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Actions and Objects
from Hobbes
to Richardson

Actions and Objects
from Hobbes
to Richardson
Jonathan Kramnick
stanford university press
Stanford, California

Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2010 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system
without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kramnick, Jonathan Brody.
Actions and objects from Hobbes to Richardson / Jonathan
Kramnick.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8047-7051-4 (cloth : alk. paper) —
isbn 978-0-8047-7052-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism.
2. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and
criticism. 3. Act (Philosophy) in literature. 4. Philosophy of mind
in literature. 5. Causation in literature. 6. Philosophy, English—
17th century. 7. Philosophy, English—18th century. I. Title.
pr448.p5k73 2010
820.9'384—dc22
2010010565
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality
paper
Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10.75/15 Sabon

Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: Nothing from Nothing 1
1. Actions, Agents, Causes 27
2. Consciousness and Mental Causation: Lucretius,
Rochester, Locke 61
3. Rochester’s Mind 99
4. Uneasiness, or Locke among Others 141
5. Haywood and Consent 168
6. Action and Inaction in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa 194
Notes 233
Index 299

Preface
This book is about the literature and philosophy of action during
the last half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth cen-
tury, the period that begins roughly with Hobbes and Rochester and
ends roughly with Hume and Richardson. It features works that
examine what happens when someone acts, when someone writes
a letter or lifts her feet or kills or kisses, and so on. For many, the
difference between actions and other kinds of events turned on the
presence of mental states. Someone writes a letter because she wants
to communicate information and intends for her reader to under-
stand her. Her desire for the one or intention for the other causes
physical movements of various kinds. And yet how does a mental
state like desire or intention cause the body to move? This simple
question was of vast significance for all kinds of writers during the
period, and opened up literary and philosophical problems for our
time as well as theirs, from how a work of writing can represent
thought on the page, to how matter can be the locus of conscious-
ness, to whether minds actually cause anything to happen after all.
Writing about the mind during the period took many forms and
has been the topic of much important work in literary and intel-
lectual history. The relation between mind and actions, however,
remains relatively untapped and points in a number of unusual
directions. For example, although this book is above all interested in
the language of mental states, it does not make an argument about
the growth of inwardness or interiority or the psychological subject
during the period. Rather, considering actions leads in a different

Preface
viii
direction. Minds were understood to do many kinds of things—
from represent objects, to work through equations, to grieve—but
when they caused someone to act, they were understood to blend
in some fashion with the rest of the world. For some, this kind of
causal relation meant that minds were at bottom like everything else
in nature. When these writers considered actions, they were often
led to unexpected or unsettling conclusions: that the will might not
be free, that all matter might be sentient or nothing sentient at all,
that states of mind extend outside the head. For others, the topic of
actions provided an occasion to block just these sorts of conclusions
and to distinguish the place of mind and mental causes from other
parts of the world.
The late seventeenth and early eighteenth century was indeed
a lively time for the consideration of actions, with the combined
emergence of empirical philosophies of mind and new literary forms
designed to feature experience in often startling ways. Against this
expansive backdrop, I follow the problem of actions from the cul-
tures of Restoration-era science to mid-eighteenth-century social
theory, from worries about political authority to the consideration
of a commercial society. While I place importance on what we
might call externalism, I also watch notions of the external shift
from physical bits of matter in motion to the elaborate networks of
law and exchange. My goal has not been to follow a single perspec-
tive as it grows to dominance, however, but rather to examine com-
peting models of mind and action across the period and into ours.
I thus examine writers who have been integral for literary studies
along with those whose ideas might challenge our expectations on a
number of topics: from where seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
writers looked to find the sources of actions to what kinds of enti-
ties they considered to be conscious.
Actions and Objects has been generously supported through-
out by Rutgers University. In the early stages, I received fellowship
help from the NEH, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library,
and the Huntington Library. At the end, I was the beneficiary of a

Preface ix
wonderful year at the Stanford Humanities Center, which saw the
completion of this manuscript and the start of another. As I tried
out some of these arguments and readings, a few appeared in print.
Early versions of sections of Chapters 3 and 5 appeared in ELH and
a very different version of a section of Chapter 4 in the Yale Jour-
nal of Criticism. They have now been completely reconsidered and
rewritten, but trace sentences remain.
One pleasure of taking some time to finish is accumulating so
many debts of gratitude. I’ve been extremely fortunate to test some
of these arguments among a superlative group of graduate students
over the years. I could simply not have written a word without their
questions, responses, and quarrels. My period cohort—Lynn Festa,
Paula McDowell, and Michael McKeon—has provided invaluable
feedback and conversation. Also at Rutgers, I’ve had the pleasure of
working with Billy Galperin, Colin Jager, Meredith McGill, Jonah
Siegel, Henry Turner, and Rebecca Walkowitz. The “Mind and Cul-
ture” seminar at the Center for Cultural Analysis provided a burst
of intellectual energy and renewal just when I needed it most; our
many guests and fellows will find their promptings and ideas scat-
tered over these pages.
The same is true for the crew at Stanford, old friends and new:
John Bender, Terry Castle, Denise Gigante, Joshua Landy, and
Blakey Vermeule. It has come to seem that the broader eighteenth-
century world is an expansive set of fascinating interlocutors,
including Helen Deutsch, Sarah Ellenzweig, Marcie Frank, Jody
Greene, Sandra Macpherson, John Richetti, Helen Thompson, and
others who have listened to me talk about actions and minds over
the years and who have helped to shape the argument in ways they
might not realize. Parts of this book were delivered to audiences
at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, UCLA, the
University of Chicago, and Yale, where audiences were curious and
receptive and challenging in the best ways. James Kierstead, Mike
Gavin, and my editor Emily-Jane Cohen all made it possible for this
book to come together in the end.

Preface

It gives me great pleasure finally to thank those whose contin-
ued intellectual presence in my life I consider a tremendous gift:
Jared Gardner, Elizabeth Hewitt, Jonathan Goldberg, Adela Pinch,
Michael Trask, Michael Warner, and Bliss Kern. Bliss read the entire
book and made it better.

Introduction: Nothing from Nothing
Things happen. Often we try to explain them. When Edmond
Halley looked back on records of passing comets, he noticed that
one seemed to appear every seventy-six years. He then thought hard
about orbital velocity and gravity, drawing on what he knew about
mathematics and physics. When a fashionable young man cut off
a lock of hair belonging to a fashionable young woman, Alexan-
der Pope wrote a poem. He thought hard about human actions,
drawing on what he knew about motivation and desire. Halley and
Pope both understood that neither comets nor cuttings come into
the universe from nothing. Yet for Halley, the comet’s return didn’t
have anything to do with beliefs or decisions. The comet didn’t
choose to shoot by earth. Rather, its particular mass and distance
from the sun put it on an unalterable ellipse. For Pope, the cutting
of the lock had little to do with the properties of metal shears or
strands of hair. The Baron chose to cut Belinda’s hair. Pope would
like to know why he did so:
Say what strange Motive, Goddess! cou’d compel
A well-bred Lord t’assault a gentle Belle?
Oh say what stranger Cause, yet unexplor’d,
Cou’d make a gentle Belle reject a Lord?1
Were we to examine the Baron’s motives, Pope says, we might
discover why he cut Belinda’s hair. Were we to examine hers, we
might discover why she rejected his advances. Were we to do either,
we would learn how motives serve as causes, “am’rous Causes” to
be exact. Enclosed in the two couplets therefore is an implicit theory.


Belinda and the Baron are agents. Their actions have causes. Among
these causes are states of mind. We may go even further. States of
mind distinguish actions like the rape of the lock from events like
the appearance of Halley’s comet.2
They do so because they serve a
causal role. States of mind make something happen, just like states
of physical matter. In other words, Pope plucks minds from other
kinds of things only to make us wonder how far the distinction
goes.
This book is about minds and actions in Restoration and
eighteenth-century Britain. It examines how writers described what
precedes and constitutes an agent’s doing something, whether writing
a letter or fleeing a kingdom. The topic gathered new attention
during the period because it opened the possibility for a causal
theory of behavior in line with causal theories applied elsewhere in
the natural world. If desires, fears, beliefs, and so on were like causes
and actions were like effects, some said, then minds were similar to
other things in the environment; if minds represent the world in
motion, others responded, they were in some special sense distinct
from everything else. The discussion animated genres as diverse as
the treatise, the lyric, and the novel. Sometimes it concerned matters
as ordinary as the lifting of one’s feet; other times it engaged topics
as broad as what it means to be a person. In each case, the concern
was how states of mind might prompt, accompany, or follow the
movement of physical bodies. In this introduction, I will set out the
conceptual issues involved in the period’s consideration of actions.
I’ll then turn to a chapter-by-chapter summary of my argument. If
my sense of this book is right, several of my formulations may be
surprising, so I’ll present them in some detail.
One might expect a book about minds to validate the long-
standing sense that the eighteenth century witnesses a new language
of inwardness or subjectivity associated with the joint rise of empiri-
cal philosophy and the novel.3
I complicate this thesis by pointing to
the largely unacknowledged role of external factors in the period’s
conception of mind. In the works I examine, the distinguishing

