TRATAMIENTO CONTABLE DE LAS PROPIEDADES DE INVERSIÓN BAJO LA

In Byrd’s feeling of powerlessness against the urges of his flesh I see a key element of his understanding of himself, his life, and his place in the world. We may seek the roots of Byrd’s political, economic, or matrimonial failures in his colonial status and/or unsatisfactory

relationship with his father, and conclude that such failures prompted compensatory sexual activity necessary to reassert virility or construct a “masculine persona.”80 But in Byrd’s world the arrow of causality pointed in the opposite direction. Of course, it would be difficult to

determine to what extent Byrd’s sexual activity was physiologically conditioned.81 But he himself clearly thought that it was, as the opening of his “Inamorato l’Oiseaux” testifies: “Never did the sun shine upon a Swain who had more combustible matter in his constitution than the unfortunate Inamorato. Love broke out upon him before his Beard, and he cou’d distinguish sexes long before he cou’d the difference betwixt Good & Evil. […] Tis well he had not a Twin-sister as Osyris had, for without doubt like him he wou’d have had an amourette with her in his mothers belly.” It was the violent “civil war” between Inamorato’s principles and his inclinations that “hinder’d him From reaching that Eminence in the World, which his Freinds and his Abilitys might possibly have advanct him to.”82 Kenneth Lockridge, in his relentless pursuit of the colonial dilemma in Byrd’s writings, dismisses this statement as an “initial tendency” to lay the blame not where it really belongs, although he does have to acknowledge that it reflects Byrd’s deep-seated fear of his emotional and sexual impulses. A psychological explanation is not far behind: according to Lockridge, such fear is “often found in personalities haunted by the fear of rejection.83 But I will argue that the anxieties about the flesh were as much culturally as psychologically conditioned, and that the dichotomies reason/passion and mind/body in different forms run through the entire corpus of Byrd’s writings and shape his life as a project and cultural act.

Trying to make sense of his complicated life, Byrd looked to his human constitution for the structures underlying his social circumstances and social being. And his distinction between the principles and inclinations invokes a deep layer of assumptions and ideas about the nature of

80 _{Brown, Good Wives, 330-333. See also Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage. Interestingly, Stone}

discovers a chronological connection between problems in the office, political crises, and periods of heightened sexual activity in the case of Pepys as well: Family, Sex and Marriage, 552-561.

81

There are possible indications of the over-activity of Byrd’s body in the diary: he records his “nocturnal pollutions” (London Diary,191), instances when he “kissed the maid and my seed came from me,” (ibid., 71; such cases are many) or “hugged [a woman] till I spent” (ibid., 118), or fondled a woman’s genitalia with the same result (ibid., 348). Lawrence Stone’s account of early modern English sexual patterns does suggest that the later fixation on penetrative sex was yet unknown in Byrd’s lifetime. But then again, the records left by people like Byrd and Samuel Pepys are among Stone’s main sources.

82

“Inamorato,” 276.

83

Lockridge, Diary, 29. Strangely enough, the “initial tendency” to blame the passionate body never surrenders its place to any explicitly stated “colonial complex.”

human individuality and the inner constitution (structure) of the human agent to which, perhaps, a consistent social reflection necessarily led. Already in the first fundamental Western attempt at political philosophy, Socrates tied his investigation of political regimes to establishing the basic structure of the human soul and differentiated it into three parts: calculating, desiring, and spirited. The first two, in Socrates’ view, opposed each other, and the third, representing the energy and emotions of the soul (not to be confused with physical needs and desires), was by its nature an auxiliary to the calculating part, unless corrupted by bad rearing. These parts

corresponded to the three classes in Socrates’ city (or rather the classes corresponded to the parts of the soul): the money-making, the auxiliary (guardians and defenders of the city), and the deliberative. In both cases, men will achieve justice and happiness when the calculating and spirited part “will be set over the desiring – which is surely most of the soul in each… and they will watch it for fear of its being filled with the so-called pleasures of the body and thus becoming big and strong, and then not minding its own business, but attempting to enslave and rule what is not appropriately ruled by its class and subverting everyone’s entire life.”84 Perhaps Byrd feared that his life had become an example of such subversion.

The struggle between principles and inclinations, between reason and desire, seen as the content of our moral life, reflected an essential complexity and heterogeneity of “man.” Plato’s writings were perhaps the first to register so forcefully the emergent and very lasting preoccupation, in Western reflection on man, with the problem of the coexistence, union, and conflict of two independent and different phenomena – soul and body, or, more broadly, spirit and matter.85 It seemed plain to most, before the modern age of natural sciences, that human reason,

understanding, cognition, and the ability to discover and follow the laws of nature and moral principles were simply irreducible to animal bodily functions and had to represent a specific form or level of existence, differentiating man in kind from the animal creation. As the famous

