The New England Mind

The Seventeenth Century

Perry Miller

• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781839745478
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

In The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, as well as successor The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, Perry Miller asserts a single intellectual history for America that could be traced to the Puritan belief system."A fascinating and indispensable book."?Saturday Review"This classic work towers over the great mass of subsequent scholarship, and remains after forty years our single best work on American Puritanism… For many years to come every serious student of American Puritanism will still have to begin by reading The New England Mind."?James Hoopes"A magnificent book, the most illuminating and convincing interpretation of Puritanism that I know and a model example of intellectual historiography. Miller seems to possess a rare combination of gifts and acquired intellectual virtues?disciplined faithfulness to sources, philosophical insight and outlook, creative imagination."?H. Richard Niebuhr"The New England Mind is an authoritative description of Puritanism, the most subtle and most fully coherent intellectual system which has ever functioned as the official code of an American regional society… The book is the best single illustration of what is meant by 'the history of ideas' as a method of dealing with American materials."?Henry Nash Smith?Print ed.

BOOK III—ANTHROPOLOGY

CHAPTER IX—THE NATURE OF MAN

A school of Puritan writers, which included the New England divines, ultimately found in the doctrine of the Covenant of Grace the answer, which academic physics could not furnish, to the problem of securing guarantees for rational order in a universe governed by super-rational absolutism. Yet before we examine this ultimate creation of the Puritan genius, we must consider another set of preconceptions which conditioned it no less than did the physics, for the problem was posed not only in the natural universe, but more urgently in a particular portion of the universe, in the constitution and psychology of man. If the divines were forced to balance special enactment against habitual regularity in such phenomena as tides and earthquakes, they were doubly pressed to reconcile them in matters of human behavior, and above all in the process of regeneration, for the question persisted: if God enacts events in sequences within the realm of nature, must He not also ordain sequences within the realm of grace? If He establishes a succession of “means” for combustion, surely He must create one for conversion! Yet it was well understood that nowhere was the divine will more capricious, more arbitrary, than in choosing men for everlasting life; nowhere did God less heed physical causes and environmental factors than in His elections. Before the preachers turned to their Bibles to heal the imperfections of physics, they had already phrased the issue, or to speak more accurately, it had been phrased for them, in the accepted language of contemporaneous psychology. Because regeneration worked a change within the soul, they could not describe the method of grace without presupposing a certain method of the soul.

Their psychological doctrine existed ready made, and they themselves contributed no ideas or propositions to it.{89} There is no need here to review it in detail; a bare outline, more simplified than can be found in the sources, will serve our purpose. The starting point, as in all Christian science, was the assertion, “Anima rationalis creatur,” that the soul is not engendered by physical transmission, but is specially and individually created by God Himself. It is, as John Norton said, spiritual, incorporeal, “created by God of nothing, immediately infused into the body as the proper form thereof, by which man is, liveth, is sensible, moveth, understandeth, willeth, and is affected.” It is, of course, an integral unit, yet like God of whom it is an “image”, it is also a trinity, as becomes clear when we consider its place in the great chain of being. The higher must include the lower: plants have a “vegetative soul”, which contains the powers of nourishing and propagating; animals have a “sensible soul”, which contains the powers of nourishing and propagating, and, in addition, the senses and animal spirits, the “interior senses” of common sense, imagination, and memory, the passions and the sinews capable of motion; men have a “rational soul”, which contains all the powers and faculties of the vegetative and sensible, and, in addition, the distinguishing faculties of the rational creature, reason and will. “There are three lives in man, there is the life of plants, of beasts or sence, and the life of reason,” said John Preston, and in 1678 a Harvard thesis echoed, “There are three souls in the same man.” More because of this tenet than of any other, Puritans in the early seventeenth century still lived in the ordered, hierarchal, and fixed world of medieval cosmology, and by it could still glorify man as a “Microcosmos”, with a body like the minerals, “a moving life as stars, a springing life as Plants...a sensitive life as Beasts, and...a rational life as Angels.”

Ideally speaking, when a rational soul functions as God designed it, the powers of the three souls fall into line like disciplined soldiers, and the whole of any human action may be depicted by a symmetrical are of motion from the impact of an object to the response. Few writers described the faculties according to such a reflex, for they usually took up the three souls in mounting succession; yet all treatments center upon a reaction that may be traced through the several stages thus: the impression of an object produces in the senses an image or replica of the thing, generally called the “phantasm” or the “species”; the phantasm is then picked up at the eye or ear by the animal spirits and carried posthaste to the common sense in the central chamber of the brain; this faculty apprehends the phantasms, distinguishes one species from another, and relays them to the imagination, fancy or “phantasy”, which, located in the front part of the brain, judges and compares one phantasm with another, retains them when the objects are absent, and sways the sensual inclination by holding and vivifying the objects of desire; after meaning and intelligibility have been attached to phantasms, they are stored in the memory, which is situated in the posterior lobe of the brain, where they may be “committal to it to keepe, as to their secretarie”; the reason or the understanding, which dwells somewhere above the middle, summons phantasms before its judgment seat from either the imagination or the storehouse of memory, determines which are right and true, and sends the image representing its decision, by the agency of the animal spirits, along the nerves to the will, which lives in the heart; the will then embraces true images as the good to be pursued, and commands the “sensitive appetite,” which consists of affections or passions; the proper emotions, being thus aroused, transmit the impulse to the muscles. So the bear, encountered in the wilderness, causes in the eye a phantasm of the bear, which is identified as belonging to the species bear in common sense, recognized as dangerous in imagination, associated with remembered dangers in memory, declared an object to be fled in reason, made the signal of command to the will, which then excites the affection of fear, which finally prompts the muscles of the legs to run.