feature of minds is the causal role they do or do not play in physical
movement. So while the writers I feature develop techniques to show
minds at work, their goal is to describe why certain actions occur
and how mental states fit into the rest of the world. The ostensible
privacy or interiority of mental states is often not an issue. We may
think of this as an important property of actions. Actions extend
mind into the world. Belinda might conceivably be thinking about
all sorts of things in the course of her day, from the taste of tea
to troubles with Betty. Pope is interested in why she rejected the
Baron, however, and so therefore looks at her reasons for doing so.
The same might be said for many of the well-known and incidental
actions mulled over in the writing of the period. Why did Evelina
accept Orville’s invitation to dance? Why did Moll steal that bundle?
Any time a writer asks why such an event happened, she pares
mental states into those fixed to behavior, the desires or beliefs that
form reasons for acting. To the degree to which literary history has
focused on inwardness or privacy, therefore, it has missed several
important features of mind-talk during the long eighteenth century.
This book looks closely at three such features as they take the
form of nagging questions: Are actions freely chosen or subject to
necessity? How do mental properties cause physical change? How
can a physical object be the locus of conscious experience?
Let’s start with the first question. The notion that human behavior
might be discussed in causal terms brought with it a serious entail-
ment. As soon as we know all the facts about Halley’s comet, we
understand why it has to appear every seventy-six years. The comet
doesn’t have any say in the matter. An inflexible confluence of causes
(mass, gravity, velocity, and so forth) rigidly determines its arrival.
The comet is subject to necessity. The question thus emerges with
some urgency if the same is true for actions. Were we to know all
the facts about the Baron’s cutting of the lock, or Belinda’s refusal
of the Baron, would we understand why each had to happen? Pope’s
language of causes suggests this may be so. Indeed, John Dennis
voices precisely this worry in his Remarks on Mr. Pope’s Rape of


the Lock (1728), in which he complains that the word “compel” in
line six “is a Botch for the Sake of the Rhyme,” because it “supposes
the Baron to be a Beast, and not a free Agent.”4
Although he is
no friend to Pope, Dennis would still like to save the poet from
the charge of determinism. Surely Pope didn’t mean to say that the
Baron lacked freedom of the will. Pope’s emphasis on causation
suggests that Dennis was wrong. The poor Baron may have been
just as compelled as the comet, unable to do anything other than
cut. He too may have been subject to necessity.5
Writers like Dennis worry that necessity is a sort of alibi for
reprehensible behavior. Don’t punish me, the Baron might say; I
couldn’t have done otherwise. The assumption is that if one isn’t
free to choose one’s actions then one can’t really be held responsible
for them. The freedom that allows agents to take responsibility for
what they do is, on this view, incompatible with the necessity that
says they could never have done otherwise. One major contribu-
tion of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of action was,
however, precisely not to pose freedom and responsibility against
necessity. It was rather to show how the two could be compatible.
Traditionally credited to Hobbes, compatibilism of this kind has
had great influence up to the present day.6
The argument works by a
series of redefinitions. First among them is freedom itself. “Liberty
or Freedome,” Hobbes writes, “signifieth (properly) the absence of
Opposition” or “externall Impediments of motion.”7
On this view,
freedom does not refer to an ability to choose or will actions. Rather,
freedom refers to an ability to perform actions once they are chosen.
While “no Liberty can be inferred of the will, desire, or inclination,”
we can infer a “Liberty of the man; which consisteth in this, that he
finds no stop, in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination
to doe” (146). A will may no more be free than a thought may be
brittle or a square may be fast. In contrast, an action is free when it
may be brought to completion, confined when it is impeded.
This redefinition was useful for Hobbes because it put the freedom
of actions together with the safety provided by the state. Absolute

power was not a threat to liberty; rather, it provided the protection
for agents to act as they would choose.8
Despite changes in political
theory over the course of the period, the idea that freedom could be
compatible with necessity had considerable endurance. Hume for
example defined liberty as “a power of acting or not acting, accord-
ing to the determinations of the will” and then argued that this
power in no way conflicted with universal causation: “We cannot
surely mean, that actions have so little connexion with motives,
inclinations, and circumstances, that one does not follow with a
certain degree of uniformity from the other, and that one affords
no inference by which we can conclude the existence of the other.”9
Surely, he says, we cannot imagine that the will is indifferent to
motives or that motives don’t serve as causes. Liberty requires only
that actions may be completed. For Hobbes, the state performs this
role by allowing for common safety and enduring contracts; for
Hume a society of commerce and reciprocity draws the behavior of
one person to the interests of another. In either case, the will finds
its place in a lattice of causes, and actions come under the same fine-
grained analysis as the rest of nature.
Although the compatibilist account of agency looms large in the
history of philosophy, with canonical British writers like Hobbes,
Locke, and Hume at front and center, its importance for questions
of literary history has not been much explored. One goal of this
book is to do just that. The topic of reasons for acting might be of
interest for how we think about such things as the writing of literary
character and the placing of actions into narratives.10
Compatibil-
ism in turn might be of help to refining our sense of how dependent
characterization was on notions of internal psychology and how far
it extended outward into external objects and events. I mentioned
earlier, for example, that talk about actions brought mental causes
into the world rather than separating them from it. I would add to
this thesis that compatibilism brought the world into the mind. As
a matter of definition, no cause ever exists on its own. Causes are
paired to effects and, presumably, caused by something else too.


With respect to mental states, this means that reasons for acting
extend from experiences or desires or intentions to external objects
and back. It is not so hard to see how reasons might be internal.
The Baron desires that Belinda’s hair be cut. Belinda hopes for the
Baron to go away. While the lock and the Baron exist independently
of the mind, each is at the same time an object of a propositional
statement. They change according to the presiding mental verb (or
attitude, as we would now say): the lock is cut in the first case,
the Baron ushered away in the second.11
Mental states are thus
able to bear content, like a lock of hair, and mediate behavior, like
closing a pair of scissors.12
It is perhaps not quite so easy to see how
these same states might reach beyond the person. No small part of
my argument, however, will depend on the period’s sense of this
possibility. In different ways, Hobbes and Hume both say that every
event or object or idea links to another in a long chain of causation.
There is no way to view any one precisely on its own, since each has
antecedents and effects. With respect to mental states, the result of
this intuition is that ideas and intentions ultimately make their way
to the social and physical environment. When this relation tightens
some, the social or physical hookup actually plays a causal role in
this or that action. In our present example, we need only look at
the system of external rules and meanings that jointly govern the
behavior of the Baron or Belinda. “Am’rous Causes” reach through
things like cards and hair and forms like courtship and epic.
I will be interested in accounts of actions that stress the connec-
tion between subjective experience and the environment or that
show how the meaning of concepts is fixed on the outside or that
tie volitional states like desire or intention to physical states like
the movement of particles. I will argue in other words for the
importance of what I’ll call externalism in the literature and philos-
ophy of the period.13
In many of the cases I look at, the emphasis
fell on causation as the means by which mental states or proper-
ties have at once a real existence and are looped into other things.
Even as causation promised to join mind to the world, however, the

precise relation between the two became subject to some worry. The
question here—the second on my earlier list—was whether mental
states instigate physical change. One might be surprised if they
didn’t.14
Pope’s question about the Baron would only make sense,
after all, were his motives able to bring about his cuttings. Yet for
all the apparent simplicity of this sort of episode, it became clear to
a variety of writers that the process was difficult to pin down. Here
are Locke’s droll comments on the matter:
My right Hand writes, whilst my left Hand is still: What causes rest
in one, and motion in the other? Nothing but my Will,—a Thought
of my Mind; my Thought only changing, the right Hand rests, and
the left Hand moves. This is matter of fact, which cannot be denied:
Explain this, and make it intelligible, and then the next step will be to
understand Creation.15
Locke’s hand has been writing for some time. It has been forming
letters from ink, words from letters, sentences from words, and
paragraphs from sentences. The paragraphs read as more than
accidents. They make a certain sense and so seem to be the product
of an intending agent. Try as he might, however, Locke cannot
exactly describe how his will executes the writing. (I can’t either.
I’m telling myself to type this on the keyboard. So far my fingers are
moving as I’d like them to. How and why are beyond me.) Locke
does not dismiss the efficacy of mental properties or consign them
to a separate kind of substance.16
Rather, he considers the causal
relation between will and writing to be “a matter of fact” and to
be an example of a kind of relation that underpins every single act
done with deliberate intention. His amused caution has to do with
figuring out how the pieces of the causal puzzle fit into each other.
Does the relation between will and hand-movement have the same
features as the one between, say, heat and the evaporation of water?
The evaporation of water from heat happens every time the tempera-
ture crosses a certain threshold. The turning of letters into words
happens by fits and starts, according to a will described as a distinc-


tively mental property. Locke is therefore sure of two things: that
he experiences the decision to move one hand and then the other,
and that his experience causes the movement of his hands. There is
something that it feels like for him to will hand movement. There is
nothing that it feels like for heat to evaporate water. In the face of
this sort of relation, however, Locke (as it were) throws up his hands.
He knows it exists yet cannot provide an intelligible description of
how it happens. Analytic philosophers would call this a problem of
mental causation.17
It is essential to every chapter of the book.
Mental causation is so important because without it there would
be no concept of agency and no description of actions, only events.
It is important because the scene that Locke provides an expository
accounting of here reappears in different guises across the litera-
tures of the period, from the search into the “am’rous Causes”
beneath and before the rape of the lock to the prolonged question-
ing of the motives of a character like Clarissa Harlowe in doing
things like writing to Lovelace and leaving her family home. It is
important finally because of the very bafflement Locke so limpidly
voices. Attempts to resolve the problem of mental causation came
in a variety of forms: from the idea that mental states or properties
might have no causal role to play—epiphenomenalism as it is now
called—to the notion that external objects and events do the causing
for us; from accounts of the mind’s free and independent force on
the material world to a recognition that causal relations are best
inferred from an outsider’s stance. The pleasure in considering this
problem over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
has not, however, been in watching a single answer take shape from
the various responses. It has been rather in following the arguments
as they take off from their several sources, from Hobbes to Hume,
Rochester to Richardson, and in between.
At the heart of the problem of mental causation is the distinction,
if there is one, between mind and matter. For most of the writers I
consider, the causal relation at issue is not one between two kinds of
substance. For some the distinction is between mental and physical

