Alan Richardson. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN: 0521781914. Price: £37.50 (US$60)

In British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, Alan Richardson offers a fascinating new approach to the topic of “mind” in British Romanticism. Richardson contends that the Romantic era witnessed a revolution in the concept of “mind,” a revolution driven by new discoveries in the field of brain science. Throughout the history of the western world, the mind had been regarded as an immaterial, disembodied thing, and when ordinary people did think about the mind as having a particular location in the human body, it was often regarded as residing in the heart, not the head. During the Enlightenment, the immaterial character of mental states was crystallized in the rationalist philosophy of Descartes, who coined the famous dictum, Cogito, ergo sum [“I think, therefore I am”]. The Cartesian cogito was a numinous, ethereal substance that interacted in some mysterious fashion with the physical human body, from which it nevertheless remained utterly aloof and distinct. Such mind-body dualism was entirely compatible with traditional religious belief in the immortality of the soul, since it guaranteed that the mind would persist even after the demise of the physical body. Only during the half-century conventionally associated with literary Romanticism (1780-1830) did medical researchers definitively establish that the brain is the seat of consciousness, the home of “mind.” This fundamental discovery had important ramifications in the development of a new science of the mind, grounded in the supposition that mental activity is an organic process that occurs in a physical body. This new brain science was a Pan-European phenomenon, and its most important practitioners were medical doctors: F.J. Gall in Austria, Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis in France, and Erasmus Darwin and Charles Bell in England. Through painstaking anatomical and behavioral studies, these scientists established that the brain is linked to the rest of the body by sensory and motor nerves, that the brain is differentiated into “organs” with discrete cognitive functions, and that various mental disabilities can be correlated with physical trauma to the brain. In his first chapter, entitled “Neural Romanticism,” Richardson elucidates several of the most important scientific developments that resulted from the advent of this new brain science: “the rise of comparative neuroanatomy, the framing of adaptationist and functionalist analyses of specific features of the mind and brain, a fundamental redefinition of the brain as an assemblage of parts or ‘organs’ rather than an undifferentiated whole, and anti-dualistic psychological models founded on the mind’s embodiment, placing novel emphases on automatic and unconscious mental processes and on body-mind interaction” (1-2). All of these scientific developments offered new ways of understanding the most fundamental processes of human thought, and consequently they posed an implicit challenge to the prevailing popular and philosophical concepts of “mind,” “body,” “self,” and “soul.” In subsequent chapters, Richardson traces the impact of the new brain science upon several major writers of the Romantic period. In chapter two, “Coleridge and the new unconscious,” Richardson examines the poem “Kubla Khan” and its well-known introductory note from the standpoint of a brain-based conception of mind. Contemporary brain scientists were fascinated by the effects of psychoactive drugs; F.J. Gall, for example, argued that “a few grains of opium are enough to demonstrate to us, that, in this life, volition and thought are inseparable from cerebral organisation” (51). Indeed, Coleridge himself participated in “the first controlled scientific exploration of a consciousness-altering drug” (51) when he volunteered for Humphry Davy’s experiments with nitrous oxide at the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol. In this context, Richardson observes, Coleridge’s introductory note to “Kubla Khan” looks very much like a report of a scientific experiment involving a “reverie” induced by …