Remembering that this description is shamelessly simplified, and that for every point there was a long background of dispute, we can nevertheless regard it as substantially the conception underlying all Puritan discourse about human behavior, about the sin of man, and regeneration. One quotation out of a thousand that might be instanced from Renaissance writers will indicate how the reflex was conceived in contemporaneous terms:

As soone as the Exterior sences, busied about the Obiects which are proper for them, haue gathered the formes of things which come from without, they carry them to the common sence, the which receiues them, iudgeth of them, and distinguisheth them; and then to preserue them in the absence of their obiects, presents them to the Imagination, which hauing gathered them together, to the end she may represent them whensoeuer need shall require, she deliuers them to the custody of the Memory; from whence retiring them when occasion requires, she propounds them vnto the Appetite, under the apparance of things that are pleasing or troublesome, that is to say, under the forme of Good and Euill; and at the same instant the same formes enlightned with the Light of the vnderstanding, and purged from the sensible and singular conditions, which they retain in the Imagination, and insteed of that which they represented of particular things, representing them generall, they become capable to be imbraced by the vnderstanding; the which under the apparance of things which are profitable or hurtful, that is to say, under the forme of Good and Euill, represents them vnto the Will: the which being blind referres it selfe to that which the vnderstanding proposeth vnto it: And then as Queene of the powers of the soule she ordaines what they shall imbrace, fit what they shall fly as it pleseth her; Whereunto the Sensitiue Appetite yeelding a prompt obedience to execute her command, from the which it neuer straies, so long as it containes it selfe within the bounds and order prescrib’d by Nature, quickneth all the powers and passions ouer which shee commands, and sets to worke those which are necessary to that action, and by their meanes commands the mouing power, dispersed ouer all the members, to follow or fly, to approach or recoyle, or to do any other motion which it requireth. And shee obeying suddenly if she bee not hindred, moues, the whole body with the Organs which reside in the parts, and induceth them to fly or unbrace things according to the command which she hath receiued.

One illustration from New England writings will indicate how the reflex was understood in America: Samuel Willard did not in any chapter of the monumental Compleat Body delineate it so systematically as we might wish, and he often altered traditional terminology, but he described how the “Images of Things” are first received in the common sense, “as it were the Porter, which takes in the Species of things, as they are offered unto it,” are then conveyed to the imagination, which lays them together, “whereby the Sensitive Creature as it were, doth conclude Sensibly,” and are finally consigned to the memory, “whereby the Creature is able to lay up, what Cogitation hath laid together; and to bring them together again unto the Fancy, when there is occasion.” The reason ponders an image so sifted and stored, and having passed judgment upon its goodness or evil, “accordingly there is a natural aptitude in the Will, to embrace it or renounce it; to chuse or refuse it”; the will then issues commands, “unto the exerting whereof the Affections serve.” These, Willard said, are motions of the heart responding to the meanings with which imagination and reason have invested the phantasms, “and by Vertue hereof are Sensitive Beings variously affected with Love, Hatred, Fear, Desire, &c.”; at last the affections “carry the man to the Object that is chosen, and from that which is refused.” Thus all Puritans conceived that the responses of men, whether to a bear, food, beauty, or the Word of God, were conclusions of such a process; the images of all things, whether of husbandry or salvation, had to run the same course to produce their appropriate responses.

This doctrine of the psychological process was a part of the intellectual heritage which Puritans accepted without criticism, almost without realizing that it was a doctrine, since to them no other concept was available. Indeed, from their point of view it was simply a fact which had never been questioned, as obvious and natural as that two plus two equals four. Few Puritans in England and none in New England wrote books directly upon psychology, whereas they composed as many on witchcraft, providences, earthquakes, and storms as upon ecclesiastical polity; clearly in their consciousness the problem of reconciling God’s decrees and rational order loomed large in the natural universe, but they were hardly aware of even the existence of a similar problem within the soul. They discussed the faculties only in passing references, in incidental exegesis, but with no deliberate concentration, and a casual reader of Puritan sermons might never notice that they contain a version of human psychology unless his attention were expressly called to scattered passages. Nevertheless, were his attention once aroused, he could collect so large an anthology of these utterances as to constitute an extended treatise upon psychology, the outlines of a doctrine upon which all Puritans agreed, of a premise for all their thinking, that can be said to have influenced them all the more extensively because it was unformulated and taken as axiomatic.

