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| Ideas of self-control and mental discipline required the body’s innards to be tamed | |
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Today the phrase might make us think of Keynesian economics 2 or shamanic bear rituals. But these animal spirits were neither animals nor spirits. So how should we picture them? In English, the word ‘spirit’ can mean anything from the Holy Ghost to gin. In fact, such ambiguity exists throughout the romance languages, deriving from the Latin spiritus animales. With the same root as respire and expire (spiro meaning ‘I breathe’) spiritus firstly means breath, then breath of life, thus also temperament, courage, and even ghost. Likewise the meanings of anima range from breath to vital principle and rational soul.
Our animal spirits might be better translated, then, as life-carrying fluids or vital liquids. John Locke pictured them as “fluid and subtile Matter, passing through the Conduits of the Nerves”. 3 They were believed to transmit information between sense organs, brain and muscles.
An outlandish notion, deserving the cultural oblivion into which it has fallen? Or could it hold unexpected truths to intrigue modern thinkers, from cognitive scientists to neurobiologists?
Mapping the memory
Memory is the clearest area where animal spirits theory is illuminating. A theory of memory is, after all, central to a theory of mind; but memory is bafflingly resistant to scrutiny, from laboratory research to personal introspection. We consistently resort to metaphor to describe its processes. It has been compared to palaces, purses and bottles, wax tablets, dictionaries and aviaries; nowadays we might adduce filing cabinets, tape recorders, or hard drives.
Such metaphors are important. Profound consequences flow from the notion of spatial archives where memories are stored, discrete and intact, like treasures in Gringott’s vaults. 4 It empowers lawyers and therapists to dig deep. It keeps memories distinct from other mental processes, accessible on request but not interfering with cognition. It allows the theoretical possibility of downloading memories; and rather disturbingly, as in science fiction, adding, deleting or manipulating them.
Yet such a model leaves many questions unanswered. If all memories are stored in a discrete located archive, how do we explain things on the tip of your tongue? How can we be unexpectedly reminded of things? Either your notional Gringott’s goblin can access the vault or he can’t. How should we account for false memories? And, quite simply, is there enough space in our brains?
Descartes is often vilified for single-handedly alienating our minds from our bodies with his cogito. But his account of memory requires the dynamic interaction of mind, body and world. For him, memory is no storehouse or writing tablet but rather reconstructed patterns of animal spirits flowing through brain pores.
The spirits pass from the pineal gland into the ventricles of the brain, forming and retracing figures corresponding to cognitive activity. They enlarge and rearrange the interstitial pores, so that, even after they withdraw, these pores are more disposed to reopen. Repeated recall thus reinforces traces, and figures traced by a sensory input may be re-evoked by internal means.
Furthermore, like cloth pierced by needles, the reopening of one pore may open others associated with it. This offers a mechanism for total recall on partial input: the memory trace can be accessed from various reminders, not just at one brain ‘vault’. This even explains how we make sense of scribbled line drawings. “If I see two eyes with a nose,” says Descartes, “I at once imagine a forehead and a mouth and all the other parts of a face, because I am unaccustomed to seeing the former without the latter.” 5
It’s a dynamic physiological psychology that defies simplistic dualist readings. The state of the body results from the history of its interactions: a highly responsive picture of cognition, with the spirits affected not only by sensory input but also by diet and environment. It accounts for many of our puzzles: for confusion, unexpected reminders and associated memory.
And for brain space. One brain pore may form part of multiple traces, crossing and recrossing it ‘superpositionally’. The number of patterns traceable through this filamentous mesh may well be infinite. The superpositional traversing of traces across the same pores even offers to explain memory interference.
Doesn’t all this sound strangely familiar? Our modern picture of the electrochemical functioning of synaptic brain traces is strangely reminiscent of Descartes’s animal spirits in brain pores. Babies’ neural networks are constructed by experimental action and input, with successful synaptic links chemically reinforced from the cortex. The autistic, who recall certain brain patterns completely and others not at all, can learn to cope with everyday situations through repeated action. Anyone interested in modern brain studies, from cognitive philosophers and child psychologists to pharmaceutical researchers, can’t avoid the debate raging over these models of memory – but this debate is nothing new. Could it be that our animal spirits aren’t so out-of-date after all?
Domain of animal spirits
But memory is just one of the realms where the spirits act. Ever since Roman proto-physician Galen, great thinkers looked to them to account for a multitude of phenomena.