description, with the underlying substance question ruled out by
metaphysical fiat; for others the problem is fitting the mind into a
world that is wholly material; for still others a ghost does in fact
haunt the machine. The concerns raised by these responses take me
to the last of the three questions I raised earlier. Were we to ask who
cut Belinda’s hair we would think it odd if someone were to reply
the scissors. Why would we think so? On a first pass, we might say
because the Baron is a person and the scissors an object. We might
then hang a series of further distinctions on this difference. Persons
have a kind of value and set of rights, for example, while objects do
not. Junk the Baron’s scissors and he might be annoyed, but you’re
unlikely to be arrested. Drown the Baron in the Thames and you
might be held accountable for a crime. The concept of person is,
as Locke will say, a “forensic category,” useful for the assigning of
blame or praise, reward or punishment.18
But to say that persons
cause things to happen and objects do not is to take as a premise the
difference in roles one is trying to explain. Why then do we say that
a person has causal powers while a pair of scissors does not? For
many during the period the answer was that persons have conscious
experience.19
There is something that it is like to be the Baron.20
There is nothing that it is like to be a pair of scissors. Here we can
perhaps take matters no further. A person is a kind of thing that is
conscious; a pair of scissors is a kind of thing that is not. Full stop.
The premise of this sort of argument is actually twofold. It
says that persons have consciousness and that consciousness
distinguishes one person from another. This claim is made with
tremendous influence in chapter 27 of Locke’s Essay Concern-
ing Human Understanding (1690). For Locke and others, talk of
consciousness was hard to have without talk of personal identity,
and likewise bringing up personal identity was hard to do without
having something to say about consciousness. One linked series of
conscious moments wraps the whole into a single entity, making
(as the case may be) the young Locke an identical person to the old
one. If consciousness and personhood go together, however, they do

10
so with some interesting points of tension. For some writers, includ-
ing Locke on occasion, consciousness was something that bodies
have and do. It was not a separate substance put into them. But
how can a physical system be the locus of experience? Matter seems
by definition to be without experience, yet put together in certain
ways it gives rise to sentience, awareness, pleasure, pain, appetites,
and the like. In contemporary work on the mind, the question of
how this is possible is known as “the hard problem of conscious-
ness,” and it remains decisively unanswered to this day.21
Following
a single thread in the treatment of actions has thus backed me into a
large area of concern, one that I try to keep tightly laced to reasons
for acting. This topic includes consciousness because it is conscious
objects that would seem to have reasons. How precisely that is so,
however, does take us into really interesting and difficult issues.
One such issue comes directly out of the seventeenth and
eighteenth century’s version of today’s “hard problem.” It went
something like this: assuming that material entities are able to have
the sort of experiences that lead to actions—conscious reasons
for acting, let’s say—why are some entities conscious and others
not? At bottom, there is little difference between the Baron and the
scissors (or the comet). Each is a composite of particles. Yet Baron-
particles give rise to consciousness and scissor-particles do not. In
the chapters that follow, I will look at a few works that directly
ask why that is so. Once again, my interest is not only with period-
defining answers but also with some difficulties encountered along
the way. I am especially drawn to texts that come at problems of
consciousness from an oblique angle or that offer radical or at least
off-center responses to the problems at hand. I’ll be interested in
texts that try to bring consciousness and personhood together, but
I will also be interested in those that pry them apart, that present
conscious experiences without a person having them or persons
without conscious experiences in train. I’ll be interested, finally, in
texts willing to follow their premises to seemingly unusual conclu-
sions, such as all things having some sort of consciousness or
(conversely) nothing having consciousness at all.

Keeping an eye toward the unexpected conclusion has provided
one way to narrow a path through a topic as broad as the literature
and philosophy of actions. It is also, I think, what happens when
you watch writers wrestle with nearly intractable quandaries: An
action is the kind of event whose cause includes mental states, but
what, after all, does “whose cause includes” really mean? A person
is the kind of entity that has consciousness, but how and why is
that so? Answer me these and perhaps you will, as Locke says,
explain creation. Two guiding principles are at issue here. Questions
of agency and consciousness have long concerned literary study in
general and the study of Restoration and eighteenth-century litera-
ture in particular. I attempt to look closely at the component parts
of one critical feature of this concern: how reasons, intentions, and
other states of mind do or do not serve as causes for acting. This
feature then opens up a number of related topics about minds and
persons and contexts for acting. The principle is to engage large,
period-defining concepts of character or consciousness, such as they
are, through incremental examples and debates. The second princi-
ple reflects somewhat on the first. I am inclined to tilt the applecart
rather than hold it in place. So where the predominant model has
favored the growth of inwardness, sympathy, and subjectivity, I tend
(again) to favor things external, like the elemental parts of matter or
the chains of causes or the forms of contract.
With the exception of the first chapter, this book moves freely
between what in retrospect we would call philosophical and literary
writing.22
I take great pleasure in the nonexistence of this distinction
in the eighteenth century, a period when David Hume could say his
ruling passion was a “love of literary fame” and Samuel Richardson
could say that he wrote “instantaneous Descriptions and Reflec-
tions” of minds and hearts at work. I view this overlap of concerns
as permission to stipulate a relation between texts that have grown
to seem far-flung. I do track allusion, citation, and debate, but
in the main my method has been to follow the appearance and
movement of problems, especially those concerning the antecedents
to actions and the ontology of persons and objects. These topics

12
obey no boundaries of genre, though they are framed in different
ways according to the formal properties and needs of the texts in
which they come into view. So, for example, an epistolary novel
might choose to distribute its account of causes between writers of
letters, while a third-person fiction might try to represent a charac-
ter’s reasons or intentions; a piece of discursive prose might develop
a theory in explicit conversation with antagonists while a court
satire might make such dialogue internal to its lines. I arrange this
movement into a loose chronology: from a new attention to actions
amid dynastic anxieties and civil war to a concern with minds and
behavior amid polite and commercial exchange. With this backdrop
in place, it has been on occasion important to put the texts slightly
out of sequence or to put some writers in more than one chapter. I
do this to draw out concepts that might otherwise be obscured by
a stricter sense of order. I don’t think that much is lost in histori-
cal presentation by doing so; but the alternative would, I believe,
make topics like mental causation and consciousness a little more
difficult to track. These topics are of intense interest for Restora-
tion and eighteenth-century writers. At the same time, they have
been subject to concentrated attention in contemporary philosophy
of mind and cognitive science. While I focus on Restoration and
eighteenth-century texts, therefore, I also draw now and again on
the persistence of these concerns into our time. Sometimes this is to
illuminate older texts with our latest philosophy and science; just as
often this is to use the past to shine a light on the present. In either
case, I prefer to bore into texts rather than to present a survey. After
the first chapter, the rest are case studies, looking at texts that place
matters of actions interestingly in the foreground or that have been
important for the constitution of the field.
The first chapter presents an overview of the philosophy of action
from Hobbes to Hume and features three flash points in a century-
long debate over free will. I begin with a quarrel among Civil War
exiles, turn to a pamphlet war between Anthony Collins and Samuel

Clarke fifty years later, and end with David Hume’s reflections on
commercial society. The points of contention among the first two
sets of writers concern what the world is made of and whether
mental states have a causal function in a person’s behavior. Thomas
Hobbes and Anthony Collins argue that everything is composed
from a single, physical substance and therefore that a chain of cause
and effect connects every one event or object to another. On this
view, desires and fears have properties like atoms and apples, includ-
ing the ability to cause agents to act. John Bramhall and Samuel
Clarke respond that human agents will their own actions but are
themselves not willed. On this view, actions happen outside the laws
of causation that apply to physical objects, and human souls bear a
spiritual substance different from other kinds of stuff. For his part,
Hume pays attention to physical matter only to draw an analogy to
actions in the social world. We never know precisely what happens
when a physical cause yields a physical effect. Likewise, we never
know precisely what happens when a mental cause does the same
thing. In either case, we use our habits of inference and correlation
to presume a relation between the one and the other. We observe
something happen in nature and infer its material cause; likewise,
we observe an agent doing something and infer its mental cause.
The stance with respect to either is from the outside, as the private
cause of any given effect recedes from view.
The long debate over free will concerned not only what happens
when a person acts but also from what stuff persons are made and
from what point of view it is best to describe actions. Over the course
of the debate, the meaning of several key terms changed. Hobbes
and Hume, for example, share what I call an external outlook on
actions. Yet what counts as the external changes from law, reward,
and punishment in the mid-seventeenth century to commerce and
interpersonal exchange a hundred years later. For Hobbes, one’s
recognition of legal and political forms provided reasons for acting,
while for Hume the elaborate networks of a commercial society
were necessary to complete actions and make them intelligible to