eighteenth-century physician George Cheyne said, “I take it for granted, that the intelligent Principle is of a very different, if not quite contrary, Nature from this organical Machin which contains it; and has scarce any thing in common to them, but as they are Substances.”86 The advances in the understanding of the human body since the sixteenth century did not significantly undermine the basic dualism. It was natural for Byrd, in a short sketch of human anatomy in his commonplace book (the source has not been identified), to assert that human nerves were “the channels thro’ which the animal Spirits are conveyd to all Parts, and are the cause of every Sence and Motion,” as well as to identify two other kinds of spirits: “vital,” which “flow with the artereal Blood thro’ the arterys, & give life and heat to the whole Body,” and “natural,” which move via the veins and “are employd in nourishing every particular member.” But it was

important for him to note, in this anatomical description, that, regarding all these spirits, “we are sure they are only the fine parts of matter, because they are common to all living creatures, and

84

The Republic of Plato, trans. with notes and an interpretive essay by Allan Bloom, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 121.

85

For an excellent broad overview of the history of the soul-body dualism in Western thought see Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York and London: Norton, 2003), 3-109. In line with his age, Byrd calls Plato “divine” in his commonplace book, entry 178.

86

George Cheyne, The English Malady: or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers, &c. (London: G. Strahan and J. Leake, 1733), 68. On dualism in the early eighteenth-century medical discourse see Akihito Suzuki, “Anti-Lockean Enlightenment? Mind and Body in Early Eighteenth-Century English Medicine,” in MedicineintheEnlightenment, ed. Roy Porter(Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995), 336-359.

utterly distinct from the Reasonable Soul, which is peculiar to man, & makes him the Image of his Maker. All the acquaintance we have with this divine part of us, depends upon some of its Qualitys & effects. We discern it to be the Power by which we think, reason, decide, and will any thing, & particularly the faculty by which we arrive at the Knowledge of the Supream Being.” Such faculties animals most certainly do not have, although they have instincts engrafted in their nature, which partly supply the place of reason.87

The apparent confusion between the dualist and “tripartite” approach to the human being that the reader may have noticed in the above paragraphs is really the central tension of the dualist world- picture. It is based on the difference between the consideration of substances and the

consideration of the human constitution. In the latter, the material and the spiritual, even if conceived as substantially different from each other, must somehow unite and interact. The “third” component of the human constitution (the point of conjunction) could be seen to partake of both matter and spirit, or, more likely, to be a very refined degree of matter, so refined as to be able to somehow directly interact with the spiritual substance. It was not likely to be understood as a third kind of substance, essentially different from both matter and spirit. Precisely where this point of interaction was and how it could be described was the great intellectual and imaginative problem that substance dualism faced when trying to make sense of human nature. So, for instance, the connection between the immaterial soul and the material body could be imagined in the form of “spirits” – the lightest forms of matter that could be seen as the material analogue of the soul, an “animal soul,” the source of energy and life. The recurring semantic confusions, splits and parallels between spiritual substance and animal spirits, the pure immaterial soul and the animal soul underline the imaginative difficulties that human nature posed for dualist thinking. According to Byrd’s commonplace book, one of the reasons why the eating of animal blood was forbidden in ancient times was “because the Soule of all Brutes consists in the fine parts of the blood, & we are only permitted to devour their Bodys.” And further, “as the Soul or Essence of the Brute is in the Blood, the eating of it might in some measure graft it in our Selves.”88 The animal essence that brings our selves and our blood so closely to brutes as to make a direct contamination possible, also serves as a representation, or the agent, of the other, immaterial, kind of spirit in the body. Through it, and only through it, can our soul act in the material world. Even George Cheyne, who doubted the practical value and validity of the idea of animal spirits, had to make certain conclusions from the postulate of “Nature’s never passing from Positive to Negative

Quantities, till it goes thro’ the Medium of Nothing, or infinitely small of the same Denomination; its never passing from Motion to Rest, but thro’ infinitely small Motion: In a Word, its never acting in Generals, by Starts, Jumps, or unequal Steps.” It might not be improbable that “in

Substances of all Kinds, there may be Intermediates between pure, immaterial Spirit and gross Matter, and that the intermediate, material Substance, may make the Cement between the human Soul and Body, and may be the Instrument or Medium of all its Actions and Functions, where material Organs are not manifest.”89 The views of so superlative a Puritan as Cotton Mather on this problem were not much different from those expressed by a fashionable London physician

87

Kevin Berland, Jan Kirsten Gilliam, and Kenneth Lockridge, eds., The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), entry 517 (hereafter entries, rather than pages, will be cited in square brackets).

88

Commonplace Book, [538].

89

and those carefully recorded by a Virginia cavalier. In November of 1705, Mather, another great American diarist, inserted in his journal a “self-examination,” which was essentially an attempt at a Protestant theory of the human constitution. “The Oracles of God,” wrote Mather, “make a Distribution of Man, into three Parts, the Spirit, the Soul, and the Body…. The Spirit is the rational Mind; created and infused, by an immediate Operation of God. The Soul is a vital Flame, convey’d from our Parents; the next Seat of our Passions; of so fine a Temper that it can strike the Spirit, and yett of so gross a Temper, that it can also move the Body; tis the Soul by which all meer Animals are actuated. The Body, is the obvious Receptacle and Habitation of these wonderful Agents.”90 Despite the terminological differences, the identity of the basic tripartite/dualist system is evident.

