Reflections on the Mind

In ancient China, the philosopher Zhuangzi wrote that "The mind of the perfect man is like a mirror. It does not lean forward or backward in its response to things. It responds to things but conceals nothing of its own."

Nearer our own time, views of the mind are rather different from this image of calm perfection. "When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun by nettles" wrote Horace Walpole in 1779. A few years before, Joshua Reynolds had also used an image from agriculture: "The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter."

These adjurations to cultivate one's own mental garden indicate a confidence that the result will be worth the effort, but other views have been less sanguine. Edward Dyer in the 16th century might declare that "My mind to me a kingdom is", but 80 years later Milton pointed out the possible consequence: "The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." For Keats, the concern was to avoid rigidity of thought: "The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing--to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. Not a select party."

Fedor Dostoevsky was alert to suffering: "To be conscious is an illness--a real thorough-going illness", and Gerard Manley Hopkins warned that the mind "has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed." It remained for Martin Amis, a century later, to sound a more optimistic note: "Consciousness isn't intolerable. It is beautiful: the eternal creation and dissolution of mental forms."

You can find out what the scientists and thinkers of today make of consciousness and the mind in the long-awaited new edition of The Oxford Companion to the Mind.

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