14
agents. This difference in perspective might be described, I argue, as
one between a first- and third-person view. In the first case, an agent
adjusts her desires and intentions to fit into an order of rewards and
punishments; in the second, an agent looks at the actions of other
people to infer how reasons serve as causes. Likewise, Bramhall and
Clarke both defend human autonomy from external determina-
tion, yet the former does so in the name of the soul and the latter
does so in the name of common sense. Bramhall engages Hobbes
in a quarrel at the not yet established borders of philosophy and
theology; Clarke engages his readers’ sense that they are more than
lumps of matter.
The second chapter takes a close look at this relation between
persons and physics. The topic is the role of consciousness and
mental causation in a universe reducible to particulate matter and
structured by physical laws. I say close look because, unlike the first
chapter, I slice thinly through a series of late-seventeenth-century
texts, looking in particular at Lucretian ideas of matter and agency
and a few responses they provoke. I begin with Thomas Creech’s
1682 translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, the first complete
translation of the poem published in English, and examine how
the poem presents the emergence of whole objects from individual
parts, thought from thoughtless atoms, and free movement from
a universe of causes. I then trace these concerns to two writers
subject to extensive treatment in later chapters. I compare Roches-
ter’s translation of a few lines of the poem to Creech’s and examine
their separate views of determinacy. I finish with a look at Locke’s
long discussion—one equally influential and pained—of conscious-
ness and personal identity in the Essay. The question broached by
this chapter has two parts: how can insentient matter be the locus
of thought and experience, and how can experience play a causal
role in the material world? I’m interested in Lucretius because his
poem tracked consciousness and mental causation to the movement
of particles. The poem proposes that composite entities—people,
trees, cows, what have you—take shape from the collision and

adhesion of invisible and indivisible atoms. One trouble appears
when the poem considers how atoms without thought can give rise
to objects that have thought. The solution works through a process
of emergence, wherein certain kinds of atoms interlock with others
in such a way that consciousness comes out of them. A second area
of concern appears when the poem considers what role conscious-
ness has in the physical universe. The answer here is most curious.
The poem makes a case for free will by distributing agency to the
manifold of particulate matter. Individual atoms are thoughtless,
yet they are at the same time possessed of will manifested in their
random and unpredictable movement. So where the first response
looks at sentience as an emergent property, the second looks at will
as present in all things, a perspective we would now call panpsy-
chist.23
Such attention to the small units of matter was of evident interest
to Rochester, who translated two bits of Lucretius on his own along
with a piece of Seneca about the “lumber” from which all things are
made. Both Lucretius and Rochester write past the larger entities
in which consciousness and will are incarnated. They are interested
in particles, not persons. Locke’s treatment of consciousness and
personal identity in the Essay presents a very different view. In what
is arguably the first consistent use of the word “consciousness”
in its modern sense as “the perception of what passes in a Man’s
own mind,” Locke argues that consciousness provides a consistent
sense of self.24
Particles come and go but selves persist over time.
Accordingly, conscious selves anchor persons who are responsible
for their actions and subject to eventual reward and punishment.
Having made the topic of consciousness distinct from the topic of
matter, however, Locke returns to their relation in the closing books
of the Essay. There he engages what I describe as an early consider-
ation of today’s “hard problem.” How is it, he asks, that conscious
experience could arise from matter without experience? His answer
follows the conundrum to its several ends. Perhaps emergent proper-
ties are a brute fact of the world, or perhaps all matter bears some

16
sort of experience, or perhaps matter is interwoven with spirit after
all.
The third chapter picks up on the discussion of Rochester begun
in the second and spends considerably more time looking at how his
poetry engages questions of consciousness and causation, actions
and personhood. I feature Rochester because his poetry engages
the physical view he encountered in Lucretius and yet extends the
discussion to contexts for acting in the social and political world of
the Restoration. A Satyr against Reason and Mankind, for example,
asks whether mental states are able to cause anything or whether
they ride along with physical causes. It toys with the idea that
consciousness is only something left behind once physical causes
have done all their work, or that mental causes might exist but only
without agents to whom they belong. In a similar vein, Love and
Life presents composite objects that have spatial parts—a hand of
a person, a branch of a tree—but no equivalent temporal parts.25
An object (on this view) neither passes through time nor stretches
over time, but exists only in a kind of impossible present. These
musings about causation and existence over time combine in the
more sexually explicit poetry—like The Imperfect Enjoyment and A
Ramble in St. James’s Park—where mental states at turns get in the
way of the physical system or provide a language for the system’s
failure. My purpose in these readings is to show how Rochester
attempts physical explanations in terms of the movement of matter.
I also examine how he similarly attempts external explanations in
terms of the importance of context and environment. The physical
and external tend to combine or run in support of each other. Even
so, Rochester doesn’t so much make neat statements on these topics
as range over their many problems and difficulties, often to odd
and surprising effect. For example, despite his reputation for having
established desire as a basis for action, he mostly locates desire in
every place beside the heads, bodies, or persons found in his poems.
In keeping with this external view of an ostensibly inner phenom-
enon, I draw the chapter to a close by exploring the strange fate

of a couplet concerning mental causation from Artemiza to Chloe
that was cited in a variety of works in post-1688 London. My
question here is, How does a new context change the meaning of
lines committed to the importance of context? The answer takes us
from the manuscript coteries of the Restoration to the print public
of the 1710s and ’20s, and from poetry to the essay and novel.
The Rochester chapter provides one route into the eighteenth
century. The fourth chapter on Locke’s theory of action provides
another. Locke’s theory of consciousness had stated that there is
something that it is like to have one or another thought, that the
background hum of the subjective provides the underpinning of
a person’s identity over time. What, if anything, do first-person
thoughts or feelings have to do with acting? In Locke’s first pass
at this question, the answer turns out to be “not much.” The first
edition of the Essay says that we may come to full understanding
of an action by observing it from the outside. One has reasons to
do something and those reasons lead to actions. What it feels like
to have some sort of reason has no causal role to play. The entire
history of an action may therefore be plotted from an external
perspective as a doing of some thing in order to accomplish some
good. Locke’s frustration with this argument emerges at the outset
in a series of letters exchanged with William Molyneux between the
first and second edition. Molyneux asks why agents are sometimes
led to error or to act against reason. He also poses to Locke his
famous thought experiment about a blind man suddenly provided
with sight. The point of the thought experiment—the Molyneux
Problem, as it will be subsequently known—is to emphasize the
importance of first-person experience in understanding the external
world. The blind man comes to new knowledge about the cubes and
spheres he had previously touched when he sees them for the first
time. The analogous suggestion for a theory of actions is that one
learns something new about them in light of the feelings with which
they were accompanied. The second edition of the Essay takes this
new argument to heart and presents a thoroughly revised model of

18
actions. In the first edition, the cause of any action was always one’s
reason for doing whatever one did. In the second, it is always one’s
wanting to achieve some desired end. Alongside this new emphasis
on desire as a causal faculty, Locke places a new term—“uneasi-
ness”—which describes what it feels like to desire something. Seen
from the outside and the third person, desire is the cause of actions.
Seen from the inside and the first person, desire is experienced as
uneasiness. Without having a sense of this uneasiness, one can’t tell
exactly what any given agent will do or has done. Consciousness
provides additional information to what one gathers from observ-
ing the behavior of agents.
This view is in some ways compatible with what we sometimes
think we know about early-eighteenth-century literary history.
So the chapter ends with a brief treatment of Catharine Trotter,
a playwright and novelist who also wrote a treatise in defense of
Locke’s philosophy. I don’t turn to Trotter just to track the contro-
versies surrounding the publication of the Essay. (Trotter’s was
one text among many written against or in defense of Locke at
the time.) Rather, I’m interested in Trotter because she provides a
concrete example of the explicit and sign-posted theory of actions—
the kind of thing that would appear in a treatise—making its way
into the implicit staging ground of narrative fiction. Trotter had
one foot in each. One of the selling points of the kind of epistolary
fiction Trotter wrote was that it provided a first-person perspec-
tive on causes of action. Locke had said that desire causes actions
and is experienced as uneasiness. Trotter’s novel and others like it
attempted to color in what that might mean and how it might work.
Assertion of this kind has often led to a related claim that novels
express the priority of the psychological and of a particular person’s
private experience, an argument associated with Ian Watt’s famous
book on the novel, though perhaps one as old as serious consider-
ation of the genre. I don’t intend to overturn this argument so much
as give it a little bit of trouble. The final two chapters of the book
are thus focused on eighteenth-century fiction and attempt to show

how a causal account of actions might or might not make recourse
to the interior states of agents.
I’ve chosen two authors whose works seem to feature problems
of agency in interesting and opposed ways, and who are, respec-
tively, a subject of intense, recent interest and a perennial favorite. I
look at Eliza Haywood because she sustains the sort of commitment
to experience and feelings that Locke and Trotter promote without
also committing herself to accompanying notions of the interior
point of view or the separateness of personhood from environment.
Few writers of the period are more extravagant than Haywood in
their language of passionate feeling. So much is intuitively obvious.
My argument will be that Haywood stops short of assigning these
feelings to discrete persons or objects. The common-sense bonding of
experience to a subject of experience begins to loosen across a range
of incidents but is especially fraught and intriguing, I argue, with the
concept and experience of consent. Consent is a term understood
by Locke and others to join private experience to formal contracts
like marriage or impersonal structures like the state. In these
highly significant venues, it validates external authorities with the
imprimatur of the subjective. I wasn’t dragged to the altar; I freely
consented to marry this toad. The reign of this king or parliament
isn’t arbitrary; we consent to be governed. And so on. The trouble
is how to get from the possession to the expression of consent. How
do we know if someone actually consents? How do I know that I
have consented? The question poses the real quandary of accessing
mental states, phenomena that are difficult, some said impossible,
to view directly. The “How can I know if someone has consented?”
question is, in this respect, a sharpened version of the “How can I
see what another person is thinking or feeling?” question. Locke’s
answer is that you can’t and so you don’t. He outlines instead two
forms of externalization: the actual “expression” of consent in
forms of contractual stipulation, like oaths, charters, and vows, and
the tacit enacting of consent in daily life. I’m especially interested in
“tacit consent” because it attaches such a consequential entailment