Bernard Mandeville, follower of Descartes and literary physician, describes how remembering leads to other emotions: “When we have forgot a word or Sentence we may almost feel how some of the spirits, flying through all the Mazes and Meanders, rommage the whole Substance of the medullary Labyrinth. Whilst others ferret themselves into the inmost recesses of it with so much Eagerness and Labour, that the Difficulty they meet with sometimes makes us uneasie.” 6
We all know that processing feelings, thoughts and memories is not always comfortable. Jonathan Swift satirically paints the spirits as “a crowd of little animals, but with teeth and claws extremely sharp”. Besides proving painful, the spirits may be untrustworthy. Vogli describes how “especially in dreams and imaginings the same nervous fluid may indeed produce confused phantasms, but nonetheless fabricated from those objects which at one time we saw or in some way sensed.” 7
Such confusions are all well and good with our nightcaps on, but in everyday life they threaten our sanity. “Persons whose animal spirits are highly agitated by fasting, vigils, a high fever, or some violent passion have the internal fibres of their brain set in motion as forcefully as by external objects,” writes Nicholas Malebranche, another Cartesian. “Because of this, such people sense what they should only imagine, and they think they see objects before their eyes which are only in their imagination.” 8
Our physical health is not the only thing under threat. With the spirits’ fluid nature, our spiritual wellbeing is vulnerable to the effects of alcohol, music and other demonic influences. In Paradise Lost, Satan sits “squat like a toad, close by the ear of Eve,” tempting “the Organs of her Fancie” by trying to “taint/ Th’ animal spirits that from pure blood arise.” 9
The amount of spirit expended in sex was clear to Roman writer Tertullian: “The whole human frame is shaken and foams with semen, as the damp humour of the body is joined to the hot substance of the spirit. And then, in that last breaking wave of delight, do we not feel something of our very soul go out from us?” 10 Goneril in King Lear is happy to exploit this joined-up physiology, assuring Edmund “This kiss, if it durst speak, / Would stretch thy spirits up into the air.” 11
This expense of spirit provoked not only moral but physiological concerns, male liquors being in short supply. Cartesian Louis de La Forge declared that “the spirits of the brain are directly connected to the testicles. This is why men who weary their imagination in books are less suitable for procreative functions; while those who dissipate their spirits in debauching women cannot apply themselves to serious study.” 12 Scholars usually decline to comment.
Laurence Sterne’s 1759 bestseller Tristram Shandy assumes from page one that we “have all I dare say heard of the animal spirits and how they are transfused from father to son.” Shandy’s mother distracts his father with a question at the moment of emission, ruffling Tristram’s embryonic spirits beyond description. Disastrous consequences ensue, as “nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world, depend on their motions and activities”. His spirits, once set in motion, “go cluttering like hey-go-mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it… which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it.” 13
Animal spirit traces? Don’t they sound like synaptic brainwave patterns?
The vanishing
How did such a flourishing theory vanish so completely? There are several possible answers.
As early as 1649, physiologist William Harvey called them “a common subterfuge of ignorance”. The rise of rationalism signalled the end of the baroque and its generalist amateurs with theories they could not substantiate. They may have been just a harmless stopgap, “the worst accident that ever befell physiology” with a “paralyzing effect on neuroscience”. 14 Some view the identification of the electrical nature of the nervous system as a key moment in sweeping away the cobwebs of the past and ushering in the scientific age. One of the first uses of the microscope was a search – unsuccessful – for channels within the nerves in the testicles of a boar through which spirits might flow. In the end, animal spirits were a fiction. They had to go.
But another analysis, perhaps more productive, holds that the animal spirits were identified as electrical. After all, the language of electricity – currents, flow, resistors – is drawn from liquids and gases. Galvani, in his influential research into animal electricity, considered he was explaining the nature of the animal spirits. By this reading, the theory was subsumed and refined within the new sciences, with its spirituous origins swamped and forgotten.
Conveniently forgotten? A third version of the spirits’ disappearance is more sinister. They were always at odds with the notion of Moral Man.
Physician Robert Whytt warned against excusing hysteria and hypochondria through “the irregular Motion, the increasing Derivation, Repercussion, Confusion, or Hurry, of the Animal Spirits”. 15 These wriggling fluids, mixed with blood and semen, prone to spillage and confusion, offered only tenuous control of our minds. This openness to interference and influence is convincing but unnerving.
Towards the end of the Enlightenment, however, ideals of moral self-control and mental discipline required the body’s innards to be tamed. The spirits link pores and passions too indiscriminately. If they can scarcely ground memory, what happens to identity? To responsibility, morality and the social order? The Victorian age, placing autocratic reason as undisputed ruler of the mind, gladly dispensed with the challenge of these unruly bodily fluids. Heaven forfend the implication that our innards were so ungovernable – not to mention our psyches.
If you can’t beat ’em
Could it be that animal spirits theory, even if ill-founded, was doing the right kind of explanatory job?
We often think of pre-Enlightenment days as a different world, with feudal society, strange superstitions and all those ruffs. Yet their world was more tightly interconnected than ours, a time when interdisciplinarity was not demonised but applauded, indeed required.
For all the contemporary insights into hormones, neurotransmitters and the relationship between mind, body and world, the complexity of cognition continues to baffle. Only recently have philosophers, psychologists and neurobiologists started going to the same conferences, let alone participating in joint research. Animal spirits connected mental and physical realms in a way that urgently interests us today. Might these oh-so-ungovernable fluids account for the turbulence of our internal climates more realistically than many theories that followed?
Low spirits and high spirits have long since passed from medicine to metaphor. But these archaic wriggling neurotransmitters offer a way to contextualise physiology and biologise psychology. This image of the “hydraulico-pneumatical engines we call human bodies” 16 not only resonates with our experience of perceiving, remembering and dreaming. It offers a less solipsistic reading of the world than our separated sciences, a bewitching insight into how to interweave physiology with cognition. And that is exactly the complex interaction of mind, body and world that philosophy, psychology and neurophysiology are today demanding so urgently.
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