English

The Inwardness of Mental Life

1979 Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture

University of Chicago

Professor Stephen Toulmin

I

My text is taken from the twenty-third chapter of the first volume of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, beginning at the second paragraph. Laurence Sterne is here tilting at academic theories about the workings of the human mind—chiefly those of John Locke and David Hartley—and he focusses particularly on theories about the interiority of our mental experience. Take those views with proper, real life seriousness (he implies) and the consequences will be matter for fantasy. To underline the point, he gives his own fantasy free rein: "I have a strong propensity in me," he says, "to begin this chapter very nonsensically, and I will not baulk my fancy."

One further gloss, before I read the passage: in classical antiquity, the personification of faultfinding, mockery, and ridicule was the god Momus; and the "glass of Momus" to which Sterne refers was an imagined window placed in the human breast so that "secret thoughts and feelings" would stand clearly revealed. I have trimmed away Sterne's more baroque asides:

If the fixture of Momus's glass in the human breast had taken place…nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical [i.e. a glass] beehive, and looked in…viewed the soul stark naked…observed all her motions,…her machinations;…then taken your pen and ink and set down nothing but what you have seen, and could have sworn to….

But this is an advantage not to be had by the biographer in this planet;…in the planet Mercury (belike) the intense heat of the country must have vitrified the bodies of the inhabitants so that all the tenements of their souls, from top to bottom, may be nothing else but one fine transparent body of clear glass…so that, till the inhabitants grow old and tolerably wrinkled, whereby the rays of light, in...