20
to the most quotidian of activities. One person buys an item in a
store; another takes a turn in a carriage; both have consented to be
governed. Out of the minutest incidents of mental causation rise the
grandest edifices of liberal democracy.
Between mental causes and civil societies are a series of finely
grained steps: the kind of dailyness of thought and action dwelt upon
in works of fiction. Such will be my gambit, at least, in considering
Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719) and Fantomina (1725). These
will be unsurprising picks for anyone who has been paying attention
to the directions of eighteenth-century literary studies for the past
decade, and that is partly my point. Our attention has been drawn
to these works because, among other things, they are interested in
teasing through the kind of problems addressed by the dual nature
of consent, as something mental and something external. Locke’s
problem concerns the enactment of internally held mental states and
concepts. Haywood’s response is to show that there is no we or
I doing the consenting, or, in a slightly different vein, to say that
consent is in the doing, not in the expressing. One should, I think,
be careful about generalizing across kinds of writing. After all,
Haywood does not have the same kind of expository obligations as
Locke. Instead, she uses the advantages of formal experimentation,
especially in third-person evocations of tremulous feeling, to show
how mental states are as much in the world as in the head, as much
subject to the needs of plot as something one brings to other people
or larger institutions.
Readers might expect an account of Richardson to pursue an
opposite line of argument. Arguably no writer of the period is more
conventionally associated with first-person experience and the
authority of the self in advance of external circumstance. That is not
the argument I make, but neither do I simply pursue the contrary
line and suggest that our most storied novel of first-person experi-
ence really places mental states outside the mind or the person. I
end with Clarissa, rather, because its multiperspective version of
epistolary form is so suited to explore the several models of action

available in the eighteenth-century thought world. With this ending
in mind, I return to the basic ontological question around actions
with which I began, now pitched toward a work of fiction written
a century after the discussion of agency took off with Hobbes. The
ontological question is, How do we pick actions from the larger
class of events? The answer (again) is that actions involve mental
states while other events do not. Discussion of the nature of actions
thus turned on the status of this involvement. Did mental states
cause actions, and if so were they also caused? From what point
of view—internal or external, first or third person—should actions
be described? Clarissa zeros in on these questions by presenting
them from more than one vantage, as the few yet weighty events in
the novel come under painstaking description from several angles.
The novel makes clear, for example, that another way to ask about
actions is to count them. We ask about events in general when we
ask if anything has happened; we ask about actions in particular
when we ask whether anyone has done anything. Clarissa is particu-
larly interesting in this regard because so much of the tension comes
down to enumeration.
Consider the conflict at Harlowe Place. Clarissa’s family treats
her refusal of Solmes as an act against them; Clarissa doesn’t
consider her refusal an action at all. The quarrel isn’t just over
why she has done one or another thing; it is firstly whether she has
actually done anything. So Clarissa finds herself explaining to her
family that she hasn’t taken any action against them, while they
view her as continually acting in ways contrary to their interests.
To help make sense of this conflict I make recourse to an updated
version of the eighteenth-century philosophy of action, Elizabeth
Anscombe’s famous account of intentional actions as those “under
a description.”26
One point of Anscombe’s little volume, Intention
(1957), was to show how actions come into view when the question
“Why?” is asked of them. Events present themselves as a mass of
unincorporated detail. Put them under a description and the focus
sharpens some. A young woman’s legs move up and down. A pair

22
of shoes covers itself with mud. A young woman gets into a carriage
with a young man. A young woman runs away with a libertine. A
libertine kidnaps a young woman. These are separate accounts of
the same thing. The shoes get dirty as her legs move as she gets into
the carriage as she runs away or is kidnapped. Depending on which
description you choose, the event seems very different; indeed, only
in the latter two accounts is the event at all recognizable in the terms
suggested by the novel. So then the quarrel over enumerating actions
revolves around whether and how one apportions intentions in the
description one provides. The last two accounts subsume the earlier
ones because they provide the intention with which the action is
done, and (crucially) the intention belongs to a different agent in
each.
Clarissa’s way of protecting herself is often to deny a causal role
in the actions she appears to take. I did not mean to fly away with
a libertine or to harm my family or to lose my honor. I certainly did
not cause any of these things to happen. She may have intentions
but they are rarely intentions with which any actions are done; they
are more likely to be intendings to do some future thing. This to say
that Clarissa holds on to an internal view of actions and tends to
avoid causal accounts of her own behavior. The “direction of fit,”
as readers of Anscombe would put it, is world to mind.27
Clarissa
attempts to “fit” the world to her intendings. The conflict with
Lovelace that preoccupies the middle sections of the novel appears
when the “direction of fit” moves in the other way, as Lovelace
attempts to shape intendings to a world that precedes them.
Richardson writes of Lovelace, in this respect, as one committed to
an externalist account of mental states. Nowhere is this more heated
than in the consideration of consent. Lovelace arranges appear-
ances and circumstances so that it seems that Clarissa has already
consented to lose her virtue and voluntarily live with him out of
wedlock. He is frustrated and aghast when her consent does not fit
the situation at hand. Both Lovelace and Clarissa are committed
to the notion that mental states individuate actions. On his view,

mental states emerge out of necessity from the causal order in which
they are placed, so the appearance of Clarissa’s consent should be
the same as the existence of her consent. On her view, one’s experi-
ence of one’s mental states is prior to their place in any outside order
of things. Clarissa is a nice place to end, in this respect, because
the ongoing discussion of actions both shapes and is responded to
by some of the features we have come to recognize as integral to
the midcentury novel, especially in the Richardsonian mode: from
claims to first-person authority, to the contesting friction of overlap-
ping perspectives. In this case, the competition between the several
accounts of action takes off against the view that would see them
as compatible with determination. For his part, Lovelace wants
nothing to do with the notion that anyone’s behavior is both free
and determined. Intentions are supposed to conform to the world
in the manner of a belief. For her part, Clarissa insists on her power
to act even as it becomes impossible to do so. Intentions outlast the
environment they face. The novel is thus among other things a vast
tapestry woven around the idea of compatibilism first set forth a
hundred years earlier.
I close the book with a consideration of Clarissa’s death because
it is in the novel’s reflecting on whether the death is a suicide that
the topic of actions joins to the problems around consciousness and
mental causation I feature at the beginning. Clarissa wants to die
yet will not kill herself or act in any way that furthers her demise.
The avoiding of suicide thus picks out mental properties from the
flux of physical causes. Death is one among many physical events.
The prohibition against suicide—like that against murder—alights
on the mental and, in so doing, fastens on its causal role. The clarity
in which this may be stated reveals something interesting, I argue,
about the final sections of the novel: mental causation is easier to
envisage when it is related to the destruction of the person, precisely
the entity imagined to be the locus of such causes. This is not an
isolated phenomenon. The long consideration of Clarissa’s possible
suicide occurs at a historical moment when the materialist question-

24
ing of personal identity had reached the topic of ending one’s life.
First codified in Augustine’s ruminations on Lucretia, the prohibition
against suicide takes as its premise that a person is distinct from her
physical body.28
On this view, Clarissa is not just a mass of atoms;
she is an entity made in imitation of God. Yet on the view of others
(including Hume), the prohibition against suicide marks out mental
causes only to make them superfluous, rendering the providential
design of the causal order something that ought not to be disturbed
by states of mind. For some, even, the appropriate response was
to say that persons were no different from any other composite
entity and mental causes the same as their physical counterparts.
On this view, the destruction of the person is merely the return of
matter to the cosmos from which all things are made. This is not
the view provided by the novel, of course, which endeavors to show
how Clarissa is not only more than her parts but also more than a
person in the conventional meaning subscribed to by other writers
in her midst. The answer the novel provides to the twin problems
of consciousness and mental causation thus turns out to be less of a
normal or conventional one than one that is, in its own way, just as
peculiar as those seen earlier in Rochester and elsewhere.
It is possible to imagine a world in which there are only events and
no actions.29
It is not likely that we, or anything like us, would be in
this world. But nevertheless such a world is possible. Subtract every
agent and this counterfactual world looms into view: earthquakes
happen, comets shoot by, and yet no one does anything. There
probably wouldn’t be any mental properties in this world, and if
there were, they would be causally inert with respect to the pageant
of events in their midst. Everything would be caused by physical
properties alone. This world has a kind of simplicity and elegance.
It is, however, not the world we live in. Were it so, I would not be
writing this sentence nor would you be turning these pages. The
actual world is one in which some events have mental causes. When
we pick these events out, we, as the expression goes, carve nature

at its joints.30
We pare some events into actions, a class defined
by their causal history. My argument is that the century roughly
between Hobbes and Hume or Rochester and Richardson did just
that, and in so doing endeavored to discover the component parts
of actions in a way analogous to the discovery of anything else in
nature. Once upon a time this sort of argument might have been
made with particular reference to the interior life of characters or
voice of poems, a life or voice that corresponds to something like
the motives and mental causes of human agents. Perhaps for this
reason, when Anscombe sought to discount motives in her study
of intentions, she said in passing, “I am very glad not to be writing
either ethics or literary criticism, to which this question belongs.”31
For Anscombe, motives along with mental causes were inherently
obscure, whereas intentions could be read off the surface of one’s
behavior. An intentional action is not a series of doings plus an
inner, private motive. It is rather the kind of action for which one
may supply a description of why it was done. Anscombe’s attempt to
analyze an ostensibly mental-state term while holding at bay catego-
ries of the mind is crisp and seductive. Even so, it is perhaps a virtue
of writing literary criticism that one sees how even the more mind-
centered works of the period do not necessarily imply a language
of privacy or inwardness, selfhood or the individual. Some of the
works I feature are interested in these categories, but just as many
are not. What I will argue in the following chapters is this: the topic
of actions involved mental terms (including intentions) as a particu-
lar kind of cause. A close look at all kinds of texts shows that these
causes move in several directions, sometimes from within but just
as often from without. It is (again) possible to imagine a world that
has only events, with no actions. It is very difficult to imagine a
world that has no causes. Admitting causation into the account of
actions left a shudder. The works I look at are a few instances where
that shudder is most intriguingly recorded.