Mather’s “soul” here is much like the brute soul residing in the blood, which we have seen in Byrd’s commonplace book. It is the energy of life that we share with the brute creation and, in Mather’s view, the means by which our reasonable, divine self acts in the world. What

distinguishes us as human is our intellectual nature – the “rational Mind,” “created and infused, by an immediate Operation of God.” However, understanding our intellectual and moral life and the operations of our mind or soul (our humanity) is impossible without considering the role of our animal nature in the life of the spirit. The medium through which our connection with the world is solely possible remains in its essence a material substance, a means through which our animal nature ensures its presence in the life of the mind. This presence is a central moral, epistemological, and even psychiatric problem. It is through such superfine, “subtile, spirituous, and infinitely elastic” substances, which are “the Medium of the Intelligent Principle,” that the disorders and imbalances of the body reach the mind to produce the mental diseases studied by Cheyne.91 Or, in the words of Cotton Mather, “a Man bitten with a mad-Dog, has not only his

Body, but his very Soul also poisoned.” The materiality of this medium, this-worldliness of the “sensitive soul,” is the source of its power in our mind, and of the dominance in our moral life of the passions, affections, and aversions connected and responding to bodily existence. This bodily existence by itself signifies our otherness from God who left in us his presence: “The Soul of every man is Dog-bitten, or, which is as bad; Serpent-bitten, or Divel-bitten. Original Sin has depraved it; the Venom of original Sin has over-run it.” The rational mind, as Mather sees it, does not lose its essential identity and distinctness, and can comprehend the individual’s depravity, yet can do nothing on its own, lying knocked under and fettered by the sinful energy of the sensitive soul, or indeed actively participating in its passions. The only way for the immaterial spirit to break the chains is, of course, divine grace. The main characteristic of grace is the ability of the spirit to abhor, reject, and deny the “criminal Gratifications” of the soul, and to act in a different direction, out of pure considerations – based solely on understanding that such desires and gratifications are offensive to God. A regenerate spirit is that which chooses above all to glorify God; in the act of this choice, and in the ability to make it, the spirit demonstrates that it “has gotten an Empire over the Soul.”92 To do this without a direct intervention by the divine

Providence is impossible; without such an intervention, the essential immateriality of the rational mind is, so to speak, only potential energy, not kinetic.

90

The Diary of Cotton Mather (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1911), 1:526.

91

Cheyne, English Malady, 89.

92

In this, Mather is quite different from Plato in The Republic, who considers the structure of the soul only, rather than that of the human being as a whole, and within the soul itself distinguishes the part prone to act on the dictates of the body (the desiring part) and the part committed to the pursuit of reason. For Plato, control of the latter over the former is both natural and possible, even if it does not often take place in everyday life; the “spirited part” of the soul, its energy and will, is naturally a servant of the calculating part. Mather, on the other hand, seems much less

optimistic about the power of the immaterial spirit; the concept of grace implies an

acknowledgement of the powerlessness of the spirit to act on its own. John Locke appears even more pessimistic than Mather in his effort to think through the consequences of embodiment. The depraved and irredeemable nature of the body in which we are confined was the basic fact of the human condition that Locke’s religion taught him to accept (or so he thought). “Men alive are flesh & bloud, the dead in the graves are but the remains of corrupt flesh & bloud. But flesh & bloud can not inherit the kingdom of god, neither can corruption inherit incorruption i.e. immortality,” comments Locke on St. Paul.93 It is instructive that in Locke’s interpretation of Paradise and the Fall, the first couple initially refrained from sin because they had no occasion for it. There were no objects they could desire against the divine will and the order of creation, “where in the full use of the creatures there was scarce room for any irregular desires but instinct & reason carried [man] the same way & being neither capable of covetousness or ambition when he had already the free use of all things he could scarce sin. God therefor gave him a probationary law whereby he was restrained from one only fruit, good wholesom & tempting in itself.” The consequences are well known.94

Even before the Fall, God’s law and human instinct, reason and desire were essentially different, and their unity circumstantial. The body may walk in the path of reason, but that does not make it good; “good” may be only its behavior, as a result of compulsion or lack of stimuli to desire. Law is understandable, but external and alien to the flesh. True, all men are created rational, that is, are endowed with the ability to discern and comprehend the law of nature, which is also the general law of preservation and rational interest. That ability lies in the mind. But the body does not know its real good; it can lead us to self-destruction in our “Natural Propensity to indulge Corporal and present Pleasure, and to avoid Pain at any rate.”95 In the state of embodiment, human will, which is the immediate engine of our actions, follows the body and not the mind, immediate desires and