The Nose of the Mind · 25.04.06 by Brad Pasanek
James Boswell reports in his Life of Dr. Johnson that during the course of a “curious discussion” Johnson once compared sagacity to the “the nose of the mind.” The metaphor is part of a paired distinction. If the intuition is the “eye of the mind” then sagacity is the nose—”the one being immediate in its effect, the other requiring a circuitous process” (1171).
Boswell reports that a Young Gentleman takes the opportunity to quibble with The Doctor: no man ever thinks of the nose of the mind. Young gentleman that he is, he persists too long in his argument and puts himself forward with too much presumption. The figurative sense is strange to us, Boswell urges in Johnson’s defense, but no more forced than Hamlet’s “In my mind’s eye, Horatio.”1
The exchange is profoundly Shandean, and I would more were related about the mind’s nose over against the mind’s eye. Boswell’s abstract is much too compressed, and although the argument is characterized as a tedious one, we never learn the gist of it. The summary is finished before it begins, dispatched with Johnson’s loud tone: “What is it you are contending for if you be contending?”
But who indeed ever thinks of the nose of the mind?
Thomas Love Peacock comes close, exclaiming, “Oh nose of wax! true symbol of the mind / Which fate and fortune mould in all mankind” (ll. 1-2).2 The only other mind’s nose in literature that I’m acquainted with may be found in Delphine de Girardin’s writings. She asserts that “Instinct is the nose of the mind.” Girardin’s “instinct” and Johnson’s “sagacity” are wide of each other—Or perhaps they are two nostrils separated by the mind’s septum.3
I might also cite the following lines from Billingsley’s The Infancy of the World (1658) to perverse effect:
Man’s nose is like a sink by which the braine
Doth purge it self of phlegm, the nose doth drain
All slimy Excrements
The byproduct of thought is snot. [Enter Young Gentleman.] Grotesquerie abounds when we mix and muddle our metaphors.
Several body parts are enlisted in eighteenth-century pictures the mind; few support sustained analysis. The eye is, of course, both the exception and the most important of the mental organs.
Eyes and noses are complemented with other sense organs. Matthew Green writes of the “minds ear” in The Grotto. John Keats in his sonnet “To Fanny” describes the “palate of [his] mind / losing its gust” (ll. 13-14). The face, a locus of our sense apparatus, plays a special role in the metaphorics of mind, and Catherine Jemmat uses the metaphor the “pimple of the mind.”
St. Peter encourages his reader to “gird up the loins of your mind” (KJV 1 Peter 1:13), and William Godwin deploys Peter’s metaphor in his Thoughts on Man (Essay II). Mind and body participate in dualisms, material and immaterial, ancient and newfangledly Cartesian, literal and figurative. I contend that one dualism structures the other and that both rely on false distinctions.
Johnson’s juxtaposition of nose and eye queers the Shakespearean metaphor. A metaphor that no longer seems, in Boswell’s phrase, “forced” can become so with a lightest touch. Cross your mind’s eyes.
It may be that the mind’s eye is not something we usually picture because it is itself the mental organ that we suppose does the picturing. The mind’s eye may not be equipped to spy itself out. In his Amelia Henry Fielding makes the point that we often retreat into the mind, “where there is no Looking-Glass, and consequently where we can flatter ourselves with discovering almost whatever Beauties we please” (III.7.3).
Why is this eye of the mind so typically monocular? Should we picture a cyclopean mind, its one eye blinking away all the motes that trouble it? In much eighteenth-century poetic diction, reason is the faculty of the mind equipped with plural “eyes.” But this binocularity may be as much owing to assonance as to reason’s depth of vision.
The outfitting of the mind with sensory organs begs further questions: What is the mind’s mind that surveys the internal sensations delivered to it by the mind’s eye, ear, and palate? Is there a mind’s mind’s eye? And how would we ever halt this regress? A theory of consciousness that includes an account of the mind’s eye had best recognize those distinctions between literal and figurative that are poisoned and those metaphors that fail us.
These are questions provoked by trying to picture the mind’s nose and feeling the metaphor to be no more “forced” than Shakespeare’s “mind’s eye.” The way to sagacity is certainly circuitous. Following one’s nose won’t do.
Notes
1 Hamlet I.i and I.ii are the loci classici of the mind’s eye, but the metaphor is not original to Shakespeare. Alwin Thaler has done the archaeological work demonstrating that the expression has a prehistory that reaches back through Spenser, Sidney, Chaucer, St. Paul, and Plato; see Thaler’s “In My Mind’s Eye, Horatio,” Shakespeare Quarterly, VII:4 (Aut, 1956): 351-4. However, in the eighteenth-century, as in Boswell above, when the mind’s eye is invoked, the attribution is typically Shakespearean. See, for example, Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (II.iv.4), The Cry (II, Prologue), and Countess of Dellwyn (I.ii.1). I find this narrowness of attribution in the case of the mind’s eye akin to the attachment of the Tabula Rasa metaphor to Locke’s name. Neither Shakespeare nor Locke are the originators of the metaphors they’ve become associated with and yet literary history has conspired to link their names to those metaphors.
2 A “nose of wax” is “a thing easily turned or moulded; a person easily influenced, or of a weak character,” see the OED (“nose, n.” sense 9).
3 The “mind’s nose” has recently made a comeback in contemporary medical literature. See Stephen Kosslyn’s “Understanding the Mind’s Eye…and Nose,” Nature Neuroscience, 6:11 (Nov. 2003): 1124-5. See also Djordjevic, J.; Zatorre, R.J.; Petrides, M.; Jones-Gotman M.; “The Mind’s Nose: Effects of Odor and Visual imagery on Odor Detection,” Psychol Sci., 15:3 (Mar. 2004): 143-8.