1 Actions, Agents, Causes
The period covered by this study witnesses an important debate
about actions. For writers like Hobbes and Hume, human behavior
really ought to be described in causal terms. When trying to make
sense of what a person does, it is always best to examine the reasons
that cause and explain her actions. These reasons typically turn
out to be the desires and beliefs an agent has about the effects of
her actions, attitudes that are in turn caused by events external to
the agent herself.1
The view that actions are caused by attitudes
like desire and belief comes under scrutiny, however, from those
who think that causal arguments put at risk one’s autonomy and
freedom, especially when causes are understood to track back to
the outside world. While Hobbes and Hume found causal necessity
to be compatible with freedom, their opponents saw freedom as
incompatible with any sort of external dependence. My goal in this
chapter is to show how this debate encloses a range of philosophi-
cal, social, and literary concerns. Foremost among them is whether
persons are special kinds of agents, endowed with immaterial souls,
or whether mental states like desire and belief are made of the
same stuff as the rest of the world and thus susceptible to a kind of
limitless causation. Within this metaphysical quarrel over person-
hood, talk about reasons for action—one’s motives, say—often
entailed further talk about the societies in which actions occur. As a
result, debates about agency had considerable bearing on questions
of authority in an age that begins with civil wars and ends with a
commercial empire. To look at the motives that lie behind actions
was for many to examine how states of mind bring about forms of

Actions, Agents, Causes
28
politics or society. Yet states of mind like motive or intention were
often impossible to understand apart from the context in which they
occurred. And so the moral of this chapter for the larger project of
the book is this: if the philosophy of action consistently found itself
tugged between an account of agency that secluded the will within
the mind and an account that derived it from external causes, so
too did the literary forms designed to evoke the reaches of human
consciousness and action. In either case, the line between persons
and their component parts, persons and society, the mind and the
body, one mind and another, all come under meaningful pressure.2
Free Will or Necessity, Part 1
Our story begins with Royalist exiles living in Paris during the early
years of the Civil War. In 1645 William Cavendish, the Marquess of
Newcastle, commissioned Thomas Hobbes and the Anglican theolo-
gian John Bramhall to write on the free will problem, a venerable
concern of philosophers made relevant again by religious and politi-
cal upheaval. Bramhall composed a short paper that spring and
Hobbes responded quickly; Bramhall rebutted, and the exchange
remained for a time within a small group of expatriates. Upon
their return to England, however, the debate took a more public
face. In 1654 Hobbes’s paper was printed and published, without
his permission, under the title Of Libertie and Necessitie. Bramhall
followed the next year by publishing his rejoinder, A Defence of
True Liberty, from Antecedent and Extrinsecall Necessity. Hobbes
replied with a new paper, The Questions concerning Liberty,
Necessity, and Chance, in 1656. Two years later, Bramhall returned
with Castigations of Mr. Hobbes his Last Animadversions in the
Case concerning Liberty, and Universal Necessity. By this time, the
debate had moved from a manuscript coterie to a print public and
in the process taken on the formal dimensions of a major contro-
versy, with each writer stating his theses in point-by-point response
to the other and anticipating and refuting arguments in advance.3

Actions, Agents, Causes 29
Much of the controversy centered on how one might go about
defining what actions are, where they start and where they stop.
When Hobbes describes an action, he refers to an event with a causal
history. Agent P has done action R for reason Q. It is not enough
to say that P had Q while doing R; rather, in order to be part of
the description, Q must explain the occurrence of R. Consider the
following set of events: “[W]hen a Travailer meets with a shower,
the journey had a cause, and the rain had a cause sufficient to
produce it, but because the journey caused not the rain, nor the rain
the journey, we say, they were contingent one to another” and not
related as cause and effect.4
The conclusion Hobbes wishes to derive
from the example is simple. The rain happened at the same time as
the traveler’s journey but did not cause him to go, an action that was
presumably caused by the desire to get from one place to another.
The weather and a person’s decisions each have a causal structure
that prominently features reasons. This structure bears on the free
will problem because it tethers the will to something on its outside.
The agent who decides to go on a journey does so for a reason, and,
that being the case, her will has locked onto whatever disposition
or attitude explains her action. “In this following of ones hopes and
fears,” Hobbes writes, “consisteth the nature of Election,” by which
he means that choosing to act refers to a cause (a hope or fear) and
does not occur on its own.5
So when a philosopher leaves London
for Paris in the midst of civil war, he does so presumably because he
wants to be in Paris and believes that traveling to Dover and getting
on a boat is a good way of getting there. He may further believe,
given his Royalist sympathies, that being in Paris is a good idea in
the hour of Republican victory. Adding further reasons, however,
only sews more stitches to the causal net. It’s enough to say at this
point that he left because he wanted to be in Paris, for by describing
events this way we commit to the idea that “all actions have their
causes” (Questions, 70).
To describe an action that an agent performs, one needs to
provide the reason for which it was done. One can do so, Hobbes

30
argues, by looking at the sundry passions of the mind, in particular
those organized around “appetite and fear . . . the first unperceived
beginnings of our actions.”6
This use of a mental vocabulary is
important (for the moment) to satisfy the requirement that the will,
like everything else, has a cause. We have on Hobbes’s account
provided a description of his decision to take a boat to Paris if we
say he feared the Parliamentary army and wanted to be safe among
friends. Our description of his actions, however, makes an argument
against his will having been free to take them. That is because
providing a causal account of actions also supplies the grounds
of their necessity, the locking of choice onto the attitude by which
it is explained. When, for example, Hobbes argues that the Lord
having said to David, “I offer thee three things; choose thee one of
them, that I may do it unto thee” (2 Samuel, 24:12), is not evidence
for free will, he claims that one cannot show that “such election
was not necessitated by the hopes, and fears, and considerations
of good and bad to follow” (Libertie, 7). God affords to David
the opportunity to choose among options, but the act of choosing
one thing over another requires there to be a reason for doing so,
and this requirement locks the will onto the particular hope or fear
that rationalizes the choice. Seen this way, the idea of free will is a
category mistake, since it ascribes to an appetite a condition that
can belong only to an agent, and since it attempts thereby to shed
the causes that explain why one takes the actions one does.
Bramhall holds in contrast that “all the freedom of the agent is
from the freedom of the will,” a position he articulates in opposi-
tion to causal accounts of acting.7
We have sufficiently described
an action, on his view, if we say merely that it was undertaken by
the will. No lattice of causes trails behind this singular faculty.
And so while agents may be said to have reasons for acting the
way they do, those reasons never quite exert the force of a cause
into an effect. A reason might “representeth to the will, whether
this or that be convenient” but the will always retains the right to
choose what to do in response to this information (Defence, 10).

When “the will is mooved by the understanding,” for example, it
is “not as by an efficient, having a causall influence into the effect,
but only by proposing and representing the object” (Defence, 31).
In the gap between the reason that proposes objects and the will
that acts upon them lies the vaunted freedom from necessity, for
“whatsoever obligation the understanding does put upon the will, is
by the consent of the will, and derived from the power of the will,
which was not necessitated to moove the understanding to consult”
(Defence, 30). Where Hobbes tracks motives into actions, therefore,
Bramhall reverses course and sets the will apart from any motive
one might have, as if the will were a kind of person within the mind.
The result is an elaborate allegory of agency, in which “the will is
the Lady and Mistris of human actions, the understanding is her
trusty counseller, which gives no advice, but when it is required
by the will” (Defence, 30–1). Lest this seem too close to a cause
moving into an effect, Bramhall further observes that “if the first
consultation or deliberation be not sufficient, the will may moove
a review, and require the understanding to inform it self better”
(Defence, 31).8
The effort is at once to sheathe the will from causes
and provide for it a kind of psychology of choosing. To be a person,
on this view, is to be possessed of a will that can refuse to follow
motives or desires. Thus the proper tense in which to describe acts
of a free will is the past conditional. Despite the preponderance of
causes, free agents “might have suspended or denied [the] concur-
rence” of past actions or might “have elected otherwise” (Defence,
11, 209).9
One important corollary of Bramhall’s account of actions is
that their proper description really ought not to extend beyond the
agent. Insofar as the will is always free to do otherwise, the history
of an action should make reference to events within the mind only.
In pointed contrast, Hobbes argues that the description of actions
should be as extensive as possible. This kind of description, as we
have seen, begins by making reference to reasons. Hobbes got on
a boat because he wanted to get to Paris. Agent P did action R for

32
reason Q. The more closely one looks at Q, however, the more one
sees that it is caused by Q1, Q2, and so on. Hobbes wanted to get
to Paris because he feared for his safety in London. He feared for
his safety in London because he believed his writings had angered
the Parliamentary authorities. Once opened up to inspection, the
causal horizon is nearly limitless. “That which I say necessitateth
and determineth every action,” Hobbes writes, “is the sum of all
those things, which being now existent, conduce and concurre to
the production of that action hereafter, whereof if any one thing
now were wanting, the effect could not be produced” (Questions,
80).10
The sum of all things can stretch quite far. At the very least,
it can extend beyond the minds of agents to the circumstances and
contexts in which agents find themselves. So while it is true that
actions depend upon mental states, it is also true that mental states
arise from objects, events, and occurrences, from causes external
to the head. When Hobbes writes that “nothing taketh beginning
from itself” he means to include not only the will but also what
we might think of as the efficient cause of the will, the attitude
to which the will is locked. Both are brought about by causes not
of the agent’s “disposing” (Questions, 289). While propositional
attitudes like wanting to get to Paris or believing that a boat might
do the trick may seem like they begin within us, as mental terms
ostensibly should, their proper description, Hobbes argues, ought to
reach from the mind to the world. This is because stopping with the
mind’s internal repertoire of attitudes would fall short of the story
in which one comes to have attitudes locked to actions. The route
accordingly moves from the outside in: “[E]xternal objects cause
conceptions, and conceptions appetite and fear”—and appetite and
fear the various acts of the will.11
This particular dimension to Hobbes’s quarrel with free will is
worth a moment’s pause. The locking of the will onto attitudes like
wanting or fearing, knowing or believing, had seemed to commit
Hobbes to a kind of inward account of actions, one that specified
their causal history in terms of a mental vocabulary of desires or

intentions. But on further inspection it turns out that Hobbes is
equally committed to describing the history of actions with respect
to their peripheral beginnings, in contexts beyond the person.12
The long-term result, I will argue over the course of this book, is
a balancing of events internal to agents with the external forms by
which these events are shaped. Causation casts too wide a net to
capture only the propositional attitudes leading up to actions. So it
will be important for us to keep an eye on the varieties of external-
ism that begin for our purposes with Hobbes and extend into the
middle of the eighteenth century with Hume—to look, that is, at
accounts of action that track attitudes past agents having them to
the worlds from which attitudes spring, to societies and polities,
to physical units of matter, or simply to other people.13
Hobbes’s
version, as we have seen, places emphasis on the near limitless
reach of causation, the “sum of all things” that issue into a particu-
lar action. “There is hardly one Action, to the causing of which
concurres not whatsoever is in rerum natura,” Hobbes writes, and
then adds as if to explain, that “there cannot be a Motion in one
part of the World, but the same must also be communicated to all
the rest of the World” (Questions, 239). Hobbes thus elaborates a
concept of cause that binds atoms to thoughts to persons to kings to
God. On this view, actions don’t so much begin with agents as fall
backward along a continuous web.
The inclusion of any one action within a web of antecedent
causes makes an important statement about the nature of persons,
as Hobbes’s critics were wont to show. If causation doesn’t begin
with the will, but rather with attitudes and before that with reasons
for those attitudes, then the special place of the person in the
overall scheme of the cosmos has been taken away. On the most
basic sense of things, Hobbes does not consider persons to be differ-
ent in substance from other entities in the world. His description
of the universe—in which “every Object is either a part of the
whole World, or an Aggregate of parts”—admits of one substance,
reducible in all instances to the atoms that make up minds and

34
bodies alike.14
I will explore in the next chapter some of the difficul-
ties that come with this sort of physical model of consciousness and
mental causation. I would like now to stick to the place of agents
in a world where action occurs as a motion across a single chain.
Consider Bramhall’s writing a response to Hobbes. Bramhall ascribes
to this act a “moral” foundation that begins within him. Hobbes
retorts, “I doubt not but he had therefore the Will to write this
Reply, because I had answered his Treatise concerning true Liberty.
My answer therefore was (at least in part) the cause of his writing,
yet that is the cause of the nimble local motion of his fingers. Is not
the cause of local motion Physical? His will therefore was Physically
and Extrinsecally and Antecedently, and not Morally caused by my
writing” (Questions, 142–3). The turn to reasons outside the agent
flanks an emphasis on physical description. One motion across the
surface of things takes us from Hobbes’s writing to the movement
of Bramhall’s fingers to the appearance of another essay, all without
much pause for a person having a will that expresses itself in writing.
When Hobbes adds to this account that “what it is to determine a
thing Morally, no man living understands,” he gets rid of the chance
that there might be something in agents—a moral center—that stops
the motion of cause and leaves space for an authority over one’s
own will (Questions, 142).
Bramhall’s feeling that his essay has no cause other than his will
to write it, and that having this will is quite close to what it means
to be human, misrecognizes on Hobbes’s view the nature of causal
relations in a physical world. There is no space outside of matter
that belongs to the soul or the will or the passions or anything else
one might want to use as a platform for autonomy.15
Hobbes asks
Bramhall to give up the intuitive sense that he is the cause of his
own actions and that any particular action he performed could
always have gone otherwise. Bramhall’s error, in other words, is
to hew too closely to common sense—“that which he sayes, any
thing else whatsoever, would think, if it knew it were moved, and
did not know what moved it”—rather than to look into the sources

of his actions (Questions, 41). The feeling one has of free will is
intuitive only if one is ignorant of causes, a point that leads Hobbes
on a certain rhetorical flourish: “A wooden Top that is lasht by
the Boyes, and runs about sometimes to one Wall, sometimes to
another, sometimes spinning, sometimes hitting men on the shins, if
it were sensible of its own motion, would think it proceeded from
its own Will, unless it felt what lasht it” (Questions, 41). The notion
of human action as a special kind of event is on this metaphorical
description vividly reduced, as if to suggest that we are little more
than conscious tops, spun by causes beyond our immediate percep-
tion. The metaphor makes two related points, first that autonomy
is a kind of delusion and second that events internal to the mind
follow the same laws of causation as events external to the mind.
Hobbes’s inclusion of mental causation under the same laws as
physical causation serves an important purpose. If the will is locked
to attitudes and attitudes are locked to objects, thoughts, or events,
then human action is subject to the same necessity as everything
else in the world. At the same time, however, this necessity does
not deprive agents of freedom or of responsibility. Here lies one of
Hobbes’s more notable contributions to models of agency in the
early modern and modern periods. Hobbes argues that freedom
requires only that a person is able to act according to her wants,
not that the will is without a determining set of causes. “A free
agent,” on this view, is he “that can do if he will, and forbear if he
will” and liberty the “absence of external impediments” to action
(Questions, 304, 46).16
Freedom turns out to be a particular kind
of causal relation, one in which reasons are able to become actions.
The condition of freedom is therefore satisfied if the reasons one
has proceed uninhibited into the actions one takes. On this account,
no amount of determinacy conflicts with freedom, since the having
of attitudes is what it means to be an agent and since the translat-
ing of attitudes without hindrance into actions is what it means to
have liberty. To put the problem in terms of our earlier example,
it makes no sense to ask whether Hobbes’s will was free to choose

36
going to France but it does to ask whether Hobbes was free to leave
or whether the authorities intercepted his boat. “A Free Agent”
is one “whose motion, or action is not hindered nor stopt. And a
Free Action, that which is produced by a Free Agent” (Questions,
143). The forming of a will to do something, then, is part of the
causal history of an action but alone is neither free nor bound; these
conditions belong only to the agent and action themselves.
What will later be termed compatibilism is a simple yet important
argument: to describe something in terms of its causal history does
nothing to put liberty at risk.17
Rather, it is to take a close look
at that thing and examine its component parts. So to say that a
person acts for a reason is both to explain why actions occur and
to say that a person could not have done otherwise, since doing
otherwise would mean only that she had another will, locked to a
separate series of events. Freedom therefore does not require that I
am set loose from a net of causes; it simply demands that “I can do
if I will,” a condition met by there being no obstacles to my doing.
Hobbes’s compatibilism will (again) have a significant influence on
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, from Locke and
Hume, who both embraced it after their own fashions, to Kant,
who found it to be a “wretched subterfuge.”18
If one appeal of the
argument was its sense that actions become intelligible only once we
realize, often against our intuitions, that their sources are extensive,
another is the claim that having reasons for acting takes nothing
away from the accountability one incurs along the way. The contex-
tual sources of action, on Hobbes’s account, bind agents to external
structures, a claim he evidently found convenient in a time of politi-
cal uncertainty. “The necessity of an action doth not make the Laws
that prohibit it unjust,” Hobbes writes in response to Bramhall’s
worry that a commitment to necessity would mean that “praise,
dispraise, reward and punishment are in vain” (Libertie, 27).
Bramhall believes the doctrine of free will is required for systems
of politics and morality to be legitimate, since without it agents
would neither be nor feel accountable for their actions; thus even

the “perswasion that there is no true liberty is able to overthrow
all Societies and Commonwealths in the world” (Defence, 91). For
his part, Hobbes finds in necessity the very basis of obedience and
order. Agents come to have intentions, desires, and beliefs because
they witness consequences in the world about them; in this way,
“praise and dispraise, and likewise Reward and Punishment, do by
example make and conform the will to good and evil” (Libertie,
34). This exchange repeats their disagreement over the role of causal
language in the description of actions, this time with reference to
political obligation. Hobbes argues that believing that actions have
consequences is reason, in most cases, to conform one’s behavior
to Scripture and polity, and when it is not, to fear the extraper-
sonal laws of God and the state. The external antecedents to action
turn out to be the very laws one ought to be obeying. From this
perspective, Bramhall’s claim that the will acts on its own discovers
autonomy where there is none and as a result cleaves agents from
their sources of compliance.
I will come back in subsequent chapters to the seventeenth-century
quarrel over the sources and meanings of actions. Before turning to
the next installment, I want to gather some of the threads of the
controversy as I have reconstructed it so far. Much centered on the
significance of the concept of cause in the description of actions, on
whether cause was essential to understanding connections among
the diverse phenomena of the mind and world or whether it was
a threat to the special nature and place of humans in the cosmos.
Under the rubric of cause, Hobbes and Bramhall disagreed about,
for example, whether persons are endowed with immaterial souls
or whether persons are entirely physical in their composition. As a
corollary to that disagreement, they quarreled over the point where
actions started and stopped—within the precincts of the will or in
attitudes and contexts. Without simplifying too much, then, we
might draw the quarrel over cause into one between an immate-
rialist, dualist, and internalist picture of agency, on the one hand,
and a physicalist, monist, and externalist picture on the other. For

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sniffles, carrying a slate and geography in one hand, and leading a
little sister by the other, who also sniffles and stares. This, too, is
Greater New York, Borough of Richmond, better known as Staten
Island. This borough has nearly all kinds of wild and tame rurality
and suburbanity. Its farms need not be described.
III
Pointing out mere farms in the city becomes rather monotonous;
they are too common. But there is one kind of farm in New York that
is not at all common, that has never existed in any other city, so far
as I know, in ancient or modern times. It is situated, oddly enough,
in about the centre of the 317 square miles of New York—so well as
the centre of a boot-shaped area can be located.

