Musil)Mao, ZedongMarble, Annie RussellMarcuse, Herbertmarginal utility theoryMargulis, LynnMarie de FranceMarinetti, FilippoMarston, George MoultonMarx, KarlMarxismmasculinity; boyhood and; capitalism and; force and; Mailer on; TR and; in Tristram Shandymaterialism, see positivismmath; see also quantitative thinkingMather, RichardMatisse, HenriMcCarraher, EugeneMcClintock, BarbaraMcCormick, Anne O’HareMcFarlane, RobertMcKay, ClaudeMcKinley, WilliamMcNamara, RobertMead, MargaretMead, Richardmedicine, see health and healingMelville, Hermanmental health; animals and; capitalism’s effect on; physical health and; see also psychologyMental ScienceMercer, LucyMerchant, CarolynMerman, EthelMerz, CharlesMesmer, Antonmesmerism; as erotic; healing viaMexican-American WarMexicansMezieres, Eleanor demicroorganismsMiddle East, U.S. militarism inMillennial Harbinger (Harris)Milton (Blake)Milton, JohnMississippi Bubblemixed-race peoplemob madness; anti-Semitic; in financial panics; lynching as; at political conventionsModernismmoney: as erotic; as life force of capitalism; paper; as value of everythingMoney’d Man (poet)monotheism; see also ChristianityMoore, CharlesMoore, G. E.More, AnnMore, ThomasMorgan, BoyceMorgan, J. P.Morgenstern, OskarMorgenthau, HenryMormonismMosley, OswaldMoulton, FrankmoviesMulford, PrenticeMuller, Maxmultiracial identityMumford, LewisMunsterberg, HugoMurray, LindleyMurrow, Edward R.Musil, RobertMussolini, Benito“My Early Beliefs” (Keynes)NagasakiNaked and the Dead, The (Mailer)Napoleon IIINation, The (magazine)Native Americans; subjugation ofNATOnature; dominance ofNaturphilosophieNazisNegritude movementneoclassical economists; Fisher asneoliberalismneurastheniaNew DealNew EnglandNew Party (British)New ThoughtNewton; followers ofNew York City: celebrity lectures in; revivalism in; see also HarlemNew Yorker, The (magazine)New York Stock Exchange; see also stock marketNew York UniversityNicaraguaNicolet, TheodoreNiebuhr, ReinholdNietzsche, FriedrichNigger Heaven (Van Vechten)Nightingale, FlorenceNijinsky, VaslavNixon, RichardNordmann, CharlesNorris, FrankNorth, ElishaNorthwestern UniversityNorton, Charles Eliotnuclear war; fear ofnumerologyobjectivity, as mythOdum, HowardOedipal theoryOgburn, W. F.Ojibwe (tribe)On Escalation (Kahn)On Thermonuclear War (Kahn)Opportunity (magazine)Opticks (Newton)Origin of Species (Darwin)Ostwald, WilhelmOur Home Pets (Miller)OvidOxfordPacker, GeorgePaine, ThomasPalestinePaley, WilliamPalmer, PhoebePanama Canalpanics, see boom and bust cyclesParadise Lost (Milton)Parker, TheodoreParkhurst, CharlesPartisan ReviewPassing (Larsen)Pater, WalterPaterson silk strike (1913)Patterson, RobertPaulding, James KirkePaulsen, EdPavlova, AnnaPeabody, Andrew PrestonPeace ConferencePeale, Norman VincentPell, RichardPembrey, MarcusPerils of Pearl Street, The (Greene)Perkins, FrancesPetrov, StanislavpetsPettit, MichaelphrenologyPicasso, PabloPinker, Stevenplay movementPlymouth Church passimPoe, Edgar Allanpoetry: by Donne; about economics; imperialist; Romantic; by Whitmanpoliopollsterspositive thinking; as antidote to fear; Bergson and; FDR’s advocacy of; Law of Attraction aspositivism; discontent with; positive thinking vs.Post, Charles C.Potawatomi (tribe)Potter, D. B.Poughkeepsie Seer, see Davis, Andrew JacksonPoyen, CharlesPractical Magnetizer (author)Practical Psychology for Business Executives (Eddie)pragmatismPreface to Politics, A (Lippmann)Prescott, William HicklingPresley, Elvisprimitivism; in Anderson; dancing and; in Larsen; in Mailer; in McKay; in Van VechtenPrincipia Ethica (Moore)Principles of Psychology (James)probability theoryProcter, Edna Dean“Procurator of Judea, The” (France)progress; abstinence theory of; entropy vs.; evolution and; quantification and; refutation of; religion and; technology and; vitalism as counter to; vitalism’s reinforcement ofProgressive EraProtestantism; Anglican; Baptist; Beecher’s vitalist; Calvinist; Dissenters; ecumenical; Episcopalian; evangelical rationality of; evangelical revivalism in; Methodist; muscular; occult beliefs reconciled with; Pentecostal; Pietist; Presbyterian; rejection of; Unitarianpsychedelic drugspsychology: behavioral; psychoanalytic; see