Their reluctance to dwell upon it more specifically was a precaution of piety; even though the doctrine seemed to imply no conflict with their creed, Puritans must have sensed intuitively that an intensive study of the faculties might end by lessening man’s realization of sin or his awareness of his dire need for grace. Calvin had voiced this apprehension when he said that while he had no quarrel with the science, nevertheless “all curious discussion respecting the faculties themselves” were better left to philosophers. The real authors of the knowledge, he noted, were pagans, who generally deduced from it “that virtue and vice are in our own power...that the reason of the human understanding is sufficient for its proper government”; hence even though their science be factually correct, it will “involve us in their obscurity rather than assist us,” and we shall do well to let it alone.{90} The many Renaissance authors of psychological works shared some of Calvin’s distrust for their own subject; La Primaudaye warned against seeking out natural causes so curiously that we “strive to finde out another beginning of all things than God,” and he did not want his French Academie studied by those who had not previously been instructed in the fear of God. Puritan writers would base some passages of exegesis upon the psychology, but would at other moments thrust it aside and declare that since the truths about conversion are plain and incontestable, we need “not trouble our selues about the distinction of the faculties.”

However, in the early seventeenth century, Protestants in general were less fearful than Calvin, and the diminution of their caution is a part of the growth of what we have called a “Protestant scholasticism.” With theological doctrines codified, the problem now was to synthesize all knowledge or to integrate it into “method”. Protestant scholars like Keckermann and Alsted approached physics without trepidation, and appropriated for their encyclopedias the ancient doctrine of the faculties as readily as they did the doctrine of the four causes. As a matter of fact, medieval theory was ideally suited to their purposes, for Aristotelian psychology was primarily a system of classifying acts of the soul, not for explaining them mechanically. Like all medieval and most Renaissance science, it fulfilled its task when it enumerated the components, and a science which laid out arguments in method was “veritas” for Ramist logicians and a transcript of the will of God for Puritan theologians. Because the theory was purely descriptive, it could serve Puritans as it did La Primaudaye, leading men to a better knowledge of God “by that resemblaunce and similitude of his wisedome, which hee hath vouchsafed to transferre and to imprint in mans nature.” Since it was not so much a scientific hypothesis as a portrait of the image of God, the psychological theory became for Calvin’s successors, in their effort to amplify the correlations between revelation and nature, an indispensable portion of knowledge, so that in a New England sermon, Thomas Hooker would elaborate the meaning of psychological terminology and conclude, “so much for these poynts of speculation, without which I could not well open the poynt.” Samuel Willard, though confessing that “Our knowledge of the nature of our own Souls, is very shallow and confused,” would also point out that God has accommodated revelation to the nature of man and given rules of divinity adapted to “the Understandings, Wills, Affections, and Senses of men.” When divinity is preached, therefore, these “need both teaching and quickning.” The faculties could not be quickened until ministers knew what they were, and the manner of teaching depended entirely upon what concept of the faculties the ministers were taught.

To ascertain precisely what New England ministers were taught we must turn to the textbooks of physics.{91} The fact that the doctrine was contained in such works explains why the theory was so much an affair of general consent, why it was so patently and universally acknowledged, why the ministers could assume that their congregations would understand the connotation of words like phantasy, animal spirits, or affections, as modern audiences understand words like carburetor or storage battery. The theory was so familiar to men of the century that they could not have stopped to consider it as theory. It is a sign of the times that in the Elizabethan period there were produced many works upon the nature of man and the diseases of the soul, yet only one Puritan author, Edward Reynolds, contributed directly to this literature. Nevertheless, in works like those of Coeffeteau, Wright, and Senault, or The French Academic, New England Puritans could find more extended descriptions but not fundamentally any other theories than those which were already common knowledge. Elizabethan psychologists are valuable for the light they throw upon the vocabulary of emotion, and useful to students both of Shakespeare and of Puritanism, but they were not the sources for the psychological conceptions of either dramatists or divines. The theory was a heritage from the middle ages, and had been put together by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas; yet even they were not its authors, for it was an eclectic product to which many writers had contributed, some of whom had originally been diametrically opposed to each other. The groundwork was from Aristotle, and his De Anima remained the basic textbook. But some tenets were in fact derived from Plato; many had descended from Neo-Platonic attempts to harmonize Plato and Aristotle; others can be traced to the Stoics, and Cicero and Seneca were quoted hardly less than Aristotle. Augustine had also contributed, as had Pliny, Plutarch, Xenophon, Avicenna, Averroes, and the major medieval theologians. Puritans had revolted against scholastic theology and its ecclesiastical teachings; they had condemned, so they believed, the logic of scholasticism, and above all they criticized scho...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE TO THE BEACON PRESS EDITION
• BOOK I-RELIGION AND LEARNING
• BOOK II-COSMOLOGY
• BOOK III-ANTHROPOLOGY
• BOOK IV-SOCIOLOGY
• APPENDIX A-THE LITERATURE OF RAMUS’ LOGIC IN EUROPE
• APPENDIX B-THE FEDERAL SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
• NOTES