Hooke’s Mechanical Mind

Abstract

In his Lectures of Light, given to the Royal Society, and spanning the years 1680–1682 (posthumously published in 1705), Robert Hooke (1635–1703) puts forward an account of mind-body interaction which, his editor Richard Waller suggests, might possibly lead “some Persons [to] imagine that the foregoing Explication of these abstruse Actings of the Soul is too mechanical, and tends to the making the Soul a material Being,” a suggestion that Waller immediately rejects on Hooke’s behalf, though at the same time somewhat nervously distancing himself from Hooke’s views (“I hold my self not in the least obliged to defend or maintain any of his Opinions or Discourses”). At the time, with a few notable exceptions, it was common for philosophers to argue that both rationality and the possibility of immortality required an immaterial soul or mind; rejecting an immaterial soul was considered atheistical, so Waller’s nervousness is understandable. In this paper I consider, briefly, the views of earlier thinkers such as Kepler and Descartes, and those of Hooke’s patron, Robert Boyle. Their views can be seen as leading to Hooke’s mechanical model of mind-body interaction, but his view, though perhaps arising out of these earlier views, extends and improves upon them. Though Hooke explicitly says that the mind is immaterial, his model of mind-body interaction does not require such immateriality. “Because nothing is so well understood or apprehended, as when it is represented under some sensible Form,” Hooke writes, “I would, to make my Notion the more conceivable, make a mechanical and sensible Figure and Picture thereof, and from that shew how I conceive all the Actions and Operations of the Soul as Apprehending, Remembring and Reasoning are performed.” Hooke does provide such a model and, interestingly, though Hooke does not say so, it seems to be a model that will work only if, in the words of his editor, we make “the Soul a material Being.”.