also mental healthpublic worksPuritans; legacy ofPutnam, Jacksonquantitative thinking; as algorithmic; in economics; about subjective experience; about time; see also technocratic rationalityqiQuick, HerbertQuicksand (Larsen)Quimby, PhineasRabinowitch, Eugenerace; essentializing of, see primitivism; power and, see white supremacyRadio Corporation of AmericaRaguet, CondyRailroaded (White)railroadsRand, AynRAND CorporationRasmussen, Dennisrationality; in Enlightenment; evangelical; reason vs.; see also positivism; quantitative thinking; science; technocratic rationalityReagan, RonaldRedding, SaundersReed, JohnReeve, ArthurReflections on Violence (Sorel)Reid, Thomas“Relic, The” (Donne)religion, benefits of; Eastern; see also animism; Christianity; ProtestantismRenouvier, CharlesRepublicans; see also specific presidentsRice, CondoleezzaRichardson, SamuelRiesman, DavidRiis, Jacobrisk; attempts to quantify; success and; uncertainty vs.Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (Knight)Riskin, JessicaRitter, William EmersonRitvo, HarrietRoberts, AlasdairRoberts, KennethRobeson, PaulRobinson, Bill “Bojangles”Robinson, JoanRobinson, JoeRockefeller, John D., Sr.Rogers, Henry WadeRogers, RobertRogers and HammersteinRohe, AliceRoman mythologyRomantics; American; BritishRomero, CesarRoosevelt, Eleanor HallRoosevelt, Franklin (FDR); on fear; Keynes and; New Deal and; personal life ofRoosevelt, SaraRoosevelt, Theodore (TR); FDR and; militarism of; Mussolini compared with; Strenuous Life ofRorty, JamesRose, ErnestineRossiter, ClintonRoszak, TheodoreRuffin, ThomasRuggles, David“Ruined Cottage, The” (Wordsworth)Rumsfeld, DonaldRussell, BertrandRussia: American leftists in; in Cold War, see Cold War; post-WWI; in war with UkraineSailor, Beware! (play)Sand County Almanac, A (Leopold)San FranciscoSanger, MargaretSantayana, GeorgeSatter, BerylSchelling, Friedrich Wilhelm JosephSchlesinger, Arthur, Jr.School of the Woods (Long)Schrodinger, ErwinSchumann, FrederickSchumpeter, Josephscience; on animal intelligence; atomic; contemporary animism in; invisible forces in; legitimacy sought via; Newtonian; positivist, see positivism; post-Newtonian; as racist; reductionist; scientism vs.; theological implications of; vitalistScopes trialScott, Walter DillScottish moral philosophers; see also Hume, David; Smith, Adamscoundrels, good-naturedSeabrook, WillieSearch for Freedom, A (Wilmans)Second Great Awakening; see also evangelicals: revivalism ofSecond Law of ThermodynamicsSedgwick, Henryself-command; self-praise vs.self-interest; in capitalism; in nuclear deterrencesensuality; see also sexSeptember 11th (2001)Seven Arts, The (literary journal)sex; ascribed to black people, see primitivism; Donne on; investing as more erotic than; Keynes on; Kinsey on; Larsen on; mesmerism and; Mussolini and; sublimation of; see also dancingSexual Behavior in the Human Male (Kinsey)ShakespeareShapiro, JamesShaw, George BernardSheehan, JonathanSheldrake, MerlinShelley, Percy ByssheShepard, PaulShiller, RobertShipley, JosephShortest Way with Dissenters, The (Defoe)Silicon Valleyskepticism; common sense vs.Skidelsky, RobertSkinner, Michaelslavery; opposition toSleeping Beauty (Tchaikovsky)Sloan, AlfredSlosson, EdwinSmith, AdamSmith, HoraceSmith, MamieSocial DarwinismsocialismSocial SecuritySociety for Psychical Research“Song of Myself” (Whitman)Songs of Jamaica (McKay)Sorel, GeorgesSoul of a New Machine, The (Kidder)Souls of Black Folks (Du Bois)South Sea BubbleSoviet Union, see RussiaSpainspecie; banknotes vs.speculative capitalism, see capitalism; stock marketSpencer, Archibaldspirit, as termSpiritualismSpivak, Gayatrisports; speculation asstarvationstatistics; God found in; Keynes on; probability theory and; public policy and, see technocratic rationality; see also quantitative thinkingSteffens, LincolnStein, GertrudeSterne, LaurenceStevenson, Robert LouisStewart, DugaldStimson, Henrystock market; animal spirits in; attempts to quantify; bonds and; confidence and; condemnation of; credit and; gambling and; manipulation of; regulation of; tickers for; see also boom and bust cycles; capitalismStone, I. F.Strachey, JamesStrachey, LyttonStrategic Defense