There is profitable oyster-dredging in
several sections of the city.
Cross Thirty-fourth Street Ferry to Long Island City, which really
does not smell so bad as certain of our poets would have us believe;
take the car marked Steinway, and ride for fifteen or twenty
minutes out through dreary city edge, past small, unpainted
manufactories, squalid tenements, dirty backyards, and sad vacant
lots that serve as the last resting-place for decayed trucks and
overworked wagons. Soon after passing a tumble-down windmill,
which looks like an historic old relic, on a hill-top, but which was
built in 1867 and tumbled down only recently, the Steinway Silk Mills
will be reached (they can be distinguished by the long, low wings of
the building covered with windows like a hothouse). Leave the car
here and strike off to the left, down the lane which will soon be an
alley, and then a hundred yards or so from the highway will be seen
the first of the odd, paper-covered houses of a colony of Chinese
farmers who earn their living by tilling the soil of Greater New York.
At short distances are the other huts crouching at the foot of big
trees, with queer gourds hanging out in front to dry, and large
unusual crocks lying about, and huge baskets, and mattings—all
clearly from China; they are as different from what could be bought
on the neighboring avenue as the farm and farmers themselves are
different from most Long Island farms and farmers. Out in the fields,
which are tilled in the Oriental way, utilizing every inch of ground
clean up to the fence, and laid out with even divisions at regular
intervals, like rice-fields, the farmers themselves may be seen,
working with Chinese implements, their pigtails tucked up under
their straw hats, while the western world wags on in its own way all
around them. This is less than five miles from the glass-covered
parade-ground of the Waldorf-Astoria.
They have only three houses among them, that is, there are only
three of these groups of rooms, made of old boards and boxes and
covered with tar paper; but no one in the neighborhood seems to

know just how many Chinamen live there. The same sleeping space
would hold a score or more over in Pell Street.
Being Chinamen, they grow only Chinese produce, a peculiar
kind of bean and some sort of salad, and those large, artistic shaped
melons, seen only in China or Chinatown, which they call something
that sounds like moncha, and which, one of them told me, bring
two cents a pound from the Chinese merchants and restaurateurs of
Manhattan. For my part, I was very glad to learn of these farms, for
I had always been perplexed to account for the fresh salads and
green vegetables, of unmistakably Chinese origin, that can be found
in season in New York's Chinatown. Under an old shed near by they
have their market-wagon, in which, looking inscrutable, they drive
their stuff to market through Long Island City, and by way of James
Slip Ferry over to Chinatown; then back to the farm again, looking
inscrutable. And on Sundays, for all we know, they leave the wagon
behind and go to gamble their earnings away in Mott Street, or
perhaps away over in some of the well-known places of Jersey City.
Then back across the two ferries to farming on dreary Monday
mornings.
IV
Even up in Manhattan there are still places astonishingly unlike
what is expected of the crowded little island on which stands New
York proper. There is Fort Washington with tall trees growing out of
the Revolutionary breastworks, land, under their branches, a fine
view up the Hudson to the mountains—a quiet, sequestered bit of
public park which the public hasn't yet learned to treat as a park,
though within sight of the crowds crossing the viaduct from the
Grant Monument on Riverside. There are wild flowers up there every
spring, and until quite recently so few people visited this spot for
days at a time that there were sometimes woodcock and perhaps
other game in the thickly wooded ravine by the railroad. Soon,

however, the grass on the breastworks will be worn off entirely, and
the aged deaf man who tends the river light on Jeffreys Hook will
become sophisticated, if he is still alive.
Cemetery Ridge, Near Richmond, Staten Island.
It will take longer, however, for the regions to the north, beyond
Washington Heights, down through Inwood and past Tubby Hook, to
look like part of a city. And across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek from
Manhattan Island, up through the winding roads of Riverdale to
Mount St. Vincent, and so across the line to Yonkers, it is still
wooded, comparatively secluded and country-like, even though so
many of the fine country places thereabouts are being deserted.
Over to the eastward, across Broadway, a peaceful road which does
not look like a part of the same thoroughfare as the one with actors
and sky-scrapers upon it, there are the still wilder stretches of
Mosholu and Van Cortlandt Park, where, a year or two ago, large,
well-painted signs on the trees used to say Beware of the
Buffaloes.

A Peaceful Scene in New York.
In the distance is St. Andrew's Church, Borough of Richmond, Staten
Island.
The open country sport of golf has had a good deal to do with
making this rural park more generally appreciated. Golf has done for
Van Cortlandt what the bicycle had done for the Bronx and Pelham
Bay Parks. There are still natural, wild enough looking bits, off from
the beaten paths, in all these parks, scenes that look delightfully
dark and sylvan in the yearly thousands of amateur photographs—
the camera does not show the German family approaching from the
rear, or the egg-shells and broken beer-bottles behind the bushes—
but beware of the police if you break a twig, or pick a blossom.
V
Those who enjoy the study of all the forms of nature except the
highest can find plenty to sigh over in the way the city thrusts itself
upon the country. But to those who think that the haunts and habits

of the Man are not less worthy of observation than those of the
Beaver and the Skunk, it is all rather interesting, and some of it not
so deeply deplorable.
A Relic of the Early Nineteenth Century, Borough of Richmond.
There are certain old country taverns, here and there, up toward
Westchester, and down beyond Brooklyn and over on Staten Island—
not only those which everybody knows, like the Hermitage in the
Bronx and Garrisons over by the fort at Willets Point, but remote
ones which have not yet been exploited in plays or books, and which
still have a fine old flavor, with faded prints of Dexter and Maud S.
and much earlier favorites in the bar-room. In some cases, to be
sure, though still situated at a country cross-roads, with green fields
all about, they are now used for Tammany head-quarters with
pictures of the new candidate for sheriff in the old-fashioned
windows—but most of them would have gone out of existence
entirely after the death of the stage-coach, if it had not been for the
approach of the city, and the side-whiskered New Yorkers of a
previous generation who drove fast horses. If the ghosts of these

men ever drive back to lament the good old days together, they
must be somewhat surprised, possibly disappointed, to find these
rural road-houses doing a better business than even in their day.
The bicycle revived the road-house, and though the bicycle has since
been abandoned by those who prefer fashion to exercise, the places
that the wheel disclosed are not forgotten. They are visited now in
automobiles.
An Old-fashioned Stone-arched Bridge. (Richmond, Staten Island.)
There are all those historic country-houses within the city limits,
well known, and in some cases restored, chiefly by reason of being
within the city, like the Van Cortlandt house, now a part of the park,
and the Jumel mansion standing over Manhattan Field, a house
which gets into most historical novels of New York. Similarly
Claremont Park has adopted the impressive Zabriskie mansion; and
the old Lorillard house in the Bronx might have been torn down by
this time but that it has been made into a park house and
restaurant. Nearly all these are tableted by the patriotic societies,
and made to feel their importance. The Bowne place in Flushing, a

very old type of Long Island farm-house, was turned into a museum
by the Bowne family itself—an excellent idea. The Quaker Meeting-
house in Flushing, though not so old by twenty-five years as it is
painted in the sign which says Built in 1695, will probably be
preserved as a museum too.
An Old House in Flatbush.
Another relic in that locality well worth keeping is the Duryea
place, a striking old stone farm-house with a wide window on the
second floor, now shut in with a wooden cover supported by a long
brace-pole reaching to the ground. Out of this window, it is said, a
cannon used to point. This was while the house was head-quarters
for Hessian officers, during the long monotonous months when the
main army of the British army lay at Flushing from Whitestone to
Jamaica; and upon Flushing Heights there stood one of the tar-
barrel beacons that reached from New York to Norwich Hill, near
Oyster Bay. The British officers used to kill time by playing at Fives
against the blank wall of the Quaker Meeting-house, or by riding

over to Hempstead Plains to the fox-hunts—where the Meadowbrook
Hunt Club rides to the hounds to-day. The common soldiers
meanwhile stayed in Flushing and amused themselves, according to
the same historian, by rolling cannon-balls about a course of nine
holes. That was probably the nearest approach to the great game at
that time in America, and it may have been played on the site of the
present Flushing Golf Club.
These same soldiers also amused themselves in less innocent
ways, so that the Quakers and other non-combatants in and about
this notorious Tory centre used to hide their live stock indoors over
night, to keep it from being made into meals by the British. That
may account for the habit of the family occupying the Duryea place
referred to; they keep their cow in a room at one end of the house.
At any rate it is not necessary for New Yorkers to go to Ireland to
see sights of that sort.
Those are a few of the historic country places that have come to
town. There is a surprisingly large number of them, and even when
they are not adopted and tableted by the D. A. R. or D. R., or S. R.
or S. A. R., they are at least known to local fame, and are pointed
out and made much of.
But the many abandoned country houses which are not
especially historic or significant—except to certain old persons to
whom they once meant home—goodly old places, no longer even
near the country, but caught by the tide well within the city, that is
the kind to be sorry for. Nobody pays much attention to them. A
forlorn For Sale sign hangs out in front, weather-beaten and
discouraged. The tall Colonial columns still try to stand up straight
and to appear unconscious of the faded paint and broken windows,
hoping that no one notices the tangle of weeds in the old-fashioned
garden, where old-fashioned children used to play hide-and-seek
among the box-paths, now overgrown or buried under tin cans....
Across the way, perhaps, there has already squatted an unabashed
row of cheap, vulgar houses, impudent, staring little city homes,
vividly painted, and all exactly alike, with highly ornamented wooden

stoops below and zinc cornices above, like false-hair fronts. They
look at times as though they were putting their heads together to
gossip and smile about their odd, old neighbor that has such out-of-
date fan-lights, that has no electric bell, no folding-beds, and not a
bit of zinc cornicing.
Meanwhile the old house turns its gaze the other way, thinking
of days gone by, patiently waiting the end—which will come soon
enough.

Transcriber's Notes:
Simple typographical errors were corrected.
Punctuation and spelling were made
consistent when a predominant preference was
found in this book; otherwise they were not
changed.
Page 8, first line: manifestations of the spirit
could be or.

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