WIPS

Title: “Robert Hooke: Memory and Microcosm”

Abstract: From 1680 to 1682 Hooke presented a series of lectures on light to the Royal Society. The seventh and final lecture concerns human memory, which Hooke counts as one of the three faculties of the soul alongside the senses and reason. Hooke explains memory phenomena by appeal to the nature and composition of an organ in the brain. His theory is speculative, yet Hooke was an experimental philosopher as wary of feigning hypotheses as his Royal Society colleagues.

It is a curious lecture, then: a theory of memory tucked into work on light; an account of an activity of the soul – memory – in terms of an organ in the brain; and a detailed depiction of that organ based on no observations or experiments. But if we place Hooke’s little theory of memory inside the system of his lectures on light, and those lectures inside the constellation of his theory of mind, and that theory inside the galaxy of the Baconian, experimental method of which Hooke was a proselytizer and steward, we may understand it more clearly.

Hooke understood method to be an explicit expression of the implicit working of human psychology: by externalizing the basic powers of the human mind – the senses, memory, and reason – we publicize, extend, and improve our power to understand the universe. We receive information about the world via our senses, as philosophers and historians observe the phenomena of the universe; we create and curate a store of ideas in our memories, as natural historians collect and classify observations; we reason using the store of ideas in our memory, comparing, combining, and recombining them to form more general and useful ideas, as natural philosophers develop laws and regularities drawn from, and applying to, observations gathered by natural historians. Hooke did not merely make a little lecture on memory, then. His own work was the work of natural history: the work of memory, fed by the senses and delivering the necessary ingredients to reason.