Initiativestrategic essentialismStrong, George TempletonStubbs, John“Superman Comes to the Supermarket” (Mailer)surveillance stateSwift, JonathanTalbott, Strobe“Ta-Ra-Ra Boom-De-Ay”Tarbell, IdaTaylor, Frederick WinslowTaylor, JohnTaylor, TelfordTchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyichtechnocratic rationality; as countercultural; countercultural rejection of; ecological animism as antidote to; in economics; Kinsey’s studies as; liberals and; objectivity and; reason vs.; technology vs.; war justified by; see also quantitative thinkingtechno-futurismTempest, The (Shakespeare)Temple, ShirleyTess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy)theaterTheory of Moral Sentiments (Smith)Thomas, KeithThompson, AnitaThomson, WilliamThought-Force in Business and Everyday Life (Atkinson)Thoughts Are Things (Mulford)Thurmond, W. T.Tilton, Elizabeth and TheodoretimeTocqueville, Alexis de“To His Mistress Going to Bed” (Donne)Tom the Colored Boy (entertainer)Tonkawa (tribe)TR, see Roosevelt, TheodoreTract on Monetary Reform (Keynes)Trahison des clercs, La (Benda)trances; clairvoyant; hypnoticTranscendentalistsTreason of the Intellectuals (Benda)Treatise of Human Nature (Hume)Treatise on Money, A (Keynes)Treatise on Probability, A (Keynes)Treaty of VersaillesTrilling, LionelTrine, Ralph WaldoTristram Shandy (Sterne)Truman, HarryTurkey, missiles inTuskegee InstituteTweed, BossTwichell, JosephTyler, Moses CoitTylor, Edward B.Tyrrell, HenryUkraine, war inunconscious: Americanization of; collective; interpretation ofUnderland (McFarlane)unemploymentunions, see laborUnited NationsUnited States: see AmericaUnivercoelum (journal)University of ChicagoUniversity of GlasgowUSSR, see RussiaU.S. Steel“Valediction, A” (Donne)Van Buren, MartinVandenberg, ArthurVanderbilt, CorneliusVandover and the Brute (Norris)Van Vechten, CarlVerba, SidneyVestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chambers)Vibrant Matter (Bennett)Vico, GiambattistaViennaVietnam WarVilla, Panchoviolence; see also fascism; warvisualization, see positive thinkingvitalism; amorality of; countercultural; in cultural criticism; fluid metaphors in; humanist; institutional; as marginal; materialism vs.; mesmerismvitalism (cont.) as; militarism and; nonduality of; poetic; positive thinking as; primitivist, see primitivism; quantification and; religious; scientific; in social movements; youth and; see also animal spiritsVoltaireWahrman, DrorWald, LillianWalker, JimmyWalker, PeterWall Street, see stock marketWall Street and Washington (Lawrence)Wall Street RevivalWalton, Eda Louwar; euphemizing of; need for moral equivalent of; nuclear, see nuclear war; opposition to; prosperity and; race in; as regenerative; 17th century; spending on; technocratic justifications for; on Terror; see also specific warsWaterhouse, BenjaminWatson, JamesWatson, John B.Watts, AlanWaugh, FrankWayland, FrancisWealth of Nations, The (Smith)Weber, MaxWeismann, AugustWeizenbaum, JeromeWeld, HabijahWelles, OrsonWells Fargo BankWesley, JohnWhite, RichardWhite, TheodoreWhite, WalterWhite, William AllenWhitefield, George“White Negro, The” (Mailer)white supremacy; anxiety about maintaining; in international relations; lynching under; as primitivism; slavery and; sports andWhitman, JasonWhitman, WaltWhitney, RichardWhole Earth Catalog (Brand)Wigfall, Louis T.Wilcox, Ella Wheelerwild, as term; girlsWillcox, Louise CollierWilliam III (King of England)Willis, ThomasWilmans, HelenWilson, EdmundWilson, Woodrow; postwar vision ofWinesburg, Ohio (Anderson)Winkelman, BernieWittgenstein, LudwigWohlstetter, AlbertWolf, R. B.Wolfe, ThomasWolfowitz, PaulWollstonecraft, MarywolvesWoman’s World (paper)women; black; feminism and; in New Thought; as religious authorities; wellness for; see also sexWood, FernandoWoodhull, VictoriaWoodward, BobWoolf, VirginiaWordsworth, WilliamWorkers’ Dreadnought, TheWorld War IWorld War II passimWright AviationX-raysYale; Dwight atYeats, John ButlerYoung, BrighamYoung Men’s Christian Association (YMCA)youth; idealism of; perpetual; physicality ofYouth and Life (Bourne)Zen BuddhismZola, EmileZoonomia (Darwin)ZouavesZuboff, ShoshanaZulus
Copyright © 2023 by